Calcbench

The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker rolls onward, now in our third week of gathering and crunching Q3 earnings data. Our sample size has nearly tripled to roughly 2,000 non-financial firms — and overall, the positive trends we’ve seen in previous weeks continue now.  Figure 1, below, shows all the usual earnings metrics we’re tracking every week. Revenue is up 15.2 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 37.4 percent, net income up 42.1 percent.  We should note that all three of those numbers are now better than they were one week ago, when only 760-ish firms were in our sample group. A wide range of companies have reported this week, and everything has moved in a good direction since then. Notice that capex spending is up 40.1 percent compared to the year-ago period. In our update last week we explored how this quarter’s capex growth really depended on the four AI hyperscalers: Alphabet ($GOOG), Amazon ($AMZN), Meta ($META), and Microsof...

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...

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...