The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker is now back in action, for our first analysis of Q2 2026 earnings data. So far, among the large companies that dominate the beginning of earnings season, the overall numbers look solid.

As you can see, several banks — Goldman and JPMorgan foremost, but to a lesser extent Wells Fargo too — have seen ROE grow nicely since the start of the year. No wonder the banks’ share prices all jumped today and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said conditions were “getting close to as good as it gets.” (Of course, he also said in the next breath, “We just don’t know how long it’s going to last.”)

Honestly this chart is nothing especially insightful; we just use it to demonstrate the speed and ease of pulling precise information from the sea of disclosures that large companies routinely make in their earnings reports. We built this chart in less than two minutes, less than five minutes after the fifth and final bank in our sample (Citigroup) filed its earnings data at 9:41 a.m. ET.

You could run this exercise yourself any time through the Multi-Company page; or automate the process entirely by using our API to mainline earnings data directly into your own models. Email us at us@calcbench.com if you want to find out how!

 Delta Air Lines ($DAL) filed its Q2 2026 earnings statement on Friday, and we all know what that means: an opportunity to see just how ugly airlines’ fuel expenses are these days. Prepare for a rapid ascent, readers. 

The fuel costs were the buzzkill for Delta’s Q2 performance. Revenue actually rose 18.7 percent from the year-ago period, to $19.76 billion; and the crucial metric known as TRASM (total revenue per available seat mile) jumped 17 percent, from 24.11 cents one year ago to 25.11 cents today. So far, so good.

But total fuel costs rose a whopping 67 percent, from $2.46 billion to $4.11 billion. Operating income then tumbled 11.3 percent to $1.86 billion, and net income dropped 24.7 percent to $1.6 billion — but hey, those numbers are still in black ink, which is better than the alternative.

Delta executives did say in the earnings release that they expect Q3 to improve, with EPS at $2.00 to $2.50 on an operating margin of 11 to 13 percent. But then came this:

"Non‑fuel unit cost performance is expected to improve modestly from the June quarter with further progression in the December quarter as capacity growth begins to normalize. This puts us back on a path toward our long-term framework of low-single-digit non-fuel unit cost growth."

We’d love that prediction to come true, but given the renewed hostilities with Iran this week, perhaps it won’t. Calcbench doesn’t know what that might mean for future performance, but we have all the airline data you need to make your own models. 

The good news for Calcbench subscribers is that you can quickly obtain all these non-GAAP disclosures by downloading our airlines template from DropBox. That template tracks all the major airlines and disclosures automatically, so the information is at your fingertips within minutes of the airline filing its latest earnings report. 

(Disclosure of our own: The template won’t work automatically unless you (a) are a Calcbench premium subscriber; and (b) have our Excel Add-In already installed. If you need help with either of those things, email us at us@calcbench.com any time.) 

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 provision by the loan book itself:

PLL ratio = Provision for Loan Loss ÷ Loans Receivable

Using Calcbench's standardized metrics ( ProvisionForLoanLoss and LoansReceivable , both available as clean, comparable fields across filers), we built:

• •  A universe of national commercial banks, SIC code 6021, with total assets of $20 billion or more — pulled live via the Calcbench API, so it stays current as banks cross the threshold or merge away.You could also use the Calcbench Excel Addin or the Calcbench Multi Company page.
• •  The trailing 16 quarters of data (Q2 2022 through Q1 2026, the most recent quarter filed as of this writing) plus full-year annual totals for additional context.
• •  A minimum-coverage filter, requiring at least 12 of 16 quarters of valid data before a bank is included in any chart, so recent IPOs or fiscal-year mismatches don't clutter the picture with broken, partial lines.

First pass: the mega banks diverge

Looking first at the largest, most closely watched banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo — raw provision dollars already tell a real, if modest, story of divergence rather than a uniform trend. (These four have loan books of a broadly similar scale, so the dollar figures are directly comparable here; we apply the normalized ratio once we broaden to the full bank universe below, where asset sizes vary far more.)

Citi and BAC show a sustained multi-year build in provisioning — consistent with, though not proof of, rising credit stress in their books. JPMorgan is essentially flat. Wells Fargo, notably, is heading the other direction entirely, with provisions declining each year. That's not what a uniform “the consumer is under stress” narrative would predict — it's a genuinely mixed picture, and worth watching whether the Citi/BAC trend continues into Q2 2026.

