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Carnival Corp.’s Glimpse into Non-GAAP Metrics

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Cruise and hospitality giant Carnival Corp. ($CCL) delivered a solid earnings report last week , which gives us another opportunity to talk about one of our favorite financial analysis topics here at Calcbench: non-GAAP disclosures! Carnival discloses several non-GAAP metrics to help analysts understand the company’s operations. Most important are: Passenger cruise days , or “PCDs,” which is the number of cruise passengers on a voyage multiplied by the number of revenue-producing ship operating days for that voyage. PCDs are typically expressed as a number in the millions. Available lower-berth days , or “ALBDs.” This is a standard metric in the cruise industry to measure total possible capacity in a period, and is also measured in millions. Occupancy rate , which is calculated by dividing PCDs into ALBDs. Occupancy rates can be higher than 100 percent in the cruise business because ALBDs assume two berths per cabin, but in practice some cabins have more than two passengers (say, a fam...
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Preparing for the Next Debt Disclosure Wave

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Wall Street has been abuzz with concern lately about rising interest rates. The Federal Reserve is raising rates, the mortgage industry is raising rates, and soon enough the corporate debt markets will be looking at higher interest rates too. So today seems like a good time to remind analysts that Calcbench can help you identify which companies might get squeezed by rising interest rates as those companies refinance their debt — and as always, we have a few examples to show you how it’s done. For starters, let’s recap the several ways you can find debt disclosures in Calcbench. One easy launching point is our Multi-Company page . First, select the group of companies you want to research. (We have an entire post dedicated to creating a peer group if you need a refresher.) Once that group is set, choose from any number of debt-related disclosures we include in our Standardized Metrics field on the left-hand side of your screen. Those disclosures include: Total debt Short-, long-, and me...
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$2.4 Trillion in Cloud Backlog: What the Remaining Performance Obligation Disclosures Really Say

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The headline number The four largest cloud providers now report nearly $2.4 trillion of remaining performance obligations (RPO): revenue under signed contracts that has not yet been recognized. The totals are easy to add up. They are much harder to compare, because each company describes the timing of that backlog in a different way. Before we get into the analysis, at the bottom are the tags and the datapoints that we used to get the data directly out of Calcbench. Company RPO ($B) As of Scope Microsoft 684.0 Jun 30, 2026 Company-wide ($678B commercial) Oracle 664.0 Aug 31, 2026 Company-wide...
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Analyzing Fuel Costs (and Revenues) at Trucking Companies

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  Third-quarter earnings will start arriving in mid-October, and one issue on analysts’ minds is likely to be fuel costs — which, as anyone who has visited a gas station recently already knows,  have been rising painfully all summer long.  Trucking and transportation businesses will be among those firms likely to report slower growth, higher costs, or both as a result of increasing fuel costs. For example, just last week J.B. Hunt Transport ($JBHT) warned analysts that Q3 earnings will be 5 to 10 percent below expectation s amid ““some of the most radical and abnormal swings” in fuel costs that the company has ever seen. Calcbench can help analysts understand the effect of those costs (and how companies are trying to stay ahead of that pressure) because many companies in trucking, transportation, and related sectors disclose what they’re paying for fuel, plus any surcharges they’re imposing to pass along those costs to customers. Finding those disclosures is a breeze with...
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The Value of Pay-Versus-Performance Data

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Today we interrupt our usual attention to corporate earnings data to call out another type of disclosure that institutional investors might also find useful: the pay versus performance data one can use to evaluate CEO compensation. Companies have been making these disclosures since last year, and the information is readily available in Calcbench through our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page . Look for the “Related Documents” menu on the left side of the screen, open it, and you’ll see an option for “Pay Versus Performance” at the bottom. Click on that choice, and the compensation disclosures will appear for whatever company you’re researching. Figure 1, below, shows the pay disclosures for Walmart ($WMT).  We had a d etailed post on how to find pay-versus-performance disclosures last year, so we won’t rehash all that material now. Instead, we want to highlight some interesting research to show why “PvP” disclosures can be so useful to institutional investors. Because, accord...
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Building Earnings Quality Measures with Calcbench Data

Earnings quality — the question of how closely a company’s reported profit tracks the actual cash moving through the business — is one of the oldest and most durable ideas in fundamental analysis. When earnings run consistently ahead of cash flow, it’s usually a signal worth investigating further; when the two move together, it’s generally reassuring. With standardized financial data available through the Calcbench API, the Multi-Company page, or the Excel Add-in, you can construct earnings-quality screens ranging from straightforward to fairly sophisticated — and apply them across the entire market at once! To illustrate that range, we built two versions ourselves. Two ways to measure the same idea. The simple version: cash flow relative to net income. Divide operating cash flow by net income for a given period, and you have a quick, intuitive gut-check. A ratio near 1 is good and normal; a ratio well above or below 1 is worth a second look.  This ratio is also easy to explain a...
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