EC What Will Retail Earnings Show?

Wal-Mart (WMT) kicks off the Q4 earnings season for the brick-and-mortar retail space, with the retail giant on track to release results Tuesday morning. The company has been in a league of its own lately, with many in the market viewing Wal-Mart as the most capable of all the traditional retailers to offer a competitive challenge to Amazon’s (AMZN) ever-growing dominance of the retail space.

This ‘promise’ has been showing up in recent quarterly results, with the stock making significant gains following the quarterly release on November 16th when it showed impressive comps and handily beat expectations. The stock is up +52.1% over the past year, handily outperforming the +16.2% gain for Target (TGT) and the industry’s +39.9% gain. Year-to-date, Wal-Mart shares are up +6.1%, compared to the S&P 500 index’s +2.2% gain.

Wal-Mart shares lost ground in the recent market sell-off, but have already recouped almost half of its losses. This shows a high level of confidence in the company’s Q4 report on Tuesday. The other major retailers and department stores will be reporting in the following week, though Home Depot (HD) will also be reporting results on Tuesday.

Unlike Wal-Mart, Home Depot shares have been hit hard in the recent sell off and still remain under pressure. Home Depot shares are up +30.6% over the past year, but they are down -1.5% in the year-to-date period, likely reflecting fears of higher interest rates weighing on the broader housing sector.

Retail Sector Scorecard

As of Friday, February 16th, we now have Q4 results from 18 of the 39 retailers in the S&P 500 index. Total earnings for the 18 retailers that have reported already are up +13.1% from the same period last year on +14.6% higher revenues, with 72.2% beating EPS estimates and 77.8% beating revenue estimates.

Please note that we have a stand-alone Retail sector, unlike the official Standard & Poor’s placement of this space in their Consumer Discretionary sector. The Zacks Retail sector includes, besides the traditional department stores and other brick-and-mortar retailers, the online vendors like Amazon and Priceline and restaurant operators. Results from the online vendors and most of the restaurant operators are already behind us at this stage and form part of the scorecard described here. Wal-Mart and Home Depot will be the first in the traditional brick-and-mortar space coming out with results. 

The side-by-side charts below compare the sector’s results thus far with what we have seen from the same group of 18 retailers in other recent periods.