Retail Investors Unhappy with Walmart's Earnings Beat

Price Target Upgrade Before WMT Earnings Report

An equities analyst from D.A. Davidson has recently upgraded the Walmart inc. (NYSE: WMT) stock. This analyst foresees the WMT stock reaching a price of $148/share, representing a 21.86% upside potential for WMT shares. Since this upgrade was released, the WMT stock has experienced a 3.21% increase in its share price, which could be partially due to this upgrade.

However, by conducting a quick search on google, I was able to find that Walmart reported its earnings earlier this morning. Walmart reported an EPS of $1.77 versus their expected EPS of $1.62, this represents an EPS beat of 9.26%. Furthermore, Walmart also reported their revenues to be $152.86B versus their revenue estimate of $150.81B, representing a beat on their revenue estimates of 1.36%. Lastly, Walmart forecasted that its EPS will decline between 9-11% over the next year, which is why its stock was not up by a larger percentage in pre-market trading. Walmarts earnings release represents the bulk of the 3.21% increase since the analyst upgraded their price target.

If you would like to continue reading about Walmart's earnings report, you can do so here.

How is WMT Stocktwits Reacting to this?

What insights can we draw from WMT Stocktwits data over the past day?

• 158 Posts (up 131.58%)
• 66.53% of posts are "bullish" (down from 82% in the previous day)

As we can see, WMT's recent earnings report and analyst price target upgrade has had noticeable effects on the social sentiment within the WMT StockTwits community. Firstly, the level of posting in the WMT StockTwits community has increased by over 100% which is great to see. However, while the posting volumes have increased by a large amount, the people posting about the WMT are less optimistic on what their future holds.

I believe that this decrease in sentiment is due to the fact that Walmart stated that its EPS would decline by 9-11% over the next year, which might have spooked retail investors. Furthermore, this news would be music to the ears of the retail investors who are bearish on the WMT stock, prompting them to post multiple times to let everyone know.

Whether you are trying to stay up-to-date on posting volumes, likes, and/or impressions within a stock's Stocktwits and/or Twitter communities; diving deeper into the “whale” accounts that are driving sentiment in the WMT Stocktwits and/or Twitter communities, or just keeping up with how different stocks are ranking in terms of their social sentiment; there is no better time to get familiar with social sentiment data.

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