Tuesday, March 3, 2026

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.

For more information, email us@calcbench.com any time!
Friday, February 27, 2026

We are just about at the end of Q4 and full-year earnings season, and this Friday have perhaps our last earnings roundup of the season courtesy of the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. 


We now have more than 2,000 non-financial firms in our sample, including important late filers such as Walmart ($WMT) and Nvidia ($NVDA), which just filed two days ago. Figure 1, below, shows the change in Q4 2025 numbers from the year-ago period.



Most notably, net income is up 10.2 percent from one year ago, revenue up 8.5 percent. EBIT, operating income, and cash from operations are all up by double-digits too. Cash is up 9.8 percent.


Capex spending is also up an impressive 25.1 percent, which one might assume to mean that companies are spending oodles of cash to invest in long-term growth — but one would be misled! 


As we wrote one week ago, that surge in capex spending is entirely due to four AI hyperscalers pouring staggering sums into building data centers. Strip those four out (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft) and capex spending among the rest of Corporate America actually fell by 3.4 percent compared to one year ago.


Figure 2, below, is the same information in table format.


Metric 2025 2024 Firms YoY Change
Revenue 4.93T 4.54T 1,942 +8.6%
Cost of Revenue 3.01T 2.69T 1,758 +11.7%
Capex 400B 320B 1,731 +25.1%
OpEx 1.27T 1.19T 1,991 +6.6%
SG&A 677B 629B 1,933 +7.6%
Operating Income 639B 567B 2,168 +12.8%
Net Income 493B 448B 2,026 +10.2%
Assets 30.35T 27.88T 2,187 +8.9%
Cash 1.97T 1.79T 2,162 +9.8%
Total Debt 8.77T 8.16T 1,635 +7.4%

There’s still plenty of financial data to arrive, including rich disclosures in 10-Ks, segment-level analysis, and lots of juicy morsels of insight in the footnotes. Heck, we might even do one or two more earnings roundups too if late filers submit data that changes the picture materially. Whatever the data is, we have it, and you can find it!


Wednesday, February 25, 2026
You may have seen headlines lately that pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk ($NVO) will enact significant price cuts for its blockbuster weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus starting in 2027.

Novo Nordisk is cutting prices because it’s facing stiff competition from Eli Lilly &Co. ($LLY) and pressure from government regulators to make the popular drugs more affordable. The cuts will lower the price for a one-month supply to $675, which translates into reductions of from 35 to 50 percent depending on the exact drug. 

For financial analysts, an important question emerges: Just how much money does Novo Nordisk make from these drugs, anyway?

As always, Calcbench can help.

Novo Nordisk is based in Denmark, and as a foreign issuer its annual report is known as a Form 20-F. In that report, however, the company does report the sales of individual drugs just like U.S. pharmaceutical companies do. (We have a pharmaceutical sales template available for Calcbench premium subscribers. Email us at us@calcbench.com for more details.) 

We called up Novo Nordisk’s 2025 annual report in our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page, searched for “Ozempic” and immediately found a neat table listing revenue for that drug and many more, all organized by major geographic segments. From there, we exported the table into Excel (another standard Calcbench power) and arrived at Figure 1, below.


(Novo Nordisk reports its sales numbers in Danish krone; we converted them to U.S. dollars at the current exchange rate of 1 krone = $0.158.)


Then we reconfigured the numbers to total up sales from all three drugs in the United States and the rest of the world to see how dependent those three blockbusters are on the U.S. market. See Figure 2, below.



So even as U.S. sales are still rising, the pace of sales growth is decelerating; while sales in the rest of the world is picking up. U.S. sales only grew 43.3 percent in the last three years; rest of the world sales grew by 89 percent in the same period.

What we don’t know is whether the price cuts entice more U.S. insurance plans to cover the three drugs and therefore lead to higher sales thanks to a low price/high volume strategy. But analysts following Novo Nordisk can build your own models to get better insight into that question. The data is there, and you can pull it out with a few easy keystrokes through Calcbench.
Monday, February 23, 2026

Reading the Signals: Why Meta Borrows While Swimming in Cash


Meta
3% 
How much Free Cash Flow is left after deducting Share Repurchasing Spend and Equity Withholding Taxes
Alphabet
19%
How Much Free Cash Flow is left after deducting Share Repurchasing and Equity With Holding Taxes


On Feb. 23 the Wall Street Journal published a detailed analysis of Meta’s cash flows and debt levels, exploring how the social media giant is trying to juggle equity awards for employees, cash needed to build AI data centers, and cash needed for ongoing operations, too.

The article is an examination of how to study companies’ financial disclosures so that you can understand how all the pieces fit together. Here at Calcbench, however, we just want to remind everyone — we have all that data there for the taking, with just a few easy clicks.


Let’s start with a recap of the article itself, written by columnist Jonathan Weil. The premise is that while Meta is generating heaps of operating cash flow, which would seemingly help to cover the huge capital expenditures Meta is laying out to build AI data centers, that’s not how it works in practice. 


In practice, because Meta must cover the cash costs of equity compensation given to employees, and those costs are expensive, the company doesn’t have heaps of cash that can cover the costs of data centers. That’s why Meta is taking on new debt to pay for its data centers, even as operating cash flows increase.


This phenomenon — of employee-related equity compensation costs gobbling up free cash flow — exists at lots of tech companies, as Weil’s column notes; Meta just happens to be an outlier example.


With Calcbench, however, analysts can perform your own analysis of this issue quickly and easily. Then you can bring better judgment to your own assessments of whether and how the AI hyperscalers can afford all this.


