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Bank Loan Loss Provisions and How to Get Them

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Screening for credit stress across a bank cohort Ahead of Q2 2026 bank earnings, we wanted to answer a specific question: is there evidence that bank customers — consumer and commercial borrowers alike — are under rising credit stress? Not for one bank, read off a single 10-Q, but systematically, across the sector, using Calcbench's standardized data. This post walks through the method, what it found, and a wrinkle along the way that's arguably the more important lesson: a systematic screen is only as good as your willingness to double-check what it flags. The method Provision for loan loss (PLL) is the natural starting point for a credit-stress question — it's the expense banks book each quarter in anticipation of loans going bad. But raw PLL dollars are a noisy signal on their own. A bank's provision grows simply because its loan book is growing, independent of whether borrower quality is deteriorating. To separate “more loans” from “worse loans,” we normalized pr...
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More Tariffs Analysis From Helen of Troy

Second-quarter earnings reports will start hitting the wires any day now, and analysts should expect a lot of talk about tariffs — specifically, how much money companies are expecting in tariff refunds, and how those refunds will flow through the financial statements. Today we have a primer on how companies might disclose all that thanks to Helen of Troy ($HELE), maker of home healthcare and beauty products. Helen filed its latest quarterly report on Wednesday (its fiscal Q1 2027, for the quarter ending May 31) and had quite a bit to say about the tariff refunds it expects since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Trump Administration’s IEEPA tariffs earlier this year.  Helen made the disclosures in the Management Discussion & Analysis of its 10-Q. For starters, the company said it paid $80.5 million in IEEPA tariffs in its fiscal 2026, which ran from March 1, 2025 to Feb. 28, 2026. That’s roughly 8.3 percent of the $970.6 million Helen reported as cost of goods sold for t...
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Non-GAAP Adjustments, Part II: Big Adjusters

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Today we continue our look at trends in non-GAAP reporting, based on the findings of our annual analysis of non-GAAP adjustments to net income among S&P 500 firms.  Our previous post recapped the report’s biggest findings for 2025 earnings — most notably, that adjusted net income was almost universally higher than traditional GAAP net income, but the “spread” for 2025 was lower than that for 2024. Average dollar value for each non-GAAP adjustment was also lower in 2025 than the prior year, too. Now let’s look at non-GAAP from different perspective: Which firms made the largest adjustments to net income, and for what reasons?  First, some background. Calcbench (and our invaluable partner Suffolk University) identified 2,320 adjustments to net income items among the S&P 500 for their 2025 earnings. Those adjustments totaled $271.09 billion.  We then classified each of the 2,320 adjustments into one of 11 categories: Every company adjusted net income in its own way, ...
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