Broadening the screen — and a red flag

Expanding the universe to the full set of $20B+ SIC 6021 banks, one name jumped out immediately: Capital One , whose PLL ratio looked like the most stressed loan book in the entire cohort.

On the surface, that's plausible — Capital One's business is concentrated in credit cards, a structurally higher-loss, higher-yield lending category than traditional commercial banking. But the size and shape of the signal didn't look like ordinary credit-card seasoning. It looked like a single, enormous spike.

The Discover effect

Pulling Capital One's PLL ratio quarter by quarter tells the real story:

In every quarter shown outside Q2 2025, Capital One's ratio sits in a steady 0.65%–1.30% band — comparable in kind to the other mega banks. Then, in a single quarter, loans receivable jumps by $107.7 billion and provision expense jumps to $11.43 billion, more than four times the typical run rate. The very next quarter, both numbers snap back to normal.

That $107.7 billion jump in loans receivable is not organic loan growth — it's Discover Financial's loan portfolio landing on Capital One's balance sheet at the close of the Capital One–Discover merger in May 2025. Under CECL accounting, acquiring a loan portfolio typically requires booking a large “day one” provision against the acquired book, even though those loans aren't newly risky — the reserve reflects an accounting requirement at the moment of acquisition, not a change in the borrowers' behavior.

We also checked whether this distortion showed up elsewhere. It does: Capital One's net income briefly went negative in the same quarter (a loss of roughly $4.3 billion, against revenue that fell to just over $1 billion, driven by the same provision mechanic flowing through Calcbench's standardized bank revenue definition). Every downstream metric that touches provision or net income in that quarter tells the same distorted story for the same underlying reason.

Why this matters more than the finding itself

Excluding the merger quarter, Capital One's credit trend actually looks unremarkable — stable, in a similar range to the other mega banks, with no clear deterioration. The “riskiest loan book in the cohort” read was, in the end, a single quarter of merger accounting, not a multi-year trend.

That's arguably the more useful lesson here. Standardized data makes it possible to run a systematic credit-stress screen across dozens of banks in minutes rather than reading 10-Qs one at a time — but a screen that ranks a ratio and stops there will happily flag M&A activity as “stress” right alongside genuine deterioration. The value of the data is in the breadth it unlocks; the value of the analysis is in knowing which spikes deserve a second look before they go in a headline.

What we're watching into Q2 2026

• •  Does the Citi / Bank of America upward provisioning trend continue, or has it plateaued?
• •  With the Discover integration quarter now a year behind it, does Capital One's PLL ratio look clean and back in its normal band, and is that number, going forward, a meaningful signal on card-lending stress?
• •  Do any other banks in the broader $20B+ universe show a Citi/BAC-style multi-year build worth flagging before earnings land?

We'll revisit this screen once Q2 2026 filings are in.

Second-quarter earnings reports will start hitting the wires any day now, and analysts should expect a lot of talk about tariffs — specifically, how much money companies are expecting in tariff refunds, and how those refunds will flow through the financial statements.

Today we have a primer on how companies might disclose all that thanks to Helen of Troy ($HELE), maker of home healthcare and beauty products. Helen filed its latest quarterly report on Wednesday (its fiscal Q1 2027, for the quarter ending May 31) and had quite a bit to say about the tariff refunds it expects since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Trump Administration’s IEEPA tariffs earlier this year. 

Helen made the disclosures in the Management Discussion & Analysis of its 10-Q. For starters, the company said it paid $80.5 million in IEEPA tariffs in its fiscal 2026, which ran from March 1, 2025 to Feb. 28, 2026. That’s roughly 8.3 percent of the $970.6 million Helen reported as cost of goods sold for the year. 

Then came the good stuff. Helen said it submitted reimbursement claims worth $6 million to the Trump Administration in May 2026, during its fiscal Q1 2027. Of that amount… 

“As of May 31, 2026 we concluded that $1.9 million of tariff refunds were probable of being recovered and recorded a receivable within prepaids and other current assets, along with corresponding reductions to Cost of Goods Sold of $1.8 million and inventory of $0.1 million in our condensed consolidated financial statements.”

Ah ha! This is the first substantive disclosure we’ve seen not just of how much money a company expects in tariffs refunds; but also how those amounts will be reported in the financial statements. So we know that Helen… 

• Paid $80.5 million in tariffs in fiscal 2026

• Applied for $6 million in tariff refunds in fiscal Q1 2027

• Was certain enough about receiving $1.9 million in refunds that Helen booked them as accounts receivable;

• And matched the $1.9 million gain in accounts receivable to a reduction of $1.8 million in cost of goods sold and of $100,000 in inventory.