Let’s walk through a comparison of Meta ($META) and Alphabet ($GOOG). 


Finding the Relevant Disclosures


Finding the relevant disclosures in Calcbench is straightforward. Just go to our Multi-Company page, call up the companies you want to research (in this case, Meta and Alphabet), and enter the relevant disclosures in the Search Standardized Metrics field on the left side of your screen.


For our purposes today, the six metrics we want to study are:


  • Operating cash flow

  • Free cash flow

  • Gross capital expenditures

  • Value of shares repurchased during the period (not the number of shares repurchased, which Calcbench also tracks for you)

  • Payments related to taxes for share-based compensation

  • Total debt


We entered all those metrics, and Calcbench immediately returned Figure 1, below. You should see something similar on your screen.



Among those six metrics, the only one that’s a bit tricky is the payments related to taxes for share-based compensation. Both Meta and Alphabet do list that number in the earnings release, specifically on the Statement of Cash Flows under financing activities — but they tag the disclosure somewhat differently, so you might need to check the actual earnings release to confirm. But the number will always be there somewhere. 


Anyway, once we pulled together the data and lined them up in a spreadsheet, we arrived at Figure 2, below.



Back to Weil’s column in the Wall Street Journal. His key point was that when you add Meta’s repurchase spending and equity withholding taxes together, they equal nearly 97 percent of free cash flow. So Meta actually doesn’t have oodles of spare cash lying around to build data centers; it needs to preserve the $115 billion in operating cash flow for operations, rather than just capex. That’s why the company is tapping debt instruments to pay for its data center dreams. 


By comparison, Alphabet’s repurchase spending and equity withholding taxes are only 81 percent of free cash flow. One could run the same comparison exercise for Amazon ($AMZN), Microsoft ($MSFT), and Oracle ($ORCL) too, although beware that Microsoft and Oracle run on July 1 and June 1 fiscal years, respectively, so their annual report data is rather out of date by now.


So the issue for Meta is that its spending on equity compensation is consuming operating cash flow, which in turn narrows the company’s options to finance its AI data center dreams and drives it toward more debt. Little surprise, then, the Financial Times just had an article too, noting that Meta is cutting staff equity awards for the second year in a row. 


If you’ve been using Calcbench for financial analysis all along, you could’ve seen that coming!

Friday, February 20, 2026
CapEx: Ex Big 6 — Or Is It Big 4? | Calcbench Earnings Monitor
CALCBENCH Earnings Monitor · Feb 20, 2026
Calcbench Earnings Monitor

CapEx: Ex Big 6 — Or Is It Big 4?

📅 Feb 20, 2026 📊 Q4 2025 vs Q4 2024
+14.9%
Broad market CapEx growth
4
Companies driving the gain
−3.4%
CapEx growth ex-hyperscalers

Four Companies Are Driving the Entire CapEx Story

Here is the headline: across more than 1,100 public companies, Capital Expenditures appear to be up nearly 15% year-over-year. But that number is almost entirely a mirage. Strip out four companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — and CapEx for the rest of corporate America actually fell 3.4% in Q4 2025 versus a year ago.

Four firms. That is the entire story. Everything else is noise.

We will show you the data below — but we wanted to say that up front, because the aggregate number alone is deeply misleading.

Figure 1 — YoY % Change by Metric, Q4 2025 vs Q4 2024  |  CapEx highlighted in orange  |  n = number of reporting firms
Metric Q4 2025 Q4 2024 Firms YoY Change
Revenue$4.32T$4.00T1,344+7.99%
Operating Income$564.0B$488.6B1,478+15.44%
CapEx ▶$310.7B$270.5B1,108+14.87%
Assets$24.13T$22.15T1,464+8.94%
Liabilities$14.58T$13.52T1,427+7.82%
Cost of Revenue$2.68T$2.38T1,219+12.75%
Cash$1.58T$1.42T1,446+11.51%
Net Income$424.3B$397.9B1,392+6.64%
SG&A Expense$573.6B$536.4B1,321+6.95%
Operating Expenses$1.05T$999.6B1,347+5.49%
Inventory$1.47T$1.36T981+7.74%
Operating Cash Flow$750.3B$623.1B1,303+20.41%
Total Debt$6.60T$6.19T1,097+6.67%
Short-Term Investments$548.2B$475.1B321+15.41%
EBIT$547.2B$494.4B1,370+10.68%
Restructuring$8.17B$6.66B295+22.70%
Stock-Based Comp$52.3B$48.1B866+8.72%

CapEx is up nearly 15% in our broad sample — one of the strongest moves in the monitor, trailing only Operating Cash Flow (+20.4%) and Restructuring (+22.7%). It looks impressive. As we noted up front, it is not what it seems.

The Hyperscaler Effect

Big 6 — Or Really Big 4?

With NVIDIA yet to report, six of the Magnificent 7 have now filed results. Not all of them are spending more — Tesla and Apple both cut CapEx year-over-year. The real drivers are just four: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, who together added roughly $48 billion in incremental capital spending versus Q4 2024. Here is the breakdown.

Figure 2 — Mag 6 Capital Expenditures ($B), Q4 2025 vs Q4 2024  |  TSLA & AAPL shaded — both declined YoY
Ticker Q4 2025 CapEx Q4 2024 CapEx Delta
MSFT$29.9B$15.8B+$14.1B
GOOG$27.9B$14.3B+$13.6B
AMZN$38.5B$26.1B+$12.4B
META$21.4B$14.4B+$7.0B
TSLA ▼$2.4B$2.8B−$0.4B
AAPL ▼$2.4B$2.9B−$0.6B

Not all of the Magnificent 7 are expanding their capital footprint. Tesla and Apple both cut CapEx year-over-year. The heavy lifting is being done by just four companies.

