By Shelly Banjo, Wall Street Journal

When it comes to holiday shopping, it pays to track what retailers do, not what they say.

For all the hype, Black Friday isn’t the day to find the best deals, according to new data from Adobe Systems Inc., which has collected information on one trillion visits to 4,500 retailing websites since 2008.

Instead, retailers’ biggest price cuts last year came on the Monday before Thanksgiving, and shoppers who bought items on Thanksgiving Day snapped up the season’s lowest prices, according to Adobe.

The weeks before the Black Friday weekend offered better deals than the weeks leading up to Christmas.

What’s more, those who shopped on Black Friday were more likely to find items out of stock.

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