Calcbench

Amazon ($AMZN) filed its quarterly report last week, which gives us a great opportunity to talk about one of the most important questions on Wall Street these days. How much exposure do the tech giants (Amazon included) have to artificial intelligence darlings Anthropic and OpenAI ?  Anthropic and OpenAI don’t disclose much about their financial structure or performance directly, since they’re privately held. The tech giants pouring billions and billions into both firms, however, do disclose some details about those investments.  So if analysts know where to look, you can learn quite a lot about who is investing in whom, to what extent, and what those investments are worth from one quarter to the next. Start with Amazon and its first-quarter 10-Q, filed on April 30 . Using our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page, we did a quick search of “Anthropic” across the whole filing and found multiple references to Anthropic.  Most informative was a disclosure in the Financial...

YoY Revenue  +10.9% YoY net income  +34.0% YoY cost of Revenue  +9.1% We revved up the Calcbench Earnings Tracker this weekend for our first analysis of Q1 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 800 firms, revenue is up 10.9 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 20.6 percent, and net income up 34 percent. Can’t complain about performance like that. Then again, notice the cost of revenue: up 9.7 percent. Notice operating expenses, up 9.8 percent. Notice SG&A expenses, up 8.1 percent.  Altogether, that suggests that costs are rising swiftly for large companies. If they want to keep operating margins high, they’ll need to raise prices, cut costs (which usually means layoffs), or both.  Meanwhile, we also have capex spending up 35 percent from the year-earlier period, ...

"When people see the [Calcbench] platform in action, natural curiosity kicks in, and they want to try it for themselves." We are delighted to share our recent interview with Tee Duncan, Partner, Grant Thornton, about how he and his team use Calcbench day-to-day. Duncan oversees audit quality and complex audit matters across several offices. His career began at Arthur Andersen, and has spanned quality management, audit standards, tools & training, and innovation across U.S. and international geographies. A longtime Calcbench user, Duncan was among the first at Grant Thornton to adopt the platform and has played a pivotal role in its adoption across the firm. Q: How did you first discover Calcbench?   A:  Around 10 years ago, I was introduced to Calcbench through our innovation team. At the time, there weren’t many users who had adopted Calcbench. I started experimenting with the platform and found two main use cases for it: (1) quickly getting up to speed on an engageme...

All six major U.S. airlines have now filed their first-quarter earnings releases, and to exactly zero surprise, all six reported sharply higher fuel costs that pummeled their operating costs. Casual observers of the industry might wonder, “OK, that stinks; but don’t these guys offset price spikes through hedging instruments?” Users of Calcbench, however, will already know the answer: no, they don’t , and the airlines are likely to suffer with painfully high fuel costs for quite some time. Figure 1 maps out the average cost per gallon for the six largest U.S. airlines for the last nine quarters. Figure 2 shows total fuel expense as a percentage of total operating revenue. The spikes we see for Q1 2026 in both charts are no surprise; average cost of jet fuel per gallon has more than doubled since war began. Figure 2, however, shows us that some firms are feeling that price pressure much more than others. JetBlue ($JBLU) and Alaska Air ($ALK), for exampl...