Today’s morning missive was picked up by Dow Jones Market Talk:
11/28 11:21A More To Holiday Sales Than A Few Phone Calls
11:21 (Dow Jones) The widely cited National Retail Federation’s "Black Friday" report takes some heavy flak from Maxim Group’s Barry Ritholtz. "There are few things that make us more annoyed than bad data, lazy thinking or poor analysis," he writes. The NRF, he says, "hit for the inept cycle." For starters, the report is only a survey. "They asked 4,209 consumers how much they were planning on spending" and extrapolated the total from that "all without seeing any actual data whatsoever," he says. "If I were their mathematics or statistics professor, I would give them a grade of ‘F’." The real picture, he says, is very mixed.
Coolio!
