September 2026
Adobe reported its Q3 print -- here's what actually moved
Adobe filed its fiscal Q3 10-Q today, September 22 -- a couple of days ahead of last year's September 24 filing -- for the quarter ended August 28, 2026. Last month we walked through all 25 ratios using the prior quarter's numbers as a placeholder while we waited. This is the follow-up we promised: the same ratios, now from the actual filing, next to what they were last quarter so you can see what genuinely shifted and what didn't.
As before: this is a read of arithmetic sitting inside a public filing, not a forecast or a recommendation, and none of it is financial advice.
Margins: mostly steady, with operating margin doing the more interesting work
Revenue came in at $6.76 billion, up 2.1% from last quarter and 12.9% year over year. Gross margin eased slightly to 88.7% from 89.2% -- a small move, well within normal noise. Operating margin actually improved, to 34.8% from 33.8%, meaning revenue grew faster than R&D and go-to-market spend did this quarter. Net margin for the quarter rose to 27.0% from 25.9%. On a trailing-twelve-month basis, though, net margin dipped slightly to 28.0% from 28.7% -- a reminder that a TTM ratio can move for a reason that has nothing to do with the newest quarter: it also drops the quarter from a year ago that just rolled out of the window. (More on how TTM ratios work in the ratios guide.) EBITDA margin eased slightly to 38.6% from 39.1%.
Returns: still north of 60% ROE, still the same two drivers
Return on equity (TTM) came in at 61.9%, down slightly from 62.8% last quarter -- the DuPont breakdown lands at almost the same number, 61.9%, from 28.0% net margin times 0.88x asset turnover times a 2.50x equity multiplier. Every piece moved only a little: asset turnover ticked up from 0.87x, equity multiplier eased from 2.53x. Nothing here suggests a change in how the business is being run, just the normal quarter-to-quarter drift. Return on assets held essentially flat at 24.3%, versus 24.2%.
Liquidity and leverage: the deferred-revenue story holds, and leverage eased a touch
Current ratio improved to 0.77x from 0.75x, and working capital's gap narrowed to negative $2.73 billion from negative $3.01 billion -- still negative for the same reason we called out last time (deferred revenue from subscriptions sitting as a current liability, not a sign Adobe can't pay its bills), just a bit less negative this quarter. Quick ratio is identical again, since Adobe still carries no meaningful inventory. Cash ratio slipped to 0.37x from 0.41x. Debt/equity eased to 1.55x from 1.60x and debt/assets to 60.8% from 61.5%, both moving in the more conservative direction. Interest coverage improved to 35.7x from 34.8x. Book value per share rose to $30.23 from $28.98, tracking the quarter's addition to retained earnings.
Efficiency: collections slowed a bit, payments sped up a bit
Receivables turnover eased to 12.4x from 13.5x, which pushed days sales outstanding up to 29.3 days from 27.0 -- worth keeping an eye on over the next filing or two, though one quarter's move isn't much to draw a conclusion from on its own. Payables turnover ticked up to 6.4x from 6.2x, meaning days payable outstanding came down to 56.6 days from 58.7 -- Adobe paid its own suppliers a little faster this quarter even as it collected from customers a little slower. Inventory turnover, days inventory outstanding, and cash conversion cycle are still a dash, and still for the expected reason: no inventory tag, because there's no inventory.
What's next
Most of what changed this quarter is the kind of movement you'd expect from one normal quarter to the next -- nothing here reads as a shift in how the business is being run. The one line worth watching going forward is days sales outstanding, since collection speed is usually one of the earlier places a change shows up if one is coming. Pull up Adobe yourself to see the full ratio set against the actual filing. Questions or feedback? Email support@edgarspear.com.
September 2026
Adobe, going into its next print: a full read of where the numbers stand today
Adobe hasn't filed its fiscal Q3 10-Q yet. We've got a watch running for it, and based on last year's timing it's due any day now. Rather than wait, here's a complete walk through every ratio the Pro tier tracks, using the numbers Adobe already filed with the SEC on June 15 for the quarter ended May 29, 2026. When the new filing lands, we'll publish a follow-up on what actually moved.
Worth saying up front: this is a read of arithmetic sitting inside a public filing, not a forecast of what the next one will show, and none of it is financial advice.
Margins: about as good as software gets, until you get past gross
Gross margin is 89.2% for the quarter -- typical territory for enterprise software, where the cost of serving one more customer is close to nothing. Operating margin drops to 33.8%, and net margin to 25.9% for the quarter (28.7% on a trailing-twelve-month basis), which is still a strong software margin profile but shows how much R&D and sales & marketing spend sits between "cost of goods" and what actually clears as profit. EBITDA margin comes in at 39.1%. That gap between gross and operating margin is worth sitting with: it's the backdrop against which Adobe's Firefly and Sensei GenAI features are being built and sold, but the ratios describe the whole company, not the AI features specifically -- Adobe doesn't tag Firefly or GenAI revenue as its own line item, so there's no way to isolate "the AI part" from these numbers alone.
