Inside Today’s Issue

• Essay: Leopold’s Software Glitch
• Leopold Tops This List
• All Presidents Run Up Debt
• All-In On Tech Stocks
• Chart Of The Day… uniQure (QURE)

Editor’s note: Today, Porter delivers part two of a three-part series on the implosion of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund – and the key reason behind its failure that everyone seems to be missing… The final installment of this three-part series will appear in the next Journal, on Friday.

Also note this brief update to Monday’s essay, when we reported that Intuit (INTU) was a stock that Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund had shorted. Yesterday, Intuit reported fiscal Q4 results and guided fiscal 2027 non-GAAP earnings to $22.88–$23.12 per share against a Wall Street consensus of $27.31. Some people on Wall Street believe (like Leopold) that this is more evidence of the “death of software.” We disagree.

What actually happened is far more banal: effective August 1, Intuit stopped stripping out share-based compensation from these adjusted numbers. CFO Sandeep Aujla said the 2027 guidance carries a $5.81 impact from stock-based compensation expenses. Ergo, when you add $5.81 back, the guidance midpoint is $28.81 per share, 5% above the $27.31 estimate.

Here’s another way to look at it. Intuit’s GAAP accounting requires no reconstruction. Aujla guided fiscal 2027 GAAP earnings per share to $20.12-$20.36, (growth of 22%-24%) against a $19.94 consensus. Those are not the numbers of a dying business.

Fiscal 2026 revenue grew 14% to $21.4 billion. Non-GAAP operating margin expanded 1.5 points to 41.7%. Q4 adjusted earnings came in at $4.03 per share against a $3.58 estimate. Mid-market revenue grew 39% with customers up 28%, and Intuit Enterprise Suite – the accounting and payroll package sold to companies too large for QuickBooks Online – passed $145 million in annualized revenue, 4x the prior year.

Microsoft (MSFT) passed 30 million paid Copilot seats in the June quarter, up from 15 million in January. Tech wizards like Leo Aschenbrenner hate Copilot – Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (“AI”) assistant. Just like they hated Windows ’97. And everything else Microsoft has ever built.

So what?

Accenture alone bought 740,000 Copilot seats. Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes-Benz, and Roche have each deployed more than 90,000. Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligation – contracted revenue not yet recognized, which is the closest thing software has to a railroad’s signed freight contracts – stands at $678 billion, up 84% year over year!

Annual recurring revenue for Adobe’s (ADBE) AI-first passed $500 million in the quarter ended May 2026 and tripled year over year. Salesforce’s (CRM) Agentforce went from $800 million of annual recurring revenue in the January quarter to $1.2 billion by April, up 205%. Veeva Systems (VEEV) is giving its AI agents away free inside Vault CRM through 2030, which is the single most revealing data point in the set: Veeva does not need to monetize AI, because Veeva’s moat is the validated record, not the intelligence applied to it.

Aschenbrenner thought AI would eat the applications. Instead, the applications are selling AI as an upsell on top of a subscription the customer cannot afford to cancel – because it costs nothing compared to the value it delivers.

These software companies are computing tollbooths: they’re what enterprises pay to implement compute. And as compute gets cheaper, they will generate vastly more revenue, not less. The proof is sitting there in their earnings and cash flow: they’re riding on lower and lower cost of compute, which makes their business more and more efficient.

• Adobe: 36.6% operating margin, 35.6% return on invested capital (“ROIC”), capital expenditure of $179 million on $23.8 billion of revenue – 0.75% – and $9.85 billion of free cash flow (“FCF”)
• Veeva: 28.7% operating margin, 68.5% ROIC, a 44.3% FCF margin, and effectively no capex at all
• Salesforce: $41.5 billion of revenue, roughly $14.4 billion of FCF, capex of about 1.4% of revenue, and $72.4 billion of contracted backlog
• Intuit (INTU): $18.8 billion of revenue, roughly $6.1 billion of FCF, $124 million of capex

Veeva earns 68 cents a year on the dollar. And invests nothing in growing its business.

Adobe currently trades at about 11x trailing earnings. Salesforce at about 13x. Intuit at about 14x. These are the multiples of a dying industry applied to businesses converting a third to nearly half of every revenue dollar into free cash.

This enormous mispricing was manufactured by people who, like Aschenbrenner, believed these businesses were doomed. But they aren’t.

And that’s not all.

