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Q2 Earnings: Our First Look

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The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker is now back in action, for our first analysis of Q2 2026 earnings data. So far, among the large companies that dominate the beginning of earnings season, the overall numbers look solid. Figure 1, below, tells the tale. With roughly data from roughly 280 non-financial firms, revenue is up 13.6 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 33.1 percent, and net income up an eye-popping 85. 1 percent.  Those numbers might look impressive at first glance, but don’t pass around the Friday afternoon cocktails just yet. That 85.1 percent growth in net income is deceptive. It includes a single one-time gain of $97.8 billion that tracks back to Google’s ownership stake in the newly launched SpaceX ($SPCX). That’s right. Google ($GOOG) owned roughly 6 percent of SpaceX stock as of June 30. Because SpaceX soared after its IPO on June 12, that led to a huge increase in the value of Google’s ownership stake — and under U.S. accounting rules, that ga...
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Charticle: Wall Street Return on Equity

Five major Wall Street banks reported their Q2 earnings this morning, so what better way to demonstrate the speed and ease of Calcbench data analytics than to whip up a chart of the banks’ return on equity?  “ROE” is one of the most important performance metrics banks disclose in their earnings releases. It’s calculated by dividing net income for the period into shareholder equity, and is expressed as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more efficiently the firm is generating wealth for shareholders.  ROE disclosures are also tagged and indexed by Calcbench, which means a bank’s ROE numbers are available for your inspection within minutes of the bank filing its earnings release with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  We went to our Multi-Company page and to research quarterly ROE numbers for the five Wall Street titans who filed Q2 earnings this morning: Bank of America ($BAC)  Citigroup ($C) Goldman Sachs ($GS) JPMorgan Chase ($JPM) Wells Fargo ($WFC...
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Here Come the Surges in Airline Fuel Cost

Fuel Cost Q2 2025 $2.21 per gal Fuel Cost Q1 2026 $2.78 per gal Fuel Cost Q2 2026 $3.66 per gal   Delta Air Lines ($DAL) filed its Q2 2026 earnings statement on Friday , and we all know what that means: an opportunity to see just how ugly airlines’ fuel expenses are these days. Prepare for a rapid ascent, readers.  All major airlines report fuel costs — both their total fuel expense for the quarter and average cost per gallon — as individual items on the earnings release. Calcbench tracks those disclosures, so with a few quick keystrokes we can see how soaring energy prices from the war in Iran this spring surged through the airlines’ financial reporting.  Figure 1, below, shows average cost per gallon for the six major U.S. airlines since the start of 2024. Right now we only have Q2 numbers from Delta — bu...
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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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