Friday, March 8, 2024

 Another week down, another analysis up from the Calcbench Earnings Tracker! With well more than 2,000 earnings reports in hand, we can now do even more in-depth analysis.


Our Earnings Tracker is a template we compiled using the world-famous Calcbench Excel Add-In, to pull financial disclosures automatically as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 


Figure 1, below, tells the tale. It shows total data for more than 2,000 non-financial companies that have filed Q4 earnings as of noon ET March 8. 



Figure 2, below, is that same data converted into bar charts for easy visualization.



So we have revenue up 1.78 percent from the year-earlier period, and net income up an impressive 25.2 percent. Moreover, cost of goods sold is actually lower than the year-earlier period by 1.88 percent. We first noticed this trend two weeks ago, when our Earnings Tracker had cost of goods sold down by 0.65 percent. 


Retailers in Particular


This week we wanted to take a special look at the retail sector, since big retailers are usually the last to file in earnings season (because their fiscal years typically end on Jan. 31, one month later than most companies on a calendar year-end schedule). Our Earnings Tracker lets users search by specific SIC code, so we set that filter to “5” for retailers. See Figure 3, below.



OK, this tells a somewhat different story from filers as a whole. Retailers saw revenues rise by 6.24 percent from the year-earlier period (more than other sectors), and net income rose a whopping 110 percent, from $16.2 billion one year ago to $34.2 billion last quarter. Then again, cost of goods sold also rose 5.8 percent, a sharp departure from the declines we’ve been seeing for companies overall. 


Our point here is simply that Calcbench has the data to help you perform your own analysis as quickly as possible, with the latest data around — and in-depth research is worth doing, because sometimes the niche story isn’t the same as the overall story. 


If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the spreadsheet we used for the data here, 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. 
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