Some retailers provided early holiday results on Monday that showed the crucial shopping season was solid, but didn’t blow away expectations. 

Lululemon, which is preparing for a new CEO and staring down a proxy battle with its founder, said in a release it expects its holiday quarter to be “toward the high end” of its previously released guidance. Shoe maker Birkenstock and thrift store Savers Value Village also released lackluster early holiday results.

Lululemon said it expects fiscal fourth quarter revenue to be close to $3.60 billion and earnings to be close to $4.76 per share. Both figures are at the high end of the guidance the company released in December when it announced fiscal third-quarter earnings. 

It made no changes to its previous guidance for gross margin, effective tax rate and selling, general and administrative expenses. 

Shares were slightly higher in premarket trading.

“We remain focused on executing our action plan to drive improvement in our U.S. business and look forward to the opportunities in front of us,” finance chief Meghan Frank said in a statement. 

When announcing last quarter’s earnings on Dec. 11, outgoing CEO Calvin McDonald said the company was “encouraged” by its early holiday performance but acknowledged wide discounting had driven demand during the Thanksgiving holiday period. When the shopping stretch ended, trends slowed, he said at the time. 

Like other higher-end brands, Lululemon has historically been very selective with discounts, but it has used them more liberally in recent quarters to offload old merchandise and styles that weren’t resonating with shoppers. 

During its fiscal third quarter, margins fell by 2.9 percentage points, due primarily to higher tariffs and the bigger markdowns, it said at the time. 

Birkenstock, which didn’t provide specific holiday-quarter guidance last year, said it expects sales in the quarter ended Dec. 31 to grow 11% to €402 million ($470 million). The results appeared to disappoint investors, with shares falling about 3% in premarket trading. 

Savers Value Village saw sales grow 8.4% during its holiday quarter, with comparable sales up 5.4%, excluding the impact of an extra week the company had in its calendar. Despite relatively strong growth, the company only reaffirmed its fiscal 2025 adjusted net income and EBITDA outlooks. Shares were slightly higher in premarket trading. 

The early results, which were announced ahead of the annual ICR conference in Orlando, Florida, show what many analysts had expected for the holiday shopping season. Wall Street largely anticipated results would be solid, but they wouldn’t show massive gains in consumer spending. 

The National Retail Federation previously forecasted retail sales in November and December would rise between 3.7% and 4.2% compared to 2024. That’s solid growth, but when higher prices from tariffs are taken into account, some analysts expect volume growth to be largely flat.

As Wall Street’s top bankers huddled in New York last month, preparing to convince Elon Musk’s SpaceX that they should be chosen to lead its upcoming IPO, one firm wasn’t letting its star advisor miss the bake-off.

Among the squad of JPMorgan Chase investment bankers flying 2,500 miles west to California to pitch SpaceX was the lender’s boss, billionaire CEO Jamie Dimon, people with knowledge of the trip told CNBC.

The morning after that pitch meeting, on Dec. 19, Dimon was already back in his customary early Friday perch: sitting in his bank’s New York lobby, taking meetings in full view of the thousands of employees streaming through the building’s turnstiles.

The whirlwind few days highlight the reality of Dimon’s singular impact on JPMorgan, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization.

Dimon marks his 20th anniversary as CEO this month and remains deeply involved across the sprawling businesses of JPMorgan, a giant across Wall Street and Main Street with $4.6 trillion in assets. Half a dozen executives across investment banking, asset management and consumer banking echoed that view.

Which makes the inevitable questions surrounding Dimon’s tenure loom large as he approaches 70 years of age. Dimon has for years maintained, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that his retirement was perpetually 5 years away. In 2024, for the first time, he acknowledged that window was shrinking.

Will JPMorgan’s era of dominance be over when Dimon exits as CEO?

“Given his track record, anybody else would be a downgrade,” said Ben Mackovak, a bank board member and investor through his firm Strategic Value Bank Partners.

