Four Banks Report on Oct. 13 and Two More on Oct. 14. The Filings That Preceded Them Were Mostly Raises, Not Warnings.

by Jonathan Mercer · October 2, 2026

Chief Markets Correspondent, US Market Current

The third-quarter reporting season has a fixed starting gun. JPMorgan Chase will hold its third-quarter earnings call on "Tuesday, October 13, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. (Eastern)," according to the schedule the bank published on Business Wire in May 2025 and still lists on its investor-relations site. Wells Fargo's investor-relations page lists "Q3 2026 Quarterly Earnings" for "Tuesday, October 13, 2026 at 10am ET." Citigroup's events page shows its "Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call" on the same Tuesday, with Chair and Chief Executive Jane Fraser and Chief Financial Officer Gonzalo Luchetti listed as presenters and no call time given. Goldman Sachs' conference-call schedule, published Aug. 18, 2025, puts its third-quarter call at 9:30 a.m. ET on Oct. 13 as well, with results released at "approximately 7:30 am (ET)."

The second wave follows a day later. Bank of America's events page lists its "Q3 2026 Bank of America Earnings Conference Call" for Oct. 14 at 8:30 a.m. ET. Morgan Stanley's investor page says its results will be announced "Wednesday, October 14, 2026, at approximately 7:30 a.m. (ET)," with the call at 9:30 a.m. That puts six of the largest U.S. banks, and the bulk of the sector's trading, investment-banking and net-interest-income disclosures, inside a 26-hour window.

What investors have to work with before then is thinner than usual, because the Securities and Exchange Commission's full-text search of 8-K filings was not reachable from our systems this week and we relied instead on company filings pulled one by one from EDGAR and company release pages. The filings we did open between Sept. 18 and Oct. 2 skewed toward companies raising or tightening their numbers rather than cutting them. That is a sample, not a census.

The biggest name among them is Carnival Corp. In an 8-K furnished Sept. 29 under Item 2.02, the cruise operator reported third-quarter results for the three months ended Aug. 31 and raised its full-year outlook. Total revenues were $8,435 million, against $8,153 million a year earlier, per the consolidated statement of income in Exhibit 99.1; net income attributable to Carnival was $1,920 million, and diluted earnings per share were $1.40 versus $1.33. The release describes net income as an "all-time high" and says adjusted EPS of $1.43 was "in line with prior year despite a $0.10 ($131 million) unfavorable net impact from fuel prices and currency rates." Fuel expense in the quarter was $615 million, up from $451 million.

The outlook language is the part that matters for the season ahead. Carnival said it now expects "operational improvement of more than $150 million in adjusted net income compared to June guidance, driven by improvements in net yields, adjusted cruise costs excluding fuel per ALBD and fuel consumption per ALBD, overcoming $150 million impact from increased fuel prices." The guidance table puts full-year 2026 adjusted net income at approximately $3,080 million and adjusted diluted EPS at approximately $2.24, with fourth-quarter adjusted EPS of approximately $0.20. The company said it had completed roughly $1.2 billion of share repurchases year to date and that "S&P upgraded the company's credit rating, making it the second rating agency to award the company an investment grade rating." It also disclosed the sensitivity that explains why the fuel line is so prominent: a 10% change in fuel cost per metric ton, excluding emission allowances, moves fourth-quarter adjusted net income by $59 million, per the release's sensitivity table.

Carnival's customer-deposit figure is the forward-looking datum in the filing. Chief Executive Josh Weinstein said deposits "reached a third-quarter record of $7.6 billion, surpassing the prior-year record by $0.5 billion despite flat capacity growth over the next twelve months," and that "for full-year 2027, both booked occupancy and pricing are at record levels." The release's own footnote notes pricing is stated in constant currency.

A smaller but more direct pre-announcement came from Vicor Corp., the Andover, Mass., power-components maker that supplies modules to high-performance-computing customers. In a GlobeNewswire release dated Sept. 30, the company said: "On September 30, 2026, Vicor raised its Q3 sequential growth guidance from more than 20% to more than 30% in view of increased royalties from the previously announced first non-exclusive license to Vertical Power Delivery (VPD)." That is the entire substance of the release; it carries no dollar figure, no executive quote and no earnings date. It was the second raise in nine days: a Sept. 21 GlobeNewswire release had lifted the same guide "from nearly 10% to more than 20%" on royalties from "a recently announced non-exclusive license" to the same technology. Vicor's most recent 8-K under Item 2.02 on EDGAR is dated July 21, 2026, covering the second quarter; its most recent 8-K of any kind is dated Sept. 10, and the company had not furnished either guidance release as an 8-K as of the EDGAR index we checked Friday morning.

KLX Energy Services Holdings, an oilfield-services company listed on Nasdaq, furnished an 8-K on Sept. 25 under Item 7.01 attaching a release that "updated its 2026 third quarter Revenue range to tighten its previously announced guidance." The new range is "$180 million to $185 million, representing a 9% sequential Revenue improvement over the second quarter of 2026," with an adjusted EBITDA margin range of 13% to 14%, per Exhibit 99.1. The same 8-K reported, under Item 8.01, the preliminary results of a subscription rights offering that expired Sept. 23; Chief Executive Chris Baker described "the Company's $125 million equity rights offering" as "a transformational step in the Company's strategy to delever." KLX said full third-quarter results would come in November.

The one negative pre-announcement in our sample came from outside the U.S. Algoma Steel Group, the Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, plate and sheet producer listed on Nasdaq and the TSX, filed a Form 6-K on Oct. 2 attaching an Oct. 1 release that guided third-quarter shipments to "approximately 145,000 tons" and adjusted EBITDA to "the range of negative $10 million to negative $20 million," in Canadian dollars. The release notes that figure "includes the benefit of an expected capacity utilization adjustment of approximately $50 million to $55 million." Chief Financial Officer Michael Moraca attributed the quarter to a turbine outage at the Lake Superior Power plant that "temporarily constrained EAF production," and Chief Executive Rajat Marwah said the replacement turbine is installed and that the company expects "first heat in the coming days" on its second electric-arc furnace.

For context on what the market has already heard from companies with August quarter-ends: Nike, Jefferies and Micron have all reported since Sept. 18, and each is covered separately. Those were scheduled reports, not pre-announcements.

The sequencing of the bank reports is what gives the second week of October its structure. The four Oct. 13 reporters will give the first consolidated reads on net interest income after the Federal Open Market Committee raised the federal funds target range to 3.75%-4.00% on Sept. 16, on trading revenue through a quarter that included that hike, and on credit costs. The Oct. 14 pair adds Bank of America's deposit franchise and Morgan Stanley's wealth-management flows. None of the six banks has furnished a pre-announcement 8-K in the window we examined.

What is not known is the shape of the rest of the calendar. Goldman's third-quarter date comes from a schedule posted in August 2025 and we did not find a more recent confirmation on its site; the date should be treated as the bank's standing plan rather than a fresh notice. We also did not attempt to count how many S&P 500 companies issued negative versus positive guidance in the period, because the aggregate tallies that circulate in the market are produced by data vendors from proprietary databases we did not consult, and the four filings above cannot stand in for them.

The dates above all come from the companies' own investor-relations pages, and each page states its time in Eastern Time. What the pages do not say is what the banks will report; none of the six had furnished a results-related 8-K in the window we examined, and the only results-release time any of the Oct. 13 reporters states is Goldman's "approximately 7:30 am (ET)."