Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Negative Divergence

We now have a negative divergence-should see a leg down

1 comment:

JC said...

Lets take a look under the hood of this mornings retail numbers:

Autos were down, but we already knew that from the previous auto dealer reports. So we'll leave that alone, since it was "in the market" already.

Looking down the table we see that Electronics were down materially - a bit over 1%.

What was up? Food and beverage (1.3%), health and personal care (0.6%), gasoline (1.9%), clothing (1.2%), sporting goods (0.9%) and general merchandise (0.4%)

Indeed, the entire gain of food and gasoline sales, $1.316 billion, compares in an interesting fashion with the total non-auto headline gain of $1.923 billion - that is, these non-discretionary purchases comprised about 70% of the total "improvement" ex-autos.

Sounds like the number isn't so good. People will always buy the necessary things, they don't seem to be buying the things that make our economy function. Best buy is hanging it's hat on its "mobile" unit which is only about 8% of its sales right now.