text: 09/06/13 06:37 AM EDT
  McDonald's is set to release its August sales results before the market opens on September 10. We expect global sales to be slightly worse than consensus expectations, led by notable weakness across the Europe and APMEA regions. We expect the U.S. sales to be in-line with consensus, which would imply a sequential deceleration to 0.7% from 1.6% in July.
  Earlier this month, we commented on July sales numbers and noted the rapid deceleration in two-year sales trends. Despite the anticipated weakness in August, we expect two-year sales trends to turn positive during the month. We have been bearish on the stock since 4/25, when we added it to our Best Ideas list as a SHORT. For 2013, we still believe MCD will have a difficult time hitting the numbers that Wall Street is expecting.
  Below, we provide charts with our estimates for each region of the world versus consensus expectations. We will follow up the August sales release with our thoughts on the data and our updated view of the stock. We continue to believe there is a disconnect between investors' expectations and the company's fundamentals. As long as this remains the case, we are looking for more underperformance versus peer consumer and S&P 500 benchmarks.