In short: Passing mention — one of the retail sites Muse searches, "like a normal human would."
10:30See, up until now, when you ask Muse to shop for something, he'll actually open up his own browser and he'll start searching the web. He'll search on Shopify websites. He'll search on Lowe's or Home Depot or Target or Walmart or Sam's Club or wherever. It'll just search like a normal human would, but it does it a lot more passively because you're not wasting your time doing it.
In short: Passing mention — a retailer whose saved credentials an agent keeps "securely forever," the lock-in that makes memory a distribution advantage.
14:27When you enter in the credentials of Smiths or Target or Walmart, it'll save that securely forever. You don't have to enter it in again. It already knows that and that creates that lock in and distribution. Then we have stage four. Commerce becomes machine to machine. This is a conversation I was recently having with my brother.
In short: Brown's final trade — freshly bought into his firm's concentrated momentum strategy; Link a long-time holder. "We did a segment a couple of weeks ago about Target hitting my list of the best stocks in the market. We have just put the stock in client portfolios for our concentrated momentum strategy — basically 16 times earnings with 33% growth expected over the next year. I think it'll keep running." Wapner: Telsey reiterates Outperform, $182 target. Link: "Welcome to the party… for a long time… it is not a fun party, but it is this year. It's up 61% year to date and they have a lot of momentum."
Target is the discount department-store chain. After a few rough years it is up about 61% this year, and it recently landed on Brown's list of the market's best-performing stocks.
His firm just bought it for a strategy that owns a small number of stocks with strong price momentum. What makes it unusual for a momentum pick is the price: about 16 times earnings, with profits expected to grow around 33% next year. Link, who has owned it through the lean years, jokes "welcome to the party."
In short: Traffic holds up — the turnaround gains credibility, with two categories still missing. Q2 revenue +5% Y/Y to $26.5B ($400M beat) with comparable sales +3.8%, driven almost entirely by a 3.6% increase in traffic — the number that matters, because it is customers rather than price. Adjusted EPS of $4.11 crushed estimates, although $1.65 came from tariff refunds; excluding that benefit, roughly $2.46 still beat consensus. Target lapped last year's Switch 2 launch while holding traffic growth, with sales up across all six merchandise categories — hardlines +10%, food, beauty, toys and wellness strong — but apparel and home were roughly flat, "showing that some of Target's historically important discretionary categories still need work." Margins were "heavily distorted" by $994M of tariff refunds, worth roughly 370 bps of Q2 operating margin; underneath, the business improved too — FY26 operating margin is now expected around 5.1% excluding refunds, roughly 50 bps above last year, while spending ~$5B on stores, technology and supply chain. Guidance raised: FY26 sales growth to ~5% (from 4%) and adjusted EPS $9.90–$10.90 including the tariff benefit, with the midpoint up $0.75 excluding it. Bottom Line: "Q2 traffic remained strong even as recent tailwinds faded. The turnaround is gaining credibility, but home and apparel still need to participate before Target can claim a truly broad-based recovery."
Target has spent a couple of years trying to convince investors it can bring shoppers back. This quarter it made progress on the measure that counts most: sales at existing stores rose 3.8%, and almost all of it — 3.6 points — came from more visits rather than higher prices. Traffic is the honest metric in retail, because you can lift sales for a while by raising prices or discounting inventory, but you cannot fake people walking through the door. Target did this while lapping last year's Nintendo Switch 2 launch, an unusually hard comparison.
The profit headline, though, is not what it appears. Reported earnings of $4.11 per share smashed expectations — but $1.65 of that was tariff refunds, money handed back on import duties, and $994 million of refunds inflated the quarter's operating margin by roughly 3.7 percentage points. That is a one-off. The useful exercise is to subtract it and look again: about $2.46 per share, which still beat. So the beat is real; it is just three-fifths as large as it looks.
The same discipline applies to the raised forecast. Target lifted full-year earnings guidance to $9.90–$10.90 including the tariff benefit, but also disclosed that excluding it the midpoint rose $0.75. The second number is the one that tells you the underlying business improved. Similarly, the margin target for the year — about 5.1% excluding refunds, roughly half a point better than last year — is stated on the clean basis, while Target keeps spending around $5 billion on stores, technology and supply chain.
What holds the view at neutral rather than positive is the mix. Sales grew across all six merchandise categories, with hardlines up more than 10%, but apparel and home were flat — and those are precisely the categories that historically made Target feel different from a grocery store and carried its best margins. As the author puts it: "the turnaround is gaining credibility, but home and apparel still need to participate before Target can claim a truly broad-based recovery." Analysis, not a recommendation.
In short: Named with Walmart as where trading-down middle-income consumers go — but grouped into the broader observation that "a lot of the brick-and-mortar stores are suffering."
37:14And you're seeing that the luxury stocks have been outperforming. The middle-income catering stocks and a lot of the middle-income middle-class people are now shopping at places more like Walmart and Target, to save money. So, obviously Walmart's doing well, but a lot of the brick-and-mortar stores are suffering and the tariffs certainly haven't helped as well.
In short: Another beaten-down consumer name that's "a great value toward year-end."
Target is the big-box retailer. Same story as Chipotle: a solid consumer business beaten down because the squeezed middle and lower-income shopper has cut back. He calls it "a great value toward year-end" — i.e. cheap because of tax-loss selling, not because the company is broken.
6:55That's why I was just in Palm Beach last week. We had a great ideas dinner. Everyone's rolling in the dough in Palm Beach because that extra $3 trillion earning an extra 3% gives that crowd a lot of capital to spend. Whereas the bottom 60% have pretty much no savings, and that's why you see the Chipotles of the world and the Targets — some of these stocks are great values toward year-end because the negativity on the consumer side has really hammered some of these consumer-facing equities.
In short: Trades ~12× earnings vs Walmart's passive-distorted ~40× — a cheap, beaten-down tax-loss opportunity.
Target is the big-box retailer. His specific argument: it trades around 12 times its yearly earnings while Walmart trades near 40 times — a gap he blames on index funds piling into Walmart, not on Target being a worse business. So Target is the cheap, beaten-down tax-loss opportunity.
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