Monday, February 20, 2012

Monday Thread

Why am I talking retail? Retailers typically use a fiscal year which is not the same as the calendar year (Christmas!) For this reason, retailers typcially report earnings in the second half of the quarter.

WMT and HD are 2 of the biggest heavy weights and both report earnings Tuesday morning. By the way, both are members of the Dow Jones 30 - so these 2 stocks will move the Dow on Tuesday. Dow 13,000, and new 52 week highs on the SP500, depend on retail.

Two ETFs track retail and these are quite different in their composition. RTH, shown above, is the "BIG Box" ETF, with over 11% in WMT, and over 6% in each of HD and AMZN (and another 5% in each of LOW, CVS and WAG). XRT, on the other hand is very diverse, with no retailer comprising more than 2%, and its largest 3 holdings are WINN, NFLX and PBY.