Consumer demand across the consumer-facing companies LikeFolio tracks rose 7.9% year-over-year in August, and Andy Swan says the same measure has grown consistently for three to four months through an oil-price spike and a rising interest rate.
Wall Street spent the same period selling the companies that serve those consumers. Some retail names are down 30% to 40% in 90 days, Home Depot is down almost 30% for the year, and the Fed was hours from another decision when this was recorded.
"Wall Street's fears right now about a consumer slowdown are definitely overblown and we think misplaced."
Swan's firm reads millions of social mentions, website visits and app downloads to work out what people are actually buying, and sells those demand signals to institutional investors he says are among its biggest clients.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 29 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Andy Swan, Co-founder of LikeFolio, the consumer-data research firm that works with TradeSmith and sells its consumer demand signals to institutional investors
🎙️ Host: Bridget Bennett, who presents MarketBeat's investing videos and its Monday live shows
📰 Published: 16 September 2026 on YouTube (MarketBeat) · recorded before the Fed decision
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 29 min | ✅ Time saved: 16 min
Key Takeaways
Consumer demand across the companies LikeFolio tracks was up 7.9% year-over-year in August, which is not what a slowdown looks like
The growth held through an oil-price spike on the Iran conflict and through higher interest rates
The top 10% of spenders carry the economy and are the least exposed to rates and inflation
Walmart's consumer demand signal is the highest it has been in several years, while the stock sells off
The trade-down is coming from shoppers who used to buy at Target, and its e-commerce now delivers within a couple of hours
Home Depot demand is up 15% year-over-year because homeowners locked into 3% mortgages have stopped waiting to move
A strong earnings report is often followed by a pullback because momentum money sells the news
Walmart's low volatility is the point, not a drawback — the business is steadier, so the stock is
Swan expects a double lift in Q4 or early Q1 2027: higher earnings guidance and a higher multiple at the same time
Google has a data-center backlog it cannot fill that is larger than the revenue those data centers produced in the past 12 months
His reading is that cloud customers are consuming 50% to 70% more than they contracted for
The consumer has already absorbed oil above $100 and a sustained rise in interest rates
Buy-now-pay-later services are part of how spending kept going
1. The Consumer Is Not Slowing
Bennett opened on the Fed's inflation fight and asked whether that is the short-term problem rather than the long-term story. Swan answered by describing what his firm measures rather than what the market fears.
LikeFolio works from millions of data points on social mentions, website visits and app downloads to establish what consumers are doing, rather than what Wall Street thinks is happening.
On that data, he said, "there's no indication to us at all that the consumer is slowing down" — the only change is that shoppers are getting pickier and looking for more value.
Asked where the burden of higher rates falls, he pointed at who does the spending: "And the top 10% are not impacted by these things nearly as much as the bottom 90%, but they're doing the load of the lifting."
He does not think a 25-basis-point move matters to that group. Inflation is not new to the consumer, and neither are rates higher than the decade-plus everyone got used to.
The number he put behind it: "In August alone, consumer demand across all of the companies that we cover" was up 7.9% from a year earlier. "That's not something that you see when consumers are slowing down."
The growth was not a single month. "We've seen consistent growth in consumer demand across multiple sectors of the economy throughout the entire past 3 to four months," he said, through an oil-price rise on the Iran conflict and through rate moves in both directions.
His conclusion is that the selling is indiscriminate: there are opportunities in individual stocks and in baskets of consumer stocks "while Wall Street throws the baby out with the bathwater."
2. The Market De-Risks Early
Bennett granted the fundamental case and pressed on the mechanics — 25 basis points will not change the long-term story, but it still moves the stock this week. Swan agreed, and treated it as the recurring pattern rather than the exception.
He listed the panics of recent months in order: capital-expenditure spending, the Iran conflict, inflation rates, oil prices.
"The market tends to anticipate and take risk off the table a lot of times prematurely, and that's what we think that we're seeing once again," he said, and expected the same for the rest of that week and the rest of the month.
Against that, he said the demand for those companies' products and services is moving significantly higher.
"What we see is Main Street really strong and very resilient at this point finding new ways to spend money with some of the old companies," he said.
Bennett framed the consequence for a viewer: the panic is what makes fundamentally strong companies cheaper, and buying the dip is the whole opportunity, in retail and outside it.
3. Walmart's Trade-Down Win
The first of the three names was Walmart, which Swan called an easy call.
His demand data shows the top 10% of spenders moving to Walmart for value: "So, our Walmart consumer demand signal is as high as it's been for multiple years into this Wall Street selloff."
