XRT

Unfortunately, some leading U.S. retailers failed to inspire investors. While Walmart (WMT), Costco (COST) and Home Depot stocks continued to rise in November, Lowe’s Companies (LOW) lost nearly 5% this week, despite improved forward guidance and nominally better than expected quarterly results in both top and bottom lines, yet it was a peanut compared to a 18% plunge in the market value of Target Corporation (TGT) in today's pre-market trading.

Lowe’s is a well-known big box home improvement chain, which operates over 1,700 stores and employs about 300,000 associates. The stock became clearly overbought by mid-October as its market value increased by almost a third since the beginning of 2024. That's why updating historical records at $287 per share led to a natural price correction, which accelerated its pace when Q3 numbers confirmed that the chain's revenue and profit came down YoY, even though moderately beating consensus estimates. Overall, further sliding below $250 per share, or even to $225-235 per share, is our baseline scenario at the moment, with the stock's potential to willingly resume its uptrend after bottoming out.

Lowe’s provided net sales of $20.2 billion in the recent three months, better than $19.95 billion averagely expected by expert polls but 1.5% below its achievements in the same quarter of 2023. Same store sales lost 1.1% YoY, hit by big-ticket items, especially large "do-it-yourself" projects. Online sales and loyalty programs grew to soften the damage. Another portion of good news is that the company's management coped well with the task of cutting costs of sales, which came down 1.5% to $13.4 billion, while administrative and other expenses only added 1.7% to $3.8 billion. This helped to improve additional losses of profit, which were reduced to 11.5% vs potentially worse analyst projections.

Based on this data, the company's own guidance for the whole year of 2024 was adjusted to a higher range of $83.0 to $83.5 billion, vs $82.7 to $83.2 billion in August estimates, but it was still below the $84 billion to $85 billion range, which was set at the beginning of the year. The guidance for same store sales drop has been lowered in Q2 from the 2% to 3%, and now it is raised to a range between 3.0% and 3.5%. It is still better than the previous estimate of a 3.5% to 4.0% loss in same store sales.