In one form or another, we’ll probably see similar accounting treatments from other companies too. For example, last week we noted that Nike ($NIKE) disclosed $986 million in “expected recovery” of tariffs — but Nike never expressly said what “expected recovery” means, or where that $986 million will show up in the 10-Q (which, as of July 8, Nike has yet to file). 

We kinda sorta assumed that Nike’s $986 million will show up as accounts receivable, but we still don’t know for sure. Now comes Helen of Troy proving that you can indeed get tariff refunds onto the financial statements in that manner. 

Even better, Helen also made additional disclosures about more tariff refunds it sought after its May 31 period-end: 

Subsequent to the first quarter of fiscal 2027, in June 2026, we submitted additional Phase 1 refund claims totaling $3.2 million related to our Beauty & Wellness segment. On June 29, 2026, CBP launched Phase 2 of the IEEPA refund claims process, which we are in the process of preparing. As of July 1, 2026, we received partial payments totaling $1.6 million for our Phase 1 tariff refunds and an immaterial amount of interest. 

Lots to unpack there. First, Helen says it has now received $1.6 million in “Phase 1” refunds, which were all part of the $1.9 million it booked as a receivable for the period that ended on May 31. 

Plus, Helen filed for an additional $3.2 million in Phase 1 tariffs after the May 31 period-close. How much of that sum will Helen be able to book as a receivable by the end of the current period? We don’t know, but we do know it can’t be more than the $3.2 million in total claims submitted. (It’s also possible that Uncle Sam will pay out the whole amount by the next earnings release.)

And finally, let’s not overlook that “Phase 2” refund window. Helen didn’t say how much it will seek as a refund in Phase 2 — but we do know the company paid $80.5 million in total IEEPA tariffs; and has already submitted claims worth $9.2 million (the $6 million submitted last quarter, and the additional $3.2 million submitted in the current quarter). So at most, Helen can only seek another $71.3 million. 

We should also note that in Helen’s earnings release the company does report a total benefit of $9.2 million from Phase 1 tariff refunds, just like we figured out in the above paragraph. Helen did not speculate about how much more in refunds it might get: “The company’s outlook… excludes any potential benefit from future refund phases due to the uncertainty surrounding the timing and collectability of those refunds.”

That’s how accounting for uncertain gains is supposed to work. A company can’t put down specific numbers until it’s confident in both the amount and the timing of when the gain will arrive. 

Regardless, gains from tariff refunds are coming. Helen just gave us a preview of how that might look like.

Today we continue our look at trends in non-GAAP reporting, based on the findings of our annual analysis of non-GAAP adjustments to net income among S&P 500 firms. 

It’s that time of year again, financial data devotees — the Calcbench Non-GAAP Reconciliations Study is here!

Every spring, Calcbench and Suffolk University team up to catalog the non-GAAP adjustments to net income made by S&P 500 firms in their annual reports. We then analyze those non-GAAP adjustments by size and number to see what trends in non-GAAP reporting we can identify. 

Our report for 2025 earnings is now available for download, and we have a summary of our findings here, too.

We studied the 2025 annual earnings releases of the S&P 500 and identified 361 companies (72 percent of the entire S&P 500) that reported either non-GAAP net income or non-GAAP earnings per share. Within that group of 361, we then measured and classified the specific adjustments each company cited to reconcile those adjusted numbers back to “traditional” net income according to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

• Among the 361 firms that reported non-GAAP earnings, 87 percent reported adjustments that led to higher earnings compared to GAAP net income, down slightly from the 89 percent identified in 2024.

• Adjusted net income exceeded GAAP net income by an average of $751 million per company, 23 percent higher than average GAAP net income. Again these 2025 numbers are down from 2024, when the average adjustment was $870 million and roughly 30 percent higher than average GAAP net income. 

• Average adjusted net income was $4 billion for 2025, compared to $3.8 billion for 2024.

• We found a total of 2,320 individual reconciling items for our sample, with an average value of $117 million per item — 14 percent lower than the previous year. The total value of all non-GAAP adjustments was $271 billion.

