You don’t need to pick and choose just one of these two retailers.
Walmart and Amazon are vying for customer loyalty they make more pushes into e-commerce.
Walmart will launch its membership program, Walmart+, on Sept. 15. The $35 service will give members unlimited free delivery. Amazon is opening its first online-only Whole Foods, in New York’s Brooklyn borough. The store will be used to fulfill online grocery orders to customers.
Quint Tatro, president of Joule Financial, says stock investors don’t need to leave one of these retail names in the aisle.
“You should own both and you get a pretty good bang for your buck.” Tatro said on CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Tuesday. “I like [Walmart’s] push into e-commerce, and certainly what the company is doing to sort of expand what they’ve been known for all these years. It’s really great to see.”
Walmart stock has climbed over 24% this year, while Amazon has surged nearly 90%, but Tatro doesn’t think you should be comparing apples to oranges here.
“The idea of them being a direct competitor to Amazon is a little stretched.” said Tatro. “You can literally get anything on Amazon.com, and that’s just not the case yet with Walmart.”
But Tatro says Walmart is still doing great on its own.
“Walmart is pretty attractive trading 25x forward earnings and 0.72 price-to-sales, and relatively healthy balance sheet.”
Ascent Wealth Partners managing partner Todd Gordon agrees.
“There has been a significant underperformance of Walmart compared to Amazon,”Gordon said on the same program. “Looking at Walmart+, it’s more of a grocery play designed to ship fresh food from their existing locations. I think it’s winnable in the short run, but longer term it could be tough running for them.”
Disclosure: Joule Financial and Ascent Wealth Partners own Amazon and Walmart.
