Black Friday 2023: The Aftermath

Black Friday is traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the US and across Europe. Previously a lot of spending focused on the high street, but online shopping has become increasingly popular in recent years, and sales are now spread out throughout the run-up to Christmas. This makes it pretty hard to do a wrap-up so soon, but we’ll try! Following that, we’ll go over the top events you can trade this week.

A month of sales

In years past, we’d already know all there is to know about Black Friday sales performance, but in 2023, Black Friday is basically just the start of the sale season — a prolonged period of deals aimed at tempting consumers into parting with their hard-earned cash.

As we can see from the chart below, the expectations are increasing each year, and the biggest dates are Black Friday and Cyber Monday (today).

Sales season in the United States

Source: Reuters

Market performance (so far)

S&P 500

The S&P 500 closed slightly higher on Friday but is trending higher Month-on Month (MoM), making almost 9% gains since this time last month.

S&P 500 performance (MoM)

Source: Google

Dow Jones

The Dow Jones made slight gains on Friday and is also having a strong November with the price rising over 7% MoM.

DJI performance (MoM)

Source: Google

Nasdaq

The Nasdaq also continued its strong performance — actually the strongest MoM performance of the lot — with the price up almost 12% since this time last month.

Nasdaq performance (MoM)

Source: Google

Early results

It’s quite early to tell, and official figures won’t be released for some time, but preliminary data from Adobe showed that online sales on Black Friday rose 7.4% (YoY), fueled mainly by discounts on products like toys, clothes and electronics.

That’s a little slower than last year when online sales jumped 10% YoY. It looks like consumers may be watching their wallets and holding out for deeper discounts (possibly coming today).

The rate of inflation is flattening out, but a lot of items and goods, particularly electronics and luxury items — very important at this time of the year — remain more expensive than they were a couple of years ago. Higher interest rates are also raising the price of buying homes and cars. That’s forcing consumers to make trade-offs at the checkout.

This might all be a sign of things to come, with Salesforce predicting that US-based online sales will only grow 1% (YoY) in November and December, which would be the slowest growth for five years.

All eyes are on the retailers and how deep they will go with their discounts. Keep an eye on the data and all the news coming out this Cyber Monday.

Now, let’s hear from you!

Are you trading the holiday season? What’s your stock pick? Let us know over on X — @_contentworks!

Top fundamental events week commencing 27/11/23

Looks like a slow start to the week, as we pick up the pace a little later on. Here’s everything you can trade this week…

Monday

No major events are planned.

Tuesday

● EUR — German GfK Consumer Confidence

● USD — CB Consumer Confidence

Wednesday

● EUR — German Inflation Rate YoY Prel

● USD — GDP Growth Rate QoQ 2nd Est

Thursday

● CNY — Chinese NBS Manufacturing PMI

● EUR — French Inflation Rate YoY Prel; Inflation Rate YoY Flash

● CAD -GDP Growth Rate QoQ

● USD — Core PCE Price Index MoM; Personal Spending MoM; Personal Income

Friday

● CNY — Chinese Caixin Manufacturing PMI

● CAD — Unemployment Rate

● USD — ISM Manufacturing PMI; Fed Chair Powell Speech

Here at Contentworks we closely follow market movements and prep content that we think your traders would love to read. Let’s get you started right here.

Speak soon!

The Contentworks team