Personal Wealth Advisors Partner Tim Speiss Quoted in MarketWatch
December 03, 2009
Tim Speiss, the partner-in-charge of Eisner's Personal Wealth Advisor's Group, was quoted in an article discussing seasonal trends at the start of the holiday shopping season, and how those trends result in both good and bad news for stocks in the sector. Tim also addressed the recent drop of initial jobless claims and why the current unemployment rate is directly related to mild holiday retail sales. The piece is titled, "Retail faces bumpy road in the short term, analysts say"
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- As retailers reported little to cheer about at the start of the holiday shopping season, seasonal trends held good and bad news for stocks in the sector, which tend to retreat for the next few weeks then rally until the year's end.
"It seems the bottom line is that while the second half of November was modestly strong, it was not strong enough to offset a slow October," said Tim Speiss, head of the wealth-management division at Eisner LLP.
Speiss believes retail sales, or lack thereof, are directly related to the unemployment rate, which stands at 10.2%.
"People are not going to feel good about spending out of their comfort zones. Even if they still have a job, they have a family member, or a neighbor, or a friend who is out of work," he offered.
On Thursday, disappointment over retail results and an index showing contraction in the services sector of the economy was offset some by an unexpected drop in weekly jobless claims, along with news that Bank of America Corp. would repay $45 billion in bailout money.
"The good news is that initial jobless claims have ramped down significantly, and employers are probably at the bone as far as their ability to shed jobs," Speiss said.
Speiss thinks this year's holiday shopping season will resemble last year's recession-plagued period, with employment and the economy picking up in 2010.
Seasonal trends
Retail stocks tend to follow, yet still lag, the broader market during the next two to three weeks, say analysts at Concept Capital.
The S&P 1500 Retail Index typically underperforms during December, after outperforming during the prior two months, then strengthens just as the end of the year approaches, the analysts said, basing the trend on an average of seasonal patterns from October through December from 1995 through 2008.
A year ago, with the economy mired in a recession, the retail tracker deviated from that trend, lapsing 40% from the end of September through Nov. 30, 2008, although rising more than 10% during the year's final month.
The easy money has already been made within the sector from a seasonal perspective, say John Kolovos and Craig Peskin, co-heads of technical analysis at Concept Capital, in a research note.
Further, Kolovos and Peskin said the underachievers tend to come from department stores and general merchandise retailers, not from the specialty retail space.