{"id":425962,"date":"2026-01-29T21:40:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T14:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/2026\/01\/tough-day-for-david-tepper-as-whr-stock-falls-8\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T21:40:17","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T14:40:17","slug":"tough-day-for-david-tepper-as-whr-stock-falls-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/2026\/01\/tough-day-for-david-tepper-as-whr-stock-falls-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Tough day for David Tepper as WHR stock falls 8%"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>David Tepper is one of the great hedge fund managers and made a killing last year in China stocks.<\/p>\n<p>In November, filings revealed he to a huge stake in appliance-maker Whirlpool Corp, buying a position worth $432 million at a reported price of $76.60. That&#8217;s about 10% of the company, which makes brands like Maytag, Bauknect and KitchenAid.<\/p>\n<p>it&#8217;s a company that I&#8217;ve <a href=\"https:\/\/investinglive.com\/news\/whirlpool-shares-on-warning-about-the-housing-market-20250130\/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"article-link\">written about<\/a> extensively over the years but not as a stock. It&#8217;s because appliance spending is a good economic barometer.<\/p>\n<p>There was bad news today in the earnings report and shares are down 8.5% to $74.00 in the pre-market.<\/p>\n<p>The company is generally seen as a proxy for housing, as new home owners tend to buy appliances. That sector is in a brutal recession right now due to the post-pandemic rise in interest rates.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the Tepper investment is a bet on a housing rebound or normalization as we&#8217;re certainly near a trough (he&#8217;s usually a macro investor). Perhaps he thinks Trump will stack the Fed and lower interest rates by 150 bps. Perhaps it&#8217;s a tariff re-shoring story as foreign appliance imports are locked out.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not clear as he hasn&#8217;t gone on the record with the reasons for the share purchase. Here is the Q4 company deck, making a case for what it&#8217;s doing right.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, company fundamentals aren&#8217;t great. That company&#8217;s Q4 results:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Revenue $4.10B vs $4.27B with 2025 full-year sales results down 6.5% y\/y<\/li>\n<li>Ongoing EPS $1.10 vs $1.52 expected<\/li>\n<li>2026 revenue guidance $15.3-15.6B vs $15.6B consensus<\/li>\n<li>2026 ongoing EPS guidance $7.00 vs $7.11-$7.21 consensus<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The spin in the release looks forward:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWith a challenging 2025 behind us, our confidence for 2026 is based on our recent successful product<br \/>\nlaunches, reduced promotional intensity and a gradual recovery of the housing market,&#8221; says CEO Mark Bitzer in the release.<\/p>\n<p>If it can hit those targets, it&#8217;s fairly cheap, trading at 10.5x ongoing earnings and a nearly 10% FCF yield at the guidance midpoint. On free cash flow, the company is aiming to generate 7% of sales, which would $1.14 billion at its $16.3B sales target, or a 25% FCF yield.<\/p>\n<p>Another promising spot is price-to-sales at 0.3x. Historically, it&#8217;s traded in a 0.4-0.6x range.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that net debt to EBITDA is at 5.5x and all the free cash (or asset sales) will need to go to deleveraging with the company talking about $400m of debt payments this year (or nearly all the forecast free cash flow).<\/p>\n<p>On the macro side, here is the regional look:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>North American Q4 sales down 0.9% y\/y, with the company highlighting Canada as a weak spot<\/li>\n<li>Latam sales down 4.6% y\/y<\/li>\n<li>Global sales up 8.0% y\/y<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Overall, it continues to be an interesting name but I still find it surprising that Tepper is making a play as it&#8217;s cheap but not extremely cheap and it&#8217;s hard to have much confidence in management.<\/p>\n<p>The good news is that today you can buy it cheaper than one of the all-time great fund managers.<\/p>\n<p>                            This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Tepper is one of the great hedge fund managers and made a killing last year in China stocks. In November, filings revealed he to a huge stake in appliance-maker Whirlpool Corp, buying a position worth $432 million at a reported price of $76.60. That&#8217;s about 10% of the company, which makes brands like Maytag, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-market-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425962\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}