Dec 1

The data is coming out on Black Friday and the entire weekend. I’ve read many reports about Black Friday but I want to see the MasterCard data coming out sometime today. What I know so far is Black Friday was up 3% this year over last year, full weekend up 7.2%, and gift cards are down 10%. Black Friday sounds pretty good but we were up 8.3% in 2007 over 2006. So we just kept up with inflation and didn’t keep the growth curve. The next question is did any of the stores make money. With the 50%-70% mark downs to get people into the doors the profits had to be hurt. I think what happened is people stopped buying in September and waited for the Black Friday deals. I think the sales are going to fall off a cliff now. I did my own shopping research on Friday. Terah and I went to the mall and it looked like a busy day but nothing impressive. Then we went to Target and it was nothing. I didn’t even wait in line to pay. We also went to Costco on Sunday and it was lighter than normal.

I’m not sure if the market will look at the retail information as a good or bad thing. It’s all a matter of what is expected. I’m not impressed. We have Obama, Bernanke and Paulson talking today and the market loves to sell when these guys talk. I can’t find a good reason for the market to go up besides more short covering and people buying into automakers for the bailout play. Maybe the government will come out with another program to save us all. What a joke!! All T-Bills are going down to record lows and Libor is going back up. These are bad things for stocks. I’m short and ready for the turn.