Returns: a 63% ROE, and where it actually comes from
Return on equity comes out to 62.8% on a trailing-twelve-month basis (63.0% using the DuPont, average-equity convention -- the two are close, which is a good sign nothing's distorted by a one-quarter swing in equity). The DuPont breakdown is the more useful number here: 28.7% net margin times 0.87x asset turnover times a 2.53x equity multiplier gets you to that 63%. Asset turnover under 1x means Adobe isn't spinning its balance sheet especially fast -- the margin and the leverage are doing almost all of the work on ROE, not asset efficiency. Return on assets, for context, is 24.2%.
Liquidity and leverage: negative working capital that isn't actually a warning sign
Current ratio is 0.75x, and quick ratio is identical, since Adobe carries no meaningful inventory to subtract out. Cash ratio is 0.41x, and working capital is negative $3.01 billion. On paper that looks like a company that can't cover its near-term obligations -- but a subscription software business collects cash from customers upfront and books the unearned portion as deferred revenue, which sits on the balance sheet as a current liability. The "obligation" behind most of that number is to keep providing software Adobe is already fully resourced to deliver, not to pay out cash it doesn't have. Debt/equity is 1.60x and debt/assets is 61.5%, and interest coverage -- 34.8x trailing operating income over trailing interest expense -- makes clear debt service isn't a real constraint at either level.
Efficiency: fast to collect, slower to pay, and no inventory line at all
Receivables turnover is 13.5x, working out to a days-sales- outstanding of 27 days -- Adobe collects from its customers quickly. Payables turnover is 6.2x, or about 58.7 days to pay its own suppliers -- more than double the time it takes to collect. Inventory turnover, days inventory outstanding, and cash conversion cycle all show a dash, and that's expected rather than a gap in our data: Adobe has no inventory to tag in the first place, being a software company, so those three ratios simply don't apply here.
What the AI Summary does with all of this
Pro accounts get an AI-generated summary that turns a page like this into a couple of plain-English paragraphs instead of making you read every ratio yourself. Fed the numbers above, it opens with something close to: "Adobe converts revenue into profit about as efficiently as software gets, but that efficiency sits under enough R&D and go-to-market spend that operating margin lands well below gross margin -- and the balance sheet's negative working capital reflects a subscription model collecting cash ahead of the obligation to deliver, not a liquidity concern." -- then keeps going through leverage, returns, and efficiency the same way. AI-generated interpretation of the ratios above -- not financial advice.
What's next
When Adobe's fiscal Q3 10-Q lands -- last year's equivalent filed September 24 -- we'll publish a follow-up covering what changed and what didn't, and whether any of it actually shows up in the numbers rather than just the headlines. In the meantime, pull up Adobe yourself and see the full ratio set. Questions or feedback? Email support@edgarspear.com.
September 2026
Chasing down blank ratios, one filer at a time
This is the third time in a few weeks we've found a ratio going blank not because of a bug in the math, but because some company reports its numbers under a tag we hadn't accounted for. First it was Oracle's liabilities. Then it was Tesla's interest expense. This week: Goldman Sachs' revenue, and FedEx's leverage ratios again. There's no version of this where we find them all at once -- SEC filers don't agree on how to tag their own numbers, and the only way to find the gaps is to keep checking real filings against what the app actually shows.
So that's what we did. Pulled a handful of companies that were in the news this week -- Generac, Goldman Sachs, Lennar -- and went through their ratio cards looking for dashes that shouldn't be there.
Debt/Equity and Debt/Assets, still blank for FedEx, Oracle, and Amazon
We fixed the "does it balance" check for these filers a couple weeks ago -- they don't tag a standalone "Liabilities" line, so we taught that one check to derive it from two numbers they do report. What we missed: the Debt/Equity and Debt/Assets ratios needed the exact same fix, and didn't have it. Same root cause, different corner of the app, found only by actually looking.
Revenue going blank for an entire sector we hadn't tested against
Every fix so far had been one filer's quirk. This one was bigger: Goldman Sachs reports a real top-line number every quarter, but under a tag called "Revenues, Net of Interest Expense" instead of the one we were checking -- because for a broker-dealer, interest expense nets against trading and investment income instead of standing alone. We'd simply never tested against a bank. Revenue, and every ratio built on it -- gross margin, operating margin, net margin -- was blank for the whole sector, silently, since day one.
What's still expected to show a dash, on purpose
Not every blank is a bug, and we'd rather say so than chase phantom fixes. Broker-dealers don't report an "operating income" line at all. Homebuilders like Lennar don't file a classified balance sheet, so Current Ratio, Quick Ratio, and Working Capital will always read "--" for them. That's the filing, not something we're failing to calculate.
