Looks Like Retail Sales Will Be the Party Pooper This Month
Hello FXML followers, on yet another Monday morning. We closed last week with some good profit, so I hope you had a nice and relaxing weekend. If you're wondering about the weekly/monthly, we decided to leave it for this evening so we could include today's results as well.
Looking at the economic calendar, the most important release so far this morning have been retail sales numbers. We know the Japanese are eager beavers, so they were the first to start the day, as is usually the case.
The prelim industrial production remained flat this month, while the retail sales declined by 1.9%. That's a horrible number and it gets even worse when it comes from another month of similar declines.
Moving across the globe to Europe, the Spanish retail sales for October missed the expectations as well, but this piece of economic data is not seen as negative because the sales went up in Spain by 3.6% nonetheless.
The last retail sales data so far came from Germany. The monthly retail sales were expected to jump by 0.2% this month in Deutschland, but instead, they dived 1.4% lower. That's a horrible number and it feels even worse when you have heard the German finance minister a few days ago saying that the German consumer and domestic demand will be the driving force behind Germany´s economic machine in the coming years.
Well, the retail sales numbers clearly don´t point that way. Maybe they´ll pick up in the coming months. The economic data from the Eurozone has shown some good progress this month, so I hope the retail sales this morning won´t ruin the party. Retail sales are pretty volatile and we´d better look at the bigger trend if we want to analyze them. However, we must keep today's data in mind for next month.