How Walmart Stock Reacted to Its Q2 2026 Earnings, Measured Minute by Minute

Walmart beat, and the stock fell anyway. Measured from the moment the numbers crossed at 11:00 UTC, it went from $115.97 to $107.33 in fifteen minutes: -7.45%. A print like that says the market was grading something other than the headline.

This page is the measured anatomy of that print on 20 August 2026: every earnings-related headline that crossed for Walmart, in order, each with the price reaction measured from its own instant.

The print, row by row

Which line actually moved it

Each row above is measured from its own instant — the price immediately before that specific headline crossed — so the rows can be compared directly. The largest single reaction, -7.45%, belongs to the 11:00 UTC line. By the time the 11:03 UTC line arrived, the measured response was -0.67% — the marginal information in each successive headline decays fast, and the decay is measurable.

Did the first read hold?

It did. By the close of that session, Walmart stood at -9.15% against the prior close — the same direction the first fifteen minutes priced. The instant read and the considered read agreed.

A beat that gets marked down is the market saying the whisper sat above the estimate, or that something inside the release — guidance, margin, a segment line — mattered more than the headline. The measured sequence above shows where that judgement landed first.

How these numbers were measured

We record the price of the instrument immediately before each headline crosses our tape, then again one minute and fifteen minutes later, together with traded volume against that instrument's own normal. Every figure on this page comes from those recordings — the timestamps are the actual instants the lines crossed. Nothing here is an estimate, a close-to-close change, or a model's guess. The method, the gates every page must pass, and how we correct errors are documented in our editorial standards.