Just before Thanksgiving, I mentioned how all of the retailers are predicting gloom and doom in my article, Retailers - Same Story, Different Year..  The American consumer is tapped, the credit crisis will mean a cancelled Christmas and the world will stop spinning.  None of it happened, much to all of our surprise, I'm sure.  My "prediction" is that the RTH will be trading above $93 which is where it was when I wrote the article.  I noticed the news was once again doom and gloom.  Retailers didn't hit their projections this year.  No one got xmas presents presumably.  I know I didn't because I was a bad boy this year, I'm afraid, but all of the kids did ... what gives?  Looking into the projections, the retailers have, on average, predicted a 3-5% increase in sales.

In an economy that's borderline recession with a consumer that's supposedly tapped, you were predicting an increase over last year and in some cases, it wasn't hit.  This hardly sounds like a disaster.  So even with today's "rotten" news, the RTH has a pre-market quote of $95.  If we hold on to $95 for the next couple of sessions, that would put the RTH up 2% since Thanksgiving.  This is about in line with the numbers so far.