Amazon ($AMZN) filed its quarterly report last week, which gives us a great opportunity to talk about one of the most important questions on Wall Street these days.

We revved up the Calcbench Earnings Tracker this weekend for our first analysis of Q1 2026 earnings data. So far, among the large companies that dominate the beginning of earnings season, the overall numbers look solid.

"When people see the [Calcbench] platform in action, natural curiosity kicks in, and they want to try it for themselves."

Q: How did you first discover Calcbench? 

A: Around 10 years ago, I was introduced to Calcbench through our innovation team. At the time, there weren’t many users who had adopted Calcbench. I started experimenting with the platform and found two main use cases for it: (1) quickly getting up to speed on an engagement, using Calcbench’s Company Detail feature; and (2) finding examples of how companies describe new accounting standards or a specific footnote using the Interactive Disclosures feature.

Q: How did adoption spread across the firm? 

A: Word of mouth has played a big role. I take the opportunity to show people what I’ve pulled from Calcbench. When people see the platform in action, natural curiosity kicks in, and they want to try it for themselves. Once they see how it makes them more efficient or effective, they’re motivated to use it. In the early days of the relationship, Calcbench held demos across our offices. Our firm’s learning group has done a great job of incorporating Calcbench into training for staff and managers alike.

Q: What are some of the Calcbench features you rely on most in your day-to-day work? 

A:  I mentioned Calcbench’s Company-in-Detail and Interactive Disclosures pages first because they both cover a wide range of use cases. To prepare for conversations with engagement teams, I use Company-in-Detail to refresh my understanding of what happened last quarter and how a client is trending year-over-year. Calcbench’s Interactive Disclosures gives me the ability to perform detailed searches in public filings, including disclosures for new accounting standards or industry-specific disclosures, SEC comment letters on certain topics, or Critical Audit Matters (CAMs) in auditor opinions.

As another use case for private and public company engagements, I also use Calcbench’s analytics tools to highlight how a client stacks up vis-à-vis competitors across a range of ratios: turnover, liquidity, inventory conversion, and other key metrics. Lastly, Calcbench’s Excel add-in is baked into everyone’s installed version of Excel. For quarterly analytics work, staff can prepopulate prior-period financial data into their spreadsheets. They just need to drop in the new period data. This saves them time. Some Grant teams also use it independently to pull in things like revenue comparisons across competitors or investment and interest rate information.

Q: How is Calcbench data being incorporated into AI initiatives at the firm? 

A: While I can’t speak to the specifics, like every major firm, we’re making a meaningful investment in AI, and structured financial data is exactly the kind of input those tools need.

All six major U.S. airlines have now filed their first-quarter earnings releases, and to exactly zero surprise, all six reported sharply higher fuel costs that pummeled their operating costs.

Casual observers of the industry might wonder, “OK, that stinks; but don’t these guys offset price spikes through hedging instruments?”

Users of Calcbench, however, will already know the answer: no, they don’t, and the airlines are likely to suffer with painfully high fuel costs for quite some time.

Figure 1 maps out the average cost per gallon for the six largest U.S. airlines for the last nine quarters.

Figure 2 shows total fuel expense as a percentage of total operating revenue.

The spikes we see for Q1 2026 in both charts are no surprise; average cost of jet fuel per gallon has more than doubled since war began. Figure 2, however, shows us that some firms are feeling that price pressure much more than others. JetBlue ($JBLU) and Alaska Air ($ALK), for example, both have much steeper increases than others such as Southwest ($LUV), American (AAL) and United ($UAL). 

Now the airlines will need to offset those fuel cost increases somehow; either through price increases of their own, lower operating income (gasp!), or some combination of both.

Hedging Against Price Increases

In theory, the airlines could avoid fuel cost surprises by purchasing derivatives to hedge against higher costs. Pay a bit more money in hedging instruments quarter after quarter, but pay less money through the nose if fuel costs suddenly spike. 

So which airlines actually do that? None of them, apparently.

One can find this information simply by calling up the airlines’ quarterly reports on our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page and then selecting the “Derivatives and Hedging” footnote choice from the pull-down menu on the left side of your screen. 

You won’t find much.

