Macy's shares are down ~5% on earnings; while EPS and guidance were raised, gross margin compression drove the negative price action.

Well, Macy's, you know, if you look at the numbers themselves, there was a strong beat um at the very least on an EPS front and sales came in around 4.87 billion versus 4.81. We can see the stock is trading slightly to the downside by about 5%.

The EPS um you know last year was 35 cents. They posted 63 cents. Uh estimates were around 37 cents. Uh comp sales systemwide consensus was 1%. They did post as a total business 2.7%.

Now, if you look at the Macy's comps, they beat the the total consensus at 1.1. Bloomingdale comps up 11.3%. So, that was a bright spot and that's typically a little bit more of the affluent or higherend consumer. Uh, Blue Mercury also increased by 6.2%.

Uh, and that's also another Q2 high sales volume number at least for Bloomingdales was the highest Q2 sales ever. So uh with that said, they did raise their guidance. Uh the old guidance for fiscal year 26 sales on the high end was 21.75 billion.

They now are are posting 21.83 as well as old EPS guidance at 220 on the high end versus now $2.35. So comp sales guidance also increased to approximately 1 to one and a half%.

So it may not necessarily be as much as perhaps folks had anticipated, but nonetheless gross margins also here appear to be slightly down. So that's also the same case for AEO.

And I think that's one of the compression compression reasons that we're seeing some some price action move to the downside in this name.