Designed to provide broad exposure to the Consumer Discretionary - Retail segment of the equity market, the State Street SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT) is a passively managed exchange traded fund launched on June 19, 2006.
While an excellent vehicle for long term investors, passively managed ETFs are a popular choice among institutional and retail investors due to their low costs, transparency, flexibility, and tax efficiency.
Investor-friendly, sector ETFs provide many options to gain low risk and diversified exposure to a broad group of companies in particular sectors. Consumer Discretionary - Retail is one of the 16 broad Zacks sectors within the Zacks Industry classification. It is currently ranked 6, placing it in top 38%.
Index Details
The fund is sponsored by State Street Investment Management. It has amassed assets over $441.67 million, making it one of the larger ETFs attempting to match the performance of the Consumer Discretionary - Retail segment of the equity market. XRT seeks to match the performance of the S&P Retail Select Industry Index before fees and expenses.
The S&P Retail Select Industry Index represents the retail sub-industry portion of the S&P TMI. The S&P TMI tracks all the U.S. common stocks listed on the NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ National Market and NASDAQ Small Cap exchanges. The Retail Index is a modified equal weight index.
Costs
Cost is an important factor in selecting the right ETF, and cheaper funds can significantly outperform their more expensive counterparts if all other fundamentals are the same.
Annual operating expenses for this ETF are 0.35%, making it one of the cheaper products in the space.
It has a 12-month trailing dividend yield of 0.77%.
Sector Exposure and Top Holdings
ETFs offer a diversified exposure and thus minimize single stock risk but it is still important to delve into a fund's holdings before investing. Most ETFs are very transparent products and many disclose their holdings on a daily basis.
This ETF has heaviest allocation in the Consumer Discretionary sector -- about 77.8% of the portfolio, followed by Consumer Staples.
Looking at individual holdings, Victoria S Secret + Co (VSXY) accounts for about 2.43% of total assets, followed by Sonic Automotive Inc Class A (SAH) and Grocery Outlet Holding Corp (GO).The top 10 holdings account for about 17.95% of total assets under management.
Performance and Risk
Year-to-date, the State Street SPDR S&P Retail ETF has added roughly 3.02% so far, and is up about 9.82% over the last 12 months (as of 07/14/2026). XRT has traded between $77.28 and $90.88 in this past 52-week period.
The ETF has a beta of 1.16 and standard deviation of 22.06% for the trailing three-year period, making it a medium risk choice in the space. With about 76 holdings, it effectively diversifies company-specific risk.
Alternatives
State Street SPDR S&P Retail ETF sports a Zacks ETF Rank of 4 (Sell), which is based on expected asset class return, expense ratio, and momentum, among other factors. XRT, then, is not the best option for investors seeking exposure to the Consumer Discretionary ETFs segment of the market. Instead, there are better ETFs in the space to consider.
Amplify Online Retail ETF (IBUY) tracks EQM Online Retail Index and the VanEck Retail ETF (RTH) tracks MVIS US Listed Retail 25 Index. Amplify Online Retail ETF has $109.42 million in assets, VanEck Retail ETF has $251.63 million. IBUY has an expense ratio of 0.65%, and RTH charges 0.35%.
Bottom Line
To learn more about this product and other ETFs, screen for products that match your investment objectives and read articles on latest developments in the ETF investing universe, please visit Zacks ETF Center.
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State Street SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT): ETF Research Reports
This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).