Calcbench

Carnival Cruise Lines ($CCL) is one of our favorite businesses to follow because it reports so many fascinating non-GAAP disclosures. Today Carnival filed a gangbusters earnings report for its quarter ending Aug. 31 — like, stupendous results on just about every financial performance metric you could imagine.  So let’s chart a course for analysis adventure, shall we?  First are the primary financial disclosures on the income statement. Revenue was up 3.25 percent from the year-earlier period, while operating expenses were up only 1.91 percent, largely thanks to a steep decline in fuel expenses. That ultimately led to pretax income up 6.54 percent, and net income up 6.74 percent. See Figure 1, below. OK, but that’s all just the usual stuff you can pull from anywhere. Calcbench subscribers can also pull a trove of non-GAAP data about Carnival too, including: Passenger cruise days (PCDs), which is the number of cruise passengers on a voyage multiplied by the number of revenue-...

  Today Calcbench welcomes a guest post from Stephen F. O’Byrne, president of Shareholder Value Advisors. O’Byrne is a renowned expert on executive compensation, and his article below explores how financial analysts can use the expanded new disclosures about executive compensation that Calcbench first wrote about last week . New compensation disclosures available in corporate proxy statements (all of them indexed by Calcbench and readily exportable into your financial models) are meant to give investors a better sense of executives’ pay compared to the performance of the companies they lead. This is known as “pay versus performance,” or PvP.  Today we explore why one new disclosure — compensation actually paid (CAP) — provides far more useful information than the Summary Compensation Table (SCT) disclosures that companies have reported for years. It provides great new insight for financial analysts, corporate governance professionals, and others who are trying to assess the va...

Casual dining player Darden Restaurants ($DRI) filed its latest earnings release today — and if you looked closely at the data, you could see the risk of inflation peeping out through the numbers.  For starters, in the earnings release that Darden filed for its quarter that ended Aug. 25, the company flat-out said it expects inflation for the coming fiscal year to be 3 to 3.5 percent. That was the only actual mention of the word in the earnings release, but with a few quick keystrokes we found a more complete picture. First, we used our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page to pull up the precise guidance Darden included in its earnings release for this quarter, its fiscal Q1 2026. That guidance, published on Sept. 18, said Darden expects inflation in the range of 3.0 to 3.5 percent for the coming fiscal year.  Then we punched the Previous Period tab to compare this quarter’s guidance to what Darden said in its prior quarter. Turns out that just three months ago, Darden was ...

Everyone knows that corporate CEOs make lots of money. Now, however, you can have a more precise understanding of exactly how much money CEOs are making and whether the CEO is truly delivering good performance for his or her firm — because Calcbench has started tracking companies’ pay-for-performance data.  Disclosures about CEO compensation are reported in the proxy statement. Typically that data is difficult to find, extract, and study, but the crack software development team here at Calcbench has developed a few techniques to find and present those disclosures in the crisp, easy-to-navigate interface that subscribers know and love.  Let’s start with an example from Walmart ($WMT) so you can see what we mean.  First, use the Disclosures and Footnotes Query tool to search Walmart’s disclosures. Look for the “Related Documents” menu on the left side of the screen, open that menu, and you’ll see an option for “Pay Versus Performance” at the bottom. Click on that choice , ...

Last month we had a post about capex spending among S&P 500 firms, and how capex spending seems to be rising briskly, but that spending is actually being driven by a few tech giants spending gobs of money on data centers for artificial intelligence.  Today we want to revisit that issue from a different angle: how is all that spending changing the nature of the tech giants’ balance sheets?  For many years, those balance sheets were notable for two basic traits: (a) lots of cash; and (b) lots of goodwill or other intangible assets. Physical assets — land, buildings, and equipment typically listed under the Property, Plant, and Equipment line item — accounted for a relatively small part of the tech giants’ overall assets.  Well, that’s changing. Figure 1, below, shows the ratio of “PP&E” assets versus total assets for four tech giants leading the AI arms race: Amazon ($AMZN), Google ($GOOG), Meta ($META), and Microsoft ($MSFT).  As you can see, the ratio f...