One of the best ways to ride the recovery (as slow and halting as it has been) has been on the back of the American consumer. The S&P consumer discretionary index has returned 100 per cent over the past three years, 40 points better than the wider market. One of the best consumer stocks has been Macy’s, which has returned 225 per cent over the same period.
The famous department store’s merry ride hit a bump on Monday, when first-quarter resultsdisappointed; the earnings outlook came in a bit below expectations. Guidance for same-store sales growth edged up, from 3.5 to 3.7 per cent, but still implied a slowdown. Quarterly growth has averaged 5 per cent over the past year.
Government data suggest that consumers should continue to chug along but signs of further acceleration are scarce. Retail sales (excluding autos, petrol and food) picked up a bit in April but have been rolling along in the same range of 6 to 7 per cent growth year on year for 10 months. Payrolls and hourly wages are only creeping higher. An optimist might point to the surveys of consumer sentiment and expectations, which have rebounded strongly from the lows of last autumn. But, as High Frequency Economics points out, consumption didn’t slow much after sentiment collapsed last summer, so it remains a bit of a stretch to think that spending should bounce as sentiment recovers. If US shoppers continue to shuffle along and no more, the time has come to think less about which retailers are most leveraged to the economy and more about which are taking share from their competitors. Can Gap, for example, keep its fashion resurgence going? Will Amazon continue to take a disproportionate piece of the shift to online retail? Investors, in other words, need to do some careful shopping of their own.