Which Way Wednesday – For Retail Sales?

Remember this from last year?:

Price-slashing failed to rescue a bleak holiday season for beleaguered retailers, as sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending, according to new data released Thursday.  Despite a flurry of last-minute shoppers lured by the deep discounts, total retail sales, excluding automobiles, fell over the year-earlier period by 5.5% in November and 8% in December through Christmas Eve, according to MasterCard Inc.’s SpendingPulse unit.  “This will go down as the one of the worst holiday sales seasons on record,” said Mary Delk, a director in the retail practice at consulting firm Deloitte LLP. “Retailers went from ‘Ho-ho’ to ‘Uh-oh’ to ‘Oh-no.’”  The holiday retail-sales decline was much worse than the already-dire picture painted by industry forecasts, which had predicted sales ranging from a 1% drop to a more optimistic increase of 2.2%.

That was the December 26th headline in the WSJ (the chart is from last year too) which pre-saged poor Q4 earnings that sent the markets off a 27% cliff from Jan 1st through March 9th of this year.  The Dow was at 9,000 last January and managed to fall all the way to 6,500 on those retail results – the same retail results we are hoping to beat by 1% this year with the Dow at 10,500.  This will be interesting to say the least.  We remain skeptical of the rally but have put up a new, very bullish Watch List as we have identified many stocks we can buy into a technicl rally if it holds up into the week after New Years as we begin to deploy some of our own sidelined cash.

We held our short-term bearish stance but our premise is wearing thin as even the 2.2% GDP (20% worse than expected) announcement yesterday was somehow taken as good news by the market.  Today the WSJ is touting strong interest in a $1.1Bn CRE auction held by the FDIC as another positive market sign – forgetting the fact that these commercial properties are being sold at 50-90% discounts and are just 3% of the over $30Bn of siezed assets the FDIC is sitting on and must sell over the next 12 months (so $1.9Bn short of target this month already). 

The FDIC must raise more capital in order to seize more banks as their balance sheet hit negative $8.2Bn at the end of September.  They had been putting off the sales, hoping for a turnaround but 50…