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A Better Approach to CEO Pay Analysis

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Below is the next installment in our series on pay versus performance data now available in corporate proxy statements. Calcbench has been working with Stephen O'Byrne, a renowned expert on executive compensation, to demonstrate how this information can help to assess whether CEOs are earning their keep and whether companies are aligning pay with performance. See his previous post for an introduction to the value of “PvP” disclosures. By Stephen F. O’Byrne Pay versus performance (PvP) disclosures give investors the ability to measure key pay dimensions for public companies and the executives leading those businesses. Investors can do this first by calculating relative cumulative pay and relative cumulative Total Shareholder Return (TSR); and then by calculating the regression trendline relating the natural log of relative pay to the natural log of relative TSR. Such a regression analysis provides insight into four “dimensions” of executive pay.  The slope of the trendline provides...
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Carnival Cruise Lines, Having a Blast

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Carnival Cruise Lines ($CCL) is one of our favorite businesses to follow because it reports so many fascinating non-GAAP disclosures. Today Carnival filed a gangbusters earnings report for its quarter ending Aug. 31 — like, stupendous results on just about every financial performance metric you could imagine.  So let’s chart a course for analysis adventure, shall we?  First are the primary financial disclosures on the income statement. Revenue was up 3.25 percent from the year-earlier period, while operating expenses were up only 1.91 percent, largely thanks to a steep decline in fuel expenses. That ultimately led to pretax income up 6.54 percent, and net income up 6.74 percent. See Figure 1, below. OK, but that’s all just the usual stuff you can pull from anywhere. Calcbench subscribers can also pull a trove of non-GAAP data about Carnival too, including: Passenger cruise days (PCDs), which is the number of cruise passengers on a voyage multiplied by the number of revenue-...
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Why ‘Compensation Actually Paid’ Is Such a Better Metric

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  Today Calcbench welcomes a guest post from Stephen F. O’Byrne, president of Shareholder Value Advisors. O’Byrne is a renowned expert on executive compensation, and his article below explores how financial analysts can use the expanded new disclosures about executive compensation that Calcbench first wrote about last week . New compensation disclosures available in corporate proxy statements (all of them indexed by Calcbench and readily exportable into your financial models) are meant to give investors a better sense of executives’ pay compared to the performance of the companies they lead. This is known as “pay versus performance,” or PvP.  Today we explore why one new disclosure — compensation actually paid (CAP) — provides far more useful information than the Summary Compensation Table (SCT) disclosures that companies have reported for years. It provides great new insight for financial analysts, corporate governance professionals, and others who are trying to assess the va...
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Darden Restaurants Serves Up Inflation Warning

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Casual dining player Darden Restaurants ($DRI) filed its latest earnings release today — and if you looked closely at the data, you could see the risk of inflation peeping out through the numbers.  For starters, in the earnings release that Darden filed for its quarter that ended Aug. 25, the company flat-out said it expects inflation for the coming fiscal year to be 3 to 3.5 percent. That was the only actual mention of the word in the earnings release, but with a few quick keystrokes we found a more complete picture. First, we used our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page to pull up the precise guidance Darden included in its earnings release for this quarter, its fiscal Q1 2026. That guidance, published on Sept. 18, said Darden expects inflation in the range of 3.0 to 3.5 percent for the coming fiscal year.  Then we punched the Previous Period tab to compare this quarter’s guidance to what Darden said in its prior quarter. Turns out that just three months ago, Darden was ...
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Introducing Pay-vs.-Performance Data

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Everyone knows that corporate CEOs make lots of money. Now, however, you can have a more precise understanding of exactly how much money CEOs are making and whether the CEO is truly delivering good performance for his or her firm — because Calcbench has started tracking companies’ pay-for-performance data.  Disclosures about CEO compensation are reported in the proxy statement. Typically that data is difficult to find, extract, and study, but the crack software development team here at Calcbench has developed a few techniques to find and present those disclosures in the crisp, easy-to-navigate interface that subscribers know and love.  Let’s start with an example from Walmart ($WMT) so you can see what we mean.  First, use the Disclosures and Footnotes Query tool to search Walmart’s disclosures. Look for the “Related Documents” menu on the left side of the screen, open that menu, and you’ll see an option for “Pay Versus Performance” at the bottom. Click on that choice , ...
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