Thursday, December 11, 2025

Earlier this week we had a post on Revenue Performance Obligations  (RPO), which is the value of contracted revenue that a company expects to deliver in future periods based upon existing customer agreements. For example, if a company has contracts with customers totaling $100 million, and those customers have already paid $30 million of that amount, then the company’s RPO is $70 million.

Our previous post examined the year-over-year change in RPO among various large companies from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025. Typically a rising RPO number is a good thing, because it suggests that the company is signing more contracts with more customers and is building a large pipeline of future revenue — but that’s not always the case. It could also mean the company is betting more future revenue on fewer customers, and if those customers don’t fulfill their revenue promises then everything melts down.


Today we want to study companies that report RPO by future period. Many companies make those disclosures, and with the right analysis you can get a better sense of what the future pipeline looks like. For example, Figure 1, below, shows the RPO by future period for Dell ($DELL).



This tells us that Dell has lots of future revenue already under contract. (For comparison purposes, Dell reported $95.6 billion in total revenue for 2024, and $71.6 billion through the first three quarters of 2025.) Even better, two-thirds of that $51 billion in total RPO is due within the next year; the sooner revenue is due to arrive, the less chance there is that some future event would disrupt your plans. 


Now consider another example from the tech world: Oracle ($ORCL). Earlier this summer Oracle announced a huge deal to provide data center services to OpenAI, but most of that revenue is back-loaded in the far side of a five-year deal. So Oracle’s expected RPO, according to the quarterly report the company filed just this week, looks more like Figure 2, below.



That RPO structure is very different from Dell’s. Much more revenue is tied up in later years, which means more time for some unexpected event to derail those projections. Moreover, lots of that future revenue is supposed to come from OpenAI (although Oracle doesn’t specify exactly how much). So if OpenAI does not grow like crazy and deliver all that revenue to Oracle within the next five years, Oracle has a big problem.


Indeed, let’s do some analysis. Oracle says it expects to collect 10 percent of RPO in the next 12 months, which means the company expects to book $52.3 billion in the next 12 months. 


To put that number in perspective, Oracle’s trailing 12 months’ revenue is $61 billion. One year ago the company’s TTM revenue was $55 billion and its expected RPO for the coming months was $37.95 billion.


So another way to look at things is to say that Oracle now expects to receive 38 percent more revenue in the coming 12 months ($52.3 billion is 38 percent larger than $37.95 billion) than it did in the prior 12 months, if we assume that the $37.95 billion projected one year ago actually came to fruition. (Remember, we don’t know that the $37.95 did actually arrive as planned. Perhaps some RPO didn’t, but it was offset by other revenue that arrived from elsewhere.)


How to Research RPO


By now astute readers will also be saying, “Wait a minute — Dell reports three tranches of RPO, but Oracle reports four. What’s up with that?” 


Good catch. GAAP accounting rules require all companies to report total RPO, but they aren’t required to report separate tranches of RPO (one year out, two years out, other future years, and so forth) according to any fixed format. 


For example, Google ($GOOG) reported total RPO of $157.7 billion in its most recent quarter. Fifty-five percent of that amount ($86.73 billion) is due within the next two years, but we don’t know whether the $86.73 billion is equally divided between year one and year two or falls along some other pattern.


This brings up another important point: not only can companies report RPO in a variety of formats; they can report it in multiple places in the earnings release and the 10-Q as well. For example, Boeing includes RPO inside a paragraph titled “Backlog” within its segment and revenue disclosure; Microsoft reports RPO in Note 11, Unearned Revenue; while RTX labels it directly as an RPO disclosure.


To complicate matters even more, many companies report RPO in the earnings release, but save disclosure of specific tranches of RPO for the subsequent 10-Q. 


Anyway, don’t worry. Calcbench has you covered. 


If you want to find RPO, you can start on our Multi-Company page. We track RPO as one of our standard disclosure metrics, so just enter the company or companies you want to research, type “remaining performance obligation” in the standardized metrics field, and see what comes up. See Figure 3, too, as an example.



From there you can use our Trace feature to see the specific RPO disclosure in the footnotes, which is where you’ll also find any information about tranches of RPO divided into future years. 


If you already know the specific company you want to research, you can also use our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page and search for “RPO” or “remaining performance obligation” or something like that, to dig up the exact RPO disclosure and all its data.


Or, if you’re a diehard XBRL user and have the Calcbench API, you can mainline all that RPO data right into your Excel models as soon as it arrives. 


Wednesday, December 10, 2025

By now financial analysts everywhere have heard the theory that Corporate America’s performance as a whole these days is being pulled along by the stellar performance of a tiny number of tech giants known as the “Mag 7” plus Oracle. 

Calcbench ran some numbers to quantify how real that effect is. We found that yes, the tech giants do distort certain line items on Corporate America’s collective income statement to a material degree — although that’s not always the case, and analysts can glean a lot of insight into overall corporate performance either way. 


See Figure 1, below. It charts the year-over-year change in 14 significant line items from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 for roughly 3,700 non-financial companies. We split that whole group into three components:


  • All non-financial firms altogether, tech giants and others alike.

  • The “Mag 7” companies, which are Nvidia, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla; plus Oracle, which is such a new addition to the group that people haven’t started calling them the Mag 8 yet.

  • All non-financial firms excluding the Mag 7 plus Oracle.



What does Figure 1 tell us? A few points jump out right away.


The overall increase in capex spending depended entirely on the tech giants. Their year-over-year capex spending jumped a whopping 69.6 percent, almost all of it going to build data centers for artificial intelligence — but all others saw their collective capex spend decline by 0.8 percent. So if you only looked at the overall increase for everyone (12.8 percent), you wouldn’t know that capex spending actually fell across most of the economy this summer and fall. 


The tech giants are burning through cash. All through Q3 earnings season, Calcbench had noticed in our Earnings Tracker that while most income statement lines were increasing nicely, cash wasn’t among them. Now we can see why: because cash among the tech giants dropped 14.3 percent, while it increased for everyone else by 2.6 percent. 


Net income growth wasn’t affected by the tech giants. Year-over-year growth was 16.3 percent for the entire population, and 16.6 percent for everyone excluding the tech giants. 


From insights like these, financial analysts can dive deeper with more probing questions, too. 


For example, if a tech giant is investing rapidly in capex and burning through its cash reserves, could that mean it will need to raise more debt in the future? What would more debt mean for the company’s debt-to-equity ratio and free cash flow? 


Or for all those non-tech giants who are still seeing healthy net income growth — how are they doing that, exactly? Revenue is rising faster than cost of revenue, but only barely; and operating expenses are growing faster than revenue. So perhaps analysts need to investigate the Other Income line to see whether one-time items are buoying net income; or whether cuts to capex might constrain long-term growth if the economy starts to accelerate rapidly.


We’ll dig deeper into the Mag 7+ effect in future posts. For now we wanted to lay down the foundational findings that something is there worth financial analysts’ attention. Calcbench can help you excavate that insight and see what it tells you.


Revenue Performance Obligations (RPO) represent the value of contracted revenue that a company has committed to deliver in future periods under existing customer agreements. RPO includes both short-term and long-term contractual commitments and reflects the remaining value of signed arrangements that have not yet been recognized as revenue. It provides a measure of future revenue that is already contractually secured.

Across the S&P 500 companies included in this review, 151 firms reported RPO in both Q3 2025 and Q3 2024, and the median year-over-year change among those firms was an increase of 11.6%.

