Kempczinski blamed a botched value menu rollout for two-thirds of Q2's U.S. traffic miss, calling it an execution failure, not a strategy problem. While MCD slid 15% from its February peak, peers SBUX and YUM posted comps in the 7 to 8 percent range, making McDonald's the most dislocated name in QSR. McDonald's 220 million loyalty users drive $40 billion in systemwide sales, fueling Feinseth's case for AI personalization to push shares to $390.
It sounds nuts, but SoFi1 is giving new Active Invest users up to $3,000 in stock for a limited time, and all it takes is a $50 deposit to get started.2 See for yourself (Sponsor) McDonald's (NYSE:MCD) currently trades at $272.83, well below the Wall Street consensus price target of $316.06. That gap works out to roughly 15.85% implied upside. The world's largest quick-service restaurant operator runs a 46,028-unit global system through a highly franchised model that produces operating margins near 46.5% and strong free cash flow.
The stock is a Dow blue chip that dividend investors treat as defensive, so a slide of this size gets Wall Street's attention. One outlier has gone further. Tigress Financial's Ivan Feinseth carries a $390 target, the highest active call on the Street, implying nearly 43% upside from here.
The catalyst was a rough Q2 26 earnings report. Global comparable sales decelerated to 1.3% from 3.8% a year earlier, U.S. comparable guest counts turned negative, and comps in China and France went red. Revenue of $7.10 billion missed the $7.13 billion consensus, and while EPS of $3.38 beat by 1.77%, SG&A surged 17%.
CEO Chris Kempczinski owned the problem, telling investors, "We don't have a strategy problem. We simply didn't execute at the level we needed to in the second quarter." He pinned roughly two-thirds of the U.S. traffic miss on a botched rollout of the 10 items for under $3 EDAP menu, saying "call it a third of the system that did not execute against what we were guiding around" on pricing. SoFi Active Invest is offering a limited-time promotion.
Open an account, fund it with $50 or more, and you could receive up to $3,000 in complimentary stock for Active Invest accounts. See for yourself by clicking here now. Shares are off 14.54% from the February 2026 peak near $319 and sit below both the 50-day and 200-day moving averages.
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