For example, JetBlue had this to say in its 2025 Form 10-K, filed on Feb. 26:

The Company has historically aimed to reduce volatility in operating expenses through its fuel hedging program. However, based on higher fuel hedging premium costs over time and other factors, the Company has discontinued its fuel hedging program in 2025 and does not intend to add additional fuel derivatives at this time.

JetBlue hasn’t yet filed its 10-Q for first-quarter 2026, and perhaps it will have something else to say in its new filing. Then again, fuel prices are already up, so any new hedging instruments now will be more expensive. 

Southwest reported much the same in its first-quarter 10-Q, filed on April 23:

The Company has historically aimed to reduce volatility in operating expenses through its fuel hedging program. However, based on higher fuel hedging premium costs over time and other factors, the Company discontinued its fuel hedging program and terminated its remaining portfolio of fuel hedging contracts, which were scheduled to settle through 2027, to effectively close its fuel hedging portfolio during 2025. The Company does not intend to add additional fuel derivatives.

Southwest did, however, report the income it received while liquidating those hedges. The value of those hedges had been reported in AOCI (accumulated other comprehensive income) from quarter to quarter; but as Southwest closed out the hedges, those amounts were reclassified from AOCI into expenses or operating revenue on the income statement. See below:

The other airlines don’t even report a derivatives footnote at all, or make any other substantive disclosure about hedging. 

So, yeah. Fuel costs are sky high and squeezing the airlines. That’s not likely to change any time soon.

As of April 27, 2026

Of the 544 firms that have so far reported calendar Q1 2026 GAAP net income (and that also reported in Q1 2025), aggregate net income grew 16.2% year-over-year — from $179.3 billion to $208.4 billion. That’s a $29.1 billion increase (note: Unlike our weekly metric recap, this does include financial services firms).

Ten companies account for all of it.

The top ten contributors to the year-over-year change in net income added a combined $29.2 billion — slightly more than the entire $29.1 billion delta. That means the other 534 companies, taken as a group, contributed essentially nothing on net.

The Top Ten Contributors

Micron alone is responsible for roughly 42% of the entire reported delta. Add GE Vernova and Netflix and you’re at two-thirds of it from three names.

The Drag on the Other Side

Concentration on the positive side is matched by meaningful drag from a small number of large declines. The ten biggest negative contributors collectively reduced aggregate net income by about $25.3 billion year-over-year:

The headline 16.2% growth figure is real, but the distribution behind it is not broad-based. A handful of large positive swings — concentrated in memory semiconductors, power equipment, streaming, and money-center banks — more than offset substantial declines at several large-cap names, with the broad middle of corporate America contributing little.

A Note on Timing

This snapshot is drawn from filings through the morning of April 27, 2026. Calendar Q1 is a heavy reporting week, so the 544-company population — and the rankings above — will move materially in the days ahead. We’ll revisit once the window settles.

Source: Calcbench.

Keurig Dr. Pepper ($KDP) filed its first-quarter earnings statement on Thursday morning, and to our delight, the filing gives us another chance to talk about one of our favorite financial reporting issues here at Calcbench.

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:

Insights like this can be hard to find simply by reading the earnings releases, since each bank tags its proprietary trading revenues in its own unique way. Calcbench, however, does have the tools to extract those nuggets of information and compare them across banks, which is why we were able to present Figure 1.

Calcbench subscribers can also use our database superpowers to track banks’ exposure to mortgages, auto loans, commercial real estate, loans in arrears, and other important metrics too. And if you want a spoiler: we’ll have a template for proprietary trading by second quarter so subscribers can get all this information automatically!

Earnings releases and quarterly reports for Q1 2026 will start arriving in large numbers this week and next. One issue sure to be on the minds of financial analysts will be the war in Iran and how that fighting might affect corporate operations — so where should you look for disclosures that might help you understand a company’s exposure to that risk?

Clothing maker Levi Strauss & Co. ($LEVI) filed its latest earnings report earlier this week with an intriguing new disclosure about tariff costs. Analysts might want to take a look here, since we may see more such disclosures from other companies as Q1 earnings releases start arriving later this month.

What’s the Point of This

Today we continue our series on new corporate tax disclosures by asking a simple question: Which foreign countries receive the most tax payments from U.S. filers? 

As you might recall from our previous post, this year we’re starting to see a wave of new disclosures about corporate tax payments, courtesy of a new accounting standard that went into effect in 2025. U.S. filers must now report actual taxes paid to different jurisdictions around the world, so long as those individual amounts are at least 5 percent of total taxes the company pays that fiscal year. 

