Strap in. When Jeff Macke is driving the conversation, you need to pay attention. The wisdom, wit, and one-liners fly by fast.
While other seven-year-olds spent their weekends playing with Lincoln Logs and Wiffle Ball, Jeff was riding around town in a station wagon with his dad, visiting Target stores. He wasn’t just tagging along—he was analyzing end-caps, product presentations, and the cleanliness of the floors and staff.
Abercrombie took the pipe, Foot Locker was predictably lousy. Where I'm looking now as we grind through Mall Store Earnings,
Some of the best trades I make are the ones I pass on entirely. So it was for $ANF which into earnings this morning already down 40% for the year and somehow managed to disappoint investors. The teen darling and recent 10-bagger reported numbers slightly ahead of expectations for Christmas but guided the current year well below expectations.
Needless to say Wall Street focused on the negative, sending ANF shares all the way down to the low $80s or 50% below where they were trading as recently as January.
I love ANF. I shop there with my son, it's made me a lot of money and the aggressively suggestive catalogs from the '90s were an endless source of delight when I was a younger man. Here's a little secret: consumer stocks are where love goes to die. If you hold your winners forever you usually end up broke. Love the game, date the stocks. Long-term ANF investors should have known better.
Which doesn't mean you need to forget about the companies entirely. Quite the opposite. Shares of the Gap have been public...
Every stock in the mall is getting obliterated on Tariff headlines and slow spending. Finding dips to buy and places to hide.
We wanted clues as to how consumer stocks were going to handle the News when reporting earnings over the next couple weeks and, for the most part, the answer seemed to be "poorly", at least when it came to the Big Box names which continue to be plagued by Tariff headlines and ambivalent customers.
As more or less anticipated, Target and Best Buy posted ok numbers and guided cautiously (see: "Beat and Guide Lower" from earlier this week). On which is the only name of the three I own turned in a glorious quarter and outlook (sees ~35% Q1 growth!) but was only rewarded with a rather anemic bounce:
What Did We Learn:
The risk is still to the downside. ONON could have bounced higher. In fact, it really should have gotten a bigger bump from today's report, which was about perfect. Best Buy arguably could have seen a gain on slightly better than expected news and Target hasn't seemed this lost in years but not in a surprisingly way. The net result was negative returns on the...
It's Game Time. By Tuesday morning's opening bell earnings from Target, Best Buy and ON will have set the stage for the coming flood of retail earnings... if you know what to look for. How to get ahead of the wave.
It's time to get serious about retail earnings. Walmart has doubled the performance of the Magnificent 7 over the last 12 months. Right here in this very space I suggested buying the dip when the stock sold-off on weak guidance. And Investors who did chalked up gains of about 3%.
I love the consumer, Walmart the stock and making money but not even I can get super fired up over grinding out 3% trades on the largest employer on earth that isn't the Chinese Army. The entire planet follows Walmart and Amazon. If you don't own the stocks you should. And, once you buy it's best to forget about them entirely.
If you want to make money trading consumer stocks you need to get into the grit and draw conclusions where the rest of the world doesn't. It requires knowing not just the financials but the stories behind some of the three-legged dogs, fallen angels and more obscure companies just popping up on Wall Street radars. ...
