Early reports on holiday sales are completely unreliable

Ignore everything related to holiday sales over the next few days.

There will be stores and retail federations and a million other groups touting how strong or weak Black Friday sales have been. It will continue throughout the holiday season and will variably lead to excitement or hand-wringing.

It's all spin and none of it ever correlates with the final retail sales data that is released in January.

There is probably some value in what individual retailers are saying but that's mostly spin too.

There's only one trend you can bet on: More people will do their gift buying online, especially at Amazon.