Wall St flat as Disney weighs; retailers off on sales worries | Reuters

Wall Street was little changed in light trading on Friday, with consumer stocks falling as investors worried about early reports on the U.S. holiday shopping season and Disney weighed.

U.S. stock markets were scheduled to close three hours early at 1 p.m. ET (1700 GMT) after being shuttered all day Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday.

“We’re going to get today over with and hit the ground running next week,” said Brian Battle, director of trading at Performance Trust Capital Partners in Chicago.

Battle said he expected a busy start to next week as investors prepare for the non-farm payrolls report due Dec. 4, which will bring volatility ahead of the Fed’s widely expected decision to raise interest rates at its mid-December meeting.

At 12:03 p.m., the Dow Jones industrial average fell 9.22 points, or 0.05 percent, to 17,804.17, the S&P 500 gained 1.6 points, or 0.08 percent, to 2,090.47 and the Nasdaq Composite added 10.48 points, or 0.2 percent, to 5,126.63.

Eight out of the 10 major S&P sectors were up modestly while the energy index fell 0.8 percent as crude oil prices fell and the consumer discretionary sector was down 0.4 percent, led by media stocks and retailers.

Crowds were thin at U.S. stores and shopping malls in the early hours of Black Friday and on Thanksgiving evening as shoppers responded to early holiday discounts with caution and bad weather hurt turnout.

The top retail movers were Signet Jewelers, down 1.8 percent followed by declines at Lowes Cos, Macys Inc and Gap Inc.

Other big retailers such as Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney and online retail giant Amazon.com were down slightly while Best Buy fell 1.3 percent. The Dow Jones U.S. General Retailers index was down slightly.

Thanksgiving kicks off the crucial November and December shopping season in which many retailers make anywhere between 20 percent and 40 percent of annual sales.

The National Retail Federation sees holiday sales rising 3.7 percent, versus 2014’s 4.1 percent increase.

“We believe Thanksgiving shopping was a bust,” analysts at Suntrust Robinson Humphrey said in a research note. “Members of our team who went to the malls first had no problem finding parking or navigating stores.”

Performance Trust’s Battle, however, said Black Friday anecdotes were just “noise.

“What matters most is the season as a whole and not just one day when some of that business is being done online,” he said.

Dow component Walt Disney fell 3 percent to $114.97, after it said late on Wednesday that its ESPN sports network lost 3 million subscribers in 2015.

Disney was the biggest drag on the Dow and the S&P 500 and brought down other media stocks including Viacom, Time Warner Inc, Twenty-First Century Fox and CBS Corp.

Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by 1,650 to 1,269, for a 1.30-to-1 ratio on the upside; on the Nasdaq, 1,543 issues rose and 1,081 fell for a 1.43-to-1 ratio favoring advancers.

The S&P 500 posted 14 new 52-week highs and 2 new lows; the Nasdaq recorded 69 new highs and 29 new lows.

(Additional reporting by Tanya Agrawal; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Nick Zieminski)

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