The shoppers arriving are ones who used to buy at Target or other more expensive stores, he said, and "they're taking very big pocketbooks with them."
The second leg of the case is e-commerce, where he was blunt about the starting point: "They fell behind for a decade. Their e-commerce solution was pretty terrible and they were losing to Amazon at every turn."
On where it stands now: "It's competitive with Amazon. It gets the items to your door, within a couple of hours."
The strategic value, in his account, is that the customers it is winning back are ones who would not have shopped there five or six years ago, and that the data shows those customers being made happy enough to come back.
4. Good Earnings, Then a Dip
Bennett raised the pattern that bothers retail investors: a strong earnings report, then a pullback a few weeks later. Swan's explanation is about who owns the stock going in.
"I think it's no secret that Wall Street likes to get ahead of itself a little bit," he said, describing momentum funds pushing stocks making new highs even higher.
What follows is a sell-the-news event: "Even when the company puts out a phenomenal earnings report, phenomenal guidance, it just becomes time for a lot of traders and those with a short-term outlook to take profits and can push the stock down."
He drew the line between holding periods rather than between good and bad companies. The move is a problem for anyone watching the next two or three months, and an entry for anyone thinking in two, three or five years.
What his data adds, he said, is not just that these companies are winning new customers but that they are making them happy enough to keep.
5. Low Volatility Is the Play
Bennett put the comparison directly: Walmart has pulled back not quite 10% in three months, while other retail names are down 30% to 40% over 90 days, and Walmart's 52-week range is barely a range at all.
Swan's answer was that the volatility is a property of the business, not of the ticker: "Well, the stocks are more volatile because the business is more volatile. And Walmart stock is less volatile because its business is less volatile."
He treats that stability as the reason to use Walmart to express a view on the consumer rather than a smaller, more niche retailer.
The trade he described is skewed: "That's an asymmetric type of opportunity in our books that reduces the total risk that you're taking to the downside because Walmart's so diversified, so big and so stable" while still giving exposure to the consumer upside.
The upside, in his framing, comes from Wall Street being wrong about the consumer and from wallet share moving out of other retailers into Walmart.
6. Home Depot's Second Wave
The second name is more volatile, and Swan said the market treats it as more exposed to inflation and interest rates. His data says the opposite.
The figure he gave is "consumer demand for Home Depot plus 15% year-over-year," which he said is about as strong as it has been since the do-it-yourself renovation boom of the pandemic.
The mechanism is the mortgage lock-in, and he said homeowners have stopped waiting it out: "And what we think is happening there is that consumers have pretty much accepted the fact that mortgage rates are going to stay high."
"You understand that if you're sitting at a mortgage rate of 3% or less, you're probably not selling if you don't have to anytime soon," he said. "The home that you're in is going to stay the home that you're in for a while."
What follows is spending on the house instead of on moving — kitchens, outdoor space, basements, and appliances such as a washer-dryer combination or a refrigerator.
"There's a new cycle of home renovation happening and most people that are embracing that are going to Home Depot," he said, and of 15% growth at a company that size he said: "It tells us that Wall Street is dead wrong about the inflationary or interest rate pressures that they think that the consumer is feeling."
Bennett asked whether the do-it-yourself wave is large enough to show up in earnings. Swan said the professional side counts too: "Home Depot wins most of the contractor business as well." A contractor hired to remodel a house, he added, is very likely to buy the materials there.
7. When the Fear Thaws
Swan's case for the timing of a re-rating is that management teams are being deliberately cautious, and that the caution itself sets up the move.
Executives are "towing the line" on guidance, he said, because interest rates are rising and oil prices are rising and they have to be conservative about the future.
His expectation is that the Iran situation, the Fed and oil prices normalize, at which point managements can talk optimistically again.
The result he described is two things happening at once: "So you get that double dip of expanded EPS guidance along with an expansion of multiple that can really drive stock prices up very quickly once that kind of fear thaw starts to happen."
He put a date on it: "And that's what we think will happen either in Q4 or early Q1 of 2027."
8. The Institutions Are Back
Bennett brought her own screen to the conversation, saying institutional buying in Home Depot showed large signals in the second quarter with the stock near the bottom of its 52-week range, and added: "It's down almost 30% for the year, but you can see they're starting to get back in at where the stock is today."
Swan said he watches the same thing, and likes seeing institutions raise positions into a trough.
His reason is that those institutions are looking at his own data: "We sell directly to those institutions," he said, and they are among LikeFolio's biggest clients for consumer demand signals.
That means institutions can see the same divergence he does — demand rising on Main Street while companies and sell-side analysts stay cautious.
"And when institutions are starting to pick up shares while the consumer data is pointing higher, that's just another confirmation signal that we're on to something," he said.
