FTSE Friday: Post-Christmas gifts from UK retailers

Happy New Year and welcome back to our end of the week round-up of UK large-cap news. The RNS is still pretty quiet - although Next (LON:NXT) and Bamp;M European Value Retail SA (LON:BME) showed up their peers by proving that it is possible to release a Christmas trading update in the first week of the new year. We’ve also had a useful update from across the pond: Walgreens Boots Alliance (NSQ:WBA) (which owns the eponymous pharmacy chain) has announced a strong set of numbers for its fiscal first quarter against a tough comparison last year.
There are three interesting insights we can gain from these updates which we will dive into in this article:

Online versus in-store sales - has the former peaked?
The outlook for the UK economy - this doesn’t feel like a recession
The outlook for value versus luxury

But first an overview of the announcements themselves.
The Next trading update was its annual masterclass in managing expectations. After a better-than-expected Christmas-trading period (full priced sales up 4.8% in the nine weeks to 30 December), management has increased its full year pre-tax profit guidance to £860m (up 4.5% on last year). Interestingly, that is bang in...