Combined, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft added roughly $48 billion in incremental CapEx versus the prior year — a striking concentration of investment activity driven almost entirely by AI infrastructure buildout.

The Real Picture

What Happens When You Exclude Them?

Once you remove those six reporting Mag 7 members from our broader sample, the CapEx picture flips — from a +14.9% gain to a modest decline.

Sample CapEx Q4 2025 CapEx Q4 2024 Firms Growth
Ex Mag 6 Reported$188B$194B1,102−3.05%
Ex Mag 4 (ex TSLA & AAPL)$193B$200B1,104−3.44%

Excluding the six reported Mag 7 companies, aggregate CapEx for the remaining 1,102 firms actually fell 3.05% year-over-year. Narrow the exclusion to just the four meaningful spenders — dropping Tesla and Apple back into the sample — and the decline steepens to −3.44%.

The takeaway: the CapEx boom is real, but it is highly concentrated. Strip away four companies, and the rest of corporate America is actually pulling back on capital investment. It is worth noting that this reflects a single quarter of data — one data point is not a trend, and we should be careful about overstating the conclusion. That said, the magnitude of the concentration is difficult to dismiss. When four firms can single-handedly swing a market-wide decline into a double-digit gain, that is a signal worth watching closely, particularly as AI infrastructure investment continues to accelerate.

What's Next

NVIDIA Still to Come

We will revisit this analysis once NVIDIA reports later this month. Given NVIDIA's AI infrastructure buildout, it is likely to add further to the hyperscaler CapEx total — making the concentration story even more pronounced.

📌 This analysis will be updated when NVIDIA files Q4 2025 results. Follow Calcbench for the update.

Calcbench, Inc.  ·  CALCBENCH.COM  ·  Data sourced from SEC filings via Calcbench

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Accounts Receivable Analysis  ·  SIC Division 7

Three Firms With Unbroken DSO Growth, 2020–2025

Of 68 publicly-traded SIC Code Division 7 companies analyzed in Business Services, only three recorded a higher Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) in every successive year from 2020 through 2024. 2025 data shown where available.

This analysis was inspired by a post on Michael Burry's blog, Cassandra Unchained, which originally highlighted Palantir's rising DSO trend. We extended the analysis across all 68 SIC Division 7 companies in our dataset to identify whether the pattern was unique to Palantir.

Palantir Technologies
65.3
2025 DSO (days)
▲ +30.7 days since 2020
Match Group
33.9
2025 DSO (days)
▲ +14.6 days since 2020
Dayforce, Inc.*
51.1
2025 DSO (days, est.)
▲ +11.8 days since 2020

Days Sales Outstanding — Annual, 2020–2025

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Days Sales Outstanding Palantir Technologies Match Group Dayforce, Inc.*
Palantir Technologies  SIC 7372 Match Group  SIC 7389 Dayforce, Inc.*  SIC 7372

Source: Calcbench  ·  Export date 2026-02-19  ·  Annual calendar-year periods.
* Dayforce went private 2/6/2026. 2025 value estimated from TTM revenue and Q3 2025 ending receivables balance. Dashed line and open circle indicate estimated data point.

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Retail giant Walmart ($WMT) filed its Q4 and full-year 2025 results today, leading off with a 4.7 percent increase in annual net sales and a 10.5 percent jump in consolidated net income. 

Walmart being a large, sophisticated business, however, the company also reports a host of lower-profile disclosures too. Today we want to spotlight some of those items, how analysts can find them, and what information they might give you as you ponder Walmart’s results.


For example, one useful metric for retailers is the ratio of inventory to net sales. If that number is rising, it means goods are piling up on the shelves while consumers stay away; a state of affairs that often leads retailers to slash prices so they can clear the shelves for next season’s goods. 


We used our Multi-Company page to pull up Walmart’s inventory and net sales numbers for fiscal years 2020-2026; and within a few moments had Figure 1, below.



As you can see, that ratio bulged upward in 2022 and 2023. Inflation surged at that time too, driving consumers to be more cautious with spending. Now Walmart’s inventory-to-sales ratio is 8.3 percent, just a whisker above its pre-pandemic norms of roughly 8 percent.


Segment Growth


Walmart also reports three primary operating segments: Walmart U.S., Sam’s Club (the big box discount division of Walmart), and Walmart International.


You can use either our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page or the Show Tag History feature to track those segment-level disclosures over time. We used the See Tag History feature to cook up Figure 2, below, in about a minute.



Walmart actually discloses many other segment numbers too, such as e-commerce sales, health and wellness, grocery sales, and geographic segments such as Canada, China, and “Other” international.


Sometimes you can find that data in the earnings release, but not always; and you need to read the footnotes carefully to find the precise disclosure you want. For example, Walmart’s earnings release mentions the word “ecommerce” 17 times and talks about how much e-commerce sales have risen in the last fiscal year, but the earnings release never actually discloses what that number is. 


To find that, analysts need to wait for Walmart to file its full 10-Q report (which should be in a few days) and then you need to pore through the footnotes. 


Or, once the 10-Q is filed, you can use our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page to search Walmart’s segments disclosure, and we find the number for you!


Figure 3, below, shows what we mean. If you look on the left-hand side, you can see (by the red arrow) that Walmart reported $79.3 billion in e-commerce sales one year ago. We then used the world-famous Calcbench Trace feature to trace that number back to the Walmart footnote about disaggregated revenue (seen on the right side of Figure 3) to identify exactly where Walmart reports its e-commerce numbers and how those numbers have changed in recent years. 