One challenge with RPO disclosures is that companies place this information in widely varied locations within their filings — making it difficult for investors or analysts to retrieve consistently without a structured database. For example:

 - Boeing includes RPO inside a paragraph titled “Backlog” within its segment and revenue disclosure.

 - Microsoft reports it in Note 11 – Unearned Revenue.

 - Adobe presents it within the Revenue footnote.

 - RTX labels it directly as an RPO disclosure.

 - Oracle includes it in the Accounting Policies section.

Calcbench standardizes the capture of this information so users can retrieve it regardless of where it appears in the filing.

Top 20 RPO Increases

Name Ticker RPO 2025 RPO 2024 YoY $ Change YoY % Change
Oracle Corp ORCL 455.3B 99.1B 356.2B 359.4%
Microsoft Corp MSFT 398.0B 266.0B 132.0B 49.6%
Boeing Co BA 635.7B 510.5B 125.2B 24.5%
Alphabet Inc. GOOG 157.7B 86.8B 70.9B 81.7%
Amazon Com Inc AMZN 200.0B 164.0B 36.0B 22.0%
RTX Corp RTX 251.0B 221.0B 30.0B 13.6%
GE Vernova Inc. GEV 135.3B 117.7B 17.5B 14.9%
General Dynamics Corp GD 109.9B 92.6B 17.3B 18.7%
Lockheed Martin Corp LMT 179.1B 165.7B 13.4B 8.1%
General Electric Co GE 176.3B 166.1B 10.2B 6.1%
TKO Group Holdings, Inc. TKO 16.6B 7.2B 9.4B 130.4%
Caterpillar Inc CAT 22.5B 14.1B 8.4B 59.6%
Baxter International Inc BAX 9.9B 2.8B 7.1B 259.6%
International Business Machines Corp IBM 64.0B 57.0B 7.0B 12.3%
Northrop Grumman Corp /DE/ NOC 91.4B 84.8B 6.6B 7.8%
Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc. HII 55.7B 49.4B 6.3B 12.8%
Ford Motor Co F 6.0B 500.0M 5.5B 1100.0%
Quanta Services, Inc. PWR 21.0B 15.6B 5.4B 34.3%
ServiceNow, Inc. NOW 24.3B 19.5B 4.8B 24.6%
Honeywell International Inc HON 39.1B 34.3B 4.8B 13.8%

Top 20 RPO Decreases

Name Ticker RPO 2025 RPO 2024 YoY $ Change YoY % Change
On Semiconductor Corp ON 8.1B 13.7B -5.6B -40.9%
First Solar, Inc. FSLR 16.4B 21.7B -5.3B -24.4%
Verizon Communications Inc VZ 53.8B 57.9B -4.1B -7.1%
Global Payments Inc GPN 737.4M 3.8B -3.1B -80.7%
Pfizer Inc PFE 4.0B 7.0B -3.0B -42.9%
Crown Castle Inc. CCI 404.0M 2.0B -1.6B -79.8%
Unitedhealth Group Inc UNH 11.6B 13.0B -1.4B -10.8%
Coterra Energy Inc. CTRA 5.7B 6.2B -500.0M -8.1%
Targa Resources Corp. TRGP 2.6B 3.0B -386.4M -12.9%
Sempra SRE 3.3B 3.6B -327.0M -9.0%
Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. ICE 3.4B 3.7B -300.0M -8.1%
Moderna, Inc. MRNA 79.0M 361.0M -282.0M -78.1%
News Corp NWS 1.1B 1.3B -210.0M -15.9%
Motorola Solutions, Inc. MSI 8.9B 9.1B -200.0M -2.2%
Arista Networks, Inc. ANET 465.9M 626.3M -160.4M -25.6%
Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. CRL 649.3M 803.5M -154.2M -19.2%
Align Technology Inc ALGN 1.4B 1.5B -112.3M -7.5%
Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. LYV 1.4B 1.5B -100.0M -6.7%
Medtronic plc MDT 300.0M 400.0M -100.0M -25.0%
American Water Works Company, Inc. AWK 7.9B 8.0B -98.0M -1.2%

 

Here are some of the data in chart form.  





As you can see, the levels of the increases in RPOs far exceeds the dollar levels of the decreases. 

In a few days, we will add to this work by looking at the term structure of the performance obligation of some of these firms.

Thursday, December 4, 2025

We interrupt our recent string of posts about AI infrastructure costs to go back to tariffs and trade war pressures — because those are still a thing, as evidenced by today’s earnings release from liquor maker Brown Forman Corp. ($BF).

The headline is that revenue for the company’s most recent quarter (its fiscal Q2 2026, ending on Oct. 31) declined 5 percent from the year-ago period to $1.04 billion. Operating income dropped 10 percent to $305 million, and EPS was down 14 percent to $0.47 percent


Dig beneath the surface, however, and we quickly find that tariffs are driving a significant portion of those declines. 


First is this narrative disclosure in the earnings release:


In a challenging economic environment, net sales in the Developed International markets declined 4% (-6% organic), though improved sequentially. The decline was driven by the absence of American-made beverage alcohol from retail shelves in most of the Canadian provinces and lower volumes of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey in Germany and the United Kingdom. The decline was partially offset by the positive effect of foreign exchange, new agency brands in Japan, and the benefit from transition to owned distribution in Italy.


“Developed International” is a geographic segment Brown Forman defines as Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, plus assorted smaller markets grouped into an “Other” designation. As you can see from the above disclosure, sales for this segment declined by 4 percent in the most recent quarter.


OK, but how much is that in dollar terms? Brown Forman’s earnings release doesn’t disclose that number, but the company does disclose geographic segments in its full 10-Qs — so with some elementary sleuthing and Calcbench tools, we can figure it out.


First we opened the Segments and Breakouts page to search for Brown Forman’s geographic segment disclosures in its fiscal Q1 2026 quarter, which ended on July 31. As you can see in Figure 1, below, the company had $257 million in sales for the Developed International segment.



Second step: we ran the same search for the Developed International segment for Q2 2025, one year ago. That number was $289 million — and since this quarter’s numbers declined by 4 percent from one year ago, that means Q2 2026 sales for the Developed International segment must be $277.4 million (which is 4 percent less than the $289 million from one year ago). 


Presumably this will be proved true when Brown Forman files its full 10-Q in coming weeks. Our point is simply that even without the 10-Q, you can piece together a rich disclosure picture by pulling together data from the earnings release and prior 10-Q disclosures. You just need the right tools. (Read: Calcbench.) See Figure 2, below.



O Canada Segment


We were also curious about Canada sales specifically. Canadian liquor stores removed Brown Forman brands from their shelves earlier this year in retaliation for Trump Administration tariffs on Canadian goods. (Most liquor outlets in Canada are run by the provincial governments, so yes they can do this.) 


The bad news is that Brown Forman doesn’t report sales numbers for specific countries. It does, however, report sales growth or declines for specific countries. The declines for Canada are so steep they’ll blow your teque off. See Figure 3, below.



That’s a 62 percent decline in Canada sales in the six months of April through October 2025. Ouch. 


We know that Brown Forman’s total revenue for the first six months was $1.96 billion (that’s from the earnings release); and the Developed International segment accounted for roughly $566.4 million in that same period, which is 29 percent of total revenue.


Alas, we can’t tell how much Canada itself contributes to total revenue, which is a shame, because Canada’s trade retaliations could well be the factor that is pushing Brown Forman’s growth into decline. 


