There has been accelerated bearish put activity in a retail-sector ETF, SPDR S&P Retail (NYSEArca: XRT), as investors gear up for earnings season.
XRT takes an S&P based equal weighted approach that is periodically rebalanced as stocks run or fall, to the U.S. Retail equity segment of the market, and currently its top weightings are: EXPE (1.62%), TRIP (1.57%), and CHRS (1.40%).
Year to date, XRT has fared very well, having rallied 14.20% and slightly outpacing peer Retail equity ETF Market Vectors Retail (NYSEArca: RTH) which is up 14.11% YTD.
RTH is designed to track the Market Vectors US Listed Retail 25 Index which tracks the performance of the 25 largest U.S. listed Retail companies.
RTH has a clearly large cap bias when compared to the equal weighted XRT, as top holdings currently in RTH are WMT (11.46%), AMZN (9.24%), and HD (8.70%).