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After a strong start to the holiday shopping season and a big jump in consumer confidence reported earlier this week, November same-store sales data came in Thursday with a decidedly mixed bent -- but that's not a bad thing, according to Breakout's Jeff Macke.

"There is this perception that Black Friday is just this buying binge where folks go in willy-nilly and just buy everything," says Macke, referring to the 16% jump in Thanksgiving weekend retail sales and a 33% rise in Cyber Monday sales. "That is not the case" and these same-store sales are evidence of that.

"The good retailers, the people who were properly positioned into Black Friday and over November did great" and beat sales expectations, Macke says, citing Costco as a prime example. (Editor's Note: Macke is currently long Costco).

Costco sales rose 9% and beat expectations by 3.5% in November while net sales jumped 11% to $7.51 billion over the previous month. The Limited

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A day after coordinated central bank action sent financial markets screaming higher, Thursday was shaping up as a day of rest and reflection -- and a little bit of giveback.

Major averages were modestly lower in recent trading, on the heels of higher-than-expected jobless claims data and weakness in China's Purchasing Managers Index, which shrank for the first time in three years.

Meanwhile, Europe is still very much in crisis and not even the most wide-eyed optimist would argue the EU's sovereign debt/banking crisis was "solved" by Wednesday's central bank action. At best, the central bankers bought time for the sovereigns - and debt yields on the continent have come down the the past 24 hours - and provided only temporary relief for the short-term funding pressures on European banks.

But don't call the gains this week (remember, Monday was a big up day too) a "sucker's rally", says my Breakout colleague Jeff Macke.

"You can't

Provided by the Business Insider:

Central banks around the world to the rescue?

First, the scoreboard:

Dow: +488.9 pts, +4.2%
S&P 500: +51.7 pts, +4.3%
NASDAQ: +104.8 pts, +4.2%

And now, the top stories:

• Global coordinated intervention. The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Canada, and the Swiss National Bank announced they would lower the cost of swapping dollars. Specifically, they are cutting the U.S. dollar liquidity swap rate by 50 basis points. This is an effort to boost liquidity in the European bank funding markets. The announcement, which came before the markets opened, caused futures to roar higher.
• In case that wasn't enough, the Fed also reminded us that it could still do much more: "[W]ere conditions to deteriorate, the Federal Reserve has a range of tools available to provide an effective liquidity backstop for such institutions and is prepared to use these tools as needed to support financial stability and to