Friday, November 21, 2025

That’s a wrap on Q3 earnings season, folks. This week we received earnings data from Nvidia ($NVDA) and Walmart ($WMT), the last big filers to grace the markets with performance data. So with roughly 3,700 non-financial companies now compiled into the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker, let’s take one last look at Q3 2025.

Overall, it was respectable stuff. 


Figure 1, below, is our standard snapshot of earnings performance. Net income is up 16.1 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 8.1 percent, revenue up 6.8 percent. Even cash, which had been slightly down from the year-ago period for most of this season, finally turned positive and was up 0.7 percent.



The patterns above are largely what we’ve seen for several weeks now. There are still plenty of idiosyncrasies within individual companies, even apparent all-stars like Nvidia — which had great top-line numbers, but raised eyebrows once analysts dug into its inventory and accounts receivable numbers. So as always, dig into the segment-level and footnote disclosures to understand what’s really going on!


Meanwhile, Figure 2, below, shows all the latest numbers 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.


So that’s a wrap on Q3. Now we can all coast through the holidays and then get ready for Q4 earnings in six weeks!


Thursday, November 20, 2025

Walmart filed its latest quarterly earnings release today, so of course we took a peek to see how the world’s largest retailer and economic bellwether performed. 

The news was decent enough. Revenue up 5.8 percent from the year-ago period, net income up 29.1 percent, and EPS 35.1 percent. Operating income was down 0.2 percent, but that’s due to a one-time charge related to an upcoming spin-off; adjusted operating income without that charge was up 8 percent.


We kept skimming through the earnings release and then came to this:


Adjusted EPS of $0.62 excludes the effect, net of tax, of $0.20 gain on equity and other investments and $0.02 related to settlement of a certain legal matter, partially offset by $0.07 of incremental share-based compensation expense…


Hold up. Walmart ($WMT) reported an adjustment to GAAP of $0.20 because of a one-time gain on equity and other investments. Two weeks ago, we had a post about Amazon’s ($AMZN) latest quarterly results, noting that half of Amazon’s net income came from adjustments on equity (specifically, a mark-up in the value of Amazon’s equity stake in Anthropic).


So if Walmart reported an adjusted EPS number based on gains in equity and other investments, we wondered — what adjusted EPS number did Amazon report for its own equity gains? 


Spoiler: Amazon does not report adjusted EPS at all! 


Look for yourself if you’d like. Amazon’s Q3 earnings release does not include an adjusted EPS number. It does not include the word “adjusted” anywhere in the text at all. In fact, Amazon reports hardly any non-GAAP disclosures, other than Free Cash Flow. 


Filers that report non-GAAP financial metrics are supposed to reconcile those numbers back to their nearest GAAP counterpart, and Amazon does provide a reconciliation for net income to net cash from operating activities. But since that’s the only non-GAAP disclosure Amazon reports, that’s the only reconciliation analysts get.


This leaves financial analysts in a tricky place. Companies typically aren’t required to disclose non-GAAP metrics; we can’t say Amazon is doing anything wrong here. But Walmart is reporting a non-GAAP adjustment to EPS for gains in equity holdings and Amazon isn’t. 


So if you just compare standard EPS for both companies ($1.95 for Amazon, $0.77 for Walmart), you’re missing a significant part of the EPS picture: how much those EPS numbers depend on equity gains rather than operating income. If you want to compare adjusted EPS to have a better sense of that complexity — well, you can’t. Amazon doesn’t report it.


The only way you could capture that nuance, so you can have a true apples-to-apples comparison, would be to extract the Other Income number from both companies and model an estimate of adjusted EPS yourself. With Calcbench that’s easy enough; you can use our Excel Add-in or API


Our point is simply that financial analysts need to perform that level of “data due diligence.” A cursory look at the earnings release or the Statement of Income won’t cut it.


Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Earlier this week we had a post about Oracle’s ($ORCL) exposure to off-balance sheet leasing commitments, and particularly how those amounts have soared to an eye-popping $99.8 billion in recent months — none of it included on Oracle’s balance sheet.

That post made us wonder: what other companies have similar off-balance sheet arrangements, and in what amounts? 


Typically that information is hard to find. Analysts need to sift through a company’s quarterly report, and the number is usually buried away at the bottom of a page somewhere in a footnote near the end of the filing. That’s how Oracle disclosed its $99.8 billion, for example. 


Thankfully, Calcbench can help you leapfrog all that work to get to the good stuff. All those off-balance sheet disclosures are also tagged in XBRL. So if you just search by XBRL tag — which Calcbench lets you do — the numbers pop up quickly and easily.


The exact tag is:


 "UnrecordedUnconditionalPurchaseObligationBalanceSheetAmount"


We searched the S&P 500 for all firms that reported numbers using that tag, and did a time-series of data for the last seven quarters (that is, since the start of 2024) to see how those off-balance sheet commitments have changed over time. The result is Figure 1, below.



Hooo boy, that’s a lot of information for a single chart. Several points jump out.


First, notice that the tech giants are racking up lots of off-balance sheet commitments, almost all of it for data centers to run artificial intelligence. We thought Oracle’s $99.8 billion was eye-popping, but the numbers for  Amazon ($AMZN) and Microsoft ($MSFT) are even larger. And while Meta’s ($META) off-balance sheet numbers are lower, those numbers are growing rapidly. 


Second, it’s interesting to see that tech companies involved in the AI arms race aren’t the only ones carrying off-balance sheet commitments, but those other companies incur off-balance sheet commitments in a very different way. 


United Airlines ($UAL), Delta Air Lines ($DAL), JetBlue ($JBLU), Alaska Air ($ALK) — they all have off-balance sheet commitments to lease aircraft sometime in the future, but the lease amounts are relatively steady. It’s much the same for Netflix ($NFLX), too: commitments for future content, but commitments that are relatively stable from one quarter to the next. 


So at least for the airlines, Netflix, and other non-tech giants, you can see a logic there. People will continue to fly and watch more seasons of “Bridgerton,” so the airlines and Netflix need to line up resources to meet that future demand. 


Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and other “hyperscalers” making bets on AI are different. It’s not clear that demand for AI will scale up to match those data center commitments, or that the macro-economics of AI will be sustainable over the long term. 


How to Find This Stuff


Finding the numbers for off-balance sheet disclosures is easy enough. As we said above, you can search by tag and quickly find all filers that report something using that tag.


For example, you can go to the Multi-Company search page and start typing “unrecorded” in the XBRL tag search field on your screen. A dozen possible tags show up; just select the disclosure that interests you, and you’ll see all filers who used it in the period you’re searching. See Figure 2, below.



You could run the same search in a more refined way on our Raw XBRL Data page, although this page assumes you already know the exact tag you want to search. (If you don’t know the name of the tag, one cheat code is to find that disclosure in a filing somewhere and click on the number, which should be hyper-linked. That will open a small box at the bottom of your screen that explains what the tag for that disclosure is. Copy that tag name and paste it into the XBRL search page.) 


Once you find that off-balance sheet number, there’s still the question of exactly what that number is about. That’s easy. You can use our Trace feature by clicking on the result and that will open a box to the exact footnote that explains what the number is about.


Figure 3, below, shows how it works. We searched for “Unrecorded Unconditional Purchase Obligations” (one of the common tags for off-balance sheet disclosures) among the S&P 500 in Q2 2025. Meta reported $52.56 billion worth of such obligations. We clicked on that amount, and a box opened to the footnote disclosure, which tells us that the amount is “mostly for data centers, certain network infrastructure, and colocations” — that is, data center stuff.



