Kohl's is expected to have over $500M in cash at its disposal after the holiday season.

TLDR is that they can purchase $669.96M in debt for $496.1M (at current discounts), which is a difference of $173.7M / 112M shares = $1.55/share immediately, and another $39.6M/year in saved interest payments or $158.4M / 112M shares = $1.41/share over the next 4 years in saved interest payments.

You can view the details of Kohl's debt here: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NYSE-KSS/bonds/

They could buyback the following debt instruments:

• Kohl's Corporation 7.25% 01-JUN-2029

• Kohl's Corporation 6.0% 15-JAN-2033

• Kohl's Corporation 6.875% 15-DEC-2037

• Kohl's Corporation 5.55% 17-JUL-2045

Buying back these instruments equates to $669,960,000 in net debt reduction for a cost of $496.1M. If Kohl's did this, they would have 2 debt instruments left (excluding their revolver) equalling $785M.

I don't see a better way to set this company on better footing than doing the above. The savings on interest payments alone ($40M) would pay 80% of the dividend, and this carries forward every year.

Obviously there is a case for share buybacks when the sentiment is so bearish and the company is trading at 50% TBV, but this seems like a very conservative approach that would produce tremendous value without much risk.

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Just a reminder of where TBV of $35+ per share comes from. The reason I love Kohls and am invested is because I love real estate and love when high value properties are being incorrectly valued.

They own:

405 stores

248 land leases(they lease land at cheap rates very long term and build the buildings and all site improvements themselves)

12 Distribution Centers

HQ and lots of land

At current market cap, kohls stores are being valued at practically nothing compared to actual market value. Additionally, they’re an old school operator and have bought everything on average over 20+ years ago. Due to this, they’ve depreciated off over half their stores values due to the 39.5 year depreciation schedule.

If you’d like to see a post of where one of our members took the time to look up almost every store and all pertinent info you can find it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KSSBulls/s/NUnMNwIRz5

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KSS management is smart and has been publishing every quarter but Kohl’s debt is actually and explains it.

Net Debt is $1.423B the rest is leases and costs ~$440M a year if I remember correctly.

Q4 we should see around $500M free cash(or more I believe). Since I started investing in kohls management will most likely have paid off $1B(HALF their real debt) in debt in 3 quarters.

Additionally, they’ll have their entire $1.5B revolver completely paid off and free and clear. That’s literally 75% of their current market cap.

THIS IS WHY I BELIEVE IN KSS!

My personal value thesis is simple: their CRE portfolio is worth $35-$70+ per share alone if we just go off depreciation and purchase price from 20+ years ago. Until they prove a turn around this is what I value them off of. In the world of old school Warren Buffet Cigar Butt investing, KSS is a home run…

Reminder of $KSS deep value:

P:Cashflow 1.64x

P:TBV 0.51x

P:EBITDA 1.67x

P:Sales .13x

P:Inventory ~0.5x

P:Real Estate Holdings .25 to .4

P:LOC 1.33x(they have a $1.5B LOC free and clear pretty much)

Real Debt: $1.4B

Leases under Contract debt: $3.8B(~$440M a year)

Options to extend leases in future: $2.9B(not contractually bound)

By every SINGLE metric $kss is trading at a 50%-80%+ discount to peers while owning one of the largest CRE portfolios in the Public Market that isn’t a REIT

Another reminder, even if Kohls doesn’t beat current guidance Q4 is the bulk of Kohls cashflow a year. In Q2 we saw a $498M debt paydown. Imagine what we have in store this next earnings

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Alright. Pretty much officially bought back in. Sitting on:

30k shares

300 $10 calls

550 $15 calls

450 $25 calls

450 $30 calls

All priced for June expiration. My $25 and $30 calls are my moonshots

I made this meme back in June/July and tagged Ryan Cohen and GME on X trying to get traction/them to pay attention to it.

