Welcome back!
I hope everyone had a fine holiday weekend. Friday was uneventful for us and we went into the weekend still 55% bearish, expecting the usual pre-market shenanigans into Monday’s open. We did a full cover on our bearish DIA puts at 9:55 am and did very well on that play so we felt good about flipping back to slightly bearish into the close, which seemed a bit pumped-up to us anyway. As you can see from Corey’s chart, it was the weak Nasdaq performance that kept us cautious, as it just doesn’t seem likely that we’re going to get a strong reversal off that dip.
This is going to be a heavy data week with only Chicago PMI this morning but the intensity level quickly notches up as we start December (already!) with Construction Spending, ISM, Pending Home Sales and Auto Sales tomorrow. Wednesday we get the Challenger Job Cuts Report, ADP’s Employment Report, Oil Inventories and the always fun Fed Beige Book. Thursday we’ll see the usual Jobless Claims, Revised Productivity for Q3, the Employment Cost Index and ISM Services and we finish on Friday with Nonfarm Payrolls and Factory Orders.
Also during the week we’ll get everyone’s opinion on the retail sales numbers but the NRF Report yesterday seemed to nail it showing that more people (195M) went shopping than last year (172M) but they spent an average of just $343, down from $373 (8%) last year. “Shoppers proved this weekend that they were willing to open their wallets for a bargain,” NRF says, noting the surge in numbers was likely due to cash-strapped shoppers visiting stores early to get the best deals. You will also hear today that Comscore shows 11% more online shopping than last year with $595M spent on Black Friday, while this $60M bump may sound very impressive – try to keep in mind that 195M people spending $343 in the stores on Friday is $66.9Bn or 66 THOUSAND Million. On-line shopping is not going to save Christmas if the live purchases aren’t there….
IN PROGRESS