So what are the risks to all these off-balance sheet commitments? That’s a subject for another post, and other analysts. But Calcbench has all the data you need to ask (and hopefully answer) such questions.


Sunday, November 16, 2025

You may have seen the Financial Times’ excellent article the other day analyzing Oracle ($ORCL), picking apart the tech giant’s exposure to OpenAI and the many ways that mammoth deal might turn sour for Oracle.

Or maybe you already knew Oracle’s potential risk here because you’ve been studying those same disclosures yourself — disclosures that are all readily available in Calcbench.


Don’t get us wrong; we appreciate the FT’s article, which is packed with good points and insight. But consider the key metrics that the article cites:


  • Segment-level revenues

  • Debt levels

  • Cash and short-term investments as a percent of total assets

  • Free cash flow

  • Leases

  • Debt-to-equity ratio


Calcbench tracks all those metrics for public filers. So if you had wanted to run your own analysis of Oracle’s exposure to OpenAI, perhaps comparing that exposure to other AI “hyperscalers” such as Microsoft ($MSFT), Google ($GOOG), and Amazon ($AMZN) — well, we’ve had all that data all along, there for the picking.


Always in the Footnotes


For example, the article notes near the bottom that Oracle “has signed at least five long-term lease agreements for US data centres that will ultimately be used by OpenAI, resulting in $100 billion of off-balance-sheet lease commitments.”


That’s absolutely right: if you look at Oracle’s most recent annual report (filed last May), you’ll see $147.4 billion in total liabilities, and only $11.5 billion in operating lease liabilities. 


So where is that disclosure of $100 billion in off-balance sheet lease commitments? It’s in the footnotes! Specifically, the number is tucked away at the bottom of a note blandly labeled “Leases.” See Figure 1, below.



You’ll notice that the exact number is $99.8 billion, and that number is tagged in XBRL. This means that you can use our See Tag History feature to see how that number has changed over time. We did exactly that — and those Calcbench fans with heart conditions may want to sit down and take a few deep breaths before reading further. Ready? See Figure 2, below.




Holy poop, Oracle’s off-balance sheet leasing commitments have increased by 24,822 percent in five years — from $411 million in 2020, to $43.4 billion at the end of the company’s fiscal 2025 six months ago, to $99.8 billion as of Aug. 31.  


Oracle’s off-balance sheet commitments more than doubled in its summer quarter. Presumably all of that is due to the deal that Oracle reached with OpenAI in the same period, where OpenAI has agreed to purchase $317 billion of computing power from Oracle for years to come. 


That computing power has to come from somewhere, which means Oracle needs vastly more data center resources. Hence its leasing commitments are soaring. 


The company will file its next quarterly report in early December, and lord only knows what the off-balance sheet leasing commitments will look like then. But as soon as Oracle does file those numbers, Calcbench will have them indexed and ready for analysis within minutes. 


Other Metrics


So that’s the off-balance sheet commitments. We also mentioned a squadron of other performance metrics cited in the Financial Times article: cash, debt, free cash flow, debt ratios, and so forth. Where can you find those? 


One great place to start is our Bulk Data Query page, which lists just about every financial disclosure a company might ever make. That includes individual items on the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows; plus other non-standard disclosures and even important liquidity ratios that you’d typically need to calculate yourself. Calcbench has all that for you.


For example, if you go to the Bulk Data page and scroll to the bottom, you’ll see more than two dozen profitability, liquidity, and solvency ratios. Figure 3, below, lists them all, with debt-to-equity highlighted since that one was mentioned in the FT article.



All these metrics can be calculated and then exported to your desktop in a tidy spreadsheet. You can then fiddle with them to your heart’s content, especially if you have our Excel Add-in. Alternatively, power users can have the data piped directly into your own models using our API. If you need help with either of those, email us at us@calcbenc.com any time.


Our point is simply that you don’t need to wait for the business press to write an in-depth article exploring possible AI bubbles or any other corporate financial scenario. If the data is out there, we have it, and you can consume it as soon as you’re ready.


Friday, November 14, 2025

We are now deep into Q3 earnings season, with only a few big corporate names still outstanding. (Nvidia and Walmart, for example, both file next week.) So even though we now have nearly 3,000 non-financial companies in our sample, overall earnings growth this week hews closely to what we saw last week.  

The numbers are in Figure 1, below. Net income growth is up 18.6 percent from the year-ago period (up just a tad from last week), operating income is up 10.5 percent (down two tads’ worth from last week), and revenue is up 6.4 percent (essentially flat from last week). 



Capex is up 11.1 percent from the year-earlier period. That’s down a few points from the 13.7 percent increase we reported last week — but more to the point, it’s down sharply from the 27.7 percent increase we reported two weeks ago


For now, at least, the growth picture has stabilized. It might change again next week when Nvidia ($NDVA) and Walmart ($WMT) enter the chat; we’ll have to stay tuned. 


Meanwhile, Figure 2, below, shows all the latest numbers 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.


Wednesday, November 12, 2025

You may have seen articles in the mainstream business press lately questioning the strength of the AI investment boom. Are AI pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic making any money? If they’re not, do we know how much money they’re losing? And are those losses showing up on the books of other tech companies, that financial analysts could get a better sense of the true picture here? 

As always, Calcbench is on the case. 


Let’s start with Microsoft ($MSFT), which has been investing in OpenAI for years, primarily via cloud computing resources Microsoft provides to the generative AI startup. In its quarterly report from Oct. 29, Microsoft reported a $4.1 billion loss from those investments, up from a $688 million loss in the year-earlier period. See Figure 1, below.



We were intrigued. If Microsoft is reporting a $4.1 billion loss on OpenAI today and a $688 million loss one year ago, what other losses has it disclosed related to OpenAI in the past? 


Alas, we can’t really tell. Microsoft only started reporting OpenAI-specific disclosures one year ago, at the start of its fiscal 2025; that’s the $688 million loss, reported under the “Other Income, Net” line item. Prior to that period, Microsoft didn’t mention OpenAI losses at all.


Even starting in Q1 2025, however, Microsoft described the OpenAI losses in rather vague terms. Microsoft reported an Other Income loss in that period of $683 million, “primarily reflect[ing] net recognized losses on equity method investments, including OpenAI.” 


The word “primarily” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Investors at that point in time didn’t know whether “primarily” meant almost all of the $683 million loss, or 51 percent of it, or something in between. Only now, one year later, can we see that “primarily” meant essentially all of the Other Income net losses that quarter. 


If we chart Microsoft’s Other Income losses from Q1 2025 (when we get the first mention of OpenAI’s relevance to that line item) forward, we get Figure 2, below.



Again, we don’t know precisely how much OpenAI was responsible for those losses throughout the first four fiscal periods, but clearly it was a lot — and then losses soared in this most recent quarter, to the point where Microsoft started disclosing exact numbers. 


What Else Microsoft Is Saying


We also used the text search feature in our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page to see what else Microsoft has said about its exposure to OpenAI. Tucked away in the Management Discussion & Analysis of last week’s 10-Q we found this (emphasis added by us):


Current year net income and diluted EPS were negatively impacted by net losses from investments in OpenAI, which resulted in a decrease in net income and diluted EPS of $3.1 billion and $0.41, respectively. Prior year net income and diluted EPS were negatively impacted by net losses from investments in OpenAI, which resulted in a decrease in net income and diluted EPS of $523 million and $0.07, respectively.


