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Q4 Earnings Start Revving Up

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Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q4 earnings data from more than 320 non-financial firms — and so far, those firms are reporting impressive net income growth from the year-ago period. Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 15.1 percent from one year ago, revenue is up 6 percent, and cash from operations is up 25.1 percent. All numbers moving in the direction Wall Street wants to see. If you want to worry about anything, you could fret over cost of revenue, operating expenses, and SG&A expenses — all of which are currently rising faster than overall revenue, which implies that companies will start to feel inflationary pressures sometime soon. Then again, we still have a relatively small number of companies in our sample size, and the picture could look quite different in another four weeks or so, when we’ll have nearly 10 times as many earnings releases to digest.  Figure 2, below, shows th...

Tracking New Tax Disclosures

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Some of you may have noticed that companies are disclosing more tax information lately, thanks to a new accounting rule that requires filers to break out taxes paid to federal, state, local, and even overseas tax authorities. If tax analysis is your thing, fear not! Calcbench has an easy way to find all this information and we’ve even cooked up a template to track tax disclosures automatically. These new disclosures arise from updates to tax accounting rules that the Financial Accounting Standards Board adopted in 2023 , and which went into effect with annual 10-K filings that companies started to make this month. Previously, companies only disclosed a single number for “income tax provisions.” Now they must report individual amounts and percentages for a variety of taxes paid or tax credits claimed, and do so in a nice table format. One of the first companies to report these new details was Netflix ($NFLX), with its annual report filed on Jan. 23. Figure 1, below, is the new table tha...

First Q4 Earnings Analysis

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Welcome back to earnings season, everyone! The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker has nearly 150 Q4 2025 earnings reports in the hopper — not a large number, but big enough for us to fire up the analysis engine running again. At midday on Friday, Jan. 23, we were tracking data from 149 non-financial firms that have already filed their Q4 2025 reports. Collectively, that group reported net income 2 percent lower than what they reported one year ago, although operating income was up 23.1 percent and revenue was up 5.9 percent.  Huh, wait a minute. If revenue is up a decent amount and operating income is up by more than 20 percent, but net income has declined, doesn’t that imply some big expense further down the income statement related to taxes or restructuring charges or something like that?  Indeed it does, and indeed that has happened. See Figure 1, below.  We have a huge spike in tax provisions (up 205.1 percent) and an impressive jump in restructuring costs, too (up 48....

Cheat Code for Finding Tariff Disclosures

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Companies are now filing Q4 and full-year earnings reports fast and furious, and some number of financial analysts out there will want to know what companies are saying about tariff-related charges.  If you just do a quick text search for “tariff” you’re wasting time, because a tremendous number of companies include the word “tariff” as part of a meaningless, boilerplate disclosure. For example, “Our performance might be affected by numerous risks, such as tariffs or an asteroid hitting Earth,” or that sort of thing.  Fortunately, Calcbench offers an easy way to find informative disclosures about tariffs, such as when companies report some specific tariff cost. Let’s walk through that cheat code now. Begin on our Earnings Release Raw Data page , where you can search through all the GAAP and non-GAAP disclosures companies include in their earnings releases. You’ll see something like Figure 1, below.  You’ll want to configure your search parameters to match what you see ab...

Wall Street and Credit Card Rates

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All the big Wall Street banks have reported their fourth-quarter and year-end earnings now, and as we noted in our prior post , the banks report numerous specific lines of revenue. Today we wanted to examine credit card revenues in particular. If the Trump Administration follows through on President Trump’s demand that interest rates for consumer credit cards be capped at 10 percent, what might that mean for the credit card revenue that banks receive? Figure 1, below, gives us a preliminary sense of the money involved. It shows quarterly credit card revenue from Bank of America ($BAC), Citigroup ($C), JPMorgan Chase ($JPM), and Wells Fargo ($WFC) for the last three years.  As you can see, we’re talking about multiple billions of dollars, although Citi’s billions are far larger than any of the other banks. You can find these numbers easily by searching the banks’ footnotes via our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page and using the See Tag History feature. More Data, More Analysi...

From Banks to Airlines, Earnings Season Gets Going

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Earnings season kicked off again on Tuesday, with Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings numbers from Delta Air Lines ($DAL) and JPMorgan Chase ($JPM), plus a scattered few others. Today let’s start with JPMorgan and a look at its many lines of revenue.  One can find those many lines of revenue from our Company-in-Detail page, which captures and displays those numbers if a company reports them. (Not all companies do.) Figure 1, below, is simply a quick look at JPMorgan’s income statement , filed at 6:41 a.m. today. You’ll notice that we highlighted one particular line, “principal transactions.” Broadly speaking, principal transactions are those where the bank itself (the principal) commits its own capital to a deal. They have a clear, direct effect on the bank’s overall profitability, since the money going into the deal would otherwise fall straight to the bottom line. Principal transactions can fluctuate substantially from one quarter to the next. See Figure 2, below; pulled together by...

Defense Contractors, Dividends, and Capex

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Last week President Trump declared that U.S. defense contractors had to stop spending money on dividends and share buyback programs so that the companies could redirect that money to expanding the country’s defense base. Calcbench takes no view on the political or legal practicalities of such a move, but it did make us wonder — how much money are we talking about here, anyway?  Thanks to our Bulk Data Query and Multi-Company pages, we quickly found the answer. Let’s start with six major defense contractors in the United States: RTX Corp. ($RTX) Lockheed Martin ($LMT) Northrop Grumman ($NOC) Huntington Ingalls ($HII) Leidos ($LDOS) General Dynamics ($GD) Using our Multi-Company page, we quickly found the amounts that each firm spent on capital expenditures, dividends, and share repurchases in 2024. See Figure 1, below. The amounts vary widely, depending on each firm’s overall size. Perhaps more important for financial analysis is to look at the relative spending among the t...