After Thanksgiving holiday, retailers are in demand in the US as Black Friday begins
After being closed on Thursday for Thanksgiving, Wall Street seems to be making up for lost time.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is currently nearly 1% higher, up 109 points, in what will be a half day's trading. Hopes of a solution to Greece's financial crisis at next week's meeting of its international lenders have made investors more optimistic, traders said.
Meanwhile retail shares were in demand on Black Friday, the day when the holiday shopping season begins, amid hopes shoppers will be out in force to snap up bargains. Michael Hewson, senior market analyst at CMC Markets, said:
US markets have that post-thanksgiving Black Friday feeling pushing higher in thin trading with markets focussing on the retail sector on the US's busiest shopping weekend of the year. This particular weekend, which includes Cyber Monday, can make or break retailer's sales targets for the year with footfall used as a gauge of how well a retailer's numbers could be in the coming weeks.
Given the concerns about the fiscal cliff and the fallout from Hurricane Sandy, one of the great imponderables has been the resilience of the US consumer, particularly the disconnect between some of the sentiment indicators and the retail sales numbers in the middle part of this year.
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