How to Analyze Any Stock's Quarterly Earnings

Second quarter earnings season is upon us. Most of the stocks in your portfolio are likely going to release their latest results within the next few weeks. And we want you to be ready.

In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on July 1, Fool.com contributors Brian Withers and Brian Feroldi discuss how they prepare for and analyze the earnings from their favorite stocks. 

Brian Withers: Before we go over our stocks, we want to talk a little bit about how to get information during earnings season, when are earnings, when are the companies that you're interested in are reporting. We're going to do a little inside baseball today. I'm going to share my screen and let's see, let's try it this way. We're going to get a fool.com, we're going to start there. I'm going to show you how to find when earnings are. You can go to your premium services here and what's cool is right here under the more, there's a community button. Click on that and then look at this calendars right here. You probably haven't clicked on this before, but what does it do? Is it takes you right to this board called PB premium boards calendars. This is super cool. TMF music has been maintaining this for as long as I can remember, and it's super useful. You click on the latest post and you can see when the earnings are, he posts something every week and he bolds the earnings that are upcoming. You can see AeroVironment (AVAV -2.15%) 6/29, they're reporting their Q4. Here's the estimate for the for the quarter. AMC (AMC -4.12%) is after market close. I think this firm, I'm guessing because a lot of these are estimated dates, firm means that the date is been announced by the company. I'm guessing-

Brian Feroldi: That's correct.

Brian Withers: That's what that means. How can I find the company that I want to? Go out here to the bottom, there's a sortable calendar. This is like the best thing ever. It's sorted by company name, but let's sort by report date. There's a bunch that don't have dates and the red ones are this week. We can see McCormick (MKC -0.46%). Look at this, McCormick reported BMO before market open. Let's go find out what's happening with McCormick. I go to my Google Search, do McCormick Investor Relations. Investors McCormick Company. The leader in flavor. Every investor website is different. You can click on financial information, but typically, if it's recent earnings, it will be right here on the front page. Annual Report, latest news. McCormick reports strong second quarter. Typically, companies have a news release. If the market closes at 4:00 and they are doing an aftermarket, it's like 4:01, this is the thing that goes out to the press and all the bots scan this stuff and report out, here's what the company did. This is free form, there's no specific format for this, so they can talk about whatever. What you'll see here, the couple of bullets up at the top are the things that McCormick's management is highlighting about how cool their quarter was. Usually, you have some President and CEO remarks and then second-quarter a little more deep dive on the results. Then usually the outlook. They'll present some either upcoming outlook for the next quarter or for the full year. It looks like the way McCormick does it is a full-year estimate. If you scroll down even further, this is weirdly formatted, they have net sales, the flavor solutions segment. Then if you go all the way down to the bottom, operating income, this is usually these non-GAAP financial measures, so you have to watch. This is non-GAAP. Here we go. This is even some of their spin on it. Here, it's after.

Brian Feroldi: Can you zoom in, Brian?

Brian Withers: Zoom in, yes. It's really tiny on my screen too. This is not formatted very well. A lot of times, they're better. You get through the earnings report and then they have the about the company thing and the investor contact and then they throw the income statement, the balance sheet, and the cash flow. That's here. You can actually get the actual numbers versus maybe some non-GAAP stuff that they report up at the top. You can also look through some of these presentations. Wow, look at this, they have a presentation. This is another way that you can look through. You got to remember again, it's a presentation, so it's a PowerPoint or PDF and they are really pitching. You got to remember it's an investor deck for investors. They're pitching, here's the cool stuff that we're doing, robust two-year growth momentum. Well, that's not a GAAP measurement. They talk about their portfolio. I like these presentations because if you're not super familiar with the company, it really gives you a management mindset and what they're doing. But you do have to remember that this isn't the actual report. They also have financial information here. This is where they post the SEC stuff. An 8-K is an unscheduled event, so this is basically just the earnings announcement. You want to look for the 10-Q, which is all of the financial details, the GAAP presentation, what they send to the SEC. The last piece that I always like to look for, and it doesn't look like this company, McCormick has it on their website. Sometimes on their website they have, let me look under events here. Here's the earnings call, that was the presentation that we just saw. You can listen to the earnings call here, but I like to read the transcript. Let's Google search again, McCormick. It may not be out yet today because it was just before market open today. Earnings transcript, and Q1. This was 3:30, but you can at least see this is how you get to it and you can read it. The other way you can do it is always click on the ticker and then this will show you all of the articles. Dmitry here has a McCormick what-to-watch report, that may be useful to read as well. Here's the Chairman, President, CEO talking about here's how we did, and then later on down you get analyst questions.