Umm, wow. Microsoft’s total diluted EPS for its most recent period was $3.72 — so if the company didn’t have that OpenAI loss, diluted EPS would’ve been 11 percent higher. 


Even more interesting is that OpenAI losses went from a $0.07 drag on EPS one year ago to a $0.41 drag today, a six-fold increase. By comparison, total EPS rose only 12.7 percent (from $3.30 EPS one year ago to $3.72 EPS now.) 


So those OpenAI losses are growing, and growing so fast that Microsoft has decided to start reporting them; which means Microsoft believes the OpenAI relationship is material to investors. Going forward, presumably Microsoft will keep disclosing those OpenAI losses — or, in theory, any OpenAI profits, if the company ever starts making money. 


Either way, it’s a useful glimpse into the state of OpenAI and its relationship to Microsoft. You just need to know where to look, and have the right tool to help you translate data into insight.







By Olga Usvyatsky

Debt instruments can have a huge effect on stockholder equity and EPS, depending on the precise nature of the debt that a company issues. Today let’s look at two examples of convertible debt, and how companies try to manage its attendant EPS implications, from the technology firms Snap ($SNAP) and Zillow ($Z). 


First, a refresher on how convertible debt works. Convertible debt is a financing instrument that combines elements of both debt and equity. While the interest rate on convertible bonds is generally lower than the rate on traditional bond instruments, investors gain the option to turn their debt holdings into company shares at some predetermined "conversion price" set in the terms of the debt agreement. 


For the shareholders, the downside of the conversion is dilution — because the conversion of debt into equity increases the number of shares outstanding, which therefore decreases the corresponding EPS.


One way to avoid that outcome is through a type of call option. A call option gives its holder the right (but not the obligation) to buy a specific stock or other asset at a predetermined price — commonly known as the “strike price” — within a set period of time. 


“Capped call” transactions are a hedging tool that convertible bond issuers often use to protect against shareholder dilution. When a company issues a convertible bond, it can buy call options on its own stock with a strike price equal to the bond's conversion price and a cap that limits the counterparty's exposure. 


A capped call transaction effectively raises the price point at which dilution begins, and that shields shareholders from having their ownership diluted until the shares trade well above the conversion price. The trade-off is cost: capped calls typically consume 7 to 9 percent of the debt proceeds upfront, as Calcbench explained in its previous piece using Uber’s ($UBER) $141 million hedge to illustrate. 


Importantly, capped calls involve separate transactions between the issuer of the convertible and third-party underwriters, subject to a separate agreement that lays out terms and conditions. But since capped calls are used to protect against conversion-related dilution, we typically expect the companies to unwind capped calls promptly once the convertible security is redeemed or expires upon maturity of the convertible. 


The logic here is simple: capped calls are costly, and unwinding them is a liquidity-positive event that generates cash inflow. So why pay for a hedge when the dilutive convertible instrument no longer exists? 


Example 1: Snap


In February and May 2024, Snap repurchased its 2025 convertible notes. Upon completion of the repurchase of convertibles in May 2024, Snap terminated its capped call transactions, recording a $62.7 million inflow from cash from financing. Snap disclosed the transaction as follows (emphasis added):


“Our financing activities for the six months ended June 30, 2024 primarily consisted of the Note Repurchases for $859.0 million, repurchases of our Class A common stock for $311.1 million, and the purchase of the 2030 Capped Call Transactions for $68.9 million, partially offset by the issuance of the 2030 Notes for net proceeds of $740.4 million and the termination of the 2025 Capped Call Transactions for proceeds of $62.7 million.”


But not every company reports a capped call transaction this way. Sometimes you find an outlier. Zillow seems to be such an exception.


Example 2: Zillow


In September 2019, Zillow issued a $500 million convertible note with maturity in 2026, a conversion price of $43.51, and the initial cap price of $80.575. The terms of the convertible and the capped call imply that Zillow purchased an anti-dilution hedge, which protects shareholders from dilution when the stock trades between $43.51 and $80.575. 


Put differently: the hedge effectively raises the dilution threshold to $80.575. On Sept. 27, 2019, Zillow’s stock closed at roughly $29.53, more than 30 percent below the initial conversion price. 


Five years later, in December 2024, Zillow redeemed its 2026 convertible note. In contrast to Snap, Zillow decided to keep the associated capped calls outstanding (again, emphasis added):


“In connection with settling our 2026 Notes in December 2024, we elected to keep the associated capped call transactions outstanding.”


The capped calls were terminated on Aug. 25, 2025, about eight months after the redemption of the convertible note:


“On August 25, 2025, Zillow Group, Inc. (the “Company”) will enter into agreements … to unwind and terminate certain capped call transactions by and between the Company and each Counterparty (such transactions, the “Capped Calls,” and the unwind and termination of the Capped Calls, the “Unwind Transactions”)... Upon settlement of the Unwind Transactions, the Company will have no remaining capped call transactions outstanding.


The Company expects to receive from the Counterparties an aggregate of 3.1 million shares of the Company’s Class C capital stock, which will reduce the Company's Class C capital stock outstanding, and $38.2 million in cash (the “Unwind Amount”), upon the Unwind Transactions. In connection with the Unwind Transactions, the Counterparties may buy or sell shares of the Company’s Class C capital stock in secondary market transactions and/or unwind various derivative transactions with respect to such Class C capital stock.”


Why did Zillow elect to delay the termination of capped calls? We don’t know. Recall, however, that the economics of the capped call transactions is a company buying a call option on its own stock. Buyers of the call options usually believe that the price of the underlying instrument is likely to increase, sending a bullish signal to the market.


One possible explanation is that Zillow's management believed that Zillow's stock price was likely to increase, and incorporated this belief into their decision not to terminate the calls. Zillow’s stock price closed at $76.6 on Dec. 24, 2024 — about 5 percent below the initial cap of $80.575. The stock closed around $88.80 on Aug. 25, 2025, an increase of 16 percent over the eight-month period. For comparison, the S&P 500 increased about 6.6 percent over the same period.


Let’s also remember that Zillow received both cash and shares as part of consideration received for unwinding the capped call transaction. Another possible explanation is that Zillow preferred to receive the shares — effectively reducing dilution — in 2025 rather than in 2024. 


Why would a company do that? Perhaps to match the timing of accretive capped calls unwinding with dilution related to the issuance of shares upon exercise of stock options. 


According to Zillow’s Q2 2025 filing, the company issued 1.32 million Class C shares upon exercise of stock options, 2.97 million shares upon vesting of RSUs, and repurchased 4.2 million Class A and 1.4 million Class C shares in the first half of 2025:


“During the six months ended June 30, 2025, we repurchased 4.2 million shares of Class A common stock and 1.4 million shares of Class C capital stock at an average price of $70.09 and $73.19 per share, respectively, for an aggregate purchase price of $297 million and $103 million, respectively.”


The company also reported the transaction in the following table:


A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.


For comparative purposes, during the first six months of 2024 Zillow repurchased 1.1 million of Class A stock and 5.996 million of Class C stock. So the 3.1 million of Class C capital stock received by Zillow in August 2025 as part of the consideration could have potentially reduced the buybacks needed to mitigate the dilutive effect of options issuances and RSUs vesting in 2025. 


Of course, there could also be other reasons besides stock price expectations and buyback considerations that we did not discuss here. But Zillow’s delay in unwinding the hedge looked unusual, certainly interesting enough to ponder a few ideas. 


