Sentiment/High end spend/Other earnings of note/Japan CPI

Here's a quick stock market sentiment check that I forgot to give yesterday. Bullishness has cooled a touch off the extreme levels of the past few weeks. Investors Intelligence said Bulls slipped to 54.4 from 57.1 while Bears rose .5 pt to 17.7, still a rather wide spread. In the AAII data, more volatile and fickle, Bulls fell by 8.2 to 40.4, the lowest since early November and most went to the Neutral side as Bears were up a more modest 2.6 pts to 26.8. The CNN Fear/Greed index, measuring actual market behavior, fell to 65 from 71 one week ago and still in the 'Greed' category. Bottom line, we're off the bullish boil and the boat is less full but it's still leaning firmly positive. 

We got lower guidance from Burberry last week and heard a few weeks ago from the CEO of Neiman Marcus talk a bit cautiously about the higher end customer. In case you didn't see yesterday the stock of Watches of Switzerland crashed by 37%. In their earnings call the CEO said "As widely reported across retail and luxury sectors, Christmas trading was very difficult to predict and ultimately below projections. This trend continued into January, and we believe the trend will continue for the remainder of the fiscal year...The global watch market continues to normalize, following two years of exceptional growth."

Watches of Switzerland stock

Maybe this watch weakness was reflected too in the UK retail sales data seen today. They were very weak in December, falling 3.3% m/o/m ex auto fuel and that was well worse than the estimate of down .7%. The ONS said "Food stores performed very poorly, with their steepest fall since May 2021 as early Christmas shopping led to slow December sales. Department stores, clothing shops and household goods retailers reported sluggish sales too as consumers spent less on Christmas gifts." The UK economy remains mired in a stagflationary backdrop. Gilt yields have had a wild few days, jumping 19 bps on Wednesday and falling by 10 bps over the past 2 days.