Nike closed at $38.77 on September 3, 2026. Under forty dollars. From the $163.63 peak circulating this week, that is a drop of more than 75 percent. Direct-to-consumer revenue is still shrinking. Converse is still collapsing. And in our scored database, Nike is still a 75/100 — labeled extremely woke.
Shoppers do not need another sermon about brand purpose. They need the receipts next to the score. The stock is a public number. The score is a public number. This week, only one of them moved.
The under-$40 print
TradeSmith listed NKE with a September 3 close of $38.77, a session low of $37.95, and a one-year change of about minus 47 percent. MarketWatch printed the same neighborhood during the session. StockScan puts Nike's all-time high at $179.10 on November 5, 2021. The Daily Signal's $163.63 figure is the peak number making the rounds in conservative coverage this week. Split the difference however you want. The swoosh is trading like a company that spent years telling America what to think and is now asking wholesale partners to take the product back.
That is not a vibe. Fiscal 2026 earnings coverage already showed the operating crack. In the fiscal fourth quarter ended May 31, 2026, Nike Direct revenue fell 7 percent on a reported basis and 9 percent currency-neutral, with Nike Brand Digital down 12 percent and Nike-owned stores down 7 percent, according to SGB Media's recap of the call. Wholesale, the channel Nike spent years starving, grew 1 percent currency-neutral. Converse revenue was $244 million in that quarter, down 32 percent reported and 34 percent currency-neutral. Earlier in the year, Q3 Converse revenue had already plunged 35 percent to $264 million. The trend-brief rounding of DTC down 6 percent and Converse down 31 percent for fiscal 2026 is the same story: the digital engine stalled, and the Chuck Taylor machine is in a ditch.
China is part of this. So is a product cycle that lost the running boom to upstarts. CEO Elliott Hill is on a turnaround that keeps promising North America while Greater China keeps shrinking. None of that erases the other ledger: Nike still carries the Kaepernick era, the Betsy Ross snub, Be True, and No Pride No Sport in its brand memory. Customers who walked away over politics did not come back because a quarterly slide deck said integrated marketplace.
The score that did not budge
BuyWokeFree scores brands on documented behavior, not on last week's stock chart. Nike sits at 75/100, extremely woke. The file is not a mystery: comprehensive ESG reporting, formal DEI programs, Pride sponsorship through Be True and the No Pride No Sport campaign, PAC money that has skewed heavily Democratic, and a CEO Action for Diversity pledge. The one dimension Nike did not max out was the HRC Corporate Equality Index — it landed a 50, not a perfect 100. That is how you get to 75 instead of a clean 100.
A lower stock price is not repentance. It is a market. If Nike wanted the score to move, it would have to move the underlying conduct. Rolling back a slogan in a 10-K while keeping the same activist architecture is how you stay at 75 while the ticker prints 38.
Who actually picked up the shelf space
The running boom did not wait for Beaverton. HOKA is scored 42/100 — woke, not extremely woke. Parent Deckers runs sustainability programs, a 60 percent BIPOC/LGBTQ+ marketing-representation commitment, and a PRISM employee group. That is not a patriot brand. It is still 33 points cleaner than Nike, which is why a lot of suburban dads now own a pair they did not plan to buy.
New Balance is the adult in the footwear and apparel aisle: 20/100, mildly woke. Boston. Made-in-USA factories that still exist. Owner Jim Davis put $500,000 into the GOP Senate Leadership Fund in October 2024. No Pride campaigns. No perfect HRC score. Modest ESG reporting and an Empowering People DE&I platform are what keep it off a zero. If you want a household sneaker name that did not spend a decade lecturing you, this is the one that keeps surviving our ladder.
Adidas is not the escape hatch. It scores 75/100 in our file — the same band as Nike — and the listing is still in content review. A perfect 100 on the HRC 2025 Corporate Equality Index, a 50 percent women-in-leadership goal by 2033, annual Pride collections, and a DEI stack most sporting-goods peers have been quietly shrinking. Switching swoosh for three stripes is not a boycott. It is a wardrobe change.
Do not confuse a cheap stock with a cheap score
Go-woke-go-broke is a slogan. The database is a spreadsheet. Nike's share price can fall because China is a mess, because DTC alienated retailers, because Converse lost a generation, and because a chunk of the American middle stopped treating the swoosh as a default. All of those can be true at once. What is not true is that a sub-$40 print rewrote the 75.
We already walked the five-year chart in August. The new fact this week is the round number: under $40. The old fact is unchanged: if you still want the logo, you are buying a 75. If you want out of that band, New Balance at 20 is the scored alternative that is actually on shelves. HOKA at 42 is the compromise a lot of people already made. Adidas at 75 is a lateral move.
The ticker will bounce. Turnaround CEOs always get a bounce. The question for this site is simpler: did the company change the behavior we score? Until the Pride architecture, the DEI file, and the political giving look different, Nike stays 75 — even if the next print is $35.