Ross Stores Inc

Consumer retail and software companies report earnings next week.

Some retailers are better equipped to fight the Amazon threat.

Strong e-commerce and Rack stores set it apart.

We expect a strong holiday selling period, with Amazon and Mattel among our favorites.

Apparel companies brace for competition.

These stocks are positioned to outperform their peers, and they also score well on environmental, social, and governance metrics.

Structural trends across apparel retail, e-commerce, and travel are being mispriced by the market.

We no longer think the iconic brand holds enough pricing power for a competitive advantage.

No, says analyst Bridget Weishaar, but it will look much different in the future.

The market is now pricing in long-term cash flow assumptions that are more conservative than those baked into our longer-term consumer cyclical valuation assumptions.

Short-term cash drivers do not address long-term competitive problems.

It could eventually be a disruptive technology, but it has some barriers to clear first.

The market now appears to be pricing in more conservative long-term cash flow assumptions than baked into our longer-term consumer cyclical valuations.

We think Ross is perfectly positioned to gain market share with its brand-name merchandise at a discount.

Top managers continue to exercise a lot of patience as they look for buying opportunities in a U.S. equity market that has risen close to 40% since the start of 2013.

While the market overreacts to low first-quarter comps and EPS thrown off by foreign exchange rates, we continue to believe that TJX is best in class.

The consumer shift to e-commerce is becoming more pronounced, but retailers are fighting back.

There has been more breadth than depth in the high-conviction and new-money purchases that we've seen so far from our top managers, even with the increase in investor inflows in early part of 2013.

Part of the so-called fiscal cliff was avoided, but the economy will still feel related headwinds in the first quarter, and more skirmishes loom.

The economic news was uniformly positive this week and even included some respectable news from the battered manufacturing sector.