Down 34% With a 5% Yield, Is This High-Dividend Stock Too Cheap to Ignore, and Worth Buying in October?

It’s a little hard to imagine now, but not so long ago, Target (TGT -0.54%) was a much-loved stock. The ubiquitous retailer seemed to be making all the right moves, with improving fundamentals reflecting a successful strategy.

That was then, this is now. Target’s share price has cratered by 34% so far this year while other retail favorites — Walmart and Costco Wholesale, to name two — have retained their luster. Target is the very definition of the beaten-down stock these days, but I don’t think it’s going to stay that way for long.

A perfect storm of negativity

Target’s woes are the result of several negative factors converging to hurt the fundamentals.

The current administration’s trade policy has seen tariffs come and go, at times unpredictably; this isn’t good for a retailer like Target that imports regularly. The supply chain issues that were a feature, not a bug, of the early 2020s weren’t managed all that well by the company; meanwhile, it had to contend with persistent inflation that kept many consumer wallets shut.

Image source: Getty Images.

Target’s recent performance has been disappointing, at least on the surface. In its second quarter, the results of which were published near the end of August, the company’s net sales slumped by nearly 1% year over year to just over $25 billion. That was on the back of a nearly 2% drop in comparable-store sales.

Net income as measured by generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) fell more precipitously, diving by 22% to $935 million. This wasn’t the only recent quarter to feature top- or bottom-line declines.

Retail is a tough industry, though, stuffed as it is with much competition and low margins. Prior to its current doldrums, Target was an outperformer, if anything, and that memory is making the recent slides look more dire than they might otherwise appear.

Besides, there are numerous reasons to be positive about the company’s future if you know where to look. One is its well-managed same-day delivery service, where it has effectively copied a page from the Amazon playbook. Its take from same-day delivery increased a robust 25% in the second quarter, contributing to a more than 4% increase in overall digital sales.

And new-ish premium programs such as the Roundel advertising service and third-party sellers marketplace Target Plus have been posting double-digit gains of late.

A turnaround is in the works. Yes, analysts tracking the stock are collectively modeling slides over full-year 2025 for both revenue (projected to fall 1.4% against the 2024 figure) and per-share profitability (by 17%). However, they’re anticipating a comeback in 2026, with the annual top line inching up by nearly 2%, and a rise in headline earnings per share by a relief-inducing 9%.

A generous member of dividend royalty

What makes Target even more appealing as a turnaround-to-be story is that its quarterly dividend, generous during the good times, is especially rich now. It yields more than 5% on the current sunken share price, putting it firmly in high-yield dividend territory. It also beats the pants off the average dividend yield of S&P 500 component stocks, which sits at less than 1.2%.

What’s more, unlike other beaten-down companies, the payout looks sustainable. In its most recently reported quarter, free cash flow (FCF) approached $4.5 billion, far more than enough to fund the slightly over $2 billion in dividends it doled out during the period. It even had sufficient monies for activities like share buybacks and debt retirement.

Target’s shareholder payout is clearly important to the company, so much so that it has declared dividend raises annually for 54 years running, making it a Dividend King. That’s one of the longest dividend-raise streaks going for any company of any size, and it’s beaten by only a handful of publicly traded businesses.

So ultimately what we have here is a stock that feels extremely oversold and is cheap not only in price, but in key fundamentals (its forward P/E, for example, is less than 12). It’s also a monster of an income generator these days, with that 5%-plus yield. Target continues to be a bargain, in my view, and is absolutely tempting as a buy.