When I was a kid, the “nice” store was Sears and the also-ran was JC Penney. You could kind of tell how nice a mall was by which one of those anchor stores they had. Well, that’s all ancient history now. You can see how these two former giants have ultimately followed each other together into oblivion.
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
This is the heart and soul of the web site. Here we have literally tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. You can also click on any category icon to see posts tagged with that particular category.
Sector Focus: Food and Retail
Preface to all sector posts: This weekend I’m organizing charts in a different way. I’ve picked from my existing portfolio of live short positions and have grouped favorite shorts in specific sectors. Here are the selections for this group, and hopefully the markups will speak for themselves.
Go Big or Go Home
I’ve got a couple of real winners (that is to say, losers) in my world today – – DLTR, down about 10%, and BIG. I’ve suggested both as shorts many times, but I wanted to hit on BIG again, because I think it’s going to be a dynamite failure with much lower prices to come.
Years of WalMart Success
I’ve been mentioning recently how retail is one of the last remaining sectors to still look genuinely bullish. WalMart, the king of retail, proved this at the opening bell, vaulting nearly 10% higher (which, for a company this big, is as huge as its customers).
Retail Breaks to New Lifetime High
I now know something I didn’t know before – – or at least refused to believe. But now I’m a believer. There is no limit to how much crap people will buy in a desperate attempt to fill the void in their souls and desperately pile on credit card debt in a feckless bid for happiness. Keep buying, folks. Consumers will never be satisfied, and they will never stop buying.
Retail’s Strong Base
Retail Strength
I guess there really is no meaningful limit to how much crap people will buy to try to fill that inner void. Just incredible:
The Retail Miracle
One sector that looked ready to falter as recently as last August was retail. As measured by the symbol XRT, however, retail has ascended overall by about 25%. I wanted to show some specific stocks that were bullishly configured and a few which still seem prone. The bullish ones include gargantuan Walmart:
