Retail stocks are getting slammed

Retail stocks are getting slammed on the Monday after the big Thanksgiving shopping weekend.

It's still too soon to definitively tell exactly how Black Friday shopping went, and how Cyber Monday is going.

However, early surveys indicate that it may not have been a spectacular weekend.

Here were some of the biggest losers in retail in early afternoon trading:

• Urban Outfitters: -4%
• Under Armour: -3.7%
• Macy's: -2%
• Kohl's: -2%
• Gap: -1.8%
• Walmart: -1.2%
• Target: -1.2%

The National Retail Federation said more shoppers spent time online instead of in queues outside malls. As for the total volume of sales, it estimated that sales would increase 3.7% this year, although this isn't comparable to last year, according to USA Today.

Preliminary data from analytics firm RetailNext showed that overall sales fell 1.5% on Black Friday, while average shopper spending dropped 1.4%. ShopperTrak estimated a decrease from last year to a total of $12.1 billion.

Retailers started offering discounts long before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and so that also likely impacted the volume of sales this weekend, and today.

In a note to clients on Monday, Deutsche Bank research analysts wrote,

"We believe Black Friday weekend was soft overall as shoppers stuck to their lists (smaller baskets YOY), partly offset by further migration of traffic to online and before the weekend. We think off-price outperformed on apparel despite deep dept. store discounts, and we saw a modest shift in traffic away from big box retailers as the weekend progressed."

Also, we're just coming out of a disastrous third quarter earnings season for most of the major department stores, who blamed declining sales on everything from bad weather to the strong dollar.