Calcbench tracks all this data (of course), which means that financial analysts can gain new insight into where the companies that you follow tend to pay the most taxes. 

Even better, Calcbench also tracks this data in aggregate, so we can get a macro-level view of which countries receive how much money in taxes from U.S. filers. 

Table 1, below, lists the 10 countries that received the largest amounts of total tax payments in 2025. Note that the “country” receiving the largest amount of taxes is no specific country at all; companies only have to identify a country by name if payments to it are at least 5 percent of all taxes the company pays. So the single largest destination is simply undefined.

Calcbench is always striving to provide more data to our subscribers, so you can put that data to good use driving better financial analysis.

To that end, today we kick off a short series of posts on new tax payment disclosures that companies are now making: what that data is, what it tells you about corporate financial performance, and how you can find it in Calcbench. 

This is the same dataset Calcbench provided to The Wall Street Journal for its March 20 story about corporate cash taxes paid.

Our tale begins in 2023, when accounting rule-makers adopted a new standard formally known as ASU 2023-09, Improvements to Income Tax Disclosures. The standard requires companies to report the actual taxes they pay to different jurisdictions around the world, so long as those individual amounts are at least 5 percent of total taxes the company pays that fiscal year. 

For most companies, ASU 2023-09 went into effect with their 2025 fiscal years, which means we’re seeing these new tax disclosures for the first time ever in the annual reports arriving this spring — and yes, Calcbench has all the data, indexed and cleaned and ready for you!

Where This Data Exists

Companies will typically report this breakdown of taxes paid as part of the Income Taxes footnote they file along with their financial statements. Calcbench subscribers can find that footnote by (a) looking up a company on our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page and calling up its most recent financial filing; and then (b) selecting the Income Tax footnote from the list of choices on the left side of your screen.¹

For example, we looked up IBM’s ($IBM) tax disclosures from its 2025 annual report, filed on Feb. 24. IBM’s tax footnote runs fairly long, but at the very bottom was this neat table listing taxes paid around the world in 2025:

Not every filer will have a disclosure that looks exactly like this, of course. Different companies will have operations in different parts of the world, and some might have very few jurisdiction-specific disclosures if those amounts don’t exceed 5 percent of the company’s total tax bill. But if a company is filing disaggregated tax disclosures under ASU 2023-09, Calcbench has that information ready to go. 

(Most companies will also report their adoption of ASU 2023-09 in their Summary of Significant Accounting Policies footnote, also readily available on our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page; although that disclosure is usually more about a new standard’s broad implications for the company and won’t necessarily include specific, data-driven numbers.) 

You can also find these disclosures via our Multi-Company page, for either one company or groups of companies. Just choose the companies you want to research, and then you can select any of various tax disclosures we provide in the standardized metrics field on the left side of your screen. See below.

Select the disclosure you want, and it appears on your screen! That’s all there is to it.

What the Data Tells You

Historically, most readers of financial statements are used to seeing tax data in the income statement, where it appears as an accrued expense charged against revenue — but thanks to the legendarily complicated U.S. tax code, the tax expense a company reports for a fiscal year isn’t always the same amount as the actual taxes paid in that fiscal year. (Sometimes adjustments between tax expense and actual taxes paid will be reported as “deferred income taxes” in the statement of cash flows as part of operating activities.) 

ASU 2023-09 drills into those actual taxes paid by a company. Moreover, a company doesn’t just report the dollar amount of taxes paid. It must also report where it paid those taxes, by country and by federal, state, and local level — which provides financial analysts with a wealth of new information. 

The standard also requires companies to disclose a “rate reconciliation” every year regardless of materiality in the following categories:

• State and local income tax

• Net of federal income tax effect

• Foreign tax effects 

• Effect of changes in tax laws or rates enacted in the current period

• Effect of cross-border tax laws

• Tax credits

• Changes in valuation allowances

• Nontaxable or nondeductible items 

• Changes in unrecognized tax benefits

  
  

What does all that look like in practice? Again, let’s look at IBM’s disclosure.