• The most notable swing in adjustments happened with gains and losses from investments, which went from an overall upward adjustment of $25.6 billion in 2024 to a downward adjustment of $8 billion in 2025. This suggests that a larger number of companies adjusted non-GAAP income downwards in 2025 to exclude investment gains; and the swing in this category alone (from positive $25.6 billion in 2024 to negative $8 billion in 2025) accounts for the entire decrease in non-GAAP adjustments in 2025. 

The scatterplot in Figure 1, below, shows the range of adjustments as a percentage of GAAP net income. Although most companies still adjusted their net income upward only within an upper bound of 100 percent of GAAP net income, a larger number than in previous years adjusted net income considerably higher, from 100 to 600 percent or more.

(Several companies in our sample are outside the range of our Figure 1 scatterplot since their adjustments were too large to include easily.)

Adjustment Categories by Size

The single largest category of adjustments in 2025 continued to be amortization of intangible assets. That category accounted for one-third of total amount adjusted across all firms, similar to the amortization category’s 2024 numbers. The second-largest category was impairments, at 28 percent of the total amount adjusted — up sharply from last year, when impairment-related adjustments were only 19 percent of the total. 

A complete breakdown of each category’s size, both by dollar amount and as percentage of total adjustment value, is in Figure 2, below. Year-over-year change in the left-side column refers to the percentage of total adjustment value. 

That’s enough for today. We’ll have more posts later this week digging even deeper into the data — we have lots! 

Struggling sneaker giant Nike ($NKE) filed its latest quarterly report this week, with margin and profit numbers that on the surface looked reasonably good.

 On May 5 the Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled a proposal to allow public companies to adopt semi-annual rather than quarterly reporting. That proposal is out for public comment until July 6. 

Today we have yet another entry in the annals of unusual tariff disclosures — this time from beleaguered children’s clothing retailer Children’s Place ($PLCE), which apparently has decided to sell its expected tariff refunds as a short-term cash infusion.

First let’s look at the big picture, which is not particularly good for Children’s Place right now. As described in its latest quarterly report, filed on June 12, year-over-year sales declined 11.1 percent, its operating loss grew by 74.9 percent, and quarterly net loss went from $34 million to $53.2 million, a jump of 56.3 percent. Management lamented that “our value customer has been impacted by higher gas and grocery prices,” and talked about “transformation efforts in a challenging retail environment.” 

Then came the interesting stuff. 

Children’s also reported that it has filed for $40 million in tariff refunds. That’s about 3.1 percent of Children’s total 2025 sales, which were $1.21 billion. (The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Trump Administration’s tariffs on Feb. 20 of this year.) The company said in its earnings release that it has received $5.5 million of that $40 million refund claim so far.

Then came the really interesting stuff:

Consistent with prior disclosures, we have monetized most of these claims at a discounted rate, by selling the future receipt of these funds to a purchaser.

Wow. Children’s Place has sold off its expected tariff refunds. We have heard of companies disclosing refund amounts they expect; but this is the first time we’ve heard of a company selling off those refund claims like accounts receivable. 

Using our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page, we hopped over to Children's debt disclosure footnote. That’s where we found the juicy details:

On March 31, 2026, the Company entered into a Claim Sale and Purchase Agreement with Alnus Investors LLC (“Alnus”) to monetize its claims for refunds of tariffs previously paid to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) ... Alnus purchased an aggregate amount of $38.2 million of the approximately $40 million refund claims submitted to the CBP at a purchase rate of 67.2%, for a total purchase price of $25.7 million. The Company has received $5.5 million of these refunds from the CBP subsequent to the end of the First Quarter 2026 to date.

So Alnus Investors purchased almost all of Children’s expected tariff claims for 67 cents on the dollar. Children’s got a one-time cash infusion of $25.7 million.

We couldn’t find any details on who Alnus Investments is. But for comparison purposes, Children’s also disclosed this quarter that it had monetized a separate tax claim from the IRS worth a total of $22.8 million. In that transaction, Children’s sold off the claim to another shadowy financing firm only known as TRMEF Basis II Corp. for $20.1 million. That’s a discount rate of 88.5 percent, compared to the 67 percent discount rate for the tariffs claim. 

So all told, Children’s stands to get a cash injection of $45.8 million in exchange for selling off $62.8 million worth of tariff and tax refund claims. 

Then again, Children’s certainly needs the money. Its cash holdings have drifted steadily downward from $12.9 million two years ago, to $5.9 million one year ago, to $4.8 million now. The company’s long-term debt is also rising swiftly, and its stockholder equity went from a reed-thin $1.4 million one year ago to a deficit of $107 million today.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Today we return to tariffs, which continue to be a vexing issue for companies and financial analysts alike. What are companies paying for tariffs? How much are tariffs squeezing margins? How much money might companies recoup from tariff refunds, if any at all? 