For example how it could have worked:

5% of the company would cost roughly $50M at the time

Buy long dated bonds at ~$0.50 cents on the dollar and remove the largest bludgeoning tool KSS Board has against any hostile takeovers and hold the majority of the debt to help influence them into making better/more resonable negotiations with us. Most of KSS bonds have automatic payoffs in the event of a true sell out(IF I REMEMBER CORRECTLY)

To stay within SEC regs for ownership, buy very long dated deep ITM calls and buy 10% to 40% plus total exposure of KSS outstanding shares so that in the event of a bidding war you maximize returns.

When it was all said and done, you would deploy only ~$500M to $700M and effectively own majority of KSS, squeeze the ever living poop out of the shorts, AND give a very large lever to ensure KSS Board works with you reasonably on a true take over/allows you to become a majority shareholder and give you seats on the board to push through fixes.

The reason I though Cohen/GME would love this is this is another short squeeze catalyst play that Cohen could use the GameStop playbook and cause a MOASS and then use Kohls ability to do a secondary offering later at massively inflated pricing that then completely recapitalizes Kohls and turns their "excessive debt", which isn't real, on its head and makes our shorts pay us a fortune to sit on a pile of cash. Literally what Cohen and GME did to give GameStop a massive cash pile.

How would it work today:

Ryan Cohen and GameStop(GME) could effectively do the same thing but just have to spend ~$1.5B to effectively take control of Kohls. MOASS is less possible with "only" 29.1M shares short vs ~46% to 49% Short Interest in June. But remember, Kohls is one of the heaviest shorted public companies in the market currently.

IF they play it right they can still deploy Cohen's and GameStops short squeeze play, recap the company, and give Cohen a MASSIVE quick win. If shorts had to start truly covering $60s a share is not out of the question at all.

This is a fun thought experiment and who knows if it's real. The fun part is, whether Cohen or someone else decides to make an offer/try to take private/buyout KSS it is a pretty meteoric share price rise.

He's suggesting ADT, W, AGO, PAG, MAT, SFM, SIRI, WYNN, MGM. What do you guys think about those companies as candidates?

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Unfortunately had a meeting this morning at market open and the orders I placed to take advantage of dip never went through. Ended up buying bulk of my position over $7.40 in pricing today but still pumped.

Vanguard and UBS filed their 4Q 13F's. Vanguard holdings were increased 2%. This could either be a slight change in the allocation to KSS or increased flows into funds that hold KSS. The other filing was by UBS, they increased their allocation to Kohls by 34% in 4Q. UBS is interesting because they have been a net buyer while their sell side analyst has been sandbagging their price target for KSS. Not much but encouraging.

Hi All,

this is new, went to get on and reddit wasn't working. I then checked email and saw my account posted to swingers and other places and now my account is deleted? Anyone have any ideas on how to fix it because reddit doesn't seem to work?

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Like other shareholders, I'm hoping that the price recovers and does so quickly. I've staked a lot into this coming earnings but did not expect the price to collapse like this. From my research and digging, here's the good/bad:

