Target (TGT) is about to cash in on the strong growth of its credit card business. The Minneapolis-based retailer said Wednesday afternoon it is in talks with an unnamed “investment partner” to sell half its credit card receivables for about $4 billion. The company stresses that the deal hasn’t been finalized but could close as early as the second quarter of this year.

The company, which said last September it would consider what to do with the cards business, says the deal “would forge a new, long-term relationship with an investment partner whose broad experience is expected to result in strategic and financial benefits to Target over time.” Target’s plan could also please value investor William Ackman, who took a big stake in the retailer last year and was assumed to have been pushing Target to sharpen its focus on retail.

Beyond that, a deal could also cushion Target against any downturn in the cards business as the economy slows. A report in The Wall Street Journal earlier this week questioned whether Target’s card operations could maintain their strong earnings growth amid a consumer slowdown. But with the prospect of a new partner and $4 billion in its pocket, Target could find itself in much better shape than its struggling peers.

The holidays aren’t being kind to retailers. First, consumers spent even less than projected on Christmas gifts in a trend that hammered sales at chains such as Target (TGT). Now there are signs that Wal-Mart (WMT) - which had been looking like a rare winner in this year’s holiday sales slowdown - may have to play catch up on the expected surge in post-Christmas gift-card spending. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that a computer glitch was keeping Wal-Mart from processing gift cards. An internal investigation found that a “third-party verifier’s systems had an inadvertent processing error,” AP reports. Wal-Mart says it’s working to resolve the problem, but that’s all too familiar a claim at the image-challenged company. Whatever Wal-Mart says, customers who can’t cash in their gift cards aren’t going to be in a festive mood.

The holiday sales season isn’t making many retailers happy. U.S. retail sales dropped for a third straight week, Bloomberg reported, as bad weather apparently kept shoppers home and added to the ranks of procrastinators. The trends point to more pain for big retailers like Target (TGT) and Macy’s (M), which have been struggling to boost sales as consumers pull back. Fortune’s Suzanne Kapner recently reported that in addition to the widely discussed economic pain tied to the bad housing markets, shoppers are also being discouraged by big stores’ lack of must-have fashion merchandise. With the holiday season accounting for the lion’s share of many chains’ profits, Wall Street is crossing its fingers that the final weekend before Christmas will be a blockbuster.

Target (TGT) took it on the chin Thursday after the retailer warned that its fourth-quarter profit isn’t likely to meet Wall Street’s expectations. The company blamed soft sales at the end of November in toys and other holiday-season items, and said sales of apparel and home goods were weak as well. The news comes as investors brace for what’s looking like the weakest Christmas shopping season in years, though reports from elsewhere in retail Thursday weren’t uniformly glum.

The news comes as Wall Street awaits word of Target’s plans for its highly profitable credit card operations. Target said earlier this year it would consider selling or finding a partner for its card receivables, and the company said last month that it expected to announce a course of action by year-end. The decision to reconsider the card business — whose 2007 pretax earnings are expected to be $600 million — suggests Target has been hearing the footsteps of activist investor Bill Ackman, whose Perhsing Square hedge fund took a big stake in Target earlier this year. For his part, Ackman has been busy this week pursuing troubled bond insurer MBIA (MBI) and dangling the prospect of a public listing for his fund. But as he said of the listing notion, “the timing is not right now.” Target investors know the feeling.