Global retail hints at tremendous season

A cursory look at the chart of Home Depot, if not taking your breath away will surely make you reach for the BUY button. And with excellent reason. In fact for two excellent reasons. First, in our opinion, is the representative nature of the stock. Representative, that is, of the retail industry as a whole. Home Depot (HD) is a DIY chain of outlets based in North America with stores in Europe too. But these are not ordinary stores. They are vast on a scale that, were you never to have wandered into one, would be hard to grasp. HD sells EVERYTHING a homeowner, handyperson, contractor or designer needs to refurbish, remodel or, indeed, build from scratch, a home. No less. Second by virtue of the sector that it serves it is a direct indicator of overall health of the housing industry, surely the US, but elsewhere as well. And the housing sector in the US is in ruddy health indeed. Last weeks’ housing stats paint a glowing picture of the state of the housing market in the US. HD piggy backs on to this trend.

Silver has reached its highest level for the last two weeks or so. Generally there is an indirect correlation, meaning that one thing moves in the opposite direction from another thing, between the US dollar and Silver. Gold and silver perform largely identically so that what is generally true of gold will be true of silver, just that the numbers are lower for silver than gold. It is often called the poor man’s gold. The US dollar has shown weakness of late and maybe that is reflected in the price of silver. But again, are we academic theoreticians? Hardly. We are traders supporting ourselves and our families by exploiting the advantages the markets serve up to us daily. Silver is moving up smartly and we think it is a good opportunity to catch hold of during this holiday season low-volume bound period.