Costco Wholesale Corporation: would “operating margin stays at or above 15 percent” have held?
It would have broken in 10 years of 10: FY2016, FY2017, FY2018, FY2019, FY2020, FY2021, FY2022, FY2023, FY2024, FY2025.
Tested against Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST, NASDAQ) as the company filed it: operating margin in each fiscal year, recomputed from the annual statements, compared against 15%. Nothing here is a forecast. Every verdict is about a document that has already been filed.
Year by year, against the filings
10 of the 10 filed fiscal years could be tested. A year the figure is missing from counts as neither held nor broken, which is what the nightly check does with the same gap: a missing number is a condition of the data, not evidence about the company.
Where 15% comes from
A convention, not an estimated boundary. The figure is a line to test, and the page reports what it would have done.
The threshold is the reader's to choose. This page reports what this particular one would have done, and says so in the past tense because that is all a filed document can support. It is not a view on Costco Wholesale Corporation and it is not a recommendation.
What this page leaves out
Evaluated over 10 filed fiscal years, FY2016 to FY2025. Accounts filed before this company began tagging its statements in XBRL are not machine-readable and are outside this page. No share price is involved in any figure here, so nothing on this page is limited by the depth of our price archive.
Figures on this page are recomputed from statements filed with the SEC, and each row names the submission it came from. Filings can be mis-tagged upstream and companies restate, so check a number against the filing before you rely on it. To find out whether a company you own can be answered this way at all, use the coverage checker.
Related
- Every published rule - the same test on other companies.
- Why the same ratio has different values
Ask it about your own company
This page is one threshold on one company, chosen by us. The same question, on the company you own and at the number you would actually use, is one form away and needs no account: open this question in the retro-test tool and change either half of it.
The product behind both is the same test run every night on the rules you write for the companies you own, against the newest filed data, and one email on the day a rule stops holding. Silence when nothing breaks.