Calcbench

It’s Friday in earnings season, which means another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q3 earnings data from roughly 900 non-financial firms, and as a whole they show an impressive gain in net income from the year-ago period. Most other metrics are moving in the right direction, too. Figure 1, below, tells the tale.  Most notable is that plunge in restructuring charges you can see on the far left. Yes, restructuring charges have dropped a whopping 63 percent — but that’s because last year’s restructuring amount included a handful of enormous impairments from Intel ($INTC), AT&T ($T) and a few others. The decline we see this year is from an unusually large number one year ago. Meanwhile, net income is up 28 percent and EBIT up 24 percent. Revenue is up 6.66 percent (rather apt for a Halloween Day update), which is still more than cost of goods sold, up 5.9 percent. Big Spenders in Capex The other impressive line-item this week is capex spending, up 30...

The six major U.S. airlines have now all filed their Q3 2025 earnings releases, so we wanted to give everyone an update on their performance courtesy of our airlines industry earnings template . The template, available to Calcbench subscribers on DropBox, tracks numerous airline-industry performance metrics — everything from revenue per available seat mile (RASM) to passenger revenue, load factor, average fuel cost, and more. We track six U.S. airlines: Alaska Airlines ($ALK) American Airlines ($AAL) Delta Air Lines ($DAL) Jet Blue ($JBLU) Southwest Air ($LUV) United Airlines ($UAL) Figure 1, below, tracks their quarterly EPS (along the bottom) and quarterly RASM (along the top).  Or for those of you who prefer to consume your financial data in table format, here’s the RASM data for the last five quarters in Figure 2, below. Why did we include Q4 with a row of “N/A”? To remind you that our earnings templates automatically capture the latest data as firms file! So when the airl...

Q3 earnings season has barely begun, with only a few hundred large companies filing their earnings reports so far. Still, that’s enough for us to fire up the Calcbench Earnings Tracker again and get the analysis engine running. At close of business on Friday, Oct. 24, we were tracking data from roughly 300 non-financial firms that had already filed their Q3 2025 reports. Collectively, that group reported net income nearly 70 percent higher than the year-ago period; while revenue was up a healthy 5.2 percent and cost of goods sold (an important metric for signs of inflation) up 4.5 percent. See Figure 1, below. We need to emphasize that this first assessment of Q3 earnings comes with a host of caveats. First, there are only 300-ish companies in our sample size, a small fraction of the total number that end up in the Calcbench Earnings Tracker. (For example, we had more than 3,800 firms in our final assessment of Q2 earnings.) Important chunks of the economy are still missing from this ...

Netflix ($NFLX) filed its latest quarterly report on Tuesday. Lots of numbers on the income statement looked solid — yet the streaming giant’s share price still tumbled 7.7 percent by the end of the day. Why? Apparently because investors were surprised at a $619 million charge the company booked due to a long-running tax dispute in Brazil. Unless, that is, you were a close reader of the disclosures Netflix made in its footnotes! Then you would’ve seen this “surprise” tax charge coming from miles away. Let’s start with the disclosure Netflix made in this week’s filings , confirming the $619 million charge. That disclosure came in the Commitments and Contingencies footnote that all publicly traded companies are required to make every quarter. (Emphasis added by us.) During the current period, developments in another taxpayer’s judicial proceedings have influenced our evaluation of the Company’s most significant non-income tax matter in Brazil and we now believe that it is probable tha...

In our latest Q&A interview with people who use Calcbench in their financial analysis, we speak with Stephen O’Byrne, President of Shareholder Value Advisors . O’Byrne’s firm helps companies design better management incentive plans and measure shareholder value at the group and divisional levels using economic profit concepts.  In this interview, Calcbench talks to O’Byrne about why investors should focus on executive compensation, how to evaluate executive pay with the new disclosures, and how Calcbench can help investors with this analysis.  Let’s start at the top. Why should investors pay attention to executive compensation?  Simple: because when pay practices are connected with shareholder interests, investors have a better chance of achieving higher returns. So investors should study executive compensation to be sure that alignment between pay and shareholder interests does exist. How has executive compensation been evolving?  Proxy advisers have become incr...