Walmart round-trips its own earnings beat
Same stock, same day, two opposite verdicts before lunch and after it.
Walmart gained as much as 2.7% before the opening bell on a fourth-quarter beat and closed the session down 1.4% once its profit guidance missed the Street, while Supermicro, on a different catalyst entirely, closed up 8.3% near its highs of the day.
Same stock, same day, two opposite verdicts before lunch and after it.
Walmart's release crossed near 12:00 UTC, 7am ET. The stock's first move was down, from 125.05 to a 122.12 print inside that hour, in the same window as the headline that GAAP earnings per share fell to 0.53 dollars from 0.65 dollars a year earlier on a decline in net income to 4.24 billion dollars. By 8am ET the stock had recovered to 124.15 as the adjusted figures came into view: revenue of 190.7 billion dollars, adjusted earnings per share of 0.74 dollars, both ahead of estimates, alongside a new 30 billion dollar share buyback authorization and a raised annual dividend of 0.99 dollars a share.
The rally kept building into the 9:30am ET cash open, touching a session high of 130.10, up 2.7% from Wednesday's 126.62 close.
New CEO John Furner, in his first quarterly release since succeeding Doug McMillon on February 1, struck an upbeat tone in the filing itself: "The pace of change in retail is accelerating. It's exciting. And our financial results show that we're not only embracing this change, we're leading it."
Within the first hour of regular trading the stock was already giving the gain back. By 10:30am ET it had round-tripped nearly the entire premarket spike, and it kept grinding lower into the close at 124.87, down 1.4% on the day, a swing of just over 4 points from the morning high. The number that turned it: fiscal 2027 adjusted earnings guidance of 2.75 to 2.85 dollars a share, short of the 2.96 dollars Wall Street had modeled, on net sales growth guided to 3.5% to 4.5%.
Southern Company reported before Thursday's open too, and its adjusted fourth-quarter profit of 0.55 dollars a share landed almost exactly on the 0.56 dollars analysts had forecast, a near miss by a penny. The stock still gapped from Wednesday's 91.04 close to a premarket high near 95.66 and closed at 95.05, up 4.4% and within half a point of its intraday high. The company guided 2026 adjusted earnings to 4.50 to 4.60 dollars a share, above its roughly 4.30 dollar adjusted 2025 base, and pointed to data center demand as the driver, months after Georgia regulators approved nearly 9,885 megawatts of new generation capacity for Southern subsidiary Georgia Power largely to serve that same demand.
Two utilities of retail and power, both reporting before the same opening bell, both beating or roughly matching estimates, both guiding a full year ahead. One gave its premarket gain back to the session; the other kept almost all of it. The guidance number, not the beat, decided which.
All three names start the day flat. By the close, only one of them gave its gain back.
Super Micro Computer's own quarterly report was three weeks old by Thursday, filed February 3 with revenue near 12.7 billion dollars and a raised full-year sales outlook of at least 40 billion dollars. Thursday's move started before the cash open, in the 9am ET hour, when Benzinga reported the company was weighing a "Make in India" expansion to manufacture AI servers locally, alongside a Seeking Alpha contributor's upgrade to Strong Buy on margin-expansion grounds. The stock closed at 32.16, up 8.25% on volume of 42.1 million shares, 47% above its three-month average, and unlike Walmart it kept climbing into the final hour rather than fading from it.
Initial jobless claims fell 23,000 to 206,000 for the week ended February 14, released 8:30am ET, a decline Bloomberg described as the largest since November and well inside the better half of a wide range of estimates. The S&P 500 ETF's candle spanning that half hour ran as high as 687.90 before closing at 683.74, giving back essentially the entire pop by the top of the hour.
Twenty minutes into the same stretch, at 9:30am ET, the Commerce Department reported the December goods and services trade deficit widening to 70.3 billion dollars from a revised 53.0 billion in November, a 17.3 billion dollar jump. Neither release changed the shape of Thursday's tape on its own; the SPY finished the day down just 0.26%, a print that could as easily be read as Walmart's fade as any macro data.
West Texas crude rose 1.9% to 66.43, its second straight daily gain after a 62.30 low on Tuesday, while Brent added a similar amount to 71.66. Multiple outlets reported through the week of February 16 that the U.S. military had built up assets in the region and stood ready to strike Iran within days, with no final decision confirmed as of Thursday's close.
The VIX closed at 20.23, up 3.1% on the day and roughly 14% above its 17.79 level from the prior Tuesday. Both moves describe a market pricing a risk that had not yet arrived, not one reacting to an event that had.
Neither line needed a strike to happen. Both needed only the possibility of one.
The Supreme Court's ruling on whether the 1977 emergency-powers law lets the president impose tariffs, argued in November, remains undelivered with no public date. Nvidia reports fiscal fourth-quarter results after Wednesday's close, February 25, the next scheduled mega-cap print on the calendar and the one Oppenheimer reiterated an outperform rating on Thursday ahead of.