Aschenbrenner assumed that because a technology is transformative, the capital that builds it will earn its cost.

There is no relationship between those two things. In fact, it’s more likely not to be true.

Leo’s own essay contains the tell:

Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans.

He wrote that as a bull case. But it isn’t. That is a recipe for a financial disaster.

• Amazon (AMZN) spent $131.8 billion of capex in 2025 against $139.5 billion of operating cash flow. That is 94.5% of everything the business generated poured back into the ground, in a single year. Its 2026 capex guidance is $220 billion.
• Alphabet (GOOGL) spent $91.4 billion in 2025, 55.5% of operating cash flow, and guides to $195 billion to $205 billion this year
• Meta Platforms (META) spent $72.2 billion, 62.4% of operating cash flow, and guides to $125 billion to $145 billion
• Microsoft spent $115.9 billion in the fiscal year that just ended, against $182.9 billion of operating cash flow. Capex was 34.9% of revenue, up from 18.1% two years earlier. FCF fell to $67.0 billion from $74.1 billion in fiscal 2024, on revenue that grew by more than a third over the same span. Microsoft is running harder and generating less cash. That is what a huge capital cycle does even to the best business in the world.
• Moody’s (MCO) projects hyperscaler capex of $785 billion in 2026 and close to $1 trillion in 2027, funded in part by roughly $175 billion of debt issuance this year. Where will the money come from?
• Oracle (ORCL) had fiscal 2026 capex of $55.7 billion, FCF of negative $23.7 billion, capex at 82.6% of revenue, long-term debt up from $76.3 billion to $124.7 billion, and $248 billion of future data-center lease obligations not yet on the balance sheet
• CoreWeave (CRWV) had $5.13 billion of 2025 revenue, $14.9 billion of capex, negative $7.25 billion of FCF, net debt at 8.1x EBITDA, term loans at 11% to 15%, a weighted-average short-term borrowing rate of 12.3%, and a $1 billion private placement in April 2026 at 9.75%.

Meta’s Hyperion campus in Louisiana is financed through a special purpose vehicle in which Blue Owl Capital (OWL) holds 80% and Meta holds 20%, funded by $27.294 billion of senior secured notes at a 6.581% coupon maturing in 2049. The noteholders have no pledge on the physical data center. Their credit is Meta’s promise to pay rent starting in 2029, plus a residual value guarantee – that’s $27 billion of debt, secured by a lease, sitting off the balance sheet.

And like the EU’s finance minister explained two decades ago…

When it gets serious, you have to lie.

Microsoft extended server useful lives from three years to four, then to six, adding about $3.7 billion to fiscal 2023 operating income. Alphabet did the same, adding about $3.0 billion. Amazon added about $2.5 billion in 2024. Meta added $2.59 billion in 2025. Oracle added $573 million. Every one of those is a non-cash increase in reported profit produced by an assumption about how long a chip stays useful.

It’s a lie.

But not everyone is lying. Effective January 1, 2025, Amazon shortened the useful life of a subset of its servers and networking equipment from six years back to five, citing, in its own 10-K, “the increased pace of technology development, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning.” That cost it $1.4 billion of additional depreciation and $1.0 billion of net income.

Amazon is the operator with the longest and hardest-won experience running data centers at scale, and Amazon is the one telling you the hardware wears out faster than the schedules assume.

Tell me what you think of today’s Daily Journal: porterstansberrydirect@gmail.com

Good investing,

F. Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, Maryland

Inside Today’s Issue

• Essay: Leopold Was Wrong
• GenZ “Invests” In Sports
• Consumers Tap Out
• Uncle Sam Keeps Spending
• Chart Of The Day… BWX Technologies (BWXT)

Editor’s note: Today, Porter begins part one of a three-part series on the implosion of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund – and the key reason behind its failure that everyone seems to be missing… We will publish the next Journal this week on Wednesday.

Leopold Aschenbrenner lost $30 billion (67%) in a month.

The consensus post-mortem – from The Wall Street Journal to comments on X – is that the young man who ran the Situational Awareness fund used 4-to-1 leverage on concentrated positions and got carried out. While that is true, it does not convey any useful information. Leverage is certainly the reason Leopold lost so much, so quickly. But it is not the reason he lost. Leverage is merely a magnifying glass. It doesn’t pass judgment.

The reason his fund was doomed was because he’s wrong. And no one, anywhere, has explained why Leopold Aschenbrenner was wrong.

