Nomura confirms its 'neutral' stance on the general retail sector after the impact of the snow on sales and bearing in mind the recent underperformance of the shares.The Japanese broker said that weekly trading data from upmarket food chain Waitrose and its department store owner John Lewis suggest that full price sales have fallen short of expectations, due to the bad weather in late November and around Christmas."We estimate this could have impacted non-food specialist retailers anywhere between 2-4% over the quarter as a whole prior to the post Christmas sales period," says analyst Fraser Ramzan. "Sales may have been recovered post Christmas, but inevitably at lower margins."Nomura notes that the customers that did venture out seemed to prefer to shop in one place, and so supermarkets and department stores such as Marks & Spencer (M&S) may have fared better than most.As the sector underperformed last month, it left a poor outturn broadly discounted, but Ramzan says that the renewed squeeze on disposable income in the current year may be a greater issue."Our preference remains for self-help stories such as M&S and Dixons," he adds.