Try it
Pull up Goldman Sachs -- revenue and margins show real numbers now instead of dashes. We'll keep finding more of these. That's what shipping against 8,000 different companies' worth of inconsistent bookkeeping looks like.
September 2026
Watchlist now emails you when a new filing posts
Until now, your watchlist could only tell you about a new 10-Q or 10-K the next time you happened to have Edgar's Spear open. Now it emails you.
What's new
Add a company to your watchlist and you're done -- no extra setup. The moment it files a new 10-Q or 10-K with the SEC, you'll get an email with the filing date, a link straight to the document on sec.gov, and a link back into that company's page in Edgar's Spear.
Checked on a schedule that matches how filings actually happen
Most 10-Qs and 10-Ks land right before the market opens or right after it closes -- Oracle's most recent 10-Q, for example, was accepted ten minutes after the 4:00pm close. So the watchlist is checked every 15 minutes from 6am-8pm Eastern on weekdays, and every few hours overnight and on weekends, when a new filing showing up is rare. You'll hear about a new filing shortly after it posts, not hours later.
Try it
Search for a company you care about, add it to your watchlist, and Edgar's Spear will do the watching from here. Questions or feedback? Email support@edgarspear.com.
September 2026
"Does it balance" was returning blank for some filers
Oracle's "does it balance" check was coming back empty -- not wrong, just missing. It turns out this wasn't an Oracle-specific glitch; it's a filer-naming quirk that can affect any company.
What was happening
Oracle never tags a standalone "Liabilities" line in its XBRL data. Instead it reports total liabilities-and-equity and total equity separately and expects you to subtract one from the other. A handful of other companies file the same way. The balance check was looking for a tag that simply doesn't exist for these filers, so it had nothing to show.
The fix
When a filer doesn't report liabilities directly, Edgar's Spear now derives it from two numbers they do report independently -- total liabilities-and-equity minus total equity. A small note appears under the balance check whenever a number is calculated this way instead of pulled directly from the filing, so it's always clear which is which.
Try it
Pull up Oracle's page and check the balance section -- it now shows assets, liabilities, and equity all tying out, with the derived-liabilities note underneath.
September 2026
Interest Coverage was showing a blank dash for several mega-caps
If Interest Coverage showed "-" for a stock like Tesla, that wasn't a bug in the ratio -- it was a missing tag.
What was happening
In 2024, a new accounting rule split the old generic "interest expense" tag into operating and non-operating versions. Most large companies -- Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, Netflix, and Ford among them -- switched to the new tag around the same time. Edgar's Spear was only looking for the old one, so the number quietly disappeared for anyone who'd switched.
The fix
Interest Coverage now checks both the old and new tag names, so it picks up whichever one a filer is currently using.
What's still expected to show a dash
Banks report interest expense as several separate line items rather than one total, since it's their core cost of business rather than a financing expense -- Interest Coverage isn't a meaningful ratio for them either way, so a dash there is correct, not missing data.
September 2026
First 50 signups get Pro free
To help get real people using Edgar's Spear while it's still small, the first 50 people to sign up get a complimentary Pro account — every ratio, no charge. .
How to claim one
Sign up for a free account, then email support@edgarspear.com from the address you signed up with and mention you'd like one of the free Pro spots. We'll upgrade it by hand, no charge, as long as spots last.
September 2026
Introducing AI ratio summaries
Plus and Pro accounts can now turn a page of ratio cards into one clear read. Select the ratios you care about — or none, and get everything at once — and Edgar's Spear synthesizes them into a single, plain-English interpretation, built entirely from the numbers already computed from the filing.
How it works
Every ratio card on a company's page is now clickable. Select the ones you want a read on — say, just the liquidity and leverage ratios — and hit "Summarize N selected ratios" beneath the grid. Nothing selected, and the button reads "Summarize all ratios" instead: pressing it takes everything currently on screen. Either way, you get one cohesive paragraph back, not a blurb repeated per ratio.
Grounded in the filing, not the model's memory
The model only ever sees the labels, formulas, and values already computed for the ratios you selected — the same numbers already on your screen — with an explicit instruction not to bring in any outside fact about the company. It isn't told which company it's looking at, and it isn't asked to guess. What comes back is a read of the math you selected, not a research note.
Where it lives
It sits on every company page, beneath the Plus and Pro ratio grids — a natural extension of ratios that are already gated behind those plans. Free accounts don't see ratio cards to select in the first place, so the feature follows the same line the ratios already draw. See the Plans panel for what's on each tier.
Still just a read of the numbers
Every summary carries a line underneath it: "AI-generated interpretation of the ratios above — not financial advice." Treat it as a fast way into the math, not a recommendation — the same spirit as the rest of this site: it's here to get you to the real filing faster, not to replace reading it.
Try it
Open any company you're already tracking, select a few ratios (or none), and see what comes back. Questions or feedback? Email support@edgarspear.com.