Why Home Depot, Target, and Walgreens Stocks Have Trailed the Market This Year
The S&P 500 index may have had the worst first half of a year since 1970, but several retailers did even worse. Many retailers received extraordinary boosts in their businesses from the pandemic, so it's not surprising to see backtracking from some of those upward stock moves.
Names like Target (NYSE: TGT), Home Depot (NYSE: HD), and Walgreens Boots Alliance (NASDAQ: WBA) may be in the same sector, but they have very different types of businesses. They each benefited from pandemic trends in different ways, but they all had one thing in common in the first half of 2022. The S&P 500 dropped nearly 21% over that time, but Target nearly doubled that, dropping 39%. Home Depot and Walgreens also lost to the index, down 33.9% and 27.3%, respectively, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
It wasn't just a shift in consumer trends that caused the outsize stock drops. It became more of a long-term problem for Target. In addition to changing consumer needs, the company was caught with excess inventory partly due to its efforts to navigate supply chain disruptions by stocking up.
Source Fool.com
