Calcbench

YOY Net InC., All  +34.8% YOY NET INc., Ex Mag 7 +16.8% YOY Op Inc., All +20.3% YOY Op Inc., Ex Mag 7 +13.1% Now that the Q1 earnings season is largely behind us, today Calcbench returns to a question that has lingered over Wall Street for the last six weeks. To what extent is overall corporate financial performance being propped up by the super-duper stellar performance of the tech giants?  In aggregate, that Q1 performance looks great : revenue up 11 percent from the year-earlier period, operating income up 20.3 percent, net income up 34.8 percent. No wonder Wall Street indices have been dancing decidedly upward for the last several months. Look deeper into the data, however, and one can see that much of that aggregate performance is thanks to the so-called Mag 7 stocks: Apple ($AAPL) Amazon ($AMZN) Alphabet ($GOOG)  Meta ($META) Microsoft ($MSFT) Nvidia ($NVDA) Tesla ($TSLA) We stripped out those seven firms from our Earnings Tracker sample, and then re-calc...

That’s all, folks — with earnings data from roughly 3,600 filers, including the last few giants such as Nvidia ($NVDA) and Walmart ($WMT), which both filed this week, we now call time on the Q1 2026 earnings season. Overall, it was good. Revenue was up 11 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 20.7 percent, and net income up 34.8 percent. Expense lines such as cost of goods sold, operating expense, and SG&A expense are all higher too, but none higher than the increase in revenue. Capex is up 29.5 percent although that number is skewed by the AI data center craze so we put an asterisk next to that one. Figure 1, below, shows year-over-year change across 18 assorted line items. Fun fact: Nvidia reported $58.32 billion in net income this week. If you omit that amount from all other net income this quarter (which was $585.1 billion), then the year-over-year gain would be only 21.4 percent, not the 34.8 percent we actually see in Figure 1, above. P...

Everyone might be gushing over Nvidia ’s ($NVDA) earnings report released earlier this week, but Calcbench is feeling a bit brick-and-mortar today.  So we’re going to look at Walmart ($WMT) instead, to revisit one of our favorite subjects these days: Walmart’s holdings in warehouse automation firm Symbotic ($SYM) and how those holdings affect Walmart’s earnings per share. We’ve written about this relationship before . Three months ago, Walmart reported EPS of $0.53 — but in a tiny footnote tucked away on Page 33 of the earnings release, Walmart said that Symbotic’s poor share performance that quarter had pulled down EPS by $0.21.  If you exclude that equity adjustment from net income, you’d have a non-GAAP adjusted EPS of $0.74. That’s what Walmart did, also on Page 33 of its earnings release that quarter.  OK, that was then; Walmart just filed its latest earnings release today for the quarter ending April 30. So what has changed?  For starters, Symbotic’s share p...

AI chipmaker Nvidia ($NVDA) will file its next quarterly earnings release on May 20, and presumably the company will report zillions in net income because that’s what Nvidia has been doing since the start of the AI boom several years ago. In advance of that earnings release, however, we wanted to call out a niche but telling part of Nvidia’s net income: all the money it makes simply by owning shares in other companies . Here’s what we mean. Large businesses and asset management firms must file a Form 13-F with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which discloses the equity investments those firms have in other companies. So an analyst can look up a company’s Form 13-F holdings, see how many shares of other companies that company owns, and estimate the value of those equity holdings. As those holdings change in value from one quarter to the next, the original company must report the change in the Other Income(Loss) line on its income statement. For example, back in March we noted tha...

YOY REVENUE  +10.5% YOY NET INCOME  +26.3% FIRM COUNT 3,100 The Calcbench Earnings Tracker rolls on this week, with Q1 earnings data from more than 3,100 firms now in hand. That means the broad trends we see in financial performance are generally set, although the arrival of many smaller firms does nudge those trends downward just a bit. As you can see in Figure 1, below, the year-over-year change in all important metrics is still positive; that growth is just decelerating compared to what we saw in last week’s numbers , which were also somewhat decelerated from the week before. Such is the order of things as a larger number of smaller firms report their earnings data and eclipse the smaller number of larger firms that reported first. Anyway, as you can see from Figure 1, revenue is up 10.5 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 14.8 percent, and net income up 26.3 percent. Except, recall our post from earlier this week , when we noted that the vast majority of...