What our model says COST and WMT are worth

This page compares TickerWorth's fair-value estimate for Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST) and Walmart Inc. (WMT) side by side — a discounted-cash-flow (DCF) model cross-checked against peer multiples and asset value. On our fair-value estimate neither COST nor WMT looks undervalued at today's price. These are model estimates — educational, not price targets or recommendations, and the model can be wrong. The point of a head-to-head is less the exact numbers than the questions they raise: which business the market is pricing more optimistically, and whether that optimism is justified by the growth each would need to deliver.

COST trades at $989.11 against a fair value of $328.61 (201% above fair value), while WMT trades at $118.81 against a fair value of $45.00 (164% above fair value). A larger gap below fair value means the market is more skeptical of that business's future cash flows than our model is.

The assumptions differ under the hood. COST is discounted at a weighted-average cost of capital (WACC) of 9.4% with a terminal growth rate of 2.5%; WMT at a WACC of 8.0% and terminal growth of 2.5%. A higher discount rate lowers today's value of future cash flows, so a cheaper-looking multiple can simply reflect higher perceived risk. When two companies screen differently on our DCF, the discount rate and the growth path are usually where the disagreement lives.

How to use this comparison: treat each fair value as what the business would be worth on our lenses — the DCF lens is what the business is worth if its cash flows grow as modeled and are discounted at the stated WACC. Open either company's full page to see every assumption and its source, run the reverse-DCF to see the growth the current price already implies, and read the sensitivity band to see how far each fair value moves with the discount rate — setting the discount rate yourself is a Pro tool. None of this is investment advice — it is a transparent, auditable way to frame COST versus WMT on intrinsic value.