Equity Adjustments


And in perhaps the finest of fine print, Walmart also reports adjustments to EPS based on equity investments it has in other businesses. This isn’t unusual; as we’ve written before, lots of large businesses have equity investments in other businesses and they regularly re-assess the value of those holdings. Sometimes (as we explored in a post about Amazon’s ($AMZN) investments in Anthropic last November) those markups can have a huge effect on overall pretax income.


The change in valuation ultimately gets rolled into EPS, so companies often report adjusted EPS that lets you see how much those investments are or aren’t affecting overall EPS.


That brings us back to Walmart. Tucked away on Page 33 of the earnings release we found a disclosure that the company investments in Symbotic ($SYM), a warehouse automation business, led to a $0.21 hit to EPS in Walmart’s most recent quarter. Hence Walmart reported overall EPS of $0.53 and a non-GAAP adjusted EPS of $0.74.


Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise. A quick look at Symbotic’s share price shows that the stock went from a high of nearly $84 in late November to a low of $54 at the end of January, the close of Walmart’s most recent quarter. So of course Walmart had to write down the value of that investment, and here we are.

Thursday, February 12, 2026

China is still a very important trading partner of the United States and most large companies in the world, even amid the tariffs and other trade tensions that exist between the United States and China these days.

So how are those trade tensions affecting the China revenues of major public filers? It’s still early in the reporting season, but we decided to crack open our Segments, Rollforward, and Breakouts page to see what analysts can already glean.


We first selected the S&P 500 and then searched for all firms that reported a China geographic segment in 2025. Thirty-six companies have both (a) already reported their full-year 2025 numbers; and (b) reported revenue for a China operating segment. 


We then compared those China revenues to the firms’ total revenues, and compiled a top 10 list of U.S. filers with the highest percentage of China revenue. See Figure 1, below.



Perhaps to no surprise, the list is dominated by chip companies, some tech giants (Apple, Tesla), and MGM Resorts, presumably thanks to its casinos in Macau. 


Then we wondered: how do these China revenue numbers compare to, say, 2023 numbers? With a few more clicks, we pulled up the China revenue for these same 10 firms in 2023. See Figure 2, below.



Well look at that. Qualcomm ($QCOM) tops the list in both years, but its China revenue declined by $2 billion even as total revenue grew, so the chipmaker is now less dependent on China as a major market than it was two years ago. 


In contrast, Broadcom ($AVGO) held its China revenue essentially flat, but overall revenue went from $35.8 billion to $63.9 billion, so its China concentration fell nearly in half. And MGM International Resorts ($MGM) didn’t even report a China segment in 2023.


But why are we even making everyone look back and forth between figures 1 and 2? Consider Figure 3, below, which just compares 2023 and 2025 China revenue for each company.



Interesting: six of the ten firms in our sample saw China revenue decline over the last two years. Clearly decoupling is underway.


As always, segment-level disclosures are a bit of a dark art, since each company can define geographic segments in its own way. For example, some filers report an “Asia-Pacific” segment that does include China; others report Asia-Pacific and China as separate segments; and still more don’t even report any geographic segment data at all, although they do have China sales.


So our numbers above can only provide a partial snapshot of how U.S. and China trade patterns are evolving over time — but clearly, evolving they are.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Big tech stunned the world last week when Amazon ($AMZN) and Google ($GOOG) both filed 2025 earnings reports and also announced plans to spend astonishing amounts of money on data centers in 2026. 

Their big bets came shortly after Meta ($META) and Microsoft ($MSFT) filed their own quarterly reports at the end of January, which also included plans for somewhat smaller but still staggering amounts of money going to data centers this year.


The only one not yet disclosing fresh numbers is Oracle ($ORCL), but they’re scheduled to file their next earnings release on March 9, and we’ve already written about Oracle’s data center ambitions — and obligations — in the recent past. 


So what does the biggest picture look like? Do the hyperscalers even have the cash to cover all these capex costs? We cracked open our Multi-Company page to take a look, tracking capex and operating cash flow by calendar quarter and then adding up those numbers by year, even though Microsoft and Oracle use non-Jan. 1 fiscal years. 


Figure 1, below, shows the combined operating cash flow versus net capex spending for all five companies mentioned above, 2020 through 2025; plus estimated capex for 2026 (as per the companies’ guidance for 2026 capex spending). 



Notice that the spread between capex (in blue) and operating cash flow (in red) has been getting progressively narrower year after year. What we don’t know is estimated operating cash flow for 2026. (The hyperscalers have generally offered guidance on operating income, but that’s not the same.)


We could try to model an estimated operating cash flow by looking at the rate of increase from 2020 numbers ($262.5 billion) through 2025 ($602.83 billion). That rate changed from year to year: up 12.1 percent in 2021, down 0.3 percent in 2022, then up 34.6 percent the following year. 


The average rate of change in operating cash flow across that whole six-year period was 18.7 percent. If we assume 2026 operating cash flow is 18.7 percent higher than 2025 numbers, that implies a value of $715.56 billion. Which would imply a Figure 2, below, that looks like this:


That estimated 2026 differential is a lot narrower. Will it come to pass? We’ll have to wait and see. 

Individual Hyperscalers

Different individual companies tell different stories. For example, here’s the chart for Amazon ($AMZN):



Capex got dangerously close to exceeding operating cash flow in 2025. Then again, capex did exceed operating cash flow in 2021 and 2022, and Amazon is still here (although its share price did go through a marked decline in 2022).


