Where's Your Messiah Now?

Following up on Parting the Red Sea? and A Little Shop Of Horrors? We warned about Black Friday and Cyber Monday results and the markets...
Either one of two things... initial Black Friday (half day) and Cyber Monday news is good, and a bounce could be in the cards. Bad news, and it could be a repeat of 2008, -6% drop in 1.5 days of trading. 
Funny thing is, when the market does poorly during the Black Friday period, the year end rally is usually nice. When the market does well during BF, said rally is subdued. Degree of severity depends on if its a Bull or Bear market. 
Again, beware the Ides of Dec and Jan. TBD.  19 Nov 2018, 04:18 PM 
Online
Cyber Monday sales topped $7.9 billion according to Adobe Analytics data, making it the single largest shopping day in U.S. history.  This represents a 19.7 percent increase year-over-year (YoY). 
Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday brought in $3.7 billion (28 percent growth YoY) and $6.2 billion (23.6 percent growth YoY) in revenue, respectively. 
Saturday and Sunday, November 24 and 25, set a new record as the biggest online shopping weekend in the U.S. ($6.4 billion) growing faster than Black Friday and Cyber Monday with more than 25 percent on each day. - Business Wire
Sounds like sales are up, this is upbeat and good news?  Meanwhile, where the rubber meets the road...

Oil
In commodities, oil prices were higher, clawing back some losses from a nearly 8% plunge the previous session, which traders have already dubbed 'Black Friday'. - Investing.com
And as to consumer spending in the physical construct, rather than digital...

Brick and Mortar
The Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday kickoff of the U.S. holiday shopping season showed the increasing preference for online purchases, as more Americans opted to stay home and use their smartphones while sales and traffic at brick-and-mortar stores declined. 
Preliminary data from analytics firm RetailNext showed net sales at brick-and-mortar stores fell 4 to 7 percent over the two days, while traffic fell 5 to 9 percent, continuing the trend of recent years. No data was yet available for actual spending in stores. 
In 2017, brick-and-mortar sales were down 8.9 percent for the weekend year-over-year, and shopper traffic fell 4.4 percent. In 2016, store sales were down 4.2 percent and traffic was down 4.4 percent, according to RetailNext.  - Reuters
Declines in traffic and spending, but that doesn't matter, does it?  The cloud or clown (as I call it, there have to be clowns, send in the clowns) will take care of everything? 

On Black Friday, empty shopping mall and big box parking lots were reported in many metropolitan areas around the country including suburban Chicago, New York and ...

On the heels of Kohl's, Lowe's, Target, Best Buy, other major retailers and consumer discretionary getting pummeled, empty parking lots on Black Friday?

Where did they all go? It looks like the cloud or clowns mouth landed in the parking lot and swallowed all the shoppers, Cadillacs, Lincolns too, Mercuries and Subaru?

In keeping with our parting of the Red Sea theme... somehow, I can hear this loud and distinct...



More to come in Rapture?, stay tuned, no flippin.

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