We know the drill: U.S. retailers count on the holiday shopping season for as much as 20% to 40% of their total sales for the year.
And we know that this year won't be any different.
What we don't know is how much American consumers are going to spend: Will this season go like gangbusters, or will it just be a bust?
The National Retail Federation (NRF) is expecting a gangbusters holiday season, having just forecasted a record $602 billion in sales, a healthy 3.9% jump from 2012.
But the respected Gallup polling group is expecting a bust, saying that U.S. consumers expect to spend an average $704 each, or about 10% less than during the Christmas season a year ago.
Investors often handicap the major retailers, trying to guess which one will get the biggest share of the holiday shopping bucks.
We're not going to waste our time with that futile exercise.
You see, we know that the holiday season is also a big time of the year for gadget sales: American consumers are only too happy to drop small fortunes on computers, smartphones, and the other consumer-electronic gadgets that are the tangible results of this country's dominant high-tech sector.
We can predict who those winners will be, and can identify the stocks we believe will zoom as a result.
Today, I'm going out on a limb once again to predict that the tech sector will have a great Christmas overall. And I've identified four tech stocks to buy that should do well for investors this holiday season.
Packing a Punch
Back in June, I made what I called a "bold prediction" – and said we would see a surge in tech-sector stocks in the second half of the year. That wasn't the consensus view at the time: Most pundits were predicting a hefty sell-off.
Turns out investors who followed my advice June 28 and put their money in tech stocks as a group did well.
Since that time, the tech-oriented NASDAQ Composite Index has gained 16.73%, compared with a gain of only 11.5% for the "blue-chip" Standard & Poor's 500 Index.
That's a significant difference.
So, when I tell you today that I'm as optimistic as I was back then, you know I'm not just blowing smoke.
And here are the four tech stocks to buy that I'm handicapping as the big winners of this year's holiday splurge.
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About the Author
Michael A. Robinson is one of the top financial analysts working today. His book "Overdrawn: The Bailout of American Savings" was a prescient look at the anatomy of the nation's S&L crisis, long before the word "bailout" became part of our daily lexicon. He's a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and reporter, lauded by the Columbia Journalism Review for his aggressive style. His 30-year track record as a leading tech analyst has garnered him rave reviews, too. Today he is the editor of the monthly tech investing newsletter Nova-X Report as well as Radical Technology Profits, where he covers truly radical technologies – ones that have the power to sweep across the globe and change the very fabric of our lives – and profit opportunities they give rise to. He also explores "what's next" in the tech investing world at Strategic Tech Investor.
Good choice though the benefits are mainly seasonal except for Amazon which continually grows both in retail and cloud servers for Content Delivery Networks