Not necessarily. More people who cannot afford the higher end stores may be shopping walmart because they have more discretionary income or confidence. People who regularly shop Target, Safeway, Macys or Best Buy are not going to all of a sudden switch to Walmart. In most cases, Walmart doing well means a larger segment of the middle to lower incomes are spending more. They are a significant part of the economy because they are usually the first segments to pass on spending when times get tough or cut back. So Walmart doing well gave strength to the market given the segment of the population WMT serves. You are reading the data through the eyes of your puts as opposed to looking at it in reality. I am not saying that WMT means the economy is doing awesome, but an increase in retail sales or continued good forecast from someone like WMT is not necessarily an indication that people are simply moving from higher end to lower end. WMT and Target are so important because of the segments they serve and the consumer power they wield. You need to see forecasts into DEC to get the best picture, OCT is a dead month for retail anyway as it is the lull between back to school season and the start of the holiday shopping season. I predict that NOV sales will show better numbers over OCT when you factor in NOV has an EXTRA week after Thanksgiving. More time to pull in people for the start of holiday shopping in Thanksgiving. Barring any outlier crash crisis, NOV should bring some continued good news in the retail sector with the extra days of shopping.
An oscillation (top or bottom) of price at an extreme level on a longer term chart (bottom of attached chart) that fails to breach a Trend top or Trend bottom. On a quicker scale (top portion of chart) this failure will trigger price to move away from a Trend bottom (in the case of the attached chart) or top in a readable movement of quicker trading price oscillations.