Several major apparel brands filed their latest earnings reports the other day. Sure, we could do the usual look at their year-over-year revenue and earnings — but Calcbench data can do much more than that!

That’s all, folks — with earnings data from roughly 3,600 filers, including the last few giants such as Nvidia ($NVDA) and Walmart ($WMT), which both filed this week, we now call time on the Q1 2026 earnings season.

Overall, it was good.

Revenue was up 11 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 20.7 percent, and net income up 34.8 percent. Expense lines such as cost of goods sold, operating expense, and SG&A expense are all higher too, but none higher than the increase in revenue. Capex is up 29.5 percent although that number is skewed by the AI data center craze so we put an asterisk next to that one.

Figure 1, below, shows year-over-year change across 18 assorted line items.

Put another way, the 3,600 firms in our sample reported a collective year-over-year gain of $151.2 billion in net income. Thirty-eight percent of that gain comes from Nvidia alone.

We’ll do further analysis next week to assess just how much Nvidia and the other Big Tech firms are now carrying overall growth and performance for all U.S. filers — but clearly, it’s a lot.

Meanwhile, the table below shows the year-over-year change across 12 line items.

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.

So that’s a wrap on Q1 2026 earnings. Enjoy the long weekend, and we’ll be back mid-July for our first look at Q2!

Everyone might be gushing over Nvidia’s ($NVDA) earnings report released earlier this week, but Calcbench is feeling a bit brick-and-mortar today. 

AI chipmaker Nvidia ($NVDA) will file its next quarterly earnings release on May 20, and presumably the company will report zillions in net income because that’s what Nvidia has been doing since the start of the AI boom several years ago.

Anyway, as you can see from Figure 1, revenue is up 10.5 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 14.8 percent, and net income up 26.3 percent.

Except, recall our post from earlier this week, when we noted that the vast majority of growth in net income can be attributed to a tiny number of firms enjoying huge profit growth. As nice as that 26.3 percent jump is, it isn’t spread widely among a large number of firms. 

At the same time, cost of revenue is up 10.3 percent, operating expenses are up 9.1 percent, and SG&A expenses are up 8.7 percent. Those numbers aren’t too far below the increase in revenue. We’ve also seen multiple inflation indicators start flashing red this week. 

So if this is what Q1 looks like, with only a brief exposure to war and high energy costs, what will Q2 numbers look like? We don’t know, but Calcbench will always be gathering and indexing the latest corporate financial data to help you find out!

Meanwhile, the table below shows the year-over-year change across 14 line items.

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!

Wall Street has been broadly pleased with Q1 earnings so far, and at first glance you can’t blame them: as of last week, overall net income among 2,100 firms that had already filed earnings data was up 27.4 percent. What’s not to love about that? 

Another week, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q1 earnings data from roughly 2,100 firms — and for the second week in a row, the aggregate numbers look solid.

Growth in all the most important performance metrics is somewhat down this week compared to last week’s numbers, but that’s not a surprise. Last week we had only 800 firms in the Earnings Tracker sample, mostly the largest of the large. Now we have far more mid-sized and small firms reporting, and they tend to push the numbers downward.

All that said, the numbers are still moving upward. Year-over-year growth in revenue, operating income, and net income has decelerated from last week, but the growth is still healthy double-digits. See Figure 1, below.

The next question to ask — and one that Calcbench will explore next week — is the extent to which a small handful of over-achievers are skewing the whole picture.

For example, capex spending is up 30.7 percent from last year, but that’s almost entirely due to a tiny number of tech giants spending billions upon billions building data centers. In prior quarters, if you strip those data center hyperscalers out of the picture, capex spending was falling for everyone else.

We’ll perform that analysis for Q1 in a few weeks, once the last few hyperscalers file their latest earnings reports. (The last of the bunch is Oracle ($ORCL), which doesn’t file again until June 10.) 

Financial analysts should also perform similar analyses for operating income and net income. You can do that in any of several easy ways on Calcbench, such as using our Multi-Company page to compile net income for a large number of companies, compare Q1 2026 to Q1 2025, export the whole thing to Excel, and then lop off the 10 firms with the biggest growth in net income in absolute dollars. 

Figure 2, below, shows the earnings comparison in table format. 

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.