On the other hand, here’s the same chart for Oracle ($ORCL):


A very different story. Oracle had solid operating cash flow over capex until 2024, and then capex soared, and then it soared even more in 2025, and it will soar even further in 2026. Plus, Oracle is a very different business than Amazon, which has always had large capex demands for its e-commerce operations. This is Oracle’s first venture into being a capital-intensive business.

Next we have Google ($GOOG), at a much more orderly progression:



Ditto for Microsoft ($MSFT):


And finally Meta ($META), or Facebook for the old-school purists:

Interesting that Meta also saw compression between operating cash flow and capex spending in 2025. It saw similar compression in 2022 — which, like Amazon, also coincided with a drop in share price over the year. 

The next question for financial analysts is how the hyperscalers will afford all this capex spending in 2026. They could squeeze cash flow even further, but they could also tap the debt markets. That’s what Oracle and Google have both done recently.


Can analysts track the debt that the hyperscalers are shouldering and then model the pressure those interest payments will add to net income, to better understand whether these AI bets are likely to pay off?


Yes, Calcbench lets you do that too. That will be in a future post.

Monday, February 9, 2026

Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. Last week we saw hundreds more companies report Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings, and we now have year-over-year data on roughly 700 non-financial firms. Let’s see what tale they tell. 

Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 12.1 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 21.2 percent, and revenue up 8.2 percent.



Interestingly, cost of revenue is up 14.1 percent. That’s a lot, although it’s down from the 18.3 percent year-over-year gain in last week’s earnings analysis. Since high cost of revenue can indicate higher prices for customers (read: price inflation) down the road, we’ll need to watch that line item closely as more firms file earnings and we get a sense of the bigger picture. Within two weeks we should have a much better view into what’s going on.


On the other hand, operating expenses are up only 5.9 percent, and SG&A expenses up 7.1 percent. Both of those numbers are below revenue increases, which is good. (As for capex spending, we’re devoting a whole separate post to that because the tech giants’ spending on data centers is so off-the-charts nuts it skews the picture for everyone else.) 


Figure 2, below, shows the data again in table format.



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!

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Disney Corp. ($DIS) released its latest quarterly earnings on Monday, and we get to those numbers momentarily; but the real news came on Tuesday, when Disney announced a successor to legendary and long-time CEO Robert Iger: Josh D’Amaro, who has been running Disney’s theme parks and cruise lines division since 2020.

If you’ve been a close follower of Disney’s financial data, however, D’Amaro’s promotion to the top office isn’t really a surprise.

Disney reports three principal operating segments: 

  • Entertainment, which includes Disney films, television, and streaming services such as Hulu and Disney+;

  • Sports, which is ESPN and various other sports channels overseas; and

  • Experiences, which are the Disney resorts and cruise lines.

One might assume that Disney is primarily an entertainment business because these are the folks who, ya know, invented Mickey Mouse and made zillions of dollars from the Avengers movies. But Disney reports revenue and operating profit for each of the three operating segments above — and if you were a close follower of those segment-level disclosures, you’d have seen that Disney has, inexorably, become more of an experiences company in recent years. 

Let’s start with Figure 1,  below. It shows annual revenue from Disney’s Entertainment and Experiences segments since 2022. (We started there because 2020 and 2021 were marred by the pandemic and travel restrictions.)


Yes, the Entertainment segment (in blue) does generate more revenue overall, but compare the trend lines. The Experiences segment (in red) definitely has a more upward slope. (We excluded the Disney sports segment because its revenues are less than half the other two segments.)

Figure 2, below, shows the operating profit for Entertainment and Experiences over the same periods.


The Experiences segment generates multiple times more operating profit than the Entertainment segment, and the overall trend-lines are nearly identical in slope.

The health of the Experiences segment is D’Amaro’s doing. Moreover, Disney is rolling out more parks in the near future, and it’s a business one can understand. The Entertainment segment still inhabits a strategic free-for-all zone where nobody is quite sure how artificial intelligence, social media, and evolving consumer appetite for going to the movies will all shake out.


So if Disney was going to select an Iger successor from the inside, D’Amaro was always going to be at the top of a very short list. All a Disney analyst on the outside had to do was study the segment-level disclosures over time.


Finding Segment Disclosures


As always, that’s easy to do in Calcbench. 


For starters, try our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page. Select the company you want to research, and then the segment you want to study from the pull-down menu at left. (You can search for operating, geographic, and other segments that a company might report.) 


Figure 3, below, shows the results when you search for Disney’s operating segment disclosures in its fiscal Q1 2026, the numbers filed earlier this week. The blue-highlighted column is the Experiences segment mentioned above.



From there you can export the data to Excel for further analysis.


If you stumble upon a segment disclosure while studying a company on the Disclosures and Footnotes Query page, you can always hold your cursor over that number for the See Tag History and Export History to Excel choices. Same data, exported to the same user (you), just via a different channel.


And of course if you use the Calcbench API, all this data gets pumped directly into your own desktop analysis models within minutes of the company’s filings hitting the Securities and Exchange Commission database. All of it groomed, polished, and traceable as always.


Our ultimate point being that you can connect those human elements of corporate analysis, like possible CEO succession, back to corporate data. Sometimes the signs are there all along, if you just know how to tease them out — like, by using Calcbench.
Friday, January 30, 2026

Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q4 earnings data from more than 320 non-financial firms — and so far, those firms are reporting impressive net income growth from the year-ago period.

Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 15.1 percent from one year ago, revenue is up 6 percent, and cash from operations is up 25.1 percent. All numbers moving in the direction Wall Street wants to see.



