Walmart and TJX Buy Back More Stock
Retail giants kept buying shares while software and home-goods firms paused or stopped repurchases.
Coverage: 6 of 12 companies in this theme (ADSK, ESTC, TJX, TOL, WMT, WSM) — a sample, not the full set.
Walmart (WMT) and TJX Companies (TJX) kept buying back stock in the summer of 2026, while Elastic (ESTC) and Williams-Sonoma (WSM) sat on their authorizations. The split across six companies points to uneven confidence in using cash to shrink the share count.
Walmart approved a new $30 billion repurchase program in February 2026 that replaced a prior $20 billion authorization, and $25.1 billion remained available as of July 31, 2026. The retailer bought 25,962,022 shares in the three months ended July 31, 2026, including 10,936,366 shares in July at an average price of $111.99.
TJX Companies’ board approved a new $3.0 billion stock repurchase program in February 2026, with about $2.7 billion remaining as of August 1, 2026. The company repurchased 5,097,116 shares in the second quarter of fiscal 2027, including 2,632,354 shares in the period from May 31 through July 4, 2026.
Elastic’s board authorized a $500.0 million share repurchase program in October 2025 with no expiration date; $200.0 million remained after the three months ended January 31, 2026. The company purchased no shares in January 2026 under that program, after buying 1,323,219 shares in November 2025 and 1,093,036 shares in December 2025. Elastic later bought 804,601 shares in May 2026 at an average price of $49.71 and made no repurchases in June or July 2026, leaving $120.0 million available.
Williams-Sonoma made no share repurchases in the fiscal period from May 4 through August 2, 2026, under its September 2024 $1.0 billion authorization, with $50,756,000 remaining.
The retail pair still had billions of dollars of authorization left after heavy buying. Elastic and Williams-Sonoma, by contrast, had smaller programs and little or no recent activity. That gap in both scale and pace is the clearest signal of where each company is choosing to deploy cash.