On the morning of Thursday, July 30, before the opening bell, Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness sold its entire public stock portfolio – the long side and the short side together, roughly $16 billion of it – to Ken Griffin’s Citadel in a single block trade.

That night, Aschenbrenner wrote to his limited partners. Net performance for the month, unaudited: down 67%. Net performance for the year: still up 80%.

We let you down this month. We came closer to permanent capital impairment than is acceptable to us.

Six days earlier, on July 24, he had written a different letter. That one reported a 439% net return for the first half of 2026, described the selloff in artificial intelligence (“AI”) stocks as one of the best buying opportunities since early 2025, and invited his investors to wire more money starting August 1. It closed with a postscript:

At times we call out opportunities that seem like a particularly good time to add funds, if you have been waiting for one.

Assets that stood near $45 billion at the start of July finished the month around $10 billion, and roughly half of what remains is a single illiquid private stake in Anthropic.

Leopold is 25 years old. He graduated from Columbia University at 19, as valedictorian. He worked at the FTX Future Fund from February to November of 2022, then joined OpenAI’s Superalignment team, then was fired in April 2024. Two months after the firing, he published a 165-page essay called “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” raised $225 million from Patrick and John Collison, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and started a hedge fund. He had never managed money before.

Situational Awareness was constructed to express exactly two convictions.

1. The physical build-out of AI – the chips, the memory, the power, the data centers, the neoclouds – was the trade of the decade. The fund’s disclosed long positions read like an inventory of the second derivative of the AI boom. Bloom Energy (BE), fuel cells for data centers. Sandisk (SNDK) and Micron Technology (MU), memory. CoreWeave (CRWV) and Nebius Group (NBIS), rented compute. IREN (IREN), Core Scientific, Applied Digital, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Bitfarms, Bitdeer – Bitcoin miners converting their substations into AI compute.

2. Application software was going to be destroyed by AI. Not disrupted. Obliterated.

Leo explained why on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, in June 2024:

I’m so bearish on the wrapper companies because they’re betting on stagnation. They’re betting that you have these intermediate models and it takes so much schlep to integrate them. I’m really bearish because we’re just going to sonic boom you. We’re going to get the unhobblings. We’re going to get the drop-in remote worker. Your stuff is not going to matter.

That was the whole thesis. Buy the compute. Short the stuff that runs on the compute.

By CNBC’s reporting, the short leg included Adobe (ADBE). A 13F does not disclose short stock. It does not disclose swaps. We only know about Adobe because reporters were told… but you can look at the tape and, when you do, it’s clear that Leo was short software in a major way.

Between the June 30 close and the July 29 close – the last session before the block trade cleared his shorts – the two sides of his portfolio did this.

The longs:

• Sandisk: down 55.32%
• Nebius: down 46.33%
• Bloom Energy: down 45.90%
• CoreWeave: down 38.90%
• Micron: down 35.98%
• IREN: down 35.91%

The shorts, over the same 20 sessions:

• Workday (WDAY): up 37.24%
• Adobe (ADBE): up 28.49%
• Intuit (INTU): up 27.64%
• Salesforce (CRM): up 20.25%
• Veeva Systems (VEEV): up 17.15%

Over that same window, the Invesco QQQ Trust fell 10.14% and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust fell 2.32%. Nvidia – the supposed epicenter of the AI trade – fell 5.04%, and finished the full month of July up 0.33%.

This was not an AI crash.

The S&P 500 stayed near its record throughout. This was a violent rotation out of the leveraged, capital-hungry, second-derivative end of the AI complex and into the profitable, cash-generating, asset-light end of it. Which is to say: the market rotated out of exactly what he owned and into exactly what he was short.

Then there is Microsoft (MSFT).

Microsoft closed at $390.54 on Wednesday, July 29. It closed at $451.10 on Thursday, July 30 – that is a gain of 15.51% in a single session on 110.2 million shares, against a July average of 37.1 million. Yes, Microsoft reported its fiscal Q4 after the close on July 29. But the results were nothing out of the ordinary. Revenue came in at $90.00 billion against an $87.62 billion consensus – a small 2.7% beat. Earnings were $4.74 per share against $4.21. It was a good quarter. Not a historic one. A 2.7% revenue beat does not add roughly $450 billion of market value to the most widely owned company on Earth in six and a half hours.

