On the big days of this month’s earnings season, The Australian Financial Review’s Chanticleer columnists James Thomson and Anthony Macdonald extract the gold from the key profit results.

JT: Paul McKenzie hasn’t had the easiest start to his tenure as CSL chief executive. A few months in, he had to announce a rare profit downgrade, due to a drop in margins in the group’s flagship Behring business, which turns blood collected from donors into treatments for immunodeficiency and bleeding disorders.