One of the best performers on the ASX 200 on Thursday has been the Afterpay Touch Group Ltd (ASX: APT) share price.
The payment solutions company's shares are up 6.5% to $12.48 in morning trade.
Why is the Afterpay Touch share price storming higher today?
As many readers will be aware, Wall Street bounced back from a heavy decline on Christmas Eve with a significant gain overnight.
One of the key catalysts for this gain was data released by Mastercard SpendingPulse.
Mastercard's SpendingPulse dataset comes from anonymous transaction data sourced from millions of Mastercard-accepting locations throughout the United States.
According to the release, the data shows that the U.S. retail sector has experienced a "robust shopping season from before Thanksgiving through Christmas."
Mastercard's SpendingPulse revealed that "holiday sales increased 5.1 percent to more than $850 billion this year – the strongest growth in the last six years. Online shopping also saw large gains of 19.1 percent compared to 2017."
One of the strongest performing areas of the U.S. retail sector was the apparel market.
The release explains that: "Total apparel had a strong season with a growth rate of 7.9 percent compared to 2017, recording the best growth rate since 2010."
Given Afterpay Touch's exposure to this side of the retail market, investors may be betting that its U.S. sales have grown strongly since its last update and have been buying its shares today in anticipation of a strong first half result.
Should you invest?
I think that Afterpay Touch is one of the best tech companies that Australia has produced in recent years and has the potential to be a blue chip of the future.
In light of this, I think it is worth considering as a buy and hold investment along with fellow tech stars Altium Limited (ASX: ALU) and Appen Ltd (ASX: APX).
But it is worth remembering that its share price does have a significant amount of future growth built into it. This means that if it fails to deliver on the market's lofty expectations its share price could be cut down to size.