The reason Microsoft was up 15% is extremely important. Leo blew up quickly because of leverage. But he failed because he is simply wrong.

Aschenbrenner’s software thesis rests on a single premise: that a company selling enterprise software is selling the work the software performs. If a model can perform that work, the company is worth nothing.

That premise is what a very smart 25-year-old engineer believes. It is not what anyone who has ever run a business believes.

Nobody buys Microsoft because Microsoft writes the best code. They buy Microsoft because Microsoft is the rail everything else runs on. Active Directory is where your employee identities live. Excel is where your board deck’s numbers come from. Teams is where the compliance-recorded conversation happens. Azure holds a FedRAMP High authorization and Department of Defense Impact Level 5 clearance, which means a defense contractor cannot casually swap it out for something cheaper without re-clearing the entire stack with the government.

Veeva Systems runs the customer relationship management and regulatory document systems of the pharmaceutical industry. Nineteen of the top 20 biopharmaceutical companies use Veeva’s regulatory information management platform. Those systems are validated under GxP – the good-practice quality regulations that govern anything touching a drug – and 21 CFR Part 11, the Food And Drug Administration’s (“FDA”) rule for electronic records and signatures. Every major release is formally qualified. When an FDA inspector arrives, the audit trail in that system is the company’s defense.

You cannot replace that with a model that is very good at writing code. You would have to re-validate a decade of regulated records, in front of a regulator, on a system with no track record, to save a fee that rounds to nothing compared with the cost of building a new drug.

How small a fee? Veeva’s licensing runs somewhere between roughly $1,800 and $6,600 per sales representative per year. A fully loaded pharmaceutical sales rep costs the employer between $134,000 and $219,000 a year. The software is 1% to 5% of the cost of the person using it.

Microsoft raised the price of a Microsoft 365 E3 seat from $36 to $39 per user per month on July 1 of this year, and E5 from $57 to $60. Add Copilot at $30 and a fully loaded E5 seat costs $1,080 a year. Against a knowledge worker costing $120,000 all-in, that is roughly 1% of the employee.

This is the part the compute maximalists cannot see. These companies are not selling labor. They are selling the rails on which labor runs, at a price so far below the value created that the buyer never bothers to negotiate hard, and with switching costs so high that the buyer could not leave even if he wanted to.

Do people try to leave? Constantly. And they almost always fail. (Ask me how I know!)

Panorama Consulting Group tracked studies of enterprise resource planning replacements and found average cost overruns at 189% across industries. Gartner projects that by 2027, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP (enterprise resource planning) initiatives will fail to fully meet their original business goals. Ripping out a core enterprise system is one of the most reliably disastrous things a large company can attempt, and it was true before anyone had heard of a transformer model.

The incumbents are not being disintermediated by artificial intelligence. They are selling it!

Next, I’ll explain how Aschenbrenner went terribly wrong. He thought AI would eat the applications. Instead, the applications are selling AI as an upsell on top of a subscription the customer cannot afford to cancel.

Tell me what you think of today’s Daily Journal: porterstansberrydirect@gmail.com

Good investing,

F. Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, Maryland

Inside Today’s Issue

• Essay: The Day “Safe” Stopped Feeling Safe
• An Important Market Warning Sign Gets Louder
• Axon’s New Deals
• Trouble At Broadcom
• Chart Of The Day… Franco-Nevada (FNV)
• Today’s Mailbag

Editor’s note: Today, Porter turns the Daily Journal over to Matt Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management and portfolio manager of the Porter & Company Porter Portfolio Index ETF (PCPP).

It was April 8, 2025, about 20 minutes after the market open.

I’d already made my peace with the equity screen on my desk. The S&P 500 had given up 10.5% in the two sessions after U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, bad enough to be the fifth-worst two-day stretch in 75 years.

And then there was the other screen.

The long bond was falling too. Not holding… not lagging… but plummeting. According to the conventions of portfolio management sold by Wall Street, a free-falling long bond while stocks were collapsing was precisely what was not supposed to happen.

By the end of what was a very long week, the 30-year Treasury closed at 4.85%, the sharpest weekly jump in long-dated yields since 1982. (The way a bond works is that when its yield rises, the price falls.)

This was big trouble for anyone with a classic 60/40 stocks/bonds portfolio. The airbag didn’t deploy because bonds – the asset that’s generally supposed to go up, when stocks go down – was going down too.