Altogether, these disclosures can help financial analysts uncover all sorts of interesting insights. For example, you can see which countries are collecting significant tax revenue from U.S. filers, or which individual U.S. filers are contributing the most to specific countries’ tax revenue. You can also see how much money foreign businesses, listed on U.S. exchanges, are paying in taxes here (since those amounts would qualify as “foreign” taxes for those non-U.S. domiciled businesses).

Calcbench will offer more examples in future posts of how to put all this information to work. For now, just know that fresh data is available and Calcbench has it ready for you!

¹ There are some firms that provide this data in Supplemental Cash Flow disclosures.

Calcbench was feeling a bit peckish this week for insights into the macro-economic environment, so how better to pass the time then sifting through the earnings releases from restaurants to see what they had to say about inflation? 

Various restaurant chains offer inflation forecasts as part of their earnings guidance. A good example of this is Darden Restaurants ($DRI). Last summer, at the end of its fiscal 2025, the company had forecast inflation for its upcoming fiscal year at 2.5 to 3 percent. By the end of its fiscal Q1 2026 in September, Darden nudged the forecast upward to 3 to 3.5 percent.

Darden filed its latest earnings release this week, for its fiscal Q3 2026. It now forecasts inflation at 3.5 percent. 

That led us to look for other disclosures at other restaurants. Sure enough, we found them.

Texas Roadhouse ($TXRH) included inflation estimates in its 2025 full-year earnings release filed on Feb. 19. The company predicts wage and labor inflation costs of 3 to 4 percent, and commodity inflation costs at an eye-popping 7 percent!

Analysts can take those numbers and do some preliminary modeling. Figure 1, below, shows Texas Roadhouse’s costs as reported on the 2025 income statement. Food and beverage costs were $2.05 billion, labor costs $1.94 billion.

If the company’s inflation forecasts prove true, that would imply 2026 food and beverage costs of $2.19 billion and labor costs of $2.01 billion — a total increase of $211.5 million. That amount would shave 44 percent off Texas Roadhouse’s operating income, which was $474.7 million for the year.

Of course Texas Roadhouse’s actual 2026 performance will hinge on other factors too, but if those inflation predictions prove true then there’s no denying they will be a significant squeeze on earnings that the company will have to address somehow: higher prices, efficiency programs, or some mix of the two — and that was all before war in Iran sent fuel and fertilizer costs soaring. Model accordingly.

One could run the same sort of analysis on Bloomin Brands ($BLMN). In its 2025 earnings release from Feb. 25, the parent company of Outback Steakhouse and other brands said it expects commodity inflation of 4.5 to 5.5 percent and labor inflation of 3 to 3.5 percent in the coming year. 

Figure 2, below, shows that Bloomin had $1.18 billion food costs and $1.24 billion in labor costs for 2025. Adjust those numbers upward according to Bloomin’s inflation estimates, and you arrive at an increase of $99.1 million for 2026, which is more than twice the company’s 2025 operating income of $37.1 million. So again, even if these inflation estimates are only somewhat accurate, that’s a big threat to earnings that Bloomin will have to address somehow.

Alas, not many other restaurant businesses do offer inflation estimates in their guidance, but perhaps that’s important to know too. From the few examples we found, inflation is clearly a potent threat to earnings. Just because other restaurant businesses don’t provide inflation estimates, that doesn’t make the threat go away.

Food for thought as you prepare for Q1 2026 earnings and questions you want to ask the CFO on that next earnings call.

The 2025 earnings season is now over, which means the 2025 proxy season is about to begin. For those analysts and institutional investors who enjoy sifting through proxy data, let’s do a quick review of the data Calcbench can bring to your fingertips.

Then in December, we flagged that Oracle had leapt to the top of the S&P 500 for year-over-year growth in Remaining Performance Obligations — a 359 percent increase, from $99.1 billion to $455.3 billion, the single largest jump among 151 firms we tracked.

Now it's March, and Oracle just filed its fiscal Q3 2026 results. Spoiler: both of those numbers have gotten even bigger.

The two charts below tell the story. We pulled them directly from Oracle's disclosures using Calcbench — the kind of analysis any subscriber can run in minutes.

What to Watch Next

Oracle is now, unambiguously, one of the largest AI infrastructure bets in the market. The question analysts should be asking isn't whether the demand is real — the RPO chart pretty clearly shows that contracts are being signed. The question is whether Oracle can actually deliver on $550 billion in performance obligations while simultaneously managing $262 billion in off-balance-sheet lease commitments and the capital expenditures required to bring those data centers online.

