 | ||
| | Bad News Signals A Bottom | |
| By Elliott H. Gue | ||
The market’s been battling a steady diet of bad news in recent days. As I noted in last week’s issue, the early read on this year’s retail sales was that Black Friday saw decent traffic, but buyers were only lured by the promise of heavy discounts. It appears that traffic died down significantly on the weekend after Thanksgiving. Online sales on so-called Cyber Monday were up strongly year-over-year. But here, too, the news wasn’t uniformly positive--online shoppers are being encouraged by heavy discounting and offers for free shipping. It also appears that discounting and clearance stores saw the strongest sales. I suspect we’ll ultimately see retailers panic and offer even heavier discounts closer to Christmas in an effort to get rid of excess inventories. It’s not a Merry Christmas shopping season by any stretch of the imagination. And check out the chart below.  Source: Bloomberg This chart shows US vehicle sales by month on an annualized basis going back to the late 1980s. As you can see, automakers are currently experiencing the sharpest dropoff in sales on record. And of course Friday’s jobs report was an even bigger disaster than most analysts had expected--in November companies laid off more than half a million workers against expectations for closer to 350,000. This is the largest one-month decline in payrolls in more than three decades. Bulletproof Yourself From the Financial Crisis This sector is rock solid and producing winners every month. Take a look at what’s happening so far in 2008: There are 22 stocks in my Income Portfolio. 13 are producing double-digit gains and four are red hot and producing triple digits! And for the record –– only one is negative. Go here and see why this sector has produced steady safe average returns of 14% over 19 years! Mounting data suggest that the economic contraction has spread overseas. Europe’s central bank slashed interest rates by the largest amount in its short history. Even China and India are looking to shore up their growth prospects with financial stimulus packages and interest rate cuts. And on the geopolitical front last week’s terrorist attacks in India and tension between India and Pakistan haven’t been positive for sentiment on emerging markets. | ||
| You’re receiving Pay Me Weekly at finan4@finanmart.com because you indicated your interest in having a a subscription to this publication. If you no longer wish to receive, please click here. Please do not reply to this message. To contact us, please use our contact form. Copyright 2008 KCI Communications, Inc. | ||
Pay Me Weekly - Bad News Signals A Bottom
