On 18 February this site published Walmart Reports Tomorrow as the World's First $1 Trillion Retailer. It named the date, named the consensus — "$0.73 EPS on roughly $189 billion in revenue" — and told readers what to watch.
Walmart reported the next morning. We never wrote what happened. Six months later that article is still the last thing this site said about it, and its headline still says "Tomorrow".
Here is the answer, and it comes with a warning about our own numbers.
What Walmart actually reported
For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, the quarter ended 2026-01-31:
| February consensus | Reported | |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenues | ~$189B | $190,656M |
| Adjusted EPS | $0.73 | $0.74 |
| GAAP diluted EPS | — | $0.53 |
Revenue beat. Adjusted earnings beat, by a cent. On the basis the consensus was quoted in, Walmart did what the preview said it needed to do.
The trap in our own series
Our stored earnings series for that quarter reads $0.53. Set that against the $0.73 the February article printed and you get a 27% miss — a dramatic, publishable, completely false number.
It is false because the two figures are not the same measure. The February article's own table labels its $0.73 as Adjusted EPS — the word is right there in the file. Walmart's release reports $0.53 GAAP diluted and $0.74 adjusted for the same quarter, so our stored $0.53 is the GAAP line. Comparing it to an adjusted consensus compares two different things and calls the difference a result.
That is worth stating plainly because this site nearly published it. The number is in our data, the consensus is in our own article, and the subtraction is one line. Nothing about either figure looks wrong on its own.
What the $0.21 actually is
The gap is not an accounting abstraction. Walmart's reconciliation attributes the whole of it to one item: a net loss of $0.21 per share, net of tax, on equity and other investments.
That is a mark-to-market movement on things Walmart owns, not a statement about selling groceries. It is the same mechanism that ran the other way at Alphabet this quarter, where a $99.0B unrealised gain on equity securities put $6.26 into a $9.11 diluted EPS and made the headline number meaningless in the opposite direction. One company's paper gain and another's paper loss, both landing on the line most readers treat as the answer.
The size is what makes Walmart's case worth flagging rather than filing. In the prior-year quarter, ended 2025-01-31, GAAP diluted EPS was $0.65 and adjusted was $0.66 — a one-cent wedge. A year later the same wedge is twenty-one cents. A reader who had checked the two measures against each other in that quarter would have found them effectively interchangeable, and would have been badly wrong to assume it stayed that way.
The three quarters since
The preview asked whether Walmart had earned its milestone. Here is the follow-through, each quarter with its period end:
| Fiscal quarter | Period end | Revenue | GAAP diluted EPS | Free cash flow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 Q3 | 2025-10-31 | $179.5B | $0.77 | +$1.91B |
| 2026 Q4 | 2026-01-31 | $190.7B | $0.53 | +$6.10B |
| 2027 Q1 | 2026-04-30 | $177.8B | $0.67 | −$1.95B |
One caveat on that middle column, since this article is about exactly this. We checked our stored earnings figures against Walmart's release for two quarters — the one ended 2026-01-31 and its prior-year comparative — and both are GAAP. The other two rows are labelled GAAP on that evidence rather than on a check of their own; there is no Walmart capture in this repository to close them.
Full-year fiscal 2026 revenue came in at $713.2B, up 4.7%. For fiscal 2027 Walmart guides adjusted EPS of $2.75 to $2.85 and net sales growth of 3.5% to 4.5% in constant currency.
About that trillion
The February headline said "the world's first $1 trillion retailer" and the body was careful: Walmart crossed a $1 trillion market capitalisation on 3 February. That is a valuation milestone, not a sales one.
Walmart's trailing-twelve-month revenue, for the twelve months ended 2026-04-30, is $725.3B. No retailer has sold a trillion dollars of anything in a year. The distinction matters because the headline is the kind a reader carries away wrong — and because a market capitalisation moves every day while revenue is a fact about a period. We are not quoting a current market capitalisation here: the price in our own data carries no as-of date, which is not good enough to put a trillion-dollar claim on.
What the Rule of 40 says, and what it does not
On this site's Rule of 40, Walmart's most recent quarter scores about 6. Revenue growth of 7.3% against a free-cash-flow margin of −1.1%, on the quarter ended 2026-04-30 where free cash flow was −$1.95B.
A $713B-revenue grocer scoring 6 is not a finding about Walmart. Our own explainer says the metric was built for "high gross margin, revenue-recognised-over-time, capex-light" businesses and that applying it to retailers "is meaningless". Walmart is the case in point: the score is dominated by a single quarter's cash-flow timing at a company whose entire operating model is inventory and stores. Read the growth line and ignore the composite.
What we still cannot tell you
The February piece rested on a specific thesis — that 75% of Walmart's share gains were coming from households earning $100K or more, and that the affluent trade-down was structural rather than a temporary response to inflation. Three quarters on, that is the question a reader of that article most wants answered.
We cannot answer it from anything in this repository. Customer-income mix is not in our data, and we are not going to infer it from a revenue line that would look identical either way. It needs Walmart's own disclosure, and until we source that, the honest position is that the thesis is untested rather than confirmed.
Walmart's reported figures for the quarter ended 2026-01-31 are from the company's fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings release, filed as an 8-K on 19 February 2026 and published on Walmart's investor site: total revenues $190,656M against $180,554M, GAAP diluted EPS $0.53 against $0.65, adjusted EPS $0.74 against $0.66, the $0.21 per-share net loss on equity and other investments, full-year revenue of $713.2B, and the fiscal 2027 guidance. Quarterly revenue, earnings per share and free cash flow for the three quarters shown, the trailing-twelve-month revenue through 2026-04-30 and the Rule of 40 inputs are from our stored Walmart data. Its earnings-per-share basis was established against the release for two quarters — 2026-01-31 and 2025-01-31, both GAAP and both matching our stored values — and the series is taken as GAAP on that evidence; the quarters ended 2025-10-31 and 2026-04-30 were not separately checked, and no Walmart capture exists in this repository to check them against. The February consensus figures and the market-capitalisation milestone are quoted from our February Walmart preview, which labels its $0.73 as adjusted.