Filed under: Earnings reports, Sears Holdings (SHLD)

When Sears Holdings (NYSE: SHLD) reports Q3 earnings tomorrow, we’ll see again if chairman and out-of-his-retail-league financier Eddie Lampert will wow investors.

Regardless of how its retail operations have performed, how is Sears doing when it comes to returning equity to shareholders? Now that William Ackman has taken a 3.5% stake in the holding company (oops, retailer), will that investment start paying off tomorrow? Lampert still controls 46% of the retailer, so with activist investor Ackman’s new slice, it’s unclear if he’ll soon be forcing any changes at the company. But, in previous stints, Ackman has forced real estate sales and similar actions at large food service companies and other retailers to get his return. Things are different in Lampert-land, though.

The company has so far underperformed from the retail side of the business, and it’s probably forced Lampert to wake up and and realize he has to ensure those operations continue to perform. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expect a profit of $0.50 on revenue of $11.61 billion tomorrow.

Will we see that? Perhaps. It is still not clear how long it will take Lampert to unlock the value of his grand masterpiece, but so far it’s either not working and impatience from the market is bubbling up.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.