For the readers interested in conducting similar research in their own companies that they follow, convertible debt, capped calls, and note hedges are all easy to find using Calcbench’s Interactive Disclosure and Multi-Company pages.


For example, we searched “capped call” in the 2024 disclosures of S&P 500 companies and found more than 75 results, including NRG Energy, Super Micro Computer, Las Vegas Sands, and more. From there you can conduct your own analysis much as we did here with Snap and Zillow.


Editor’s note: Olga Usvyatsky is an author of Deep Quarry newsletter and occasional contributor to the Calcbench blog. Usvyatsky enjoys raising interesting questions about financial disclosures, and can be reached at olga@deepquarry.com.



Friday, November 7, 2025

We’re now roughly halfway through Q3 earnings season, and have more than doubled the number of firms in the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker — more than 2,000 non-financial firms this week, compared to only around 900 one week ago. 

The bottom line this week: earnings growth is still decent, but aggregate growth has slowed down notably as more smaller firms start reporting their numbers. 


See Figure 1, below. It shows net income growth of 18.4 percent and operating income growth of 11.1 percent compared to the year-earlier period. 



Those performance numbers are good, certainly. But in our prior earnings update one week ago, with only 900 firms in the sample, net income growth was 28 percent and operating income growth was 20.2 percent. We can say the same for capex spending, too. One week ago the year-over-year growth was 27.7 percent; this week it’s 13.8 percent. 


So that’s three metrics that have nearly halved in one week, now that we’re including more small filers into the total sample. It’s a reminder that early-season comparisons can often be skewed by the smaller number of large firms. 


Capex in particular is a good example of what we mean. Why was the number so high one week ago? Because last week’s sample was weighted more heavily to tech giants spending zillions of dollars on data centers. This week we have 1,000 more companies, spending a lot less on capex, so aggregate year-over-year growth decelerated sharply. (This also means that if the AI giants do cut their capex spending bonanza, overall capex could easily turn negative, which is not good.) 


On the other hand, growth in revenue and cost of goods sold have essentially held steady (at 6.6 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively) despite the huge expansion in our sample size this week. So some of the biggest trends are still chugging along at a steady pace. 


Figure 2, below, shows all the latest numbers 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.


Amazon.com ($AMZN) reported its latest quarterly earnings last Friday, and of course the company reported gobs of revenue ($180.2 billion) and pretax income ($28.2 billion) because that’s what you do when you’re an e-commerce giant astride the globe.

Then, as always, Calcbench squinted more closely at that $28.2 billion in pretax income. Only $17.4 billion of that number came from Amazon’s operating income; another $10.2 billion came from the ever-mysterious line item known as “Other” income. What was that about? 


So we dove into Amazon’s footnote disclosures, because you can do that in Calcbench thanks to our Tracing feature and our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page. Soon enough, we found this explanation on Page 30 of the 10-Q, tucked away in the Management Discussion & Analysis:


The net gain of $10.2 billion in Q3 2025 and $14.1 billion for the nine months ended September 30, 2025 is primarily from an upward adjustment for observable changes in price relating to our nonvoting preferred stock in Anthropic, and the reclassification adjustments for the gains on available-for-sale debt securities from the portions of our convertible notes investments in Anthropic that were converted to nonvoting preferred stock during Q3 2025 and for the nine months ended September 30, 2025.


In other words, more than one-third of Amazon’s pretax income for the quarter ($10.2 billion of the $28.2 billion total) comes from its holdings in AI darling Anthropic — a nonpublic company that reportedly doesn’t yet turn a profit.


Don’t get us wrong. Amazon still had $17.4 billion in operating income, and that’s not nothing. Moreover, even if Anthropic isn’t turning a profit, the company is growing like weeds along the Amazon River. Whatever Amazon’s equity or debt holdings in the AI might be, clearly those holdings are worth more today than they were three, six, or nine months ago. Regardless, that’s still a material amount of Amazon’s pretax income tied to financial engineering rather than people buying and selling stuff. 


So we got to wondering: Are any other companies enjoying similar bumps to the bottom line from “other” income?


Spoiler: the answer is yes.


Exploring Other Income


Researching this question was easy. We simply went to our Multi-Company search page and then looked up operating income and “Other non-operating income” for the S&P 500 to see what we’d find.


For Q3 2025 filings so far, we found 178 firms that filed both numbers. Then we expressed Other Income as a percentage of Operating Income, and sorted the answers from highest to lowest. Figure 1, below, shows the 10 firms with the largest Other Income amounts relative to Operating Income.



That’s the list; then you can use the Disclosures & Footnotes Query page to investigate specific companies and why they had such bumper crops of other income.


For example, AT&T ($T) reported $6.25 billion in other income for the quarter, more than all of the telecom giant’s operating income. Most of that $6.25 billion came from the sale of AT&T’s stake in DirecTV to a private equity group:


On July 2, 2025, we sold our interest in DIRECTV to TPG Capital (TPG) and recorded a current note receivable of approximately $3,600, which we expect to receive the majority of by the end of 2025, and a long-term receivable of $500. The disposition of DIRECTV also resulted in the release of approximately $2,900 of historical deferred tax liabilities. We recorded a gain on the sale of DIRECTV of approximately $5,500, which includes the impact of the transfer of deferred tax liabilities, indemnification liabilities and unfavorable contracts…


AT&T reported net income of $9.67 billion for the quarter. If not for that $5.5 billion booked thanks to the DirecTV sale, net income would’ve been less than half of that.


Another adventure in footnote disclosures is Honeywell International ($HON). The company reported $822 million in Other Income, compared to $1.75 billion in operating income. First we traced that $822 million to an Other Income footnote that Honeywell included in its Q3 filing, which included a table (see below) that said most of that Other Income number came from a settlement related to Resideo, a maker of home temperature and security controls that Honeywell spun out in 2018. 



The Other Income footnote directs people to look at the Commitments and Contingencies footnote for more detail about the Resideo issue. We went to that footnote. Long story short, the $802 million is a one-time payout from Resideo to Honeywell to end a long-term indemnification arrangement where Resideo had been paying Honeywell for the costs of environmental matters at old manufacturing sites. 


For the record: yes, Honeywell did report this one-time Other Income gain as an adjustment to net income. The company only reported the number as part of adjusted EPS, rather than adjusted earnings; but the adjustment is in there. 


We could keep going, and perhaps in future posts we will. Our point is simply that the impressive net income and pretax income numbers we’re seeing these days can often be driven by Other Income numbers. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but shrewd analysts will keep that question in mind as you assess the long-term earnings quality of the companies you follow. 


All the data is there; Calcbench just helps you find it.


Friday, October 31, 2025

It’s Friday in earnings season, which means another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q3 earnings data from roughly 900 non-financial firms, and as a whole they show an impressive gain in net income from the year-ago period. Most other metrics are moving in the right direction, too.

Figure 1, below, tells the tale. 



Most notable is that plunge in restructuring charges you can see on the far left. Yes, restructuring charges have dropped a whopping 63 percent — but that’s because last year’s restructuring amount included a handful of enormous impairments from Intel ($INTC), AT&T ($T) and a few others. The decline we see this year is from an unusually large number one year ago.


Meanwhile, net income is up 28 percent and EBIT up 24 percent. Revenue is up 6.66 percent (rather apt for a Halloween Day update), which is still more than cost of goods sold, up 5.9 percent.


Big Spenders in Capex


The other impressive line-item this week is capex spending, up 30.7 percent from one year ago. Analysts love to scrutinize capex numbers because healthy capex spending — on buildings, vehicle fleets, data servers, and other long-term physical assets — means that companies are bullish on their future economic prospects.


