Calcbench

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...

Wall Street has been broadly pleased with Q1 earnings so far, and at first glance you can’t blame them: as of last week, overall net income among 2,100 firms that had already filed earnings data was up 27.4 percent . What’s not to love about that?  Well, we looked under the hood of that net income growth, and perhaps quite a bit. Using our Multi-Company page , we pulled the net income numbers for a total of 3,285 firms that have filed Q1 2026 earnings as of Tuesday morning. (Legions of smaller and mid-sized companies are filing Q1 earnings this week.) Yes, overall net income is still growing nicely, up 19.9 percent from Q1 2025 — but that growth is almost entirely due to a tiny number of firms reporting huge jumps in net income . Strip those super-achievers out of the picture, and net income growth for everyone else has barely budged upward. Table 1, below, tells the tale. Yes, those 3,285 companies reported $103.5 billion more in net income this quarter; but $96.66 billion of tha...

YoY Revenue  +10.3% YoY net income  +27.4% Firm Count 2,100 Another week, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q1 earnings data from roughly 2,100 firms — and for the second week in a row, the aggregate numbers look solid. Growth in all the most important performance metrics is somewhat down this week compared to last week’s numbers, but that’s not a surprise. Last week we had only 800 firms in the Earnings Tracker sample, mostly the largest of the large. Now we have far more mid-sized and small firms reporting, and they tend to push the numbers downward. All that said, the numbers are still moving upward. Year-over-year growth in revenue, operating income, and net income has decelerated from last week, but the growth is still healthy double-digits. See Figure 1, below. The next question to ask — and one that Calcbench will explore next week — is the extent to which a small handful of over-achievers are skewing the whole picture. For example, ...