📊 PRO: This Week in Visuals
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Today at a glance:
🛒 Costco: Fuel Powers A Record Quarter
💻 Dell: AI Demand Breaks The Model
📦 PDD: The Pivot Bites
🧠 Synopsys: Elliott Joins The Board
🏗️ Autodesk: Buying Its Way Into Operations
☁️ Zscaler: Guidance Spooks Investors
🌱 MongoDB: Atlas Holds The Line
🔐 Okta: Identity For The Agent Era
🖨️ HP: Memory Cost Bites
🛒 Best Buy: Sales Turn Positive Again
☁️ Nutanix: Supply Headwinds
🤖 UiPath: Agentic AI Pays Off
🔍 Elastic: AI Drives The Beat
FROM OUR PARTNERS
“One of the Largest Industries Ever”
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1. 🛒 Costco: Fuel Powers A Record Quarter
Costco’s Q3 FY26 (May quarter) revenue rose 12% Y/Y to $70.5 billion ($0.9 billion beat), and EPS rose 15% Y/Y to $4.93 ($0.01 beat). Comparable sales blew past expectations at 9.8% (vs. 7.8% consensus), outpacing the recent prints from Walmart, Target, and Best Buy.
Adjusting for gas and FX, core comps still grew 6.6% worldwide, with traffic up 2.4% and average ticket up 4.2%. The real standout was gasoline. Costco posted all-time volume records in every four-week period of the quarter, and ancillary comps surged in the high 20% range as fuel-price-sensitive members drove first-time visits to the pump. Costco usually sells gasoline 20–50 cents per gallon below local stations.
Digital is quietly building momentum:
Digitally enabled comp sales grew 20.8%, with personalized recommendations alone generating nearly $5 billion in e-commerce sales.
Conversion rates on those recommendations ran triple the site average.
AI-sourced traffic posted triple-digit growth and the highest conversion rate of any channel, though absolute volume is still small.
Shares dropped nearly 5% after earnings, a sign that 47x forward earnings now requires more than stellar execution to move the stock.
Membership fee income reached $1.37 billion (up 11%), executive memberships hit 41.2 million (up 10%), and the US/Canada renewal rate ticked up 10 basis points to 92.2%. But total paid member growth slowed to 4%, which CFO Gary Millerchip explicitly called “a more normal rate,” with no new country launch to juice sign-ups.
Gross margin compressed by 21 basis points due to softer margins across fresh foods and packaged groceries. Costco also made deliberate price investments.
The tariff story is now the swing factor. Costco has begun submitting Section 301 refund claims to US Customs, with processing expected to take 2 to 3 months, and member returns contingent on how the legal timeline resolves. Management also trimmed FY26 warehouse openings to 26 (from 28), pushing two into FY27.
The question for the coming quarters is whether the gasoline-driven traffic halo will translate into stickier basket growth once fuel comps normalize.
2. 💻 Dell: AI Demand Breaks The Model
Dell shares just surged nearly 30% post-earnings, and they have now more than tripled so far this year.
The legacy hardware company most investors wrote off years ago is now one of the best-performing stocks of 2026. The numbers behind the story are even more striking than the chart.