So a 30.7 percent bump should be interpreted as good news, right? Not so fast.


Yes, capex spending so far this quarter is up $59.8 billion, yards ahead of where it was in Q3 2024 — but the vast majority of that spending (84 percent of it) is driven by only seven firms. Moreover, five of the seven are somehow involved in the AI data center arms race, and a sixth makes chips for those five. See Figure 2, below.



In other words, if we strip these seven big spenders out of our sample, overall capex spending for everyone else is only up 7.6 percent from 2024 numbers. That trend could change still more as earnings season continues to evolve (we’re not even one-third through it yet) so stay tuned. 


Choose Your Own Earnings Analysis Adventure


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.


Thursday, October 30, 2025

The six major U.S. airlines have now all filed their Q3 2025 earnings releases, so we wanted to give everyone an update on their performance courtesy of our airlines industry earnings template.

The template, available to Calcbench subscribers on DropBox, tracks numerous airline-industry performance metrics — everything from revenue per available seat mile (RASM) to passenger revenue, load factor, average fuel cost, and more.


We track six U.S. airlines:


  • Alaska Airlines ($ALK)

  • American Airlines ($AAL)

  • Delta Air Lines ($DAL)

  • Jet Blue ($JBLU)

  • Southwest Air ($LUV)

  • United Airlines ($UAL)


Figure 1, below, tracks their quarterly EPS (along the bottom) and quarterly RASM (along the top). 



Or for those of you who prefer to consume your financial data in table format, here’s the RASM data for the last five quarters in Figure 2, below.



Why did we include Q4 with a row of “N/A”? To remind you that our earnings templates automatically capture the latest data as firms file! So when the airlines start filing Q4 data in three months’ time, that information will be whisked from the filings to the templates within minutes, ready for your analysis.


Two caveats. First, for the template to populate updates automatically, you must be a premium-level Calcbench subscriber. If you want a Premium subscription or aren’t sure whether the subscription you have qualifies, email us at us@calcbench.com and we’ll get you squared away. 


Second, you must have the Calcbench Excel Add-in installed and running. 


Once you have those items done, the template will run automatically. Onward and upward!


Monday, October 27, 2025

Q3 earnings season has barely begun, with only a few hundred large companies filing their earnings reports so far. Still, that’s enough for us to fire up the Calcbench Earnings Tracker again and get the analysis engine running.

At close of business on Friday, Oct. 24, we were tracking data from roughly 300 non-financial firms that had already filed their Q3 2025 reports. Collectively, that group reported net income nearly 70 percent higher than the year-ago period; while revenue was up a healthy 5.2 percent and cost of goods sold (an important metric for signs of inflation) up 4.5 percent. See Figure 1, below.




We need to emphasize that this first assessment of Q3 earnings comes with a host of caveats. First, there are only 300-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 Q2 earnings.) Important chunks of the economy are still missing from this Q3 picture, such as the tech giants; they’re mostly going to file this coming 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-November, and the big picture we start to see then might look very different from the one portrayed by the biggest of filers now. 


All those caveats said — this first earnings report ain’t shabby. 


We caught a foreshadowing of this message from some individual companies that filed early, such as Delta Air Line’s ($DAL) positively stellar earnings report two weeks ago


The message in Figure 1 seems to be that revenue growth is staying ahead of cost of goods sold expense (not by much, but by enough), while capex and opex spending are both down from the year-ago period. Take all that together, and it helped to drive a surge in net income.


Then again, back to another caveat: small sample sizes such as ours are vulnerable to outliers. For example, total net income for our sample this week grew by $54.6 billion, but $21.26 billion of that surge came from Intel ($INTC), and that’s because Intel swung from a $17 billion loss one year ago (Q3 2024) to plus $4.27 billion in net income in Q3 2025. 


Still, the overall picture isn’t bad. 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.


Now, another week of earnings is about to start hitting the wires. Everyone back to work!


Thursday, October 23, 2025

Netflix ($NFLX) filed its latest quarterly report on Tuesday. Lots of numbers on the income statement looked solid — yet the streaming giant’s share price still tumbled 7.7 percent by the end of the day.


Why? Apparently because investors were surprised at a $619 million charge the company booked due to a long-running tax dispute in Brazil.


Unless, that is, you were a close reader of the disclosures Netflix made in its footnotes! Then you would’ve seen this “surprise” tax charge coming from miles away.


Let’s start with the disclosure Netflix made in this week’s filings, confirming the $619 million charge. That disclosure came in the Commitments and Contingencies footnote that all publicly traded companies are required to make every quarter. (Emphasis added by us.)


During the current period, developments in another taxpayer’s judicial proceedings have influenced our evaluation of the Company’s most significant non-income tax matter in Brazil and we now believe that it is probable that a loss will be incurred. The cumulative loss recognized as an operating expense in the current period related to non-income tax assessments with the Brazilian tax authorities was approximately $619 million.


Now look back at what Netflix had to say about this matter in its previous filing from July (again, emphasis added by us). 


The cumulative current potential exposure with respect to the various issues with Brazilian tax authorities regarding non-income tax assessments, for which the loss recognition criteria has not been met, is estimated to be approximately $600 million, and is expected to increase over time.


And now let’s look at what Netflix said its earnings report from one year ago, in Q3 2024:


There is inherent complexity and uncertainty with respect to these matters, and the final outcome may be materially different from our expectations. The current potential exposure with respect to the various issues with Brazilian tax authorities regarding non-income tax assessments is estimated to be approximately $400 million, which is expected to increase over time.


In fact, let’s go all the way back to the Q3 2023 earnings report Netflix filed two years ago:


The Company is involved in litigation matters not listed herein but does not consider the matters to be material either individually or in the aggregate at this time. The Company's view of the matters not listed may change in the future as the litigation and events related thereto unfold. 


As you can see, there’s no mention of any Brazil tax dispute at all. Either Brazilian authorities hadn’t launched their investigation yet or the dispute seemed so small that any settlement wouldn’t be material.


Indeed, the first mention of a tax dispute with Brazil seems to have appeared in Netflix’ 2023 annual report, filed on Jan. 26, 2024. That’s when the company added a “non-income taxes” subsection in its Contingencies disclosure, and said this:


Similar to other U.S. companies doing business in Brazil, the Company is involved in a number of matters with Brazilian tax authorities regarding non-income tax assessments. Although the Company believes it has meritorious defenses to these matters, there is inherent complexity and uncertainty with respect to these matters, and the final outcome may be materially different from our expectations. The current potential exposure with respect to the various issues with Brazilian tax authorities regarding non-income tax assessments is estimated to be approximately $300 million, which is expected to increase over time.


So over the course of two years, we went from no tax dispute at all, to a dispute that might cost $300 million, to $400 million, to $600 million, to a current total of $619 million.


Tracking Contingences


Contingencies — that is, potential costs, such as legal or regulatory settlements — are a tricky bit of financial analysis. Accounting rules require companies first to disclose when a dispute will probably lead to a loss, even if the company can’t estimate the likely number; and then to report the number once the size of the potential loss comes into better focus and is likely to be material.


So in theory, Netflix could even end up paying more than the $619 million disclosed this week; but probably not, and even if so, any final number isn’t likely to be materially higher than the $619 million the company has booked now.


Either way, readers of the footnotes would have seen for more than a year that this number was real, and it was growing. So you could have anticipated that possible outcome and adjusted your analysis and strategy accordingly.


