Q3 Earnings, Week 3: The Numbers Ramp Up

The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker rolls onward, now in our third week of gathering and crunching Q3 earnings data. Our sample size has nearly tripled to roughly 2,000 non-financial firms — and overall, the positive trends we’ve seen in previous weeks continue now. 


Figure 1, below, shows all the usual earnings metrics we’re tracking every week. Revenue is up 15.2 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 37.4 percent, net income up 42.1 percent. 


We should note that all three of those numbers are now better than they were one week ago, when only 760-ish firms were in our sample group. A wide range of companies have reported this week, and everything has moved in a good direction since then.


Notice that capex spending is up 40.1 percent compared to the year-ago period. In our update last week we explored how this quarter’s capex growth really depended on the four AI hyperscalers: Alphabet ($GOOG), Amazon ($AMZN), Meta ($META), and Microsoft ($MSFT). They collectively reported $201.9 billion in capex spending in Q3, and if you stripped out their numbers, capex growth for everyone else was much less.


Well, that trend has not only continued this week. It’s grown even more pronounced. 


Overall capex spending this quarter is now up 40.1 percent compared to Q3 2025. But if you strip out the four AI hyperscalers, capex spending for the other nearly 2,000 firms is up only 13.6 percent — less than half as much as the group with hyperscalers included. 


Figure 2, below, demonstrates the point more clearly.



We’re not entirely sure what story that trend tells us, but we at Calcbench aren’t financial analysts, after all. We simply note that in-depth examination of the data can bring all sorts of insights to light, and we have the data to let you do that analysis. 


Figure 2, below, shows our Earnings Tracker data in table format. 


Metric Q3 2026 Q3 2025 Firms YoY Change
Revenue $5.0T $4.3T 1,898 15.2%
Cost Of Revenue $2.9T $2.6T 1,688 13.1%
Capex $483.5B $345.1B 1,697 40.1%
Operating Expenses $1.2T $1.1T 1,898 7.8%
SGA Expense $598.8B $556.6B 1,896 7.6%
Operating Cash Flow $965.2B $805.8B 1,889 19.8%
Operating Income $775.1B $564.2B 2,002 37.4%
EBIT $775.6B $594.3B 1,975 30.5%
Net Income $579.1B $407.5B 1,985 42.1%
Assets $28.8T $25.5T 1,994 12.9%
Cash $1.8T $1.6T 1,977 13.7%
Inventory $1.6T $1.5T 1,296 11.0%
Liabilities $17.6T $15.7T 1,969 11.8%
Total Debt $8.3T $7.6T 1,487 9.1%

Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.


If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 


Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at us@calcbench.com.


That’s all for this week. Come back next Friday for more!

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