Kingfisher has delivered the kind of results that usually get the City purring, yet Deutsche Bank is keeping its enthusiasm firmly in check.
The broker has stuck with a "hold" rating and a 300p price target on the owner of B&Q and Screwfix, which sits just shy of where the shares already trade.
The numbers themselves looked handsome enough.
First-half pre-tax profit came in at £404 million, well clear of the £375 million the market had penciled in.
The snag, as Deutsche Bank is quick to point out, is that £14 million of that was a one-off business rates refund, so the "real" figure is closer to £390 million.
The beat was powered by punchy like-for-like sales at Screwfix, Poland and Castorama, plus a gross margin up 70 basis points to 38.4%.
Kingfisher duly nudged up its full-year profit guidance to £595 million to £635 million.
That is a 6% upgrade to consensus at the mid-point, the broker reckons, though a rather more modest 3% once you set aside that handy refund.
Free cash flow guidance got a lift too.
Beneath the bonnet, though, things remain patchy.
Shoppers are still happily buying the small stuff, with core and seasonal ranges growing, but big-ticket spending fell 4.6%, leaving B&Q down 1.8% in the second quarter and France's Brico Dépôt looking decidedly under the weather.
Poland, up 4.3%, was the bright spot.
The dividend was held at 3.80p.
Deutsche Bank still expects the shares to tick higher, but its caution carries some weight: it only upgraded the stock from "sell" to "hold" last week.