One way to track contingencies in Calcbench is to read the exact disclosure in the Disclosures & Footnotes page, and then compare that period’s text to what the company said in the prior period. Figure 1, below, shows the comparison between Q3 (on the left) and Q2 (on the right) for Netflix:



Or you could track the disclosure on our Multi-Company page. Call up that specific line-item, then look at the time-series of disclosures to see how the number has changed over time. See Figure 2, below.



So if you know where to look, you can see these financial risks evolving over time. And like many dramas, this one was rather predictable.


In our latest Q&A interview with people who use Calcbench in their financial analysis, we speak with Stephen O’Byrne, President of Shareholder Value Advisors. O’Byrne’s firm helps companies design better management incentive plans and measure shareholder value at the group and divisional levels using economic profit concepts. 

In this interview, Calcbench talks to O’Byrne about why investors should focus on executive compensation, how to evaluate executive pay with the new disclosures, and how Calcbench can help investors with this analysis. 


Let’s start at the top. Why should investors pay attention to executive compensation? 

Simple: because when pay practices are connected with shareholder interests, investors have a better chance of achieving higher returns. So investors should study executive compensation to be sure that alignment between pay and shareholder interests does exist.


How has executive compensation been evolving? 

Proxy advisers have become increasingly aggressive about reinforcing the conventional wisdom that executives should have expected pay at the median. For some companies, this has been effective. But practices such as targeting dollar pay and percentage pay at risk can disconnect company leaders from shareholder interests. For example, when stock prices drop, companies often grant more shares to meet target dollar amounts; that insulates executives from the decline while shareholders suffer.

At the same time, there’s a small but growing group of companies that have been paying executives with private equity-like compensation. For some executives, such as Elon Musk (Tesla), Tim Cook (Apple), and Sundar Pichai (Google), they receive large upfront grants instead of annual grants to create stronger incentives. 


So what should investors focus on? 

It’s important to measure the strength and cost efficiency of incentive programs using “realizable” or “mark to market” pay. Doing this has become much easier with the introduction of new disclosure requirements that report compensation on a mark-to-market basis.

The single most important thing investors can do is measure key pay dimensions over time. I look at four dimensions: 

  1. Pay leverage, or the sensitivity of pay to relative company performance.

  2. Pay alignment which is the correlation of changes in pay with changes in performance.

  3. Pay premiums at industry average performance, or performance-adjusted cost. 

  4. Relative pay risk, which looks at pay risk relative to the risk of the company.

Pay alignment and relative pay risk are the two components of pay leverage and help you understand why the company is achieving (or failing to achieve) a strong incentive.  Pay leverage and the pay premium at industry average performance help you assess the cost-efficiency of the CEO’s incentive. Ultimately, you want to relate these pay dimensions to future returns to improve your investment strategy. 


What drew you to Calcbench?

Calcbench has an easy-to-use interface that allows me to download data for a substantial sample of companies, directly into Excel. The addition of the Pay versus Performance (PvP) data and the existing summary compensation table data are very useful for my analysis. I also find the tracing and search features to be helpful. I search proxies for terms like “fixed shares” and directly access the relevant text in underlying documents. 

If you’d like to know more about the compensation data Calcbench tracks and how to use that information in financial analysis, be sure to see our previous posts on the compensation data we have!


Monday, October 20, 2025

All the big Wall Street banks filed their Q3 earnings reports last week, which allows Calcbench to give an update on one of our favorite performance metrics: loan loss ratios!

All banks must set aside some portion of capital to cover loans they’ve extended which might subsequently default. Those are loan loss provisions, disclosed in absolute dollars. You can then calculate a bank’s loan loss ratio by dividing the loan loss provisions into total loans outstanding. 


That ratio gives investors a sense of how confident a bank is about its loan portfolio, and really about the economy overall. A declining loan loss ratio means banks aren’t as worried about the risk of default among their loan recipients; a rising one means the banks are.


So what does that picture look like today? We pulled the results for five major banks: Bank of America ($BAC), Citigroup ($C), JPMorgan Chase ($JPM), US Bank ($USB), and Wells Fargo ($WFC). Figure 1, below, tells the tale.



As one can see, the banks’ loan loss ratios for Q3 2025 (in red) were all lower than their loan loss ratios in the year-earlier period (in blue). Some were only marginally lower, others materially lower — but across all five, lower.


For those curious about the precise amounts set aside for loan loss provisions, we present Figure 2, below.



Again, these numbers are easy to find and analyze in Calcbench. We used our Multi-Company page, where you can create peer groups of companies to study and then pull up any of scores of standard disclosures we track — including numerous bank-specific disclosures, such as loan loss provisions and total loans. 


Hardcore Calcbench subscribers can also use our API to mainline earnings data directly into your own models; or you can use our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page to drill down into a single company’s detailed disclosures. 


After all, these loan loss ratios are only one performance metric among many that banks report about the performance of their loan portfolios. Banks also report loans by category (consumer credit card loans, other consumer loans, commercial loans, real estate loans, mortgage loans, auto loans, and so forth), deposits, and a host of other metrics. 


For example, Figure 3 below, is one small snippet of the disclosures from JPMorgan’s Q3 earnings release.




It’s a lot of data that banks publish. Calcbench captures it all and has it ready for your analysis.


Yes, Calcbench now offers expanded new troves of data about executive compensation, including standard disclosures such as the Summary Compensation Table (which companies have reported in proxy statements for years) and new disclosures including pay-vs.-performance metrics and our favorite, “compensation actually paid.”

OK, cool cool, we have the data. So how can Calcbench users actually find it? Today we’ll give you three easy-to-follow examples. 


For a Single Company


Let’s say you are researching a single company’s disclosures. Typically, the place to start is the Disclosure & Footnotes Query page. You can find that by scanning your choices along the top of the screen and finding the one that says “Disclosures.” See Figure 1, below (and look for the red arrow).



Once at the Disclosure & Footnotes page, you’ll next need to select the executive compensation disclosures as the specific data you want to see. Those disclosures are filed annually in the proxy statement, not in the quarterly financial statements or the annual 10-K. 


To find them, simply look to the left-hand side of your screen. You’ll see the list of disclosures that Calcbench offers. See Figure 2, below.



Skim all the way to the bottom of that list of disclosures, and you’ll see the compensation disclosures at the bottom under “Related Documents.” See Figure 3, below. 



Click on the choice you’d like, and that data will appear on your screen.


For Groups of Companies


Calcbench subscribers can also search larger groups of companies for compensation disclosures too. First, select the peer group you want to research. (We have a separate post explaining how to select a peer group, or you can use one of our pre-designed groups such as the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrials.) 


For our purposes today, we’ll use the Dow Jones Industrials. Then you go to our XBRL Data page, which lets you search for disclosures by their individual XBRL tag (since all compensation disclosures are tagged). 


Step 2 is to select the fiscal year and period you want to research. You can select any fiscal year you’d like (although the pay versus performance disclosures are new, so if you search prior years you’ll get no results because none exist). For the fiscal period, however, you must select “Y” for the whole year because compensation disclosures only exist in the annual proxy statement.



Step 3 is to select the “statement type” you want from the drop-down menu provided. Scroll down until you reach “proxy statement pay versus performance” and select that choice. 


Then just press search, and you’ll get the results. In our example above, searching the Dow Jones Industrials for their 2024 proxies, we had 866 facts or data points. From here, you can export the data into Excel for your own modeling. That’s all there is to it. 


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