9. Amazon's Two Engines
The third name is Amazon, and Swan separated it from the other two on the grounds that it pays twice.
The consumer half is the same story: demand signals for buying things from Amazon at or near all-time highs, with no sign of a slowdown.
"But with Amazon, you get that additional exposure to the AI arms race through their data center products," he said, calling the demand for those products skyrocketing. "We think it's probably the best company in the world."
His evidence that the artificial-intelligence build-out is accelerating rather than pausing comes from a competitor: "They've got a backlog for their data centers of a half a trillion dollars that they can't fulfill right now. And that's larger than the total amount of revenue that they got from those data centers over the trailing 12 months."
"So when you see backlogs bigger than the actual realized revenue stream, something very big is happening. And it's not a slowdown. It's not a pacing of the frontier. It's an expansion. It's an acceleration," he said.
Bennett asked whether Amazon's retail business generates enough cash to limit the company's exposure to the debt hyperscalers are raising. Swan said yes: "And Amazon's balance sheet can handle much more than they're even projecting to take on." He added: "The consumer side of their business is extremely strong, prints a lot of cash. The data center side of their business is extraordinarily profitable."
On the wider argument that the hyperscalers are overspending, he was dismissive: "So, I think for any of us to sit back and say they're spending too much is a fool's errand." He said Amazon and Alphabet have executed against enormous opportunities for three decades and rarely spent on something that did not materialize.
The demand figure behind his confidence is what those companies hear from customers: "Their customers are spending 50 to 70% more than they committed to and are asking for more capacity." Not building, he said, means ceding the lead to Microsoft or Alphabet.
His summary of management's position: "The smartest minds in the world are saying we have to spend this money because it's going to make us a lot of money two to three years from now and we don't care what Wall Street says about our free cash flow in the meantime."
10. Can the Consumer Take It
Bennett pushed back with the cost side, and used her own household to do it: "I can't panic order a birthday present for a kid at 11 p.m. and get it delivered to my house at 8:00 the next morning and not think that gas prices won't impact a company like Amazon and their overall business model."
Swan conceded the arithmetic. As gas prices and interest rates move higher, things get more expensive and some of that reaches the consumer.
His answer is that this has already been tested: "We have seen oil over $100. We have seen interest rates significantly higher than they were five or six years ago for a sustained period of time," and the consumer dealt with it.
He offered the counterfactual rather than claiming no damage: "In a parallel universe where interest rates remained low and oil prices remained in the 60s or 70s the consumer might simply be doing far better and spending far more."
On that reading, the current consumer is already a weakened one and is still growing: "This could be, a slowed down consumer that we're seeing right now, but that slowed down consumer is still able to spend more than they were last year."
Part of the explanation he gave is credit: "There's a lot of these buy now pay later services that have emerged that have allowed consumers to continue spending in somewhat responsible ways."
The question he says he is actually trading is the upside case, not the downside one: "If these environmental pressures, Iran, war, oil prices, interest rates start to ease or at least stabilize, how much stronger could the consumer become?"
That is why he screens for companies taking market share now, on the reasoning that they benefit most when conditions stabilize.
Bonus Insights
Swan's view is that company executives are not the constraint on capital spending — the constraint is how it reads to shareholders. "These people spend money because they're going to make money," he said.
Bennett's read on his Amazon case was blunt: "That is a very bullish Buzz Lightyear outlook on this stock for sure." She noted that Amazon carries more volatility than the other two names because of the artificial-intelligence exposure.
Swan said his framework applies across retail: look for the companies stealing customers from competitors, because those customers become repeat buyers.
Swan's bottom line is that the market is pricing a consumer slowdown his data does not show, and that the way to own that gap is through large, stable businesses taking share — Walmart on value, Home Depot on a renovation cycle created by high mortgage rates, and Amazon because it pays out on both the consumer and the data-center build-out.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Walmart (His first pick: the demand signal is the highest in several years as top-decile spenders trade down, and its e-commerce now competes with Amazon on delivery speed)
Home Depot (Consumer demand up 15% year-over-year on a second wave of renovation, plus most of the contractor business)
Amazon (His third pick, and the only one that carries both the consumer and the data-center build-out)
Target and Lowe's (The retailers he says are losing the wallet share Walmart and Home Depot are gaining)
Alphabet and Microsoft (Alphabet's unfillable data-center backlog is his evidence of acceleration; Microsoft is who Amazon would cede the lead to if it stopped spending)
LikeFolio and TradeSmith (His consumer-data research, built on social mentions, website visits and app downloads, and sold to institutional clients)
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