Mick Weinstein The Week's Best Stock Blogs

The American consumer is alive and kickin'. A Commerce Department report this week showed just mildly weakening retail sales for April, with a drop in car sales responsible for most of that. Excluding autos, retail sales actually climbed 0.5%.

The data "highlighted American consumers' ability to improvise their way out of buying gasoline and still spend on other goods," says WSJ blogger David Gaffen and reinforced a theme that's grown legs in the last few weeks - that the economy is going to hang in there, even barely."

Yet Bespoke Investment Group notes that the largest increase in retail sales has been at gas stations, food and beverage stores, and general merchandise: "These groups are all purveyors of non-discretionary items, indicating that rising inflation is causing consumers to spend a larger share of their disposable income on necessities."

One mega-retailer seems to be doing just fine: Wal-Mart reported a 7% rise in quarterly profit this week, outdoing Street expectations. Financial planner Greg Feirman says this spending environment is precisely Wal-Mart's "sweet spot" - and it's now handily beating competitor Target: "As consumers have become pinched by declining home prices, rising gas prices and an increasingly difficult job market, things appear to have shifted for Wal-Mart vis-a-vis Target. And investors have caught on."

Wal-Mart's favorable report isn't really news anymore, says Todd Sullivan. "Should the company ever miss [on earnings], only then will it be. [Wal-mart's success] isn't because it is cleaner (new and refurbished Wal-Marts are just as nice) - it is because Wal-Mart pounds their value proposition into our heads ever day, unlike Target. This isn't a trend one ought to expect to reverse anytime soon."

No Inflation? Who Knew?!

Shopped for food lately? If so, Wednesday's relatively mild CPI inflation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics may have surprised you. Yet as Gaffen indicated, "While one report does not a trend make (particularly as the prevailing view is that the government's inflation reports severely undercount inflation), it did provide a bit of solace to the market." Michigan economist and blogger Mark Perry says that in light of the latest data, concern for inflation may itself be inflated.

But that skeptical "prevailing view" of the official inflation numbers was sarcastically rendered by ETF expert David Fry: "Oh boy! Who knew? There's no inflation. All you need do is read the headlines in the financial media and listen to the talking heads and you've got the story. The trick here of course is, and has been, to drink the Kool Aid of government manipulated inflation data."

Michael Shedlock agrees: "The guy on the street does not believe energy prices are falling or that gasoline prices fell 2%. Neither do I. Supposedly they did, "seasonally adjusted."" Bond expert John Jansen found that the TIPS bond market expressed similar skepticism to the data.

Michael T. Darda of MKM Partners said, "I'm not sure what the BLS is smoking here, but it must be pretty strong stuff," and longtime official-inflation-numbers-critic Barry Ritholtz concurs.

London market participant Macro Man believes the Fed, for one, recognizes that inflation is growing by leaps and bounds: "The FOMC has started to notice that the cost of living is going up. A lot. [Macro Man would] argue that the Fed has found religion after the inflationary horse has already bolted. Still, perhaps it's better to see straight late than never; less clear is what to do about it."

TechLand: Icahn Enters Yahoo Fray With Cuban, CBS Buys CNET

Billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn set his sights on Yahoo this week, announcing he bought up more than 50 million shares of the company and will launch a proxy battle for control of Yahoo's board in order to force a sale to Microsoft.

Mathew Ingram wonders if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer "may have unwittingly tagged in The Terminator, otherwise known as Carl Icahn - a guy who was waging all-out proxy wars when Jerry Yang and David Filo were still shoving quarters into the Space Invaders machine down at the local video-game parlor." Seth Gilbert takes a look at Icahn's history and finds "multiple exit strategies" for his aggressive Yahoo move. 

Kara Swisher finds "sweet, sweet irony" in "entrepreneur and all-around bon vivant" Mark Cuban's presence on Icahn's proposed board list for Yahoo. Cuban himself is out blogging on what he'd do at Yahoo to unseat Google; Jeff Jarvis calls Cuban's ideas for Yahoo "absolutely numbnutty."

Meanwhile, CBS's $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET this week "is already prompting some predictable shoulder shrugging from folks wondering why they went with a (here come the scare quotes...) "web 1.0" company and not some hip young thang," says PaidContent's Joseph Weisenthal before examining the logic of the deal.

Ingram sees signs of desperation in CBS' buyout of the web property, but Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web sees validation of CNET as ""as stable an online collection of brands as anyone out there."

Investment Ideas

Stocks - long idea: Money manager Aidis Zunde likes his Visa stock holding but is reluctant to add to it at current levels. Short idea: Hedge fund manager Zachary Scheidt sees broadband wireless company Clearwire has "huge potential long-term growth, overshadowed by huge potential short term risk." He's short the stock, and spells out his thesis. 

Bonds: Portfolio manager Roger Nusbaum says the bond market needs "revolutionary change" to become more friendly to individual, do-it-yourself investors. Bond market veteran John Jansen speaks to a manager who is seeing "pockets of value" out there in debt from "large, diverse global financial institutions" and some REITs paper.

Global: Thomas Smicklas sees the SPDR International Small Cap (GWX) ETF as "an excellent choice for a niche in a more global-centric investment scheme."