We looked at this capex question briefly in our February post on AI hyperscaler spending, where we noted that Oracle's capex spending was soaring even as operating cash flow struggled to keep pace. Unlike Amazon or Google, Oracle is entering capital-intensive territory for the first time. The company's comfort zone has always been software licensing and database contracts — high-margin, low-capital businesses. What it's doing now is something altogether different.

You can track all of it in Calcbench — RPO, off-balance-sheet commitments, capex, operating cash flow, free cash flow, debt levels. Use our Multi-Company page, our Disclosures & Footnotes Query, or our API if you'd rather pipe the data directly into your own model.

The numbers are there. They're updated in minutes. And in Oracle's case, they are absolutely worth watching.

For more information or to start a free two-week trial of Calcbench Premium, email us at us@calcbench.com.

Grocery giant Kroger ($KR) filed its full-year 2025 earnings release this morning, with a rather unpleasant $2.5 billion impairment charge for a warehouse automation project that never delivered on its expected promises.

The impairment charge wasn’t a surprise. Kroger had previously disclosed the matter in a filing on Nov. 18, framing the matter as an “updated e-commerce plan” where Kroger would close three fulfillment warehouses around the United States. The impairment translates to a one-time hit to EPS of $2.91 per diluted share.

Wait a minute, warehouse automation costs… Why does that ring a bell? 

Because Walmart ($WMT) reported its own EPS issues with warehouse automation several weeks ago — but did so in a very different way. Together, the two earnings releases present a fascinating comparison of how large businesses might treat projects and how they disclose issues to investors when said project goes wobbly.

First, Kroger. The company originally struck a partnership in 2018 with British warehouse automation business Ocado to build as many as 20 automated fulfillment centers across the United States. Ultimately only eight such centers ever went live, including the three that Kroger now plans to close per its filing last quarter. Krogers ended up paying Ocado $350 million to get out of the partnership, and taking the $2.5 billion impairment for robotic automation dreams that never came to pass.

By taking an impairment, Kroger ends up reporting that $2.5 billion charge on the statement of cash flows, under the cash from operations disclosures. See Figure 1, below.

On the other hand is Walmart. It has an equity investment in Symbotic ($SYM), a warehouse automation company in suburban Boston. That partnership traces back to 2017, although more recently Walmart sold its own in-house robotics efforts to Symbotic in 2025 and pledged another $520 million to Symbotic in long-term investment.

We’re not robotics specialists here, so we don’t know how good Symbotic’s technology might or might not be; but the company has run at a loss for years. Walmart, as an investor, shoulders some of that loss — but reports it on the income statement rather than the statement of cash flows, in the Other (Gains) Losses line item.

Sure enough, Walmart reported “other losses” of $2.12 billion in Q4. Tucked away at the bottom of Page 33 on its earnings release was a note that “net losses were primarily driven by a decrease in the underlying stock price of our investment in Symbotic.” Those losses resulted in a $0.21 hit to EPS. (Walmart reported $0.53 EPS for the quarter, and adjusted EPS of $0.74.)

So we have Kroger, a grocery business, disentangling itself from a partnership for warehouse automation by declaring an impairment; and Walmart, a general retail business, supporting a warehouse automation tech startup that so far doesn’t turn a profit, and therefore drags down Walmart’s net income.

The things you can learn about corporate strategy just by looking in the footnotes!

Provision for Loan Losses as Percentage of Revenue, 2023-2025

Provisions for loan losses (PLL) is a valuable insight into the strength of financial firms' growth prospects. Calcbench allows users to plot PLL as a percentage of revenue over time to see which firms have significant shifts in PLL, which can be a leading indicator of potential lending trouble. The below chart shows PLL as percentage of revenue for 28 financial firms for the last three years. Some firms have two or one dots when the year-over-year percentages are unchanged.

Calcbench subscribers can find this data in several ways. You could use our Multi-Company page to track revenue and PLL for any group of companies you like (although PLL is mostly a disclosure for financial firms) and then ask for a time-series of data for both metrics. You could also configure a template with our Excel Add-In. For Premium subscribers, the data would automatically populate into your Excel template as firms file their latest disclosures.