“I’m sure somebody else could grow into the role and surprise people,” Mackovak said. “But on day one, no one is going to be as qualified to run that bank as Jamie.”

In two decades, Dimon took a middle-of-the-pack American lender and, with his unique combination of judgment, paranoia, attention to detail and scope of vision, created a juggernaut of finance that the world hadn’t seen before.

During calm times, he invested aggressively for the future, and during periods of tumult, like 2008 and 2023, he avoided pitfalls that consumed other banks, allowing him to snap up three failed institutions.

Over the past 20 years, the bank’s annual net income soared more than 500% to $58.5 billion in 2024. The firm reports full-year 2025 results on Tuesday.

Now, at a market cap of roughly $900 billion, JPMorgan is worth nearly as much as the next three largest U.S. banks combined: Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo.

Besides running JPMorgan, Dimon has taken on an outsized role in global finance as a top voice explaining market gyrations or emerging risks and influencing regulators amid policy shifts. It was Dimon’s recession warning on a Fox News segment in April that helped convince President Donald Trump to pivot on his trade policy, igniting a historic relief rally.

“It’s just the aura he has, the credibility that he’s built up in the markets,” said Fitch Ratings analyst Chris Wolfe. “The minute you step out of that role, it’s not like you can just hand that over, your successor doesn’t automatically inherit that. I think that’s the real challenge.”

The question of who could take over for Dimon — who was already a cancer survivor when he nearly died in 2020 from a ruptured aorta — has been openly discussed among investors for more than a decade.

To investors, his most likely successor is currently Marianne Lake, head of the firm’s giant consumer bank and former CFO of the company, followed by Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, the co-heads of the firm’s commercial and investment bank.

Other contenders include asset and wealth management head Mary Erdoes and CFO Jeremy Barnum.

“If investors were to do a straw poll today, they’d probably pick Marianne,” said Truist bank analyst Brian Foran.

“The running joke is that she’s a human supercomputer when it comes to banking,” Foran said. “Really, the only question mark people have about her is, she’s so analytical, can she do the kind of ‘rah-rah’ stuff to inspire the sales force?”

Wells Fargo banking analyst Mike Mayo hypothesized that JPMorgan stock could immediately drop 5% if Dimon were to suddenly exit, regardless of the named replacement. (The bank has said Dimon would serve as chairman even after relinquishing the CEO role.)

It’s a somewhat common occurrence on Wall Street for companies with iconic CEOs: The stock premium shrinks, at least for a period, when their longtime leaders announce their departures. For instance, Berkshire Hathaway shares trailed the S&P 500 last year after Warren Buffett said he was stepping down as CEO.

In recent months, Dimon oversaw the completion of the bank’s new $3 billion headquarters in midtown Manhattan and announced a $1.5 trillion initiative to bolster industries crucial to U.S. interests.

And, perhaps most crucially, he continues to instill his values into the firm’s management team.

Last year, at a conference for JPMorgan’s top 400 executives, Dimon rattled off a list of once-great companies that died though mismanagement. Finance is especially prone to this threat, because of the temptation to manipulate numbers for short-term gain, he said.

“Travelers blew up. Citi blew up, twice. Bear Stearns failed, Lehman failed, I’m here because Bank One screwed up a bunch of businesses,” Dimon said, referring to a predecessor firm to JPMorgan.

“If you look at these things, it’s complacency, it’s bureaucracy, it’s arrogance. A lot of it is dishonest numbers. Failure to set standards,” Dimon said. “These are the cancers that kill companies.”

Nobody knows when Dimon’s last day as CEO will come, except to know that it is approaching. After adjusting his standard 5-year retirement answer to hint at a sooner departure, Dimon hasn’t advanced that clock any further.

“As great as he is, he can’t do this forever,” said Barclays banking analyst Jason Goldberg. “Every day that passes, you’re a day closer to the end.”

— CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes contributed to this report.