FDIS vs RTH

FDISBFidelity MSCI Consumer Discretionary Index ETF

RTHBVanEck Retail ETF

In short

FDIS Cheap and wide. FDIS holds about 300 US consumer discretionary stocks rather than the sector's mega-cap handful, and charges 0.08% while the typical fund in its peer group asks roughly four times that.

RTH Retail, undiluted. RTH owns roughly 25 of the largest, most liquid US-listed retailers, each required to earn at least half its revenue from selling goods. No car makers or burger chains riding along under the consumer label.

Stated mandate

FDIS The fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the performance of the MSCI USA IMI Consumer Discretionary 25/50 Index.

RTH The fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the MVIS US Listed Retail 25 Index through a passive indexing approach.

Why people hold it

• FDIS 0.08% a year, level with the cheapest large fund in the group (XLY) and a fraction of the roughly 0.35% cohort median.
• About 300 holdings: the MSCI USA IMI Consumer Discretionary 25/50 Index reaches past the mega caps into mid and small caps.
• Tracks that index closely, one of the stronger implementations among the 17 funds in its consumer discretionary group.
• A multi-billion-dollar fund from Fidelity, trading since 2013, that pays distributions quarterly.

• RTH Purity screen: index members must draw at least 50% of revenue from retail, from big-box and grocery to online and specialty, so autos, restaurants and hotels stay out.marketvector.com
• Capped market-cap weighting across the 25 biggest, most liquid retailers means the giants lead. XRT takes the opposite path: modified equal weight spanning large, mid and small caps.marketvector.comssga.com
• No cleverness in the wrapper: a plain passive index fund, normally at least 80% in benchmark names, running on the same MVIS retail index since its 2011 launch.

Worth knowing

• FDIS One sector, and a cyclical one. Returns ride on how freely US households spend, so the ride is bumpier than a total-market fund's.
• The 25/50 rules cap how large any single position gets, but this is still a concentrated slice of the US market.
• Moderately traded rather than the category's busiest ticker. Limit orders are the sensible habit, especially in size.

• RTH 0.35% a year sits at the category median, but broad consumer-discretionary trackers like XLY and VCR charge under a tenth of a percent for a wider net.
• Around 26 holdings with size-led weights: a stumble at one mega-cap retailer shows up in the whole fund.marketvector.com
• Trades lighter than the headline sector ETFs, which can mean wider bid-ask spreads. Distributions land annually or semiannually rather than every quarter.

Full FDIS profile⁠

Full RTH profile⁠