Ken Fisher Explains How Black Friday Retail Sales Impact Stocks

A title screen reads “Ken Fisher Explains How Black Friday Retail Sales Impact Stocks

A man appears on screen and begins to speak.

A banner identifies him as Ken Fisher, Executive Chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of Fisher Investments.

Ken Fisher: Coming up on Black Friday there's always a certain amount of people trying to read too much into too little when it comes to things like Black Friday sales. And the reality of that is that Black Friday reported volume numbers don't actually mean anything of any significance at all. You should largely pay no attention regardless of what the media says. You should just ignore it.

Ken Fisher: The fact is we have a long history of Black Friday. We have a long history of stock prices. We can run correlation coefficients between the one and the other to see the degree to which there's any potential causality of Black Friday to stock prices and the answer is, there isn't. Secondarily, the reporting of these things in this day and age is not so totally accurate in that the location of where these sales come from isn't necessarily where it used to be and therefore the immediate reporting isn't necessarily accurate in a way that I would have any confidence in of being an indicator—if it could ever be an indicator.

Ken Fisher: Finally I make the point that a lot of times in all of these kinds of things—not just Black Friday but many others that relate to a single purported event—how it would be received by securities could well be whether it was better or worse than what people thought in advance that it would be. And yet even then at most all it tends to do, for better or for worse, is to generate a day or so of volatility. The good kind, or the bad kind, pleasant kind, or unpleasant kind, up or down, and none of that is anything more than people getting excited over nothing.

Ken Fisher: So again, I encourage you, when you see media headlines about Black Friday and all kinds of people trying to read things into it, you should just ignore that. There's nothing in that to read into that is meaningful.

Ken Fisher: Thank you.

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