If you want to worry about anything, you could fret over cost of revenue, operating expenses, and SG&A expenses — all of which are currently rising faster than overall revenue, which implies that companies will start to feel inflationary pressures sometime soon. Then again, we still have a relatively small number of companies in our sample size, and the picture could look quite different in another four weeks or so, when we’ll have nearly 10 times as many earnings releases to digest. 


Figure 2, below, shows the data again in table format.



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!

Thursday, January 29, 2026

Some of you may have noticed that companies are disclosing more tax information lately, thanks to a new accounting rule that requires filers to break out taxes paid to federal, state, local, and even overseas tax authorities.

If tax analysis is your thing, fear not! Calcbench has an easy way to find all this information and we’ve even cooked up a template to track tax disclosures automatically.


These new disclosures arise from updates to tax accounting rules that the Financial Accounting Standards Board adopted in 2023, and which went into effect with annual 10-K filings that companies started to make this month. Previously, companies only disclosed a single number for “income tax provisions.” Now they must report individual amounts and percentages for a variety of taxes paid or tax credits claimed, and do so in a nice table format.


One of the first companies to report these new details was Netflix ($NFLX), with its annual report filed on Jan. 23. Figure 1, below, is the new table that you see when you go digging through Netflix’ tax footnote.



Here is another example from Facebook — er, Meta Platforms ($META) — from its 10-K filed on Thursday morning. See Figure 2, below.



You can find these tables and disclosures via the Calcbench Disclosures & Footnotes Query page. Just look up the 10-K filing of the company you’re researching, find the tax footnote from the disclosures pull-down menu on the left side of the screen, and the disclosures will be in there. You can also try searching for “ASU 2023-09” in the text, since that’s the accounting rule prompting these new disclosures.


And of course, since Calcbench is all about ease of finding data, we have a few other short-cuts you can use too.


Finding Tax Data Quickly


One way to find tax disclosures quickly is via our Multi-Company page. Once you configure the group of companies you want to study, you can enter “income taxes” in the search fields and the disclosures that companies have made (if any) will automatically appear. 


For example, we searched the S&P 500 for companies that have already filed their 2025 annual reports, and looked up the federal, state and local, and foreign taxes paid. Figure 3, below, shows some of the results.



As you can see, a large number of companies still haven’t filed 2025 reports yet so we don’t have much data — but it will come soon! As companies file, Calcbench automatically indexes and collates that information so it’s at your fingertips. (You can also export the data to Excel for further analysis on your own desktop.) 


Calcbench also created a template to capture these tax disclosures as companies file them. The data populates automatically, so you’re getting the most comprehensive information as fast as possible. All you need is (a) a Premium-level Calcbench subscription; and (b) the Calcbench Excel Add-In. (If you need help with either of those, drop us an email at us@calcbench.com.)


That’s all there is to it!

Friday, January 23, 2026

Welcome back to earnings season, everyone! The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker has nearly 150 Q4 2025 earnings reports in the hopper — not a large number, but big enough for us to fire up the analysis engine running again.

At midday on Friday, Jan. 23, we were tracking data from 149 non-financial firms that have already filed their Q4 2025 reports. Collectively, that group reported net income 2 percent lower than what they reported one year ago, although operating income was up 23.1 percent and revenue was up 5.9 percent. 


Huh, wait a minute. If revenue is up a decent amount and operating income is up by more than 20 percent, but net income has declined, doesn’t that imply some big expense further down the income statement related to taxes or restructuring charges or something like that? 


Indeed it does, and indeed that has happened. See Figure 1, below. 



We have a huge spike in tax provisions (up 205.1 percent) and an impressive jump in restructuring costs, too (up 48.5 percent). 


That tax spike, however, is almost entirely due to a statistical quirk from one company, Abbott Labs ($ABT). Abbott received a $7.2 billion tax credit in the year-ago period, which declined to a $582 million credit in Q4. Technically that results in a $6.6 billion “increase” in tax provision for Abbott, which skews the number for the whole sample. If you exclude Abbott and its weirdness, tax payments actually fell by nearly 22 percent. 


To that end, we did recalculate everything with the tax column excluded. The result is Figure 2, below. 



We need to emphasize that this first assessment of Q4 earnings comes with a host of caveats. First, there are only 150-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 Q3 earnings.) Important chunks of the economy are still missing from this Q4 picture, such as the tech giants; they’re mostly going to file next week. Crucial retailers such as Target ($TGT) and Walmart ($WMT) won’t file until later still. 

Second, these early filers tend to be large companies, with more sturdy and robust financial fundamentals than smaller ones. The smaller folks won’t start to file until mid-February, and the big picture we start to see then might look very different from the glimpse portrayed by the biggest of filers now. 


Figure 3, below, shows the data again in table format.



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!

Thursday, January 22, 2026

Companies are now filing Q4 and full-year earnings reports fast and furious, and some number of financial analysts out there will want to know what companies are saying about tariff-related charges. 

If you just do a quick text search for “tariff” you’re wasting time, because a tremendous number of companies include the word “tariff” as part of a meaningless, boilerplate disclosure. For example, “Our performance might be affected by numerous risks, such as tariffs or an asteroid hitting Earth,” or that sort of thing. 


Fortunately, Calcbench offers an easy way to find informative disclosures about tariffs, such as when companies report some specific tariff cost. Let’s walk through that cheat code now.


Begin on our Earnings Release Raw Data page, where you can search through all the GAAP and non-GAAP disclosures companies include in their earnings releases. You’ll see something like Figure 1, below. 



