Retail Tries To Bounce – Can It Last?

Awful. Simply put, the word awful sums up the year for investors with ties to stocks in the retail sector not named Amazon.com (AMZN), Home Depot (HD), or a handful of other companies. It hasn’t been just 2017 either. As shown in our Death By Amazon Index (DBA) below, the retail sector has been in a tailspin for over two and a half years now.

Since 2012, the index has rallied 29.3%, which is less than a third of the S&P 500’s 93.4% gain. More recently, though, things have been even worse.

Since its peak in Spring 2015, the DBA index has lost more than a third of its value, and in just 2017 alone, it is down 15% in a year where the S&P 500 is up 15%! Not good.