Long term it's probably a nice buying opportunity unless you think Amazon will destroy all the old discount retailers.
Bingo. I would avoid brick-and-mortar retailers. There's no denying that AMZN has and will continue to destroy them.
Spoken like someone who misunderstands Amazon's 20 year record of growing sales without profit. Wal-Mart reports more in net income in a single quarter than Amazon has in its entire history as a publicly-traded company. Some brick and mortar retailers are vulnerable, many are not.
I will start by saying that I am not good with financials.
But I also think that Amazon is a real threat to all retail.
And more, I think that Walmart is one of the retailers which have a change in fighting Amazon, but only if they really focus on it. If they will do a half effort job they will lose faster than they imagine, although I am sure they imagine bad things already.
And now to look at some numbers:
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/wmt/financials?query=ratioshttp://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/financials?query=ratiosYou can see that the gross margin for Amazon increased, while for Walmart is stayed the same.
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/wmt/financials?query=income-statementhttp://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/financials?query=income-statementYou can see that in 2015 Walmart's income declined.
You can also see that Amazon's income is now 25% of Walmart's income.
You can look at the other tabs with interesting numbers to see the whole picture.
Walmart is a solid company but it seems it stopped growing.
Amazon is not very profitable, but it grows very quickly. Plus, recently it showed it can have be profitable.
Again, as I said, I am not good with financials but what I see is a company which reinvests everything and a company which does not do that.
The one which reinvests grows, while the other one seems to struggle a little finding an area to grow into.
Perhaps in the end Walmart should not even try to catch Amazon online and try to find something else, but for me it seems Walmart does not know exactly what direction to follow.
And if they will just try with half effort (in any direction) they will lose.
Anyway, this discussion is a little off topic for this thread :).