You’ll want to configure your search parameters to match what you see above. Most of them will already be pre-configured correctly; just pay special attention to the filing date on the right side, and the label field on the left. Both are flagged with arrows above.


You want the filing date to be, well, whatever date you choose; we selected today’s date. You want the label field set to “Contains text” and then add “tariff” as the actual text. Then hit the search button at the bottom, and that’s all there is to it. 


We ran this search early on Thursday morning. Calcbench immediately screened more than 42,000 separate disclosures from 39 filers and found exactly three that said something informative about tariffs:



That search took us roughly two minutes from start to finish, and you can do the same any time you like. It filters out all those boilerplate disclosures that convey no informational value, so you can focus your attention on what matters most. 
Friday, January 16, 2026

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 Analysis


But that only gives us a sense of the sums involved. To understand how a cap on credit card fees might affect bank business, you need to dig further. Using our Multi-Company page, we also excavated total non-interest income for all four banks and then compared those numbers to card income for 2025. See Figure 2, below.



Not only does Citi generate more card income than any of its peers; Citi also has a bigger portion of its non-interest income tied up in credit cards too. So in a world where the Fed cuts interest rates and the Trump Administration somehow forces a cap on credit card rates, that could leave Citi in a bind more difficult than what its peers might face.


Will that scenario come to pass in 2026? We don’t know. But we can arm analysts with the best information so that you can ponder the question as fully as possible.
Tuesday, January 13, 2026

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 using our See Tag History feature. 



On the other hand, you can also look at JPMorgan’s principal transactions line on an annualized basis, where things are plodding upward at a more stable pace. See Figure 3, below. 



We could just have easily analyzed other JPMorgan revenue lines, such as asset management fees, investment banking fees, or credit card fees. Our point is only to show that this data is readily available. It took us only three minutes to compile Figures 2 and 3, that was without an automated Excel template that could collapse the whole exercise to a few seconds. 


Delta Air Lines


Delta is the other early flight for quarterly earnings, and has been on an impressive string for a while. (See our post on Delta’s Q3 earnings from three months ago to understand what we mean.) Delta filed its Q4 and year-end statement at 6:31 a.m. today, and as usual the Calcbench databases were all over it.


We always love dissecting airline earnings because they’re full of non-GAAP disclosures. Foremost, airlines disclose total revenue per available seat mile (TRASM) and cost per available seat mile (CASM). 


We track TRASM and CASM on a regular basis. Figure 4, below, shows both metrics for Delta for the last five years. 



For Calcbench subscribers who are diehard airline analysts, we also have our Airlines Earnings Template. The template is a spreadsheet available on DropBox that tracks numerous disclosures in the airline sector, including:


  • TRASM

  • CASM

  • Load factor, or the percentage of seating capacity filled by customers

  • Fuel consumed

  • Average fuel cost per gallon

  • Percentage of revenue coming from passengers

  • EPS


The template populates automatically with the latest data as airlines file their numbers; we should have Q4 data from all the big players by the end of the month. The template only works if you are (a) a Calcbench professional-level subscriber; and (b) have installed our Excel Add-in — but once you do that, you’ll have all the latest data at your fingertips. (If you need help with any of that, contact us at us@calcbench.com.)


And that’s only on the first day of earnings season! Much more to come.

Sunday, January 11, 2026

Last week President Trump declared that U.S. defense contractors had to stop spending money on dividends and share buyback programs so that the companies could redirect that money to expanding the country’s defense base.

Calcbench takes no view on the political or legal practicalities of such a move, but it did make us wonder — how much money are we talking about here, anyway? 


Thanks to our Bulk Data Query and Multi-Company pages, we quickly found the answer. Let’s start with six major defense contractors in the United States:


  • RTX Corp. ($RTX)

  • Lockheed Martin ($LMT)

  • Northrop Grumman ($NOC)

  • Huntington Ingalls ($HII)

  • Leidos ($LDOS)

  • General Dynamics ($GD)


Using our Multi-Company page, we quickly found the amounts that each firm spent on capital expenditures, dividends, and share repurchases in 2024. See Figure 1, below.



The amounts vary widely, depending on each firm’s overall size. Perhaps more important for financial analysis is to look at the relative spending among the three categories by each firm. 


For example, Huntington Ingalls (shipbuilder) didn’t spend much on capex, but it spent even less on dividends and share repurchases. So while redirecting dividend and repurchasing money to capex would be a significant shift, it wouldn’t necessarily be a huge shift. 


Contrast that to Lockheed Martin’s position. The company is more than six times larger than Huntington in terms of revenue ($11.5 billion versus $71 billion) and spends far more on capex — but it spends even larger sums on dividends and on share repurchases. If Lockheed redirects all that money into capex, that is a huge shift in spending.


Then we used our Bulk Data Query page to examine Lockheed Martin specifically, to see how its spending fluctuated over time. See Figure 2, below. (This time we added free cash flow too, just because we could.)



As you can see, capex and dividend spending held quite steady over the last five years. Repurchase spending fluctuated substantially, although that’s not surprising when you think about it. Companies wanted to protect cash during the pandemic, and stock prices were rising briskly in those same years; then the markets tanked in 2022, which was a good time for confident companies to repurchase shares on the cheap.


Anyway, Figure 2 gives us a sense of how Lockheed’s free cash flow and spending have evolved over time, which lets you ponder how those same things might continue to change if Lockheed does indeed stop spending on dividends and repurchases.



