As you may know, we track 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.

Today is our first look at fourth-quarter numbers. At close of business on Friday, Jan. 31, we had Q4 filings for roughly 360 non-financial firms. Revenue was up a bit from the year-ago quarter, net income was up more, capex even more than that. See Figure 1, below.

Interesting to see that the cost of revenue declined 3.94 percent, because we’re always looking for signs of inflation and that’s where said signs would appear. Then again, we only have a relative handful of firms reporting data so far; three weeks from now we’ll have data from well more than 1,000 firms and that could tell a much different picture. All we can say for now is, we’ll see. 

All that said, the filers in our Earnings Tracker so far are the biggest of the big: Altria, Albertsons, 3M, all the major airlines, all the major tech companies, Dow, ExxonMobil, Lockheed, Royal Caribbean, and all the biggest from every other industry. So even now, this first glimpse into Q4 earnings is useful.

Calcbench will continue to update our earnings tracker at the end of every week for the next few weeks, as quarterly reports flood into the database. 

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 info@calcbench.com.