 So holiday shopping tends to pick up right about now starting with Black Friday and continuing today with Cyber Monday but with supply chain problems and inflation affecting all of us. It's no surprise that the shopping season isn't what we're used to. Someone might want to tell Biden since he's still focused on last year. Consumer spending has recovered to where it was headed before the pandemic. Early estimates are that Black Friday sales are up nearly a third since last year and in-store sales were up by nearly more even more than that. I believe it was 40 something percent. Come on man. Of course it's better than a year ago. The country was still facing COVID lockdowns. Many of those in blue states. So how does this Friday compared to two years ago when the economy was humming along? In-store shopping was down nearly 30% compared to 2019 and this year online shopping declined on Black Friday for the first time ever. Lindsay I'm curious. Do you normally do the Black Friday mall thing or are you an online shopping person? No I've never enjoyed that. You know you stand out in the cold line and then you know actually I did it one time. I went for a TV and it got stolen right out of my hands. So I was like never again. Terrible experience never again. No I don't blame you. I avoid the crowds in the malls like the plague. I'm surprised actually the shopping I did online over the past few days did not contribute to those numbers going up but Alas apparently talked to you about that after the show to figure out what you got a few hours right here on Cyber Monday. Well here to discuss what all that means for you as well as what we saw on Cyber Monday is the owner and founder of the Stock Swoosh Melissa Armo. Melissa welcome to the show. Glad to have you. Thanks for having me. So Melissa despite what Biden says Black Friday was a disappointment. What do you think we saw today as far as consumer spending goes. Well so far today Adobe which tracks online traffic of websites is predicting that the day is going to turn out pretty good. We will not know until the end of the day at midnight when all the payment brands like Visa Mastercard America Express discover they report all the totals from all the banks at midnight tonight. So we'll know some real numbers by tomorrow the stats. It's predicted supposedly it will be between 10.2 billion and 11.3 billion. Anything over 11 billion would be a really big number for Cyber Monday. Although I will say this is Cyber Monday is turning into Cyber week. And I think one of the reasons that Black Friday felt short was because Black Friday really started several weeks ago. If you're a shopper I'm a shopper. I was getting emails about Black Friday literally in October which was unusual. I think one of the reasons was people were scared stores were scared that there are people would not be able to get the supplies with all of the problems we've been having with goods and supplies coming in overseas. People wanted to make sure they got their Christmas shopping done early. And so they went and shop before Black Friday. So I think that contributed to some of the differentiation from year over year in the sales dropping for Black Friday. Yeah it was crazy to see some of those emails come in a couple weeks ago for Black Friday. Not complaining. Yeah it was great. You know we also saw on Friday we saw the stock market rebound today because we saw the stocks drop 900 the Dow down 900 the biggest worst day rather at the year. For those who are investing what do you think the rest of the year could look like and what's your advice to people who are trying to decide if maybe they should be loading up on stocks are divesting right now. I would not be loading up on stocks right now. It's not a good time to do that. Why first of all in a little bit over two weeks there's a debt ceiling limit that's going to happen if Congress does not pass something before then the market's going to fall and crash on that just like it did Friday. Second of all today we rallied back some. We did not have a big rally back. This is not a good place to buy back into the market. But the fact is that the market has run up all year. It has been a bullish year. Even I was surprised how much we ran up this year. One of the reasons is because people started going back to work. We are out of covid for the most part as far as the employment numbers go. But the fact is that there's things are still not back to normal. I think that people spent money this year because of the fact they got a lot of stimulus checks. That's why today could end up having some really big sales numbers and people are investing in the market. So if people would sell they'd be taking profits which is a good thing. But if you have a long term horizon for the markets I say stay the course. But I think December is going to be unusually volatile for the market. So I think people need to mentally and emotionally and financially prepare themselves for that. If you're in a retirement age know that the market could have another drop. Again because there's too many things in the horizon. One is the debt ceiling coming. That's December 15th. And the other thing is that Congress is looking at passing another megalodon. I mean huge two trillion dollar stimulus bill. And I do not know how the market is going to react to that. And don't forget about inflation. Don't forget about that too. That's probably why Black Friday sales might have been a little bit lower on Friday as well. You didn't see the same deals. Prices have increased. We've seen inflation. That's going to carry into 2022 despite what everyone has said including the Biden administration inflation is not transitory. We're already past that transitory inflation. So it's going to continue into 2022. Well Melissa Armo it's been great having you with us tonight. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.