With the holiday season upon us, retail looks to be in focus once more. Fortunately, this key shopping season is poised to be a solid one with many expecting decent sales.
In fact, the National Retail Federation looks for sales in November and December to increase 3.9% (yoy), while shop.org is looking for double digit growth in the online segment when compared to 2012.
Add in declining unemployment levels, low gas prices and stable-to-rising home values, and we may be in for a very favorable holiday shopping environment (also see 3 ETFs for This Holiday Season).
How To Play
Investors can easily tap into this trend by looking to one of the many retail ETFs currently trading on the market. These seek to provide broad exposure to a number of companies engaged in some aspect of retail and thus could be low risk ways to play the trend in the market.
In particular, we like the PowerShares Dynamic Retail Portfolio (PMR) and the Market Vectors Retail ETF (RTH). Both of these have Zacks ETF Ranks of 2 or better and offer great diversification across a number of important retail names.
More Information
For more on these retail ETFs and the holiday shopping season, make sure to watch our short video below. It discusses why investors should pay attention to these funds over the next few weeks and also highlights some great stats on this crucial season for the sector.