If you are like us, the end of Halloween and roll into the first week of November has us thinking about the next big shopping holiday, the Thanksgiving weekend in particular and Black Friday.
As always, Retailers will be in focus, specifically on their same store sales results coming out of the very important Black Friday season.
The largest U.S. Retail focused ETF, which also happens to see the lion’s share of block trading volume in its options when institutional players are putting on hedges and/or directional trades on the sector, is XRT (SPDR S&P Retail,Expense Ratio 0.35%). Year to date the fund has seen more than $400 million leave via redemption activity, and the fund has a base of roughly $845 million in AUM currently.
The fund employs a modified equal weighting methodology, so top holdings are very well rounded in terms of no one given name or names having over-weighted exposure at any time. Case in point, top holdings currently are AWAY (>1.1%), AEO (>1.1%), RCII (>1.1%), BURL (1.1%), and CASY (1.1%).
In many cases these names may be regionally focused retailers and potentially smaller cap names when compared to the constituents of some other ETFs that focus in the Retail Equity space like RTH (Market Vectors Retail, Expense Ratio 0.35%), which is substantially smaller than XRT in terms of asset size ($65.3 million in AUM).