I’d seen this movie before.

Three times in 17 years, the hedge – the asset that was supposed to be the ballast – didn’t hedge.

In 2008, during the Global Financial Crisis, Treasuries held. Stocks lost 37%, long Treasuries returned more than 20%. What failed, though, was everything else that had sold as diversification: corporate bonds, mortgages, credit funds, alternatives. They fell together at the exact moment managers expected they would provide a cushion for stocks by not marching to the same drummer.

In 2022, the hedge itself failed. Pandemic supply shocks, stimulus spending and the energy spike after Russia invaded Ukraine drove inflation to a 40-year high of 9.1%. The Fed raised rates 425 basis points in nine months. (A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point, so that’s a 4.25-point increase.) Few things are more challenging for a long bond than rising rates.

The standard 60/40 portfolio – for decades the default recipe in retirement planning – lost roughly 17.5% for the 2022 calendar year, as measured by Morgan Stanley Investment Management using a blend of 60% U.S. equities and 40% U.S. Treasury bonds. It was the worst year since 1937. And stocks weren’t doing the damage alone: long Treasuries fell harder that year than at any point in the recorded data.

Then came, as I mentioned, April 2025, when both equity and bond screens went red at once.

Each time the classic hedges failed, we were told it was an anomaly.

But three anomalies in 17 years starts to look less like bad luck, and more like a design flaw.

I reached that conclusion the expensive way, one drawdown at a time. Porter reached it years earlier, and he published his thoughts for the world to read.

He talked about the erosion of the dollar, and the dark and inevitable arithmetic of a government that has not stopped borrowing. He called it the bond trap: the “safe” asset had quietly become one of the riskiest things you could own. He’d been writing that years before the charts made it obvious.

That’s why, when Porter’s team called late last year about turning those ideas into an exchange-traded fund – an ETF – it was a quick and easy answer.

So how does the asset that the industry treats as its safest… become one of its riskiest?

How the 30-year Treasury works: Hand the government $1,000 for 30 years. You get a fixed coupon (that’s the interest) every six months, and then you get your principal back 30 years later.

Two things decide what that promise is worth: What those dollars will buy in 2056, and what rate other buyers demand for the same promise in the meantime. Because if they demand a higher return, the bond that you own will be worth less.

So let’s look at the borrower. The United States government ran a federal deficit of roughly $1.8 trillion in its 2025 fiscal year – 5.9% of GDP, against a 50-year average of 3.8% – plus trillions more in unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises.

In my view, there is no politically viable tax increase, and no realistic spending cut, that could close a gap that size. Historically, gaps of this kind have often been narrowed by inflation.

In other words, dollars get created, each buys a little less, and the debt gets repaid in money worth a whole lot less in real terms than the money borrowed.

That isn’t a hedge. A hedge is supposed to pay when your stocks don’t. Inflation, though, takes both.

So if the long bond isn’t reliably the defensive part of a portfolio, what else might do that job?

Porter’s answer, and the part of his framework I had the hardest time arguing with, is to hand that job to property and casualty (P&C) insurance stocks. Those are the snoozefest (for anyone who’s not an investor, at least) companies that write your home and auto coverage, and pay out when a tree lands on a roof or you get in a fender bender.

A savvy insurer who knows how to price risk could be paid to hold its bonds. Premiums arrive today, claims are paid out years later – and the insurer can retain what it earns on the money in between. For example, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) ran roughly $176 billion of other people’s money that way in 2025.

Insurance companies also choose what to own and, for example, shorten maturities (to reduce volatility and downward price movement) when the rate environment is dangerous. A bond fund, though, holds whatever its index dictates, all the way down.

Of course, an insurance company that isn’t good at understanding the risks it’s taking on will wind up paying out more than it takes in, which doesn’t do investors any good. That’s why in the “bond” slice of the new fund I’ve created with Porter, we screen for underwriting quality before anything else.

PCPP is a passive fund. It seeks to track the investment results, before fees and expenses, of the Porter & Co. Porter Portfolio Index — a rules-based, multi-asset index. In the Porter & Company Porter Portfolio Index ETF (ticker symbol: PCPP), no holding is chosen by discretion on the day. The rules are written in advance.

