It’s a quiet day for market mavens with U.S. markets closed and only two small releases from Statistics Canada.

However, those two releases do shed some light on current conditions, says RBC Financial. “December was a modestly encouraging month in the Survey of Large Retailers which indicated that the Christmas 2002 season was a good one with further evidence expected in Thursday’s retail sales report for the whole industry.” Sales in December reached $10.2 billion, up only slightly from December 2001.

StatsCan also released its leading indicator which pointed to a 0.1% gain in January over December. RBC says that this was down from a 0.3% gain the previous month, significantly due to stock market weakness.