"Happiness is not in money, but in shopping."
- Marilyn Monroe
Market action during Thanksgiving week pretty much has followed the standard script. There has been a positive bias and some very aggressive pockets of speculative action.
The Friday following Thanksgiving typically has a positive bias, but it often declines when there already has been a strong move early in the week. The Monday after the holiday historically is a weak day, and because many market players are aware of that tendency, they start to position for a pullback on Friday.
Many market players are not participating today, and volume will be extremely light, In addition, there is little news flow domestically and even foreign news slows a little while we wait to go back to work on Monday.
One thing we know for sure about the news today is that it will be filled with stories about shopping. Some media outlet will line up a poor reporter in a mall who will count shopping bags, but even the media must recognize now that the only way to measure the true strength of shopping is with online data.
Every year Black Friday shopping sets new records, and we are told shopping will be better than ever. By the time Christmas finally rolls around the numbers always are quite different, but you can be sure we'll have plenty of reports about how strong retail sales look.
We had some great speculative buying earlier this week, and the indications this morning are that traders still are chasing the cryptocurrency and blockchain plays. There are big early gaps in names such as Riot Blockchain Inc. (RIOT) , Social Reality Inc. (SRAX) , Overstock.com Inc. (OSTK) , Net 1 UEPS Techologies Inc. (UEPS) , U.S. Global Investors Inc. (GROW) and LM Funding America Inc. (LMFA) . All these names are likely to be highly volatile today, but the speculative traders are still in a good mood and willing to chase.
I'll be looking to do some positioning for next week, but the easiest mistake to make in this market is to keep on anticipating weakness. It has been far better to stick with the momentum despite all the arguments for why it can't last.
A day of reckoning will arrive eventually, but it is not going to be today.
