RTH vs XRT

RTHBVanEck Retail ETF

XRTBState Street SPDR S&P Retail ETF

In short

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.

XRT Pure retail, not broad consumer discretionary. XRT equal-weights roughly 80 store chains and online sellers, so a small-cap mall retailer carries about as much freight as a mega-cap giant. It has been the sector's trading vehicle since 2006.

Stated mandate

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.

XRT The fund seeks to provide investment results that generally correspond to the total return performance of the S&P Retail Select Industry Index, before fees and expenses.

Why people hold it

• 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.

• XRT Modified equal weight: the index resets constituents toward equal slices each quarter, so a single giant retailer does not run the whole fund.spglobal.com
• Retail only: apparel, automotive, broadline, computer and electronics, staples merchandise, drug, food and specialty stores. Car dealers count, carmakers do not.ssga.com
• Trading since 2006 and very actively traded, one of the older and busier ways to take a targeted position on US retail rather than a whole sector.ssga.com
• Sticks tightly to its index and stands among the stronger builds in its consumer discretionary peer group. Pays quarterly.

Worth knowing

• 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.

• XRT At 0.35% it costs more than broad cap-weighted discretionary funds like XLY and FDIS near 0.08%. The focus and the equal weighting are what the extra buys.
• Equal weighting pulls small and mid-cap chains up next to the giants, so moves can be sharper than a cap-weighted sector fund's.ssga.com
• One industry, roughly 80 names. When shoppers tighten up, there is no other sector inside the fund to cushion it.

Full RTH profile⁠

Full XRT profile⁠