Walmart Falls 9%, Deere Jumps 7%, Alibaba Erases a Selloff, eli terminal Thursday August 20

Walmart fell 9.15% on its slowest comparable-sales growth in six years, Deere jumped 6.94% on a construction-led beat, and Alibaba erased a 5.6% intraday drop to close green, all three verdicts written before the cash session even opened.

Thursday 4pm close S&P (SPY) 762.60 −0.84% · NASDAQ (QQQ) 710.93 −0.72% · DOW (DIA) 527.51 −1.27% · RUSSELL 2000 (IWM) 297.67 −1.34%

The three reports WMT 103.84 −9.15% · DE 620.94 +6.94% · BABA 130.53 +1.26%

Everything else WTI 87.83 +2.33% · BRENT 93.78 +2.36% · VIX 16.01 +7.52% · 10Y YIELD 4.696% +0.92%

Walmart, Deere, Alibaba and the S&P, indexed to Tuesday's close

Fifteen-minute intraday line chart from August 18 through August 20, 2026, indexed to 100, showing Walmart cracking from 100 to below 91 early Thursday, Deere climbing from 100 to above 106 before settling near 104, Alibaba diving to 97 and recovering to 105, and the S&P 500 drifting only slightly below 100 through the same window.

Three earnings, three separate lines, one flat index underneath them.

Three mega-caps reported before the bell, and the tape wrote three different verdicts

Walmart, Deere and Alibaba all reported quarterly results before Thursday's opening bell, and by 4pm each stock had settled into a different outcome: Walmart down 9.15% to 103.84, Deere up 6.94% to 620.94, Alibaba up 1.26% to 130.53. All three companies beat or raised something. Only one of the three was rewarded for it without a fight.

Walmart's guidance went up and the stock still lost 9%

Walmart raised its full-year sales growth outlook to 4% to 5%, from a prior 3.5% to 4.5%, and lifted its adjusted earnings range to 2.80 to 2.87 dollars a share. U.S. comparable sales grew just 2.6% for the quarter, against a Wall Street estimate near 3.5% and the slowest pace the company has posted in six years. The stock opened near 116 in Thursday's early quotes, broke to a low near 105.90 by 11:00 UTC, kept sliding through the cash open, and bottomed at 102.85 by 14:45 UTC before closing at 103.84.

The raised full-year number said one thing. The quarter that produced it said another, and the tape sided with the quarter.

The drug-pricing line did the damage, not the shopper

Walmart said federal drug-pricing rules cut an estimated 80 to 90 basis points from U.S. comparable sales as falling prescription prices worked through its pharmacy business. Strip that headwind out and the comp-sales miss narrows considerably. None of that appeared in Thursday's wires as new information after the release crossed near 11:00 UTC; the stock kept falling for three more hours anyway, into the regular session, without a fresh headline attached to any of the later legs down. The selling was digestion of one number, not a reaction to new news.

Deere's raise came from concrete, not crops

Deere posted earnings of 5.10 dollars a share against a roughly 4.79 dollar estimate, and raised its full-year net income outlook to a range of 4.75 to 5.0 billion dollars. Construction and forestry operating profit jumped 84%, while the company's largest division, production and precision agriculture, saw sales fall 6% as farmers kept deferring big equipment purchases. The stock opened Thursday near 611, a gap of more than 5% from Wednesday's close, then climbed as high as 639 by 15:30 UTC before giving back roughly a third of that intraday gain to close at 620.94, up 6.94% on the day.

Alibaba spent the morning down 5.6% and the afternoon erasing it

Alibaba's adjusted earnings per American depositary share came in at 8.52 yuan, well short of the roughly 10.72 yuan analysts expected, as capital spending on AI infrastructure rose 75% year over year to just under 10 billion dollars and free cash flow swung to an outflow of 44.67 billion yuan, more than double the outflow a year earlier. Cloud revenue grew 45%, its fastest pace in 22 quarters. The stock opened Thursday's cash session at 123.47, fell to a low of 121.88 by 13:45 UTC, down 5.6% from Wednesday's close of 128.90, and then climbed almost without interruption for the rest of the session to close at 130.53, up 1.26% on the day.

A reader who checked Alibaba only at 4pm would have filed a green close and moved on. A reader who checked it at 9:45am would have filed a rout. Both would have been describing the same stock on the same day.

One-day moves, August 20

Horizontal bar chart of one-day percentage moves for August 20, 2026: Walmart down 9.15%, Deere up 6.94%, Micron up 3.97%, Alibaba up 1.26%, the S&P 500 down 0.84%, the Russell 2000 down 1.34%, and the VIX up 7.52%.

Three earnings reports, three magnitudes, no shared direction.

The VIX did its whole day's work before the opening bell

The VIX closed at 16.01, up 7.52% from Wednesday's 14.89, the index's largest one-day gain of the week. Nearly all of that move happened before 13:30 UTC: the VIX held near 15.1 through the European morning, then climbed from 15.56 to 16.02 between 11:45 UTC and 12:15 UTC, the same half hour Walmart's premarket break deepened. Once the New York cash session opened, the VIX spent the rest of the day drifting between 15.5 and 16.0, even as the S&P ground lower into the close. The fear priced into Thursday arrived before Thursday's stock market did.

Oil, the VIX and the S&P, August 18–20

Hourly line chart from August 18 through August 20, 2026, indexed to 100, showing WTI crude and the VIX both jumping sharply in the pre-market hours of August 20 before flattening once the S&P 500 cash session opened, while the S&P 500 itself moves only slightly across the same window.

Both lines make their move before the opening bell, then go quiet once the session starts.

Oil kept climbing and the 10-year sold off at the same time stocks did

Persistent Strait of Hormuz tanker disruption kept a bid under crude: WTI settled at 87.83, up 2.33%, and Brent at 93.78, up 2.36%, with roughly 236 ships having transited the strait over the prior 19 days, well below the 20 million barrels a day of normal pre-war traffic. Most of Thursday's oil gain, like the VIX's, printed between 07:00 and 11:00 UTC, ahead of the New York open, before crude gave back part of the move and settled higher on the day.

Wednesday's fix didn't hold. The Treasury Department had announced it would double its long-bond buyback operations to ease pressure on longer-dated debt, and yields fell on the news, but the 10-year resumed its climb Thursday to close at 4.696%, up 0.92%. A stock market falling alongside rising oil and rising yields, with gold also higher at 4,516.30, is not the standard flight-to-safety pattern; bonds sold off on the same day equities did, offering no offsetting hedge. The market pricing a September rate hike on Kalshi eased slightly, from 29% to 28%, and the comparable Polymarket contract fell from 28.5% to 27%, arguing against a hawkish-Fed reading of the day's yield rise.

Walmart lost 9.15% despite raising full-year guidance because a 2.6% comparable-sales quarter and a drug-pricing headwind said more than the raise did, Deere gained 6.94% because a construction beat outweighed continued agriculture weakness, and Alibaba erased a 5.6% intraday drop to close up 1.26% once 45% cloud growth outweighed an AI-capex-driven earnings miss, three earnings reports that each cleared a different bar while oil, the VIX and Treasury yields all moved before the cash session opened and stayed elevated once it did.

Jackson Hole is nine days out, with no line yet on which way it breaks

The Kansas City Fed's Jackson Hole symposium runs August 27 to 29, with Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's keynote scheduled for the morning of August 28. Thursday's odds move, a slight easing in the priced chance of a September hike, gives no early signal of what Warsh will say. Whether Thursday's cross-asset selloff in stocks and bonds together was a preview of a hawkish surprise or just a single volatile session will not be answerable until that morning.