Christmas came early for retailers as a strong showing in sales during Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday gave retail-focused exchange-traded funds (ETFs) a boost, including the Direxion Daily Retail Bull 3X ETF (NYSEArca: RETL), which was lifted past its 200-day moving average.
Based on Yahoo! Finance performance figures, RETL is up 3.05% year-to-date and 51.60% the past year. In the last 5 days, RETL moved past its 200-day moving average with a tailwind of strong Black Friday sales amounting to a record $6.22 billion, according to Adobe Analytics.
RETL seeks daily investment results of 300% of the daily performance of the S&P Retail Select Industry Index. RETL invests in securities found within the index, which is a modified equal-weighted index that measures the performance of the stocks comprising the S&P Total Market Index.
If Black Friday wasn’t enough to prop up retail exchange-traded funds (ETFs), RETL got an additional boost from Cyber Monday sales reaching a record $7.9 billion, according to data from Adobe Analytics, which represented a 19.3% increase from a year ago. Retail sales on Thanksgiving Day also represented a strong online presence–a total of $3.7 billion.
The sales increase, especially for Cyber Monday, speaks to the obvious shift of consumer spending habits from brick-and-mortar retail to the convenience of online shopping. This constant year-over-year migration from brick-and-mortar to online was evident as visits to physical retail stores was down for a fifth straight year, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
