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Are the Airlines’ Fuel Woes Falling?

Airlines spend lots of money on fuel; everyone knows that already. Airlines have been spending even more money on fuel this year thanks to the war in Iran, which has pushed fuel costs to, well, sky-high prices. But when you examine fuel costs as a percentage of revenue, something strange emerges: that dire picture gets better. For five of the six major U.S. airlines, fuel costs as a percentage of revenue declined in Q3. Those percentages are still painfully high, but they’re decidedly lower than the nosebleed levels reported in Q2. See Figure 1, below. The only exception to this pattern was Delta Air Lines ($DAL), whose relative fuel costs (that’s what we’re calling fuel as a percentage of revenue) went from 21 percent in Q2 to 22 percent in Q3. Then again, Delta’s relative fuel costs are also far lower than those of the other five airlines. That’s because Delta owns its own fuel refinery, which lets the airline shave its fuel costs by a few cents per gallon ev...
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Q3 Earnings, Week 2: Enter the Hyperscalers

Calcbench is back with our latest Q3 earnings roundup. Earnings growth overall continues to look good, but beware! The AI hyperscalers entered the chat this week, and their numbers do distort a few key line items. First let’s look at the big picture. We now have Q3 earnings data from more than 750 non-financial companies. Figure 1, below, shows that revenue is up 14.5 percent from the year-ago period, operating income is up 33.5 percent, and net income is up 30.5 percent. Revenue and net income growth this week are both somewhat decelerated from the growth we saw in Week 1 , but that’s to be expected as a larger number of smaller companies join our sample. What caught our eye this week was growth in capital expenditures. So far this quarter, overall growth in capex spending is up 58.6 percent.  That number sounds impressive at first, but it includes capex spending from the four AI hyperscalers — Alphabet ($GOOG), Amazon ($AMZN), Meta ($META), and Microso...
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Can Boeing Backlog Support Revenue?

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Backlog Q3 2026 $745B Revenue Q3 2026 $94.91B Backlog/Rev. Multiple 7.85 Among the many companies filing Q3 earnings this week is aircraft maker Boeing ($BA), still trying to shake off years of financial and operational disruption from the disastrous crashes of two Boeing 737-Max jets in the late 2010s and subsequent regulatory and legal settlements in the early 2020s. Nobody would claim Boeing has returned to form yet, and the company did just post a $116 million net loss for the quarter — but when you examine Boeing’s disclosures about order backlog, perhaps one could say the company’s worst turbulence is behind it. What makes those backlog disclosures so interesting is that Boeing reports them in two ways: as a dollar amount, which now stands at $745 billion; and as number of planes on order, which stands at 6,300. This lets us do some clever analysis to see whether Boeing’s growth in backlog is enough to support growth in revenue.  We can start with the monetary backlog. That...
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Q3 Earnings: Our First Look

Good news, aficionados of financial analysis! The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker is back in action, with our first analysis of Q3 2026 earnings data.  Our sample size in this first week of Q3 analysis is still small: 243 non-financial companies, almost all of them large firms in the S&P 500 since those are typically the folks who file first after quarter-close. Within that group, however, the numbers do seem off to a promising start. Figure 1, below, tells the tale. Revenue is up 15.2 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 26.2 percent, and net income up 38 percent.  You might recall that Q2 earnings growth was distorted by what we called the SpaceX effect: gigantic leaps in net income in that period caused by a few tech firms reporting one-time gains from shares of SpaceX ($SPCX) that they owned, since SpaceX had just gone public. Here in Q3, that effect no longer exists. SpaceX ended Q3 at $148 per share, down from $157.50 at the...
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Meta's $810 Billion of Commitments

Meta Platforms ended the third quarter of 2026 with $810 billion of spending it has already promised but not yet put on its balance sheet. That is $355.7 billion of signed leases that have not yet commenced, plus $454.5 billion of non-cancelable contractual commitments. One year earlier the same two figures summed to $139 billion. Against trailing-twelve-month operating cash flow of $133 billion, those commitments have gone from about 1.3 years of cash generation to about 6.1 years in twelve months. The timing has changed along with the size. At Q3 2024, 13.5% of contractual commitments were due after the next fiscal year. At Q3 2026, 63.2% were due after 2027. The buildup Meta commitments hit $810B, 6.1x trailing operating cash flow Non-cancelable contractual commitments plus unstarted leases, $ billions, end of quarter Contractual commitments Unstarted leases Trailing-twelve-month operating cash flow ...
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