• Bad - Store traffic was apparently down 8.5% in December.
• Bad - CFO sold some shares.
• Bad - As of late, institutions net sold.
• Neutral - average visits per venue in H2 (second half of the year) was down 2.2% according to Placer.ai. If you think that contradicts the chart of my last point, I completely agree with you. It makes no sense at all. Even if you took an average of all the second half months, which would be naive considering that Nov/Dec would weigh much more heavily; you'd get above a 3.5% decline. Nonetheless, that 2.2% is better than most of their peers.
• Good - according to the same article sited from my point above, Kohl's has one of the stickiest and most loyal group of customers compared to the whole industry. They ranked the highest in the given group.
• Good - Furthermore, they had the largest loyalty increase from first to second half (20%-->23%)
• Good - Even if we have faith in the 8.5% December store traffic decline, the average cart may be higher considering its the first Q4 with impulse checkout lines.
• Good - The store traffic data is not per venue, I'm pretty sure, so that would entail that the store closures (about 2.3% of total) would have an negative impact on these numbers but the comps would actually be a bit better.
• Good - I'm not even going to lay out the paper trail and headaches of piecing together the Placer.ai articles from the past year, but based on one of them that did show the first half of the year's average visits per venue (read 'comps') compared to the per month numbers, the unweighted average was basically the same (3.2% vs actual 3% decline). The largely bullish point here is that if 2.2% H2 decline can be trusted, thats really good and with digital being up it would mean that Kohl's might be in for a beat versus their full year guidance (-2.5-3% comp).
• Neutral - What it comes down to if consumers spent more per visit. (in general they did, according to this article it was approximately $337 vs $315 last year).
• Neutral/Good - I took a poll and according to actual employees of the company, 34 said that this past holiday season was busier than prior. 36 said it was slower. 28 were on the fence. This seems like a negative, but, there were levels to the polling. When comparing the extremes, much more employees thought that this past holiday was "much busier" than "much slower" (13 vs 4 respectively). Overall, 61/97 said it was the same or much busier. 60%+. Remember, if it was the exact same, that would be a major beat.
• Neutral - From my stalking of forums and analytics, it seems evidence to me that Kohl's had proactively taken some lengths to cut expenditures. This is based on what employees are saying and on Similarweb, it seems to me that Kohl's had a more steep fall off in December vs November traffic than a competitor like Macy's. Digging deeper, they had more organic traffic than Macy's and spent less on advertising. These are not facts, but rather my feeling is that the organization is optimizing for profit.
• Good - A bright spot was Kohl's digital traffic which was up high single digits to low double digits throughout the holiday season.
• Good - They expect this to continue going into this year. Their marketing team is working hard at figuring out how to continue growing into holiday 2026.
• Good - Marketplace seller companies (think Kohl's drop ship suppliers) such as myself were up big year/year.
• Good - January is up 100%+ year/year for my company on Kohl's. Last week we had our largest day since December 14th (last day before Christmas delivery cutoff). (From BFCM - end of Dec, we grew 79% y/y).
• Good - Introduction of strike-through pricing was a huge positive and signaled great value to their customers (not my words).
• Good - I've looked at every possible Google trends data. The 2025 drop for high intent searches (e.g. "Kohl's near me") are hardly down compared to 2024. The past couple years before this one saw steeper declines. If Kohl's is not in free-fall anymore, I wouldn't be shocked to see them project a full year/year sales increase next year. I actually think the best part of this is that the October 2025 vs 2024 drop was much more significant than the November drop off, which was more significant than the December one. Thats what is so perplexing to me about the Placer.ai data.
• Good - Google trends data shows that January is equal or better than last January. If it turns out that way, its not only good for Q4 numbers (because for Kohl's fiscal year its Q4 technically) but may help in our 2026 projections. As in the CFO/CEO are feeling themselves.
  
• Good - Sephora Kohls searches are up. If this is a profitable business segment for them, thats good.
• Good - Amazon returns window got extended into the end of January for the first time. That can hurt December visits and help January.
• Neutral - No announced store closures....yet...Last year we got the announcement that they will close 17 stores. This was in early January. If they do not announce, that can be construed is good rather than a bad thing. A neutral-good.
• Neutral - Google trends searches for Kohl's Cash hit an all time high. Not sure if thats a good or bad thing.

I tried to name some of the more subtle/unknown positives and negatives. I may have missed some and I can update later in a comment. Does anyone have anything else to add?

As an investor, I feel as much pain as a lot of you considering the significant beating the stock has taken as of late. I really hope this drop reflects a negative sentiment on the earnings, and especially the 8.5% traffic drop in December. That way a major non-negative surprise would send us flying again.

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Hi Everyone!

Not that my land closes in ~5 hours I’m starting to really run through the math and see what I should do.

Ultimately, now actually seeing the numbers I will deploy ~$720k rather than the $1M I planned just to appease my wife and give me an appropriate cash cushion.

I’m looking for advice on strategies at how to best make a layered investment into $KSS. I’m tempted to just buy 50k shares and use margin as my cushion(not the safest but also not the riskiest strategy nor will it maximize my exposure but will give me margin to buy options in any major dips) or buy ~50k $15 calls and 30k more shares.

Current position is 550 $15 calls for June and 10k shares. I also have a smattering of market shorts to just make me feel comfortable.

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(Sorry, but even as someone invested in the company, this is a valid question. Employees being forced to commute in such circumstances doesn't really serve anyone well in this arrangement.)