Calcbench

Five major Wall Street banks reported their Q2 earnings this morning, so what better way to demonstrate the speed and ease of Calcbench data analytics than to whip up a chart of the banks’ return on equity?  “ROE” is one of the most important performance metrics banks disclose in their earnings releases. It’s calculated by dividing net income for the period into shareholder equity, and is expressed as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more efficiently the firm is generating wealth for shareholders.  ROE disclosures are also tagged and indexed by Calcbench, which means a bank’s ROE numbers are available for your inspection within minutes of the bank filing its earnings release with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  We went to our Multi-Company page and to research quarterly ROE numbers for the five Wall Street titans who filed Q2 earnings this morning: Bank of America ($BAC)  Citigroup ($C) Goldman Sachs ($GS) JPMorgan Chase ($JPM) Wells Fargo ($WFC...

Screening for credit stress across a bank cohort Ahead of Q2 2026 bank earnings, we wanted to answer a specific question: is there evidence that bank customers — consumer and commercial borrowers alike — are under rising credit stress? Not for one bank, read off a single 10-Q, but systematically, across the sector, using Calcbench's standardized data. This post walks through the method, what it found, and a wrinkle along the way that's arguably the more important lesson: a systematic screen is only as good as your willingness to double-check what it flags. The method Provision for loan loss (PLL) is the natural starting point for a credit-stress question — it's the expense banks book each quarter in anticipation of loans going bad. But raw PLL dollars are a noisy signal on their own. A bank's provision grows simply because its loan book is growing, independent of whether borrower quality is deteriorating. To separate “more loans” from “worse loans,” we normalized pr...

The six biggest banks on Wall Street have all filed their first-quarter earnings now, so today we thought we’d examine the banks’ proprietary trading — and specifically, how much revenue from those trades drives revenue for the banks overall.  Figure 1, below, shows the historical pattern for the last five years plus Q1 2026.  As you can see, some banks drive more revenue from proprietary trading than others. Wells Fargo ($WFC) in particular seems least dependent on proprietary trading, never even hitting 10 percent. Contrast that with Goldman Sachs ($GS), which always drives a considerable amount of revenue from proprietary trading even though the overall percentage has trended downward from the low 40s to the low 30s. Some more precise readings from Q1 2026: GOLDMAN SACHS ($GS) 32.3% JP MORGAN CHASE ($JPM) 16.9% WELLS FARGO ($WFC) 6.7% Insights like this can be hard to find simply by reading the earnings releases, since each bank tags its p...

All the big Wall Street banks have reported their fourth-quarter and year-end earnings now, and as we noted in our prior post , the banks report numerous specific lines of revenue. Today we wanted to examine credit card revenues in particular. If the Trump Administration follows through on President Trump’s demand that interest rates for consumer credit cards be capped at 10 percent, what might that mean for the credit card revenue that banks receive? Figure 1, below, gives us a preliminary sense of the money involved. It shows quarterly credit card revenue from Bank of America ($BAC), Citigroup ($C), JPMorgan Chase ($JPM), and Wells Fargo ($WFC) for the last three years.  As you can see, we’re talking about multiple billions of dollars, although Citi’s billions are far larger than any of the other banks. You can find these numbers easily by searching the banks’ footnotes via our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page and using the See Tag History feature. More Data, More Analysi...

Earnings season kicked off again on Tuesday, with Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings numbers from Delta Air Lines ($DAL) and JPMorgan Chase ($JPM), plus a scattered few others. Today let’s start with JPMorgan and a look at its many lines of revenue.  One can find those many lines of revenue from our Company-in-Detail page, which captures and displays those numbers if a company reports them. (Not all companies do.) Figure 1, below, is simply a quick look at JPMorgan’s income statement , filed at 6:41 a.m. today. You’ll notice that we highlighted one particular line, “principal transactions.” Broadly speaking, principal transactions are those where the bank itself (the principal) commits its own capital to a deal. They have a clear, direct effect on the bank’s overall profitability, since the money going into the deal would otherwise fall straight to the bottom line. Principal transactions can fluctuate substantially from one quarter to the next. See Figure 2, below; pulled together by...

All the big Wall Street banks filed their Q3 earnings reports last week, which allows Calcbench to give an update on one of our favorite performance metrics: loan loss ratios! All banks must set aside some portion of capital to cover loans they’ve extended which might subsequently default. Those are loan loss provisions , disclosed in absolute dollars. You can then calculate a bank’s loan loss ratio by dividing the loan loss provisions into total loans outstanding.  That ratio gives investors a sense of how confident a bank is about its loan portfolio, and really about the economy overall. A declining loan loss ratio means banks aren’t as worried about the risk of default among their loan recipients; a rising one means the banks are. So what does that picture look like today? We pulled the results for five major banks: Bank of America ($BAC), Citigroup ($C), JPMorgan Chase ($JPM), US Bank ($USB), and Wells Fargo ($WFC). Figure 1, below, tells the tale. As one can see, the bank...