The US Markets were closed yesterday and today we close at 1pm and then Christmas Eve we're closing early again and closed XMas day (Weds), of course, but not New Year's Eve so just two more humbug interruptions of our bull Market before 2014 and so far, it looks like we're rolling right into our Santa Rally with the US Futures up another 0.25-0.5% this morning.
Today is "Black Friday", so named because it's traditionally when retailers finally get into profits for the year and whatever they can make over the next 30 days are going to be it for their 2013 profits. Due to an unfortunate turn of the calendar, there are only 3 weekends (after this one) until Christmas – that places more than the usual importance on this weekend's retail sales.
Germany, surprisingly, had a 0.8% slump in Retail Sales for October, following through on a 0.2% drop in September and missing the predictions of leading economorons of 0.5% growth by a mile (or 1.6 kilometers). That's pegging their year/year sales at -0.2% vs the +0.3% consensus in the World's 4th largest economy.
Now, I'm not going to ruin the holiday spirit by pointing out that this is troubling. Let's just do what the rest of the market is doing and completely ignore the bad data! As you can see from Dave Fry's NYMO chart, we're not very overbought, even at these levels, so we'll add a few more 500% plays for additional upside moves and see what happens. We've placed plenty of bearish bets and we'll adjust those to keep them active but it's bullish bets we need for balance now.
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