I keep hitting the buy button on Nike, and Tuesday’s earnings report has not slowed me down. It has done the opposite. Every panic headline about CFO Matthew Friend stepping down, every Reddit thread warning of soft numbers, every fresh leg lower in the share price has me adding again. This is a confession of conviction. Take it as such.
The stock I cannot stop buying is Nike (NYSE:NKE | NKE Price Prediction), and the reason is simple. The market is treating a brand-equity franchise priced at $40.75 like a structurally broken business, while every receipt I have collected says it is a structurally sound one in the middle of a turnaround.
Why the buy button stays active
Start with what the share price has done. Nike is down 35.03% year to date and down 33.04% over the past year. The five-year line shows a 71.33% drawdown. That kind of pain inside a company that prints $46.52 billion in trailing revenue at a 16% return on equity is exactly what I show up for.
Reason one is the dividend. The quarterly payout sits at $0.410 per share, the yield runs to 3.96%, and the company just stamped its 24th consecutive year of dividend increases. That is a quarter century of shareholder discipline, funded by a balance sheet carrying $6.66 billion in cash and equivalents.
Reason two is the earnings receipts the bearish narrative refuses to read. Nike has beaten consensus four quarters running. Q1 FY26 EPS came in at $0.49 versus a $0.27 estimate. Q2 delivered $0.53 against $0.38. Q3 printed $0.35 against $0.28. Polymarket traders agree, pricing a 91.5% probability Nike beats again on Tuesday.
Reason three is what the people running the company are doing with their own money. CEO Elliott Hill acquired 47,320 shares on April 13, 2026 around $42. Director Tim Cook bought 25,000 shares on April 10. Robert Swan and John Rogers added too. That is a coordinated insider cluster at almost the exact price I am buying today. Forward earnings trade at a 21x multiple against an analyst consensus target of $58.13.
The risk I am not waving away
The real worry is China and Converse. Greater China revenue fell 17% in Q2 and 7% in Q3. Converse dropped 35% in Q3 alone. Friend himself has warned the recovery will not be linear, and he is right. What keeps the thesis intact is that North America grew 9% in Q2 and 3% in Q3, and wholesale grew every single quarter of fiscal 2026. The healthy parts of Nike are getting healthier while the weak parts shrink toward irrelevance.
What keeps me loading from here
The incoming CFO, David Denton, ran capital allocation at Lowe’s and CVS. Pair that hire with Elliott Hill’s “Win Now” framework, a $0.410 dividend backed by 24 years of raises, and a stock trading right at its 52-week low of $40.00, and the math gets very quiet. I am buying the swoosh while the crowd sells the headline.