A quarter of the portfolio goes to P&C insurance stocks, drawn from Porter & Co.’s analysis that’s screened for size, business mix, and historical return consistency. The top 20 that clear those bars go in, weighted so that historically stronger underwriters receive larger weights. No name accounts for more than 10%, and the index is rebuilt once a year.

Nobody gets to fall in love with a name. Porter & Co. builds the index. As the adviser, we can’t change it.

The other three sleeves of the fund operate the same way. You can read the full framework and the prospectus at porterandcofunds.com.

In my opinion, “safe” doesn’t suggest an investment that doesn’t move.

The question worth asking is whether the thing you bought as a hedge behaves the way you expected – during a week that the equity side is down double digits, and you’re looking at two red screens.

By that definition, the long bond may have stopped being safe some time ago.

From what I’m seeing, most portfolios haven’t gotten the memo.

Matt Tuttle, CEO/CIO
Tuttle Capital Management

P.S. Every morning before the open, I publish The Daily HEAT, my framework applied to whatever the market is doing that day. It’s free. Sign up here.

Tell us what you think of today’s Daily Journal: porterstansberrydirect@gmail.com

Porter & Co. Market Snapshot

Porter & Co. Top Positions

Inside Today’s Issue

• Essay: Target’s Tariff Refund Isn’t A Turnaround
• Evaporating Dividend Yields
• Down Days For Walmart
• How Bessent Played With Bond Yields
• Chart Of The Day… Veeva Systems (VEEV)
• Today’s Mailbag

Last September, I explained why I think Target (TGT) will end up in bankruptcy within five to seven years. Since then the stock is up 85% – which in the minds of most readers will surely lead to the conclusion that I am wrong. But am I?

Here’s my thesis.

Target was the premier retail shopping experience for roughly two decades. The “Target run” was a weekend habit for many middle-class and upper-middle-class consumers. Target combined outstanding retailing with competitive prices, which won it a higher operating margin than other retailers. Those profits powered its constant expansion and brand marketing, which created a valuable national brand. For a very long time, this was more than good enough to hold off competitive threats from Costco Wholesale (COST), Walmart (WMT), and Amazon (AMZN). But, at the heart of Target’s success was an elevated, in-person shopping experience.

Then COVID happened.

Consumers’ shopping habits changed… dramatically. Upper-middle-class customers stopped coming to the store, at first because of masks and now because delivery apps save so much time. Additionally, in many areas, Target’s stores became rundown and filled with both low-class employees and low-class customers. As traffic fell, margins collapsed.

The shopping app trend continues: DoorDash grew revenue 35.6% in its June quarter, to $4.45 billion from $3.28 billion. Instacart grew 14.1%, to $1.04 billion from $914 million. The affluent household now pays a fee to avoid going to Target.

Target lost the customer who made it profitable.

Key stats from Target’s fiscal 2021 peak to its lows in fiscal 2025:

• Revenue: $106.0 billion to $104.8 billion, down 1.2% in nominal dollars across four years of inflation
• Operating income: $8.95 billion to $5.12 billion, down 42.8%
• Operating margin: 8.4% to 4.9%
• Diluted earnings per share: $14.10 to $8.13, down 42.3%
• Free cash flow after capital spending: $5.08 billion to $2.83 billion

The company’s product mix also demonstrates this key demographic shift in its customer base. Since 2022 (full fiscal year 2022 vs fiscal year 2026):

• Home furnishing and décor: $20.3 billion to $15.6 billion, down 22.9%
• Hardlines: $18.6 billion to $15.8 billion, down 15.1%
• Apparel and accessories: $17.9 billion to $15.7 billion, down 12.2%
• Food and beverage: $20.3 billion to $24.1 billion, up 18.9%

Target replaced its highest-margin customers with people looking for cheap groceries.

But that’s not what today’s headlines claim. The company reports that operating margins have soared – jumping from 5.2% to 9.6% in the latest quarter.

When I saw those headlines, I laughed. There’s no way to increase operating margins when you’re in the middle of a turnaround that requires you to vastly improve the shopping experience while lowering prices. Target is spending heavily to improve its stores and it’s lowering its prices. How could margins improve?

Target received $994 million of refunds on tariffs last quarter. Getting a billion dollars certainly helps! The company chose to book this income as a reduction of cost of sales. Cost of goods sold therefore fell 1.7% while sales rose 5.3%, in part because of inflation.

The increase in operating margins was not brilliant merchandising. It was a one-time windfall and an accountant with a valuable imagination.

