Retail sales rally on more than just autos

Posted Sep 15th 2009 2:20PM by John Jagerson
Filed under: Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Best Buy (BBY), Lowe's Cos (LOW)

Retail sales numbers jumped more last month than they have in three years. It would be understandable to assume that this was due to the "cash for clunkers" program, which ran through August, but even excluding auto-sales retail numbers were higher than expected.

Core retail sales (which excludes autos and gasoline) was up 1.1% in August, which was almost 300% higher than anticipated. The question at this point is whether that number would have been even better and ultimately more beneficial for the economy if the government had not siphoned so much spending into autos.

An optimist might take the position that the strong "core" retail numbers are doubly encouraging considering the incentives to spend money on autos rather than other big ticket items. In either case, it looks like we can add one more indicator to the list of economic green shoots. Learn more about why investors care about retail sales here.

We are currently in between earnings seasons so there isn't a lot of detail being released by individual retail firms, but there are a few interesting announcements coming up that could confirm these rosy numbers. Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) has already released this morning with higher expectations for next quarter and Lowe's(NYSE:LOW) and Hewlett Packard(NYSE:HPQ) are both holding analysts meetings next week.

John Jagerson is a co-founder of Learning Markets, LLC. Learning Markets offers daily articles, videos and investing guides about everything from investing in stocks and options to trading currencies in the forex market and more.

Tags: BBY, best buy, BestBuy, HPQ, inthenews, LOW, retail sales, RetailSales