Stocks slip on holiday buying, interest rates

Stocks closed lower in quiet trading Monday as traders returned from the Thanksgiving holiday. Retail stocks led the declines as early signals about the strength of the holiday shopping season failed to impress. Investors are focusing on central banks in Europe and the United States, which are going in different directions on interest rate policy.

At the close on Wall Street, The Dow Jones industrial average had lost 78.6 points, about 0.4 percent, to nearly 17,720. The Standard & Poor's 500 index was down 9.7 points, about 0.5 percent, at 2,080.4, and the Nasdaq composite slipped 18.9 points, about 0.4 percent, to 5,108.7.

CRUDE ENERGY: Benchmark U.S. crude closed down 2 cents at $41.69 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

BARGAIN PRICES! Retail stocks fell after initial data from Black Friday and the first holiday shopping weekend showed shoppers were not going to stores as much as last year. Preliminary ShopperTrak data showed in-store sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday were $12.1 billion, down from $12.3 billion in 2014. Analysts said they observed the department stores having to do deep discounting to attract shoppers to their stores.

"We believe Black Friday has gone from a period of management excitement to one of anguish," Nomura retail analysts Simeon Siegel, Gene Vladimirov and Julie Kim wrote in a note to investors.

Consumer discretionary stocks were down 0.6 percent, compared to the 0.1 percent drop in the S&P 500.

INTEREST RATES: The European Central Bank is widely expected to give the region's economy another dose of stimulus as it tries to keep a recovery going and get inflation closer to 2 percent. The stimulus is likely to include increasing the amount banks have to pay to park money at the ECB, giving them an incentive to lend it out instead.

IN CONTRAST: While the ECB moves toward increasing stimulus, the Federal Reserve is getting ready to start raising interest rates for the first time since June 2006. A series of U.S. economic reports this week, culminating with Friday's jobs survey for November, could cement investors' expectations for a rate hike at its meeting in mid-December.