Will Lockheed (or any other defense contractor, for that matter) actually shift all its dividend and share repurchase funds into capital investments, personnel, and other costs to accelerate weapons delivery? We have no idea. The president’s executive order isn’t clear on specifics, such as whether a company must redirect all those monies or just some; or redirect all the money right away versus following some sliding schedule over time. What about a company using those monies to acquire other businesses instead; does that count?  


Analysts will have to wait and see — but Calcbench does have the data to let you model out various scenarios and their consequences, so you won’t be caught by surprise as those specifics become more clear.

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Our primary mission at Calcbench is to help financial analysts understand the information in corporate financial disclosures. Today we have an example of how that works in practice courtesy of disclosures just filed by publishing company Daily Journal Corp. 

Daily Journal ($DJCO) is a small publishing company based in Los Angeles that follows the legal profession in California and Arizona. It filed its 2025 annual report on Dec. 29, with $87.7 million in revenue and operating income of $9.53 million. 


We were skimming through Daily Journal’s footnote disclosures (because you should always look through the footnotes, people!) and stumbled upon the company’s Controls and Procedures footnote. This is a footnote all companies must include, where management discloses any material weaknesses in financial reporting and what management is doing to fix them. 


Material weaknesses are not welcome news. They imply that the company’s financial reports are less reliable and more prone to restatement, and the point of disclosing them is to light a fire under management’s rear end to improve financial reporting systems and fix them.


OK, back to Daily Journal. In its Dec. 29 filing, the company disclosed two material weaknesses. One was segregation of duties (that is, keeping accounting roles separate enough that no single person can use his or her permissions to commit fraud) and the other was review controls (so that management could easily examine and assess financial performance):


The company continues to have material weaknesses related to segregation of duties, review controls related to the design, implementation, and operation of controls over revenue recognition and associated deferred revenue processes that originated and were disclosed in prior periods. While management has implemented additional controls and made meaningful progress during fiscal year 2025, the company was not able to fully remediate the material weaknesses by September 30, 2025. Management’s remediation efforts continue, as described below, and management is confident in its ability to achieve a full remediation in fiscal year 2026. 


As material weaknesses go, it’s not unusual to have segregation of duties and review control weaknesses at the same time; the two are closely related. But we were intrigued by the casual mention of weaknesses “disclosed in prior periods.”


Hmmm. What did Daily Journal say about its material weaknesses in prior periods? How much progress has management made on improving the situation? 


In Calcbench, answering that question is a snap. We simply clicked on the “Previous Period” tab above Daily Journal’s 2025 disclosure to compare this year against the company’s 2024 disclosure filed one year ago. See Figure 1, below.



As you can see (if you squint; but trust us, it’s there), one year ago  Daily Journal had an additional material weakness of “insufficient accounting resources.” Specifically, the company didn’t have a dedicated internal audit team that could test and improve financial controls, so the accounting team was basically cross-checking each other’s work to intercept mistakes or other accounting shenanigans.


If you then go back to the 2025 disclosure filed this week, you can see how Daily Journal has rectified its accounting situation so far. The company disclosed three specific steps: (a) hiring more staff for the accounting team; (b) hiring a new CFO as of Dec. 12; and (c) implementing a new ERP software system for a major subsidiary with complicated accounting needs.


That’s a big step in the right direction. The question for Daily Journal investors now is whether the company will rectify its remaining material weaknesses (the segregation of duties and review controls) in the year to come.


Management says that should happen in the next 12 months. Will it? The only way to find out is to keep following Daily Journal’s disclosures closely and then compare new disclosures to the old to see how things have changed. Calcbench lets you do both.
Friday, December 26, 2025

Cash is king, they like to say in investment analysis. So during this slow holiday week, as we all wait for 2025 financial reports to start arriving in mid-January, the crack Calcbench data team decided to kill some time by looking at trends in cash for the S&P 500 versus everyone else.

Conventional wisdom is that large firms are pulling away from all other firms in corporate performance. So what does that mean for cash piles that firms might use for growth or simply to weather any recessionary forces that might come along? Let’s use our Bulk Data Query page to take a look.


Figure 1, below, shows the total aggregate cash and equivalents for the S&P 500 compared to all other filers for the six years of 2019 through 2024. 



As you can see, the “All Others” group had a staggering run-up in cash during the pandemic. Presumably that’s from the trillions in PPP loans that the U.S. government extended to corporations, other loans that firms took out during that era’s period of near-zero interest rates, and robust consumer spending that poured even more cash into corporate coffers. Then came a dramatic wind-down as stimulus spending of the pandemic era faded. 


In contrast, the S&P 500 had much more modest but steady growth in cash, from $1.74 trillion in 2019 to $2.18 trillion in 2021 to $2.2 trillion at the end of 2024. (What will total cash be for the S&P 500 for 2025? Ask us in early March.)


On Average, However… 


When we look at average cash holdings, a very different picture emerges. 


Yes, the average firm (S&P 500 and small filer alike) saw a big bump in cash holdings during the pandemic. From 2022 onward, however, average cash per firm kept rising for the S&P 500, but fell for all other firms. See Figure 2, below.




Those divergent trendlines support the afore-mentioned conventional wisdom that large firms are doing better and better, while smaller firms aren’t. 


Why would that be so? We could speculate on lots of reasons, such as gains from artificial intelligence that larger firms can exploit more quickly, or larger firms being able to withstand tariff pressures more easily, or tax policies, or what have you. 


Those issues are beyond the scope of this post, but Calcbench has tons of data to help you ponder those questions. 
FREE Calcbench Premium
Two Week Trial

Research financial & accounting data like never before. Get features designed for better insights. Try our enhanced Excel Add-in. Sign up now to try the Premium Suite.