Five Retailers, One Week: How Options Markets Are Pricing HD, LOW, TGT, TJX and WMT Earnings

A crowded week for retail earnings

Five of the largest U.S. retailers report second-quarter results within the same trading week, just ahead of August's monthly options expiration — a useful, low-stakes stretch for practicing how to read options pricing, without betting on any single outcome.

• Home Depot (HD): before the open, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026
• Lowe's (LOW): before the open, Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026
• Target (TGT): before the open, Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026
• TJX Companies (TJX): before 9:30 a.m. ET, Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026
• Walmart (WMT): before the open, Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026

The expiration itself falls on Friday, Aug. 21, 2026 — the market's regular monthly options expiration ("OpEx"), the third Friday of the month, not one of the quarterly "triple witching" dates, when stock options, index options and index futures all expire together (those fall in March, June, September and December).

What an "implied move" is

When traders talk about a stock's "implied move" into earnings, they mean the size of price swing the options market is currently pricing in, derived from the cost of at-the-money options (those with strike prices closest to the stock's current price) expiring shortly after the report. It is not a prediction of direction — up or down — just a market-derived estimate of magnitude. A stock priced for a 5% implied move could gap up 5%, down 5%, or land anywhere in between (or barely move at all).

Based on options pricing reported in the days leading up to each release:

• Home Depot (HD): implied move of about 4.2% for the Aug. 18 report.
• Lowe's (LOW): implied move of about 3.9% for the Aug. 19 report.
• TJX Companies (TJX): implied move of about 4.4% for the Aug. 19 report.
• Target (TGT): implied move of roughly 7%, the largest of the five — options traders are pricing in meaningfully more uncertainty around this report than the others.
• Walmart (WMT): implied move of about 4.6% for the Aug. 20 report.

These figures were compiled from options-market data reported between Aug. 5 and Aug. 14, 2026, and can shift right up until each report. A trader checking this on the morning of a specific earnings date should pull a live number rather than rely on one from a week earlier.

Does the market's number usually hold?

Implied moves are estimates, not guarantees, and each of these stocks has a mixed track record against its own priced-in expectations. Home Depot's largest recent deviation was a 9.2% actual move against a 3.9% implied move (November 2025) — more than double what was priced in. Lowe's has moved beyond its implied move in 4 of its last 8 reports. TJX has moved beyond its implied range in 2 of its last 8 reports, including an 8.3% single-day rise in August 2024. Walmart fell 7.7% in May 2026 against a 4.1% implied move that quarter — again, well outside the priced-in range.

The lesson isn't that implied moves are wrong — it's that they're a probability-weighted estimate, not a ceiling. A stock can and regularly does move more than what was priced in.

Why the Aug. 21 expiration matters, even though it's a "routine" monthly OpEx

As options approach expiration, at-the-money contracts carry the most "gamma" — the rate at which an option's sensitivity to the stock price (its delta) changes as the stock moves. Options market makers who sell contracts to traders typically hedge by buying or selling the underlying stock to stay roughly neutral. When gamma is high and dealers are positioned short it, that hedging activity can amplify short-term price moves: dealers buying into strength and selling into weakness, concentrated in the final trading hours before expiration.

August is also a historically thinner-liquidity month for U.S. equities than, say, March — reduced institutional trading-desk activity and a mid-summer lull mean the same size of dealer hedging flow can move a stock further than it would in a more liquid month. None of this is unique to Aug. 21, 2026, but it's a useful mechanical backdrop for why a "normal," non-triple-witching expiration can still produce outsized intraday swings, especially when stacked right behind five earnings reports.

Reading this as a trader, not a forecaster

None of the above is a signal to buy or sell any of these five stocks, or their options, before or after these reports. It's a framework for interpreting what the market is already pricing — and a reminder that options strategies built around earnings carry real, asymmetric risk. Selling options into an earnings report (a common way traders try to profit from "IV crush," the drop in implied volatility right after uncertainty resolves) can produce outsized losses if the stock moves further than the market priced in, since undefined-risk short strategies can lose significantly more than the premium collected. Buying options into earnings, meanwhile, means paying an elevated premium for that same uncertainty — and losing some or all of that premium if the stock doesn't move enough to clear it.

Options trading involves substantial risk and is not suitable for all investors.

This article is educational commentary on public market events, not personalized investment, trading, or tax advice.