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Airlines Feeling the Burn on Fuel

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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...
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Net Income Growth Q1 '26

As of April 27, 2026 Of the 544 firms that have so far reported calendar Q1 2026 GAAP net income (and that also reported in Q1 2025), aggregate net income grew 16.2% year-over-year — from $179.3 billion to $208.4 billion. That’s a $29.1 billion increase (note: Unlike our weekly metric recap, this does include financial services firms). Ten companies account for all of it. The top ten contributors to the year-over-year change in net income added a combined $29.2 billion — slightly more than the entire $29.1 billion delta. That means the other 534 companies, taken as a group, contributed essentially nothing on net. The Top Ten Contributors Company Q1 2026 vs. Q1 2025 Δ Micron Technology $12,202,000,000 GE Vernova $4,486,000,000 Netflix $2,392,440,000 ...
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Keurig Dr. Pepper’s Rising Restructuring Costs

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Keurig Dr. Pepper ($KDP) filed its first-quarter earnings statement on Thursday morning, and to our delight, the filing gives us another chance to talk about one of our favorite financial reporting issues here at Calcbench. Restructuring charges! Let’s whip through the headline numbers first. Revenue was up 9.4 percent from the year-earlier period, which is good. Net income was down 47.8 percent, which is not good; but that decline was largely due to one-time costs related to the company’s recent acquisition of JDE Peet’s and to higher interest expenses.  Then we started digging into the footnote disclosures, which one can easily do on Calcbench by using our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page. We came to the restructuring footnote, and noticed that Keurig Dr. Pepper had reported $23 million in restructuring costs this quarter for something called the Networking Optimization program, first announced in March 2024.  That program is supposed to improve Keurig’s efficiency ...
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Charticle: Wall Street Proprietary Trading Revenue

The six biggest banks on Wall Street have all filed their first-quarter earnings now, so today we thought we’d examine the banks’ proprietary trading — and specifically, how much revenue from those trades drives revenue for the banks overall.  Figure 1, below, shows the historical pattern for the last five years plus Q1 2026.  As you can see, some banks drive more revenue from proprietary trading than others. Wells Fargo ($WFC) in particular seems least dependent on proprietary trading, never even hitting 10 percent. Contrast that with Goldman Sachs ($GS), which always drives a considerable amount of revenue from proprietary trading even though the overall percentage has trended downward from the low 40s to the low 30s. Some more precise readings from Q1 2026: GOLDMAN SACHS ($GS) 32.3% JP MORGAN CHASE ($JPM) 16.9% WELLS FARGO ($WFC) 6.7% Insights like this can be hard to find simply by reading the earnings releases, since each bank tags its p...
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Looking for Disclosures on War Risk

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Earnings releases and quarterly reports for Q1 2026 will start arriving in large numbers this week and next. One issue sure to be on the minds of financial analysts will be the war in Iran and how that fighting might affect corporate operations — so where should you look for disclosures that might help you understand a company’s exposure to that risk? Many businesses will offer some thoughts about the war in their earnings releases, calls with analysts, and quarterly reports; but those aren’t the only sources of information that exist. Today let’s do a quick review of other disclosures companies might make, and how you can find them on Calcbench. For example, one often-overlooked disclosure is a company’s list of subsidiaries. If a company you follow has extensive operations in the Middle East, that could mean those facilities are vulnerable to attack, which in turn might have substantial implications for a company’s operations, earnings, and assets on the balance sheet. You can find ...
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Levi’s Intriguing New Tariff Disclosure

Clothing maker Levi Strauss & Co. ($LEVI) filed its latest earnings report earlier this week with an intriguing new disclosure about tariff costs. Analysts might want to take a look here, since we may see more such disclosures from other companies as Q1 earnings releases start arriving later this month. Levi’s filed its earnings report (for the quarter ending March 1) on April 7, and overall the income statement numbers looked solid. Revenue up 14.1 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 3.7 percent, net income up 30.2 percent thanks to a big boost on the always-popular “Other Income” line item. In short, the jeans looked fabulous.  Instead, our analytics eye drifted to Levi’s footnote disclosures, and we found this fascinating nugget in Levi’s Commitments and Contingencies footnote : On February 20, 2026, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling invalidated tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”). The Company estimates it has paid ap...
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