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Walmart suffers biggest drop in more than a year as earnings forecast disappoints

Shares sink after the world’s largest retailer said to expect slower profit and sales growth.

2/20/25 10:18AM

Walmart shares skidded on Thursday after the world’s largest retailer warned of slower profit and sales growth, despite posting fourth-quarter results that topped expectations.

The stock’s current 6.2% drop would be its biggest one-day decline since November of 2023, according to FactSet data. Shares of rivals including Target, Costco, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General were slightly lower in early trading. Despite today’s stock drop, Walmart’s stock is still up around 77% over the past year.

Walmart’s revenue rose 4% for the holiday quarter, hitting $180.55 billion, slightly above Wall Street expectations of $180.01 billion. E-commerce was a standout, jumping 20% in the US as more shoppers opted for store pickups and at-home deliveries. Higher-income customers, or households making $100,000 a year or more, continued to be big contributors to the gains.

But investors were disappointed by the company’s guidance for fiscal 2025. Walmart expects net sales to grow 3% to 4%, with adjusted operating income rising between 3.5% and 5.5% — well below last year’s 9.6% growth. The retailer also forecasted full-year earnings of $2.50 to $2.60 per share, falling short of Wall Street’s $2.76 estimate.

While consumer spending has stayed steady, Walmart is still adjusting for geopolitical risks and potential tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada. Walmart sources the majority of its goods domestically, but said it’s prepared to adjust its supply chain and lean more into private-label brands if tariffs take effect.

Still, Walmart’s core business remains strong. US same-store sales rose 4.6%, with Sam’s Club seeing an even bigger 6.8% gain.

Walmart also laid out a 13% dividend increase to $0.94 per share — the biggest hike in over a decade.

Luke Kawa4h

Micron soars after reporting huge Q1 beat, with Q2 sales guidance ahead of every Wall Street analyst’s estimates

Micron completely erased Wednesday’s big losses in after-hours trading after the memory chip specialist posted stellar results for its fiscal Q1 2026 and a much better outlook for the current quarter than Wall Street had anticipated.

For Q1, the company reported:

Revenues: $13.64 billion (estimate: $12.95 billion)
Adjusted earnings per share: $4.78 (estimate: $3.95)

And the Street’s consensus was well ahead of even the upper ranges of the guidance provided by management for the quarter for sales of $12.5 billion (plus or minus $300 million) and $3.75 (plus or minus $0.15).

For Q2, management provided an outlook for adjusted revenues of $18.3 billion to $19.1 billion, and adjusted EPS of $8.22 to $8.62. Wall Street had penciled in revenues of $14.38 billion with adjusted EPS of $4.71.

Even the bottom end of the ranges management provided is well above the top analyst’s estimate for the quarter.

These results may help spark a revival in semi stocks, which have gotten trounced in recent sessions. Hard disk drive sellers Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital are also rising in after-hours trading, as is flash memory seller Sandisk.

Micron has been one of the worst performers in the S&P 500 since last Thursday’s record close, down double digits from then until Wednesday close as investors broadly dumped AI names. Prior to that, shares had been on fire amid a bevy of Wall Street price target hikes and surging memory chip prices as demand runs ahead of supply. The AI boom has fueled a spike of immense appetite not only for GPUs and custom chips but also memory chips as well, as data centers also need a boatload of these to store information and feed it to those processors. Micron and its major competitors, SK Hynix and Samsung, have already sold out production for their most advanced high-bandwidth memory offerings for calendar year 2026.

Micron recently announced that it would be exiting its consumer chip business to focus on serving its AI customers.

Toby Bochan

Market wrap

Markets slump as AI trade tumbles

Tech dragged US stocks lower, especially the Nasdaq 100.

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The subsidies are still likely to end before the deadline.

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Luke Kawa

Bitcoin is behaving like a no-fundamentals tech stock

The three-month correlation between the daily changes in the iShares Bitcoin ETF and a Goldman Sachs basket of nonprofitable tech stocks is at a record high.

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Oracle slides on report that data center partner Blue Owl won’t fund $10 billion Michigan facility; company says project is on track without Blue Owl

Oracle shares declined early Wednesday after the Financial Times reported that Blue Owl Capital, the largest funder of Oracle’s data center investment push, will not finance a 1-gigawatt Oracle data center planned for Saline Township, Michigan. The pink-paged periodical reports:

“Blue Owl had been in discussions with lenders and Oracle about investing in the planned 1 gigawatt data centre being built to serve OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan.

But the agreement will not go forward after negotiations stalled, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The private capital group has been the primary backer for Oracle’s largest data centre projects in the US, investing its own money and raising billions more in debt to build the facilities. Blue Owl typically sets up a special purpose vehicle, which owns the data centre and leases it to Oracle.”

For its part, Oracle told Bloomberg on Wednesday morning that negotiations for a data center project in Michigan are “on schedule” and don’t include Blue Owl.

While not horrible, Wednesday’s drop puts Oracle down 15% so far this week, as the shares continue to be clobbered by rapidly shifting investor sentiment toward lofty AI investment plans.

Oracle is down roughly 45% from the all-time high it hit on September 10, in a plunge that has destroyed more than $400 billion in value. Yowza.

“Blue Owl had been in discussions with lenders and Oracle about investing in the planned 1 gigawatt data centre being built to serve OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan.

But the agreement will not go forward after negotiations stalled, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The private capital group has been the primary backer for Oracle’s largest data centre projects in the US, investing its own money and raising billions more in debt to build the facilities. Blue Owl typically sets up a special purpose vehicle, which owns the data centre and leases it to Oracle.”