On Track

Categories: Company Management

Many companies give mid-term guidance. Like…in the retail store industry, it was common to give monthly sales numbers, not just quarterly. Those numbers were watched closely by many, because retail store traffic has historically been the canary in the mine shaft of the economy, and investors in general. So a given store might start to give out less information but still say, “We’re on track” and not much else.

Well, what would that mean?

It means that a) Amazon has not killed them (yet), and that b) whatever guidance they gave Wall Street at the end of their last quarter is still in place.

So like...maybe they said, “Sales are expected to be up 3.2% this quarter.” Well, a month in, then, it’s likely that sales are in fact up about 3.2% as they are…on track.

As opposed to sales being down 15%, which would be more, um..."off the rails."

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