Retail takes over the calendar next week, and Home Depot arrives with an interim leadership team

by Leah Avraham · August 12, 2026

Previews Correspondent, Earnings Dispatch

The technology wave that carried the last two weeks of the earnings calendar is nearly spent, and what replaces it is the big-box retail block. Five of the largest US retailers report inside a three-session window beginning Tuesday, Aug. 18, which will hand investors the most direct read yet on how the American consumer behaved through the summer. It arrives days after July CPI came in exactly as forecast, at 0.1% month over month and 3.4% year over year.

Home Depot opens the sequence before Tuesday's bell. Consensus compiled in a Yahoo Finance preview calls for adjusted earnings of $4.71 per share, barely above the $4.68 the company earned in the year-ago quarter. A separate Yahoo Finance preview puts the revenue estimate at roughly $47.5 billion and notes that Home Depot's first-quarter adjusted EPS of $3.43 cleared a $3.41 estimate on revenue up about 5% to $41.77 billion. That flat earnings expectation is itself the story: the market is not modeling a step-change in the trajectory. The first preview also reported the stock down 10.7% over the trailing 52 weeks, against an 18.9% gain for the S&P 500 over the same stretch.

The company will also report under an interim command structure. Benzinga reported Wednesday that chair, president and chief executive Ted Decker is taking a temporary medical leave of absence, with senior executive vice president Ann-Marie Campbell overseeing day-to-day operations, chief financial officer Richard McPhail taking on financial management and the Pro subsidiaries, and independent lead director Greg Brenneman chairing the board. Home Depot expects Decker back within the next few months, per that account. Brenneman said in the announcement, "We are confident in Ann-Marie's and Richard's ability to lead the company during this time, and we look forward to Ted's return."

The market took note. Home Depot finished Wednesday's regular session down 3.12%, one of the weaker performers among Dow components on a day when the index itself slipped 0.04% to 53,770.27, according to Investing.com's close report, which listed it alongside Microsoft, down 2.26%, and Salesforce, down 2.12%, among the day's weakest large caps. The session was otherwise modestly positive across the S&P 500, the Nasdaq and the Russell 2000.

Wednesday, Aug. 19 is the crowded day. Target reports before the open, with a Yahoo Finance preview citing consensus of $2.21 per share, up 7.8% from $2.05 in the year-ago quarter, and noting that a return to positive comparable sales growth has underpinned recent sentiment in the name. Lowe's has scheduled its second-quarter conference call for the same date, and TJX said in an Aug. 5 announcement that it will report second-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Aug. 19 as well. Three reads spanning mass merchandise, home improvement and off-price landing in a single session should make for an unusually clean cross-read on discretionary demand and trade-down behavior.

Walmart closes the block on Thursday, Aug. 20. The company's investor relations calendar has earnings materials posted around 6:00 a.m. CT, with the call for the investment community beginning at 7:00 a.m. CT. Benzinga reported consensus of 74 cents in adjusted earnings, up from 68 cents a year ago, on revenue of $186.77 billion against $177.40 billion. Walmart's own guidance called for second-quarter constant-currency net sales growth of 4% to 5%, a step down from the 5.7% it delivered in the first quarter.

Expectations into that print are not uniform. Bank of America Securities analyst Christopher Nardone sees Walmart returning to its "beat-and-raise" pattern, arguing in a note summarized by Benzinga that "accelerating digital sales and improving profit margins could support results even if U.S. comparable-sales growth slows," while modeling 4.6% constant-currency net sales growth. The same report noted he trimmed his US comparable-sales forecast excluding fuel to 3.5% from 4%. Those two positions can coexist — a company can beat a conservative consolidated number while its domestic comp decelerates — and untangling them will be the substance of the Aug. 20 call.

Positioning heading in looks constructive rather than stretched. Walmart closed Wednesday up 2.43%, the Russell 2000 added 0.61% to 3,045.56, and the VIX fell 4.78% to 14.55, per Investing.com — a tape that is not pricing much event risk into the next two weeks. The in-line CPI print removed one obvious source of pressure on the Federal Reserve, which shifts more of the burden onto company-level commentary about pricing, traffic and mix.

What to watch across the block is less the headline EPS than the composition of sales growth. Traffic versus ticket, comparable-store performance excluding fuel, inventory levels going into the back-to-school and holiday build, and any revision to full-year outlooks will carry more information than a penny of beat or miss. Home Depot and Lowe's will speak to big-ticket and project demand; Target and TJX will speak to discretionary and value-seeking behavior; Walmart, with the widest income cross-section of the group, tends to be the one that settles arguments about which direction the consumer is actually moving.