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About Those Net Income Gains…

Wall Street has been broadly pleased with Q1 earnings so far, and at first glance you can’t blame them: as of last week, overall net income among 2,100 firms that had already filed earnings data was up 27.4 percent . What’s not to love about that?  Well, we looked under the hood of that net income growth, and perhaps quite a bit. Using our Multi-Company page , we pulled the net income numbers for a total of 3,285 firms that have filed Q1 2026 earnings as of Tuesday morning. (Legions of smaller and mid-sized companies are filing Q1 earnings this week.) Yes, overall net income is still growing nicely, up 19.9 percent from Q1 2025 — but that growth is almost entirely due to a tiny number of firms reporting huge jumps in net income . Strip those super-achievers out of the picture, and net income growth for everyone else has barely budged upward. Table 1, below, tells the tale. Yes, those 3,285 companies reported $103.5 billion more in net income this quarter; but $96.66 billion of tha...
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Earnings Roundup Week 2: Still Strong

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YoY Revenue  +10.3% YoY net income  +27.4% Firm Count 2,100 Another week, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q1 earnings data from roughly 2,100 firms — and for the second week in a row, the aggregate numbers look solid. Growth in all the most important performance metrics is somewhat down this week compared to last week’s numbers, but that’s not a surprise. Last week we had only 800 firms in the Earnings Tracker sample, mostly the largest of the large. Now we have far more mid-sized and small firms reporting, and they tend to push the numbers downward. All that said, the numbers are still moving upward. Year-over-year growth in revenue, operating income, and net income has decelerated from last week, but the growth is still healthy double-digits. See Figure 1, below. The next question to ask — and one that Calcbench will explore next week — is the extent to which a small handful of over-achievers are skewing the whole picture. For example, ...
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Amazon Offers Glimpse Into AI Investments

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...
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Q1 Earnings: So Far, So Good

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, ...
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Shop Talk With Tee Duncan, Partner, on 10 Years of Calcbench at Grant Thornton

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"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...
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