j.c. penney, abercrombie, guess, express and sears, the worst we tail companies in the s&p 500. pennie is still down 65% over three years. but with the bad comes the good. the best performing retail stocks not necessarily the headline grabbing names, had you headed appliance and electric store coms, or even brown shoe company to the last portfolio in the last three years, you would have had the top five retail stocks. we're talking by hundreds of percentage points. retail does not seem to be benefitting from the economic recovery. all-star table to weigh in. mark cohen, analyst in savannah, georgia and oliver chen, department store analyst in studio with me. marshall, it would be obvious to say the numbers are bad out of the retail world, how do you look at numbers? >> we have to recognize that things have changed. since the recession, the consumer made a different play. when it comes to timing, and retailers are stuck in this tradition of 100-year-old way of marketing and merchandising product, trying to get consumers to buy earlier out of season. the consumer clearly today, th

j.c. penney's continue toss bite out from the very deep hole it dug for itself. >>> with an hour to go in markets, the dow jones industrial average up about 49 points this hour, the s&p adding about seven, the knead dab is up 14. we're keeping a close eye on the rate space. watching oil, scott, looking for what's driving, what is the catalyst in this market. >> joins us now, steve crawl, cnbc contributors heather hughes and great, and todd saldoni, and yes, of course our own rick santelli. >> whether it's iraq. >> well, the good news about that is it's going to force interest rates to -- the fed can only do one and do at the most, and so you're going to force investors to put money into stocks, bonds and junk bonds. in light of what's happened, especially? germany, flirting with a 1% mark, you think that ten-year rate could go? >> and probably the key is it will probably stay below 250. you see retail sales, you see china, japan, as scott mentioned, all the other bad spots, so there's really a lot of dollars out there, and very little demand for that. >> but you think that's a good thing for stocks. why? >> eventually. when you put your money in the bank and it sit