| Home Depot (HD) came out with its first-quarter earnings this morning and the results sent my news feed into panic mode. The home improvement retailer reported revenue for the quarter ended April 30 about a billion short of what Wall Street was expecting. Mainstream news outlets like CNBC painted it as the "worst revenue miss in 20 years." 
The headlines I'm seeing today are steeped in pessimism. Germans have a word for this kind of doom and gloom: Weltschmerz, which translates to "world pain." It's that sense of dread that comes on when one realizes reality will never live up to expectations. But I'm not falling for it. As a trader, I actually feel empowered. You should too. We have LikeFolio consumer insights to help us cut through the noise and measure changes in consumer behavior as they're happening. This real-time data is exactly how our team saw Home Depot's disappointing earnings looming on the horizon. Analysis of Purchase Intent mentions – our measure of consumers talking about purchasing products from Home Depot – clearly displayed a downward slide in demand: 
Today's earnings results confirmed that HD demand is in fact cooling as consumers postpone projects and put off big-ticket purchases. 
Are all retailers in the same boat with Home Depot? With our consumer insights machine, we're able to stack retailers against each other to see how they compare in key metrics. To help answer that question, we looked at year-over-year growth in consumer mentions (aka overall "buzz") for HD, Walmart (WMT), Amazon (AMZN), Target (TGT), Lowe's (LOW), and Costco (COST): 
We dug deep into our consumer database to get the full story and came out with five big takeaways for investors. Find out which of these retailers could be next to miss, which could surprise, and which could really be opportunities in disguise... Click here to continue reading | 
No comments:
Post a Comment