We noticed that Knight-Swift Transportation ($KNX) updated its earnings guidance today, and the update was not good.

The company said adjusted EPS for the second quarter will likely arrive at $0.57 or $0.58, rather than the originally forecast $0.63. Third-quarter adjusted EPS will also likely decline from earlier estimates, although Q4 will move higher and 2020 looks good so far.

The downgrade was “primarily a result of the oversupply of capacity in the truckload freight market that resulted in greater than expected downward pressure on revenue per loaded mile,” the company said. “We expect these trends to continue through the back half of the year.”

OK, Knight-Swift, thanks for the tip. So how can Calcbench subscribers use that one morsel of insight to see what other transportation companies are saying about possible slowdowns?

Easily, actually. Here’s how.

First, you can find a company that files an earnings release or guidance by scanning our Recent Filings page on a regular basis. For example, we had Knight-Swift’s earnings guidance indexed in our database at 9:03 a.m. today, roughly one minute after the company had filed it with the SEC. So obviously you should sit in front of your computer all day long, refreshing our Recent Filings page constantly.

When you read that earnings guidance in Calcbench, it resides in our Interactive Disclosures page. Once you’re done absorbing the news, jump to our Company-in-Detail page, using the tab at the top of your screen. You’ll then see line-item financial statements for whatever firm you were just researching on the Disclosures page.

On the Company-in-Detail page, you can see several peers of the company you’re researching listed in the upper-right corner. See Figure 1, below, with the black arrow. In this case we’re looking at five peers of Knight-Swift: Hunt Transport Services; Schneider National; Old Dominion Freight; Werner Enterprises; and YRC Worldwide.

Click on those ticker symbols, and Calcbench whisks you to the financial information for those firms. Then you can hop-scotch back to the Interactive Disclosures page for any of them, to see what they said in their latest earnings release or guidance.

So that’s no more than six clicks, to go from discovering that Firm X has published an earnings release, to reading it, to finding its peers, to seeing whether they’ve said anything similar in their latest earnings releases.

At random, we picked Hunt Transport Services ($JBHT) as one of Knight-Swift’s peers to examine, and discovered that Hunt had also filed a Q2-2019 earnings release today. (For real, we didn’t plan that.) Lo and behold, Hunt reported lower earnings compared to the year-ago period, although revenue rose 6 percent to $2.26 billion.

Further down, however, Hunt talked about declining load volumes for its trucking business. Then again, there was no mention in this earnings release about future guidance (either better or worse), so we’re not quite sure what’s going.

Then again, Calcbench is just the data source — we don’t need to know what’s going on. You do. Our job is to help you understand what’s going on by providing timely, precise, easily located data. This is one example of how we do that, day in and day out.