Conclusion, Investment Implications, Strategy

The SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT) appears to be beginning a new Strategic trend of outright strength and relative outperformance versus the benchmark S&P 500.

Analysis

The upper panel of Chart 1 below plots the SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT) daily since January with its 200- and 50-day moving averages, widely-watched major and minor trend proxies.  The green highlights show that XRT has broken out to new all-time highs this week following two successful October tests of the 200-day MA.

Chart 1

The green highlights in the lower panel show that, as XRT was rising to new highs, the ETF began outperforming the S&P 500 (SPY) on a 63-day (quarterly, our Strategic time period) basis for this first time since April.  These events appear to be the beginning of a new Strategic trend of outright strength and relative outperformance as the country heads into the holiday season.

Table 1 below is an updated version of our Sector/Industry Group Opportunities: Outright & Relative Performance Table that is typically Table 2 of our Monday morning Keys To This Week report for Sectors & Industry Groups.  It includes XRT as well as updated performance data on the 7 additional ETFs that we currently have a positive bias on.

Table 1