Calcbench

And that’s a wrap on the Q2 2025 earnings season! Nvidia ($NVDA), unofficial curtain closer for the quarter, filed earlier this week; so with the earnings data of nearly 3,800 non-financial companies now in hand, let’s see what the big picture tells us.  Overall, the  numbers look good. Revenue was up a collective 4.6 percent from the year-ago period, which exceeded cost of revenue (up 4.2 percent) and operating expenses (up 3.4 percent). See Figure 1, below.  One notable line-item this quarter has been capex spending, up 16.7 percent from the year-ago period. That would suggest that lots of businesses are investing in technology and equipment for long-term growth, but (as we noted in a blog post earlier this week ) a huge amount of that capex spending is concentrated among a tiny number of technology firms spending gobs of money on artificial intelligence infrastructure.  We’ll take a deeper dive into capex spending in September. For now, however, it’s not clear t...

One important measure of macro-economic health is “capex” spending — that is, capital expenditures that companies make to acquire or maintain physical assets. Capex could be anything from property to hardware technology to manufacturing equipment; and the logic is that the more companies spend on capex, the better a sign it is that companies are bullish on their long-term growth.  At first glance, capex spending seems pretty good these days. According to the Calcbench Earnings Tracker, capex spending in Q2 2025 was up 16.9 percent from the year-earlier period . That means everything’s good, right?  Upon digging into the data, the answer is more complex. Figure 1, below, companies capex spending among four tech giants investing heavily in artificial intelligence against the rest of the S&P 500. As you can see, those four firms — Google ($GOOG), Microsoft ($MSFT), Amazon ($AMZN) and Facebook ($META) — account for a significant fraction of all capex spending for the enti...

Another week, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker — and this week is an important one, as several major retailers enter the picture.  This week we now have more than 3,600 non-financial firms in our sample group, including important bellwethers such as Walmart ($WMT) and Target ($TGT). Even with their numbers, however, the Q2 earnings cake is now nearly completely baked; the stats in Figure 1, below, are almost unchanged from our prior week’s report . The only statistically significant changes from last week were in net income (now collectively up 13.9 percent from the year-earlier period, compared to 13.6 percent last week) and in capex (which went from an 18.6 percent increase last week to 16.9 percent this week). But again, most of the fluctuations now are just a few tenths of a percentage point, if that.  For those who’d like to see the data presented in another way, consider Figure 2, below. Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker t...

If there’s one lesson about financial analysis that we harp upon constantly here at Calcbench, it’s that you should always read the footnote disclosures to understand what’s really going on within a company.  Today we offer example No. 7,938,617 of why that’s true, courtesy of Walmart ($WMT).  Walmart filed its latest earnings release on Thursday (for its fiscal Q2 2026, period ending July 30) and at first glance the numbers look fine: revenue up 4.76 percent from the year-earlier period, net income up an impressive 51.8 percent. Sounds great, right?  Except, operating income was actually down 8.24 percent. So how did the retail giant go from that rather gloomy decline at the operational level to a delight pop in the bottom line?  We started with the income statement summary on the Company-in-Detail page . There, we spied a one-time $2.71 billion gain in Walmart’s ‘Other (Gains) and Losses’ line-item. See Figure 1, below. (Since these numbers are typically subtrac...

We are now deep into Q2 earnings season, and Calcbench has data from nearly 3,500 non-financial companies collected and collated in our world famous Calcbench Earnings Tracker. Here’s the latest.  Broadly speaking, just about every line item you’d want to see going up is going up, although not all of them are going up by as much as we’d like. Still, upward is  better than downward.  Figure 1, below, tells the tale.  Revenue is up 4.3 percent from the year-ago period, a smidge more than than the increase we reported in last week’s earnings update . Net income is up 13.6 percent, a smidge less than the increase we reported last week. Cost of revenue, SG&A expenses, other operating expenses, inventory — they’re all moving by only a few tenths of a percent in either direction, as the big picture on earnings performance comes into clearer focus.  We still have a few more weeks of earnings season to go, but at this point one can safely say this is what Q2 2025 per...

Several weeks ago Calcbench had a post reviewing the various ways that companies have begun to disclose the effects of tariffs on their financial operations.  Today we want to explore one particular company’s approach to tariff disclosures: Yeti Holdings ($YETI), maker of coolers, ice chests, stainless steel drink mugs, and related outdoor gear.  Why Yeti? Because the company talked at length about tariffs in its Q2 earnings release filed on Aug. 7 , mentioning the word 13 times. Moreover, Yeti disclosed a wide range of effects that tariffs might have on its operations, including some fascinating non-GAAP disclosures you’d typically never expect to encounter in the wild.  Let’s begin with the headline numbers from the income statement, which were underwhelming: revenue, gross profit, and operating income all down from the year-ago period; net income and EPS up only thanks to foreign currency adjustments. See Figure 1, below. OK, kinda yucky at that headline level — but ...