MW This old-school retailer doesn't do earnings calls, and its stock has still beaten Nvidia's

By Bill Peters

Dillard's stock has shot more than 1,800% higher over the past five years. The company gives little commentary on its business but has returned cash to shareholders and shown operational prowess.

Dillard's has conducted $25.5 billion in share repurchases since 1999.

Earnings calls are often a time for Wall Street analysts to tell executives "Great quarter, guys," and ask about "color" and "puts and takes," and a chance for executives to talk about "headwinds" and "tailwinds." While investors like the transparency - or what passes for it during these events - not every company holds a call.

Yet those companies haven't exactly suffered in recent years, and shares of some of them have actually thrived, with an unlikely leader: the department-store chain Dillard's Inc. $(DDS)$.

Based on a FactSet screen of U.S. companies worth more than $5 billion that trade on major exchanges and don't hold earnings calls, Dillard's, as of Monday, had shot more than 1,800% higher over the past five years, trouncing the S&P 500's SPX 87% rally in the same span.

Not far behind was another store chain, video-game retailer GameStop Corp., which has ridden wave after wave of "meme stock" trading since 2021 and stopped holding calls around 21/2 years ago. Shares of GameStop $(GME)$ are up more than 1,700% over that five-year period.

Those gains are better than one of the stocks doing the heavy lifting for the markets of late: artificial-intelligence chip behemoth Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), which is up 1,310% over that time. Nvidia does hold earnings calls - its most recent one was on Wednesday.

Not heeding the call

Shiva Rajgopal, a professor at Columbia Business School, told MarketWatch there was at least one benefit to going earnings-call-free. "The advantage is that you need to worry less about how the CFO and the team will deal with aggressive analysts if the company were to miss the earnings forecast," he said.

Rajgopal said those companies could still make investors happy by offering financial forecasts and communicating clearly in other ways - by meeting more frequently with investors, providing more detail on regulatory disclosures, presenting at conferences or otherwise telling their stories online. But he said companies that don't schedule earnings calls put their analyst following and trading volume at risk. (Indeed, FactSet shows just four analysts covering Dillard's.)

"Academics often claim that quarterly calls promote a short-term quarter-by-quarter focus," he added. "Warren Buffett does not believe in quarterly calls, for instance. But I am not sure if companies that don't have the [stature] of Buffett can duck quarterly calls."

Indeed, among the other big stock-market advancers that skip quarterly calls are Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. $(BRK.A)$ $(BRK.B)$, which has seen its stock gain around 127% over the past five years. Elsewhere, shares of Jefferies Financial Group Inc. $(JEF)$ were up nearly 270% over that time. Shares of egg producer Cal-Maine Foods Inc. (CALM), whose bottom line had benefited from surging egg prices, have climbed nearly 180%.

Dillard's did not respond to a request for comment on why it didn't hold earnings calls. But the comparison between Dillard's and Nvidia's stocks has been made elsewhere, painting a picture of a retailer that took a bigger hit than Nvidia when pandemic restrictions hit and has thus put up a bigger percentage rebound since, with a focus on shareholder returns and retail-store fundamentals despite broader concerns about the department-store category.

Dillard's advantages

A user on the social-media platform X spotted the ongoing gap between Nvidia's and Dillard's shares over the weekend, as well as Dillard's hefty investor payouts and tighter share count over the years. Based on FactSet data, the company has offered $25.5 billion in share repurchases since 1999, which can increase earnings per share by pulling stock off the market.

In the process, Dillard's float - or the number of shares the public can trade - shrank to 8.21 million shares last year, from around 71 million in 2001, according to FactSet. Its shares outstanding have similarly thinned significantly since the late 1990s.

Fortune magazine last year noted Dillard's outperformance versus various big-tech names. The article said that what Dillard's lacked in in-store flair it made up for in nailing the basics - of running stores and keeping them well-staffed. While the company remains largely under family control, the story noted, that ownership has kept Wall Street's usual growth pressures at arm's length.

Moreover, when activist investor Barington Capital Group last year called on Macy's Inc. (M) to focus more on shareholder value, the Barington team held up Dillard's as an example.

"Barington believes Macy's should look to its department store peer, Dillard's, for a successful model in capital allocation," the firm said.

James Mitarotonda, Barington's chairman, said at the time that, since fiscal 2018, Dillard's had paid out 60% of its total cumulative cash sources to shareholders, compared with Macy's 25%.

"Dillard's has been executing a highly successful strategic plan focused on improving operating margins, prudently managing capital expenditures and aggressively returning capital to stockholders," Mitarotonda said.

But analysts have expressed concerns about both GameStop and Dillard's. Wedbush analysts have said they see "no potential for a rebound in GameStop's core business," while UBS analysts worried that discount chains and online retailers would continue to hurt department stores.

"We anticipate structural market share losses against other retail channels with more appealing value propositions to cause [Dillard's] long-term sales and margins to weaken," UBS analyst Mauricio Serna said in a note this month.

Either way, even while Wall Street's expectations for retailers remain low as consumers struggle with higher prices, Dillard's second-quarter results this month topped consensus expectations.

"We were happy to achieve a sales increase for the first time in a while and encouraged by strengthening sales trends in July," Chief Executive William Dillard said in the chain's earnings release. "In an operating environment that changes daily, we focused on controlling inventory, ending up 2% compared to 6% at the end of first quarter."

Since there was no earnings call, there was little other color to be found.

-Bill Peters

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August 28, 2025 15:01 ET (19:01 GMT)

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