With 6 weeks remaining in the holiday shopping season before Christmas, one of the traditional holiday retail giants revealed a disappointing earnings report. Things started to go bad for Macy’s after the retailer cut sales and profit forecasts, and posted a surprise drop in quarterly sales. Macy’s stock stumbled, trading about 14% lower after briefly falling more than 15%, suffering its worst day since 2008. Macy’s stock is already down more than 25% year-to-date. The company’s Chairman and CEO Terry Lundgren said:
“The company had a “tough quarter,” highlighted a series of factors, including a slowdown in visits by international tourists who frequent many big-city Macy’s locations, and warmer weather in the Northeast that’s curtailing sales of winter apparel. We’re going to take markdowns. Consumers are going to have a field day, because we’re going to have lots of values out there, but we’re going to get rid of the inventory — have to do that before Christmas.”
The other big news of the day is that U.S. banks and other financial institutions have suffered their largest ever data breach. U.S. officials in Manhattan confirmed the hack yesterday while bringing charges against 4 men for the theft of customer data of more than 100 million people. According to Bloomberg, J.P. Morgan is among the banks that were hit. See more on the date breach from Bloomberg below.
Here are the final numbers from Wednesday, 11/11/15 on Wall Street:
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 17, 702.22 (-55.99/ -0.32%)
NASDAQ: 5,067.02 (-16.22 / -0.32%)
S&P 500: 2,075.00 (-6.72 / -0.32%)
