Walmart releases second-quarter fiscal 2027 results at approximately 6:00 a.m. US Central this morning, 20 August, with the call at 7:00. Our own earnings schedule said 21 August; that was an estimate and it was wrong. The company's notice of 13 August and its investor-relations event page both say today, and this piece corrects our row.
The consensus card at the top of this page is the whole setup in one block. The setup is unusually tidy. Walmart guided the quarter on 21 May to adjusted EPS of $0.72 to $0.74, net sales growth of 4% to 5% in constant currency and adjusted operating income growth of 7% to 10%. Consensus has landed at $0.74 on about $186.7 billion. Guidance and the Street are on the same number, on the same measure. There is no visible disagreement to resolve.
Which is exactly why the interesting risk in this print is not whether Walmart beats. It is which earnings line the beat gets measured against — because this site stores the other one, and the distance between them has recently been larger than the entire year-over-year change everyone is watching for.
The two lines, and the 41 cents between them
We wrote about this three weeks ago in what the February preview never told you, using one quarter. Here are four, with the adjusted figures that piece did not carry — and the chart at the top of this page is the same four quarters as pairs of bars, where the crossover in January is visible rather than arithmetic:
| Fiscal quarter | Period end | GAAP diluted | Adjusted | Wedge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 Q2 | 2025-07-31 | $0.88 | $0.68 | +$0.20 |
| FY2026 Q3 | 2025-10-31 | $0.77 | $0.62 | +$0.15 |
| FY2026 Q4 | 2026-01-31 | $0.53 | $0.74 | −$0.21 |
| FY2027 Q1 | 2026-04-30 | $0.67 | $0.66 | +$0.01 |
Read the last column on its own. Over four consecutive quarters the difference between Walmart's two earnings measures was twenty cents, fifteen cents, minus twenty-one cents, and a penny. It changed sign twice and covers a 41-cent range — against a consensus that expects the adjusted line to rise six cents year over year, from $0.68 to $0.74.
The wedge is bigger than the story. That is the whole point of this article.
Our August piece framed the January quarter's −$0.21 against the prior-year January quarter's −$0.01 and left the impression of a wedge that had grown. The fuller series says something less tidy and more useful: it was already twenty cents wide, in the other direction, two quarters earlier, and it closed to a penny in the most recent quarter. This is not a drift. It is noise with a wide amplitude, and no amount of reading it will tell you what it does this morning.
What the wedge actually is
Not an accounting abstraction and not a restatement. Walmart holds equity and other investments and marks them through earnings, so the paper movement on those holdings lands in GAAP diluted EPS and is stripped out of adjusted. The January 2026 quarter's reconciliation attributed the entire $0.21 to a net loss, after tax, on that line.
So a reader looking at our stored $0.53 for that quarter and the $0.73 consensus our February preview printed could compute a 27% miss on a quarter Walmart beat. Both numbers are correct. The subtraction is not.
This is the same mechanism that ran the other way at Alphabet, where a $99.0B unrealised gain put $6.26 into a $9.11 diluted EPS. It is not a Walmart quirk. It is what happens when a company with a large investment book reports GAAP earnings in a period when markets move.
What is worth watching instead
The measurement problem is a caution, not a thesis. Four things in this release actually settle something:
Net sales against the 4–5% constant-currency guide. Consensus of $186.7B against the $177.4B Walmart reported a year ago is +5.3%, at or just above the top of the guided range. That is a real bar, not a formality.
Whether the full year moves. Walmart guides fiscal 2027 to adjusted EPS of $2.75 to $2.85 and net sales growth of 3.5% to 4.5%. A quarter delivered inside guidance while the year is left alone is a hold, not a raise, however the morning trades. The clean positive is the year moving up.
The tariff line the guidance excludes. Walmart's 21 May guidance explicitly assumes no impact from IEEPA tariff refunds. That is the same one-off running through this season's other big-box results, and Walmart has pre-committed to keeping it out of the guided number. Anything that arrives on that line arrives outside the comparison.
Free cash flow, which nobody will mention. Our stored series has Walmart at −$1.95B for the quarter ended 2026-04-30, against +$6.10B the quarter before. Retail cash flow is violently seasonal and one negative quarter is not a signal, but it is the figure that decides the Rule of 40 score on our Walmart page — which currently reads about 6, and which our own explainer says is meaningless for a retailer. Read the growth line and ignore the composite.
What we are not going to do
We have no model for Walmart, so this piece makes no fair-value claim. We hold no consensus series of our own: the $0.74 and $186.7B above are press-reported figures from third-party feeds, quoted as such, and our predictions.json for this ticker contains a Polymarket contract about TikTok and nothing about earnings.
And we are not going to tell you the size of the wedge this morning. It depends on what a portfolio of equity investments did between May and July, which is not in this repository, is not in the guidance, and is not forecast by anybody. This is where a preview would normally estimate a number to complete the picture. We are not going to. What we can do is tell you the range it has occupied — 41 cents across four quarters — and that it is larger than the year-over-year change the consensus is built on.
What to watch
- Which EPS figure the first headlines carry. If the tape leads with a number near $0.74, it is the adjusted line. If it leads with something materially away from it in either direction, it is GAAP, and the difference is the investment book rather than the business.
- The equity-and-other-investments line in the reconciliation. It is the single number that reconciles the two measures, and it is disclosed in the release itself rather than left to inference.
- Full-year adjusted EPS guidance of $2.75–2.85. Unchanged is a hold. Raised is the result.
- Constant-currency net sales against +4–5%, and whether the beat, if there is one, comes from that or from the operating-income line guided to +7–10%.
- Any language putting a bound on the investment marks. Walmart has never framed them as a swing factor. Saying so would remove the one thing in this print that no one can forecast.
Walmart's release timing — approximately 6:00 a.m. US Central on 20 August 2026 with the call at 7:00 a.m. — is the company's own, from its 13 August notice and its investor-relations event page; our own earnings schedule carried 21 August as an estimate and has been corrected in the same change as this piece. Second-quarter guidance of $0.72–0.74 adjusted EPS, 4–5% constant-currency net sales growth, 7–10% adjusted operating income growth and the explicit exclusion of IEEPA tariff-refund impact, together with full-year fiscal 2027 guidance of $2.75–2.85 adjusted EPS and 3.5–4.5% net sales growth, are from Walmart's first-quarter fiscal 2027 release of 21 May 2026. Consensus of $0.74 adjusted EPS on about $186.7B is press-reported from third-party estimate feeds and is not a figure this site stores or verifies. Adjusted EPS of $0.68, $0.62, $0.74 and $0.66 for the quarters ended 2025-07-31, 2025-10-31, 2026-01-31 and 2026-04-30, and $0.66 for 2025-01-31, are Walmart's own reported non-GAAP figures from the corresponding quarterly releases; the $0.21 per-share after-tax net loss on equity and other investments in the January 2026 quarter is from that quarter's reconciliation. GAAP diluted EPS of $0.88, $0.77, $0.53, $0.67 and $0.65, quarterly revenue including the $177.4B prior-year comparative, and free cash flow of −$1.95B and +$6.10B are our stored Walmart series; that series' GAAP basis was established against the releases for the quarters ended 2026-01-31 and 2025-01-31, both of which matched, and the other quarters are taken as GAAP on that evidence. Every wedge figure and percentage change is our arithmetic on those values. Alphabet's $99.0B unrealised gain and $9.11 diluted EPS are from our Alphabet coverage. This site holds no valuation model for Walmart, and no share price or market-capitalisation figure appears here.
