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.
