{"id":457,"date":"2010-07-14T11:20:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T15:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intuitiveinvestor.com\/web\/?p=457"},"modified":"2018-08-18T17:38:38","modified_gmt":"2018-08-18T21:38:38","slug":"retail-sales-number-for-june","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2010\/07\/14\/retail-sales-number-for-june\/","title":{"rendered":"Retail sales number for June"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Good morning everyone.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">The news is that U.S. retail sales were down 0.5% in June from their levels in May.\u00a0 This level compares to an expectation from economists of a 0.3% drop.\u00a0 However, if you exclude food and energy prices, both of which fluctuate dramatically, then retail sales were up 0.1%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Analysis:<\/strong> My preference is to look at the retail sales figure sans energy prices.\u00a0 Energy prices go up and down and by large amounts on a weekly basis.\u00a0\u00a0This volatility makes them good candidates to eject from a retail sales figure as they do not get at the importance of the data.\u00a0 Namely, are consumers spending or are they not spending?\u00a0 In other words, retail sales volume is more important than the prices that consumers are paying.\u00a0 Are consumers comfortable enough in their budgets to shell out cash?\u00a0 The answer here is neither yes or no.\u00a0 Retail sales up 0.1% is a break even figure with the month of May.\u00a0 Recall that figure of two months ago was a big shock to most investors and mirrored the stock market performance:\u00a0down.\u00a0 Again, retail sales in June basically mirrored the performance of the financial markets: sideways.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">I have to consider this figure to be a slight win.\u00a0 The reason is that consumers are still chugging along.\u00a0 Folks have not completely closed their wallets.\u00a0 That makes them sensitive to any positive or negative news emanating from financial markets.\u00a0 And <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">that<\/span> news ought to be mostly positive as corporate profit reports ought to be mostly positive.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Importance grade:<\/strong> 8; what the consumer does in the face of uncertain times <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">absolutely will<\/span> determine the direction of both the economy and financial markets in the medium-term (18-24 months).\u00a0 That the U.S. consumer has been resilient in the face of bad financial market news is important.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good morning everyone. The news is that U.S. retail sales were down 0.5% in June from their levels in May.\u00a0 This level compares to an expectation from economists of a 0.3% drop.\u00a0 However, if you exclude food and energy prices, both of which fluctuate dramatically, then retail sales were up 0.1%. Analysis: My preference is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}