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Saturday, September 12, 2026 • Daily Market Alert

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Explore Today's Market News from Behind the Markets:

Kroger cut its sales forecast by two-thirds. The stock closed up 2.7%.

Kroger told investors on Friday morning that American shoppers are buying
less than it expected, and then watched its stock finish the day as one of the
better performers in the S&P 500.

The grocer reported results for its fiscal second quarter, which ended August
15, and the headline number was the one management could not spin. Identical
sales excluding fuel — the industry's core measure of whether existing stores
are selling more — rose 0.2%. A year ago, the same figure was 3.4%. Kroger had
told Wall Street in June to expect 1.0% to 2.0% for the full year. On Friday it
cut that range to 0.2% to 0.8%.

Shares opened lower on the news, fell as much as 1.95% in premarket trading
to $55.27, and then reversed. Kroger closed at $58.49, up $1.54 or 2.70%, with
11.6 million shares changing hands.

What the market chose to look at instead

The sales line was weak. Almost everything below it was not.

* Adjusted earnings per share of $1.09 beat the $1.06 consensus. On a GAAP
basis, EPS was $1.05 versus $0.91 a year earlier.
* Revenue of $34.6 billion rose from $33.9 billion a year ago, narrowly
missing the $34.65 billion estimate.
* Operating profit was $971 million; adjusted FIFO operating profit came in
at $1.076 billion.
* Gross margin was 22.4% of sales, with management citing higher shrink,
higher transportation costs and a richer mix of lower-margin sales, partly
offset by pharmacy mix, sourcing initiatives, tariff refunds and a smaller LIFO
charge.
* Adjusted eCommerce sales grew 20%, and profit at Kroger Precision
Marketing, the company's retail advertising arm, grew 24%.
* Kroger repurchased $1.0 billion of stock during the quarter, after raising
its dividend earlier in the summer.
Most important for the reaction: Kroger left its full-year adjusted EPS
guidance untouched at $5.10 to $5.30, held adjusted FIFO operating profit at
$5.0 to $5.2 billion, free cash flow at $2.7 to $2.9 billion, capital
expenditures at $3.8 to $4.0 billion, and its tax rate at 23%. The company cut
the sales forecast and reaffirmed the profit forecast in the same press release.

"Our second quarter results demonstrate the resiliency of Kroger's business
model and the discipline with which our teams are executing," said chief
financial officer David Kennerley. "Adjusted earnings per diluted share grew
5%, driven by cost savings, strong pharmacy and fuel performance, and
improvement in the profitability of our eCommerce business."

The asterisks on that 0.2%

Two items inside the quarter were not about consumer demand at all. Kroger
said Medicare drug-pricing changes under the Inflation Reduction Act created
roughly a 138-basis-point headwind to identical sales — a pharmacy revenue
effect, not a lost customer. It also said the lingering effects of a cyclospora
outbreak in its produce department cut identical sales excluding fuel by about
35 basis points.

Strip both out and the underlying number looks materially better than 0.2%.
That is the argument the buyers made on Friday. The argument on the other side
is simpler: the company still could not hold its own full-year sales range, and
it had only set that range in June.

Investors have been unusually willing to punish good operating results this
year, which makes Friday's reaction the more interesting data point. It was the
opposite of the pattern that hit Adobe this week, where a tripling AI business
sat under a stock still far below its high — and a reminder that the market's
reaction function is rarely as mechanical as the investors who chase headlines
assume.

Kroger entered Friday roughly 2% above its 52-week low of $54.15 and trading
at a price-to-earnings ratio of about 34.7 — a premium multiple for a grocer.
The 52-week high is $76.58. Wall Street's mean price target sits near $69.77,
from a group split roughly 11 buy ratings to 13 holds.

The consumer number nobody wanted to see

Ninety minutes after Kroger's release, the University of Michigan published
its preliminary September consumer survey, and it was worse than the grocery
data implied.

The headline sentiment index fell to 47.8 from 51.7 in August, against a
consensus of 51.0. That is a 7.5% monthly decline, 13.2% below a year ago, and
the second-lowest reading in the survey's history going back to 1952. The low
came in May.

The damage was concentrated in what consumers expect rather than what they
are experiencing. Current conditions slipped to 50.9 from 51.9, a 1.9% decline.
Expectations collapsed to 45.8 from 51.5, down 11.1% in a month.

Inflation expectations moved the wrong way at the same time. The one-year
outlook jumped to 4.6% from 4.0%, matching June's level as the highest of the
cycle. Before the U.S.-led war with Iran began, that figure was 3.4% in
February. Five-year expectations ticked up to 3.4% from 3.3%, ending three
straight months at 3.3%.

"Year-ahead expectations for both personal finances and business conditions
plunged," said Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers. "With a
resurgence in fuel prices and trade tensions, consumers anticipate greater
pressures on their pocketbooks to come."

Sentiment fell among consumers identifying as Democrats and Republicans
alike, and was little changed among independents. Kroger cut its sales outlook
citing slower consumer spending; the Michigan survey supplies the reason why.

The inflation print underneath all of it

Friday began with the August consumer price index. Headline CPI rose 0.4% for
the month and 3.4% over twelve months, both matching the Dow Jones consensus.
Core CPI, which strips out food and energy, rose 0.3% — a tenth of a point
above forecast, and above the 0.2% median in Bloomberg's survey. The core
annual rate was 2.4%, in line.

Traders read the core miss as decisive. Odds of a quarter-point Federal
Reserve rate increase at next week's meeting jumped to roughly 86%, from 72% on
Thursday and about 67% before the data, according to CME Group's FedWatch tool.

"Overall, the report clears the path for the FOMC to hike next week — a move
that we expect will be followed by at least an additional quarter-point by year
end," wrote Ian Lyngen, head of U.S. rates at BMO Capital Markets.

"This means the Fed should go with hiking rates next week and the yield
curve, swaps and fed fund futures are all confirming the same," said Darrell
Cronk, chief investment officer for wealth and

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