MCD Q1 2026 Earnings: What 12 Years of Reaction Cohorts Say

MCD Earnings Are A Comp-Sales Story

Mega-cap restaurant earnings have a tighter reaction band than most sectors — MCD's 12-year median earnings-day |move| is ~3.1%, well below the S&P 500 Q1 reporter average of ~5.4%. The cohort retrieval pulls 47 prior MCD prints back to 2014, plus cross-ticker analogs from QSR, SBUX, YUM, and CMG with similar pre-print drift and short-interest profiles.

Across the 47-print MCD cohort, the 5-day forward median is +0.4% and the 10-day median is +0.7%. The IQR is [-2.6%, +3.5%] on the 5-day window. That's a tight central band by single-stock standards and reflects how much MCD trades like a defensive name into prints.

The Feature That Flips The Distribution

Within the cohort, one feature attribution dominates everything else: U.S. comp-store-sales surprise. Splitting the 47 prints by 'beat the consensus comp number' vs. 'miss' produces two cleanly separated forward-return distributions:

• Comp beat (n=29): 5-day median +1.4%, 10-day +2.1%, hit-rate 62%
• Comp miss (n=18): 5-day median -1.6%, 10-day -2.3%, hit-rate 33%
• Headline EPS surprise alone (in either direction): no significant distribution shift
• International comp surprise: secondary feature, ~40% of the comp-beat impact when U.S. comps are flat

What The Pre-Print Tape Is Saying

Heading into the May 7 open, MCD has drifted ~1.8% over the prior 5 sessions on rising RVOL, with options-implied move at ~3.4% — above the 12-year cohort median |move|. That's a setup the cohort has seen before: the subset of prints where pre-drift was positive AND IV was elevated has a 5-day median of +0.9% and a hit-rate of 58%, modestly better than the full cohort.

The conformal-calibrated 80% prediction band off the cohort sits at [-3.6%, +4.1%] for the 5-day forward. That's the actionable read: until the comp number prints, the cohort can't tell you direction, only magnitude.

What To Watch On The Call

After the print, the post-call cohort match is what matters more than the first 30 minutes of tape. The features most predictive of the 5-day continuation are: U.S. comp guidance for Q2 (raised vs. reiterated vs. lowered), traffic-vs-price decomposition of the comp number (traffic-driven beats hold better than price-driven beats), and digital/loyalty engagement metric trajectory.

Agent systems pricing MCD post-print should defer cohort retrieval until ~30 minutes after the call ends — that's when the chart shape stabilizes enough for the embedding to retrieve a meaningful match set.