Starting Tuesday morning, the week delivers a rare simultaneous audit of the American consumer. October advance retail sales hit at 8:30 a.m. ET Tuesday, with the Census Bureau scheduled to release the report on November 17, 2026. Home Depot reports before the open that same morning. Target follows Wednesday. Walmart closes it out Thursday. All three land into a backdrop that did not exist three months ago: consumer prices rose 0.4% in October, above the 0.3% forecast, core prices rose 0.3% for the third month in a row, and markets have been treating a December Fed hike as the base case in the wake of the hotter inflation run. Real consumer spending grew at a 3.8% annual rate in Q3. The consumer has not cracked. But oil is elevated, and long rates are above 5%. This week tells us whether that 3.8% was the peak.
Home Depot (HD): Tuesday Before the Open
Analysts expect Home Depot to post earnings of $3.84 per share on revenue of $42.81 billion. Prior-year EPS was $3.74 on revenue of $41.35 billion, implying expected growth of roughly 2.7% on the bottom line and 3.5% on the top. Those are modest numbers for a company of this scale, and they reflect the ongoing freeze in the housing market that management has described with unusual candor.
Underlying demand is constrained by elevated mortgage rates, weak housing turnover, and consumer uncertainty, which continue to pressure larger discretionary remodeling projects. At the Q2 earnings call, management said housing turnover had stayed at historically low levels for four years with no sign of an inflection point. The professional contractor channel is absorbing some of that slack, but it cannot fully offset frozen DIY renovation spend.
Margins are the precise number to watch. Management has framed tariff refunds as a timing benefit across Q2 and Q3, while also warning that incremental fuel, energy, and other product input costs should offset those refunds over the year. Home Depot disclosed it had received approximately $730 million in IEEPA tariff refunds as of August 2, 2026. If gross margin comes in below 33%, expect pressure on the stock regardless of the revenue line. Home Depot’s fiscal 2026 outlook is for adjusted diluted EPS to grow approximately flat to 4.0% versus fiscal 2025 EPS of $14.69.
Bull: Housing sentiment inflects even slightly, comps reaccelerate, and the tariff cost drag proves smaller than guided. Base: HD delivers in line, holds its full-year guidance unchanged, and the stock digests near support. Bear: Gross margin disappoints, management signals the cost offset worsens in Q4, and the stock re-tests the lower end of analyst targets near $345.
Target (TGT): Wednesday Before the Open
Target reports Q3 results before Wednesday’s open, with analysts forecasting earnings of about $2.05 to $2.06 per share on roughly $26.4 billion in revenue. The company’s FY2026 EPS guidance is $9.90 to $10.90. The critical issue is what that guidance actually represents. Q2 results included a $994 million pretax benefit from tariff refunds, and the company said its updated EPS guidance includes second quarter tariff refund benefits of approximately $1.65. With no comparable refund expected to repeat at that scale in Q3, investors are effectively reading the company’s organic earnings power for the first time in two quarters.
Excluding tariff refunds, the company has argued underlying operations improved in Q2. Bears point elsewhere: inventory increased 7.7% sequentially to $13.2 billion heading into Q3, which may presage markdown risk if sales volume fails to maintain its current pace.
TGT has clawed its way to a 64% year-to-date gain and is testing support at the $160 floor, having pivoted off its ascending 120-day moving average late last month, with added backing at the $145 to $150 area. A guidance cut on FY EPS would likely retest that zone immediately.
Walmart (WMT): Thursday Before the Open
The consensus for Walmart’s Q3 FY2027 report stands at about $0.64 EPS on $187.27 billion in revenue. That implies roughly 3.2% EPS growth from $0.62 in the year-ago quarter. The company has exceeded Wall Street’s EPS estimates in each of its last four quarters. Walmart is the clearest read on the broad consumer because it cannot hide behind a narrow product category.
Management flagged a headwind of over 100 basis points to Q3 sales growth related to a timing shift of Flipkart’s Big Billion Days between Q3 and Q4. Strip that out and the underlying trajectory looks closer to Walmart’s recent form: last quarter the company reported EPS of $0.81 against a $0.74 consensus, with quarterly revenue rising 5.9% year-over-year to $187.9 billion, above expectations.
The more relevant question Thursday is whether Walmart raises full-year guidance again. It has done so three consecutive quarters. Any hesitation on that front, combined with a retail sales miss Tuesday, would reset expectations for the consumer sector and hit XRT hard.
Bottom Line
These three earnings reports are not independent events. A soft October retail sales reading at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday sets the tone before Home Depot even opens its call. If HD margins disappoint and retail sales miss, Target walks into Wednesday with the burden of proof already elevated. By the time Walmart reports Thursday, the market will have formed a view on the consumer that no single quarterly beat can easily override. The macro overhang, with core CPI running at about a mid-3% annualized pace on the recent monthly trend, and a Fed that has made clear it intends to push inflation lower, means any sign of demand softening lands harder than it would have six months ago. Watch the guidance revisions more than the headline beats.