Target’s headline result was: 33.7% gross margin, up from 29.0% a year ago; a 9.6% operating margin against last year’s 5.2%.

What were the numbers, absent the one-time windfall?

Let me show you the 2Q results from 2024 and 2025. (Fiscal 2025’s Q2 was the liquidation quarter, when Target cleared excess inventory and cancelled orders. It’s not indicative of the company’s normal business. Fiscal 2024’s Q2 is the last one that ran normally.)

Target has a new chief executive, an “acceleration office,” 30 new stores, 130 remodels, and price cuts on more than 10,000 items. What’s changed? After two years, costs continue to grow – Selling, General, And Administrative (“SG&A”) is now 21.6% of revenue – and profits continue to fall – operating margin is 5.9% down from 6.4%, net income is $1.12 billion down from $1.19 billion.

Target went from 1,926 stores and 243.3 million square feet to 1,995 stores and 250.5 million square feet, while merchandise sales per square foot fell from $430 to $410, down 4.6% before inflation – 69 additional stores produced less sales per foot.

Another sign of brand decline: credit card profit sharing, the fee Target collects on its co-branded card, fell from $710 million to $522 million. Fewer affluent cardholders spending on credit.

Target has seen a 3.6% traffic increase. Two quarters of rising traffic is evidence that something is changing. The numbers tell me it’s more people responding to Target’s discounting because gross margin and operating margin continue to decline (compared to a real baseline, not a liquidation quarter).

Target is buying traffic with lower prices. It has reduced prices on more than 10,000 items in the last year. Average transaction price was flat this quarter and fell 0.4% for the full fiscal year, despite inflation above 3%.

Target is completing its conversion into a discount chain — more customers, cheaper carts, thinner margins, and a store experience that pushes the remaining affluent shopper toward an app.

Competing on price means competing with Walmart, which has far greater scale, and Costco, which competes with less markup, and Dollar General, which has lower cost per square foot.

Target carries the cost structure of a lifestyle retailer and the assortment of a discounter. That’s the Kmart strategy. And it doesn’t work.

There’s one wildcard that could enable Target to continue to tread water for longer than I expect.

Target sells advertising (Roundel) to its vendors. The incremental cost of those advertising dollars is close to zero. It also has Target Plus – a third-party marketplace where Target books a commission. And Circle 360 is the paid membership program at Target. Management reported Roundel gross billings were up nearly 20%, Target Plus merchandise volume was up more than 40%, and Circle 360 membership revenue up over 40%.

Target discloses advertising revenue in its annual filings:

• Fiscal 2023: $404 million
• Fiscal 2025: $649 million
• Fiscal 2026: $915 million

These are impressive numbers. But advertising is only 0.87% of total revenue.

To add one percentage point of operating margin, Target needs $1.05 billion of incremental operating profit. Advertising would have to more than double, at zero incremental cost, to recover a single point of the three and a half points of operating margin lost since fiscal 2021.

It’s a very important part of its business and it’s something that Kmart didn’t have. Is it enough to save the business? I don’t think so.

Capital spending is up 30% this year to $5 billion for the year. Target continues to invest heavily into its core retail business even though it continues to report falling sales per square foot. Shareholders are funding a bet that remodeled stores attract a customer who has already installed a shopping app and won’t go Target again. That strategy isn’t working: Target has added 69 stores over the last four years. And sales per square foot continue to fall.

Frankly, I think these decisions and the management’s handling of the tariff refund accounting show they’re delusional. But if you doubt me, just consider that they are also saying Target will resume repurchasing its own shares in the back half of this year.

Operating cash flow over the last 12 months was $8.72 billion. Remove the $994 million refund and it is $7.73 billion. Spend the promised $5 billion of capital and pay the $2.07 billion dividend, and $661 million remains for the entire year.

What Target must do is rebuild its brand, its merchandising, and its shopping experience to recapture its core, high-margin user. So far it hasn’t found that formula. And with so much competition from Costco, Amazon, Walmart, and Dollar General I don’t believe that’s possible.

Tell me what you think of today’s Daily Journal: porterstansberrydirect@gmail.com

Good investing,

F. Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, Maryland

P.S. For 50 years, market predictions offered up at The New Orleans Investment Conference have become market reality. This year, Porter has been invited to address the prestigious event, taking place October 28 to October 31. To learn more about the legendary conference and to attend, follow this link…

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