6 Top-Performing Retail Mutual Funds For The Holiday Season

As much as we'd like to say the holidays are primarily a time for family and friends, the spirit of the season has been commercialized by retailers for decades. The period between Black Friday and the new year is characterized by consumer spending, whether it's the purchase of a flight back home, holiday décor or gifts for even your most distant relatives. In 2014, holiday retail sales during this period reached $616.1 billion, and the National Retail Federation projects consumers will spend $805 on average this holiday season — an increase of $3.20 per person compared to last year.

While gift-giving might be on your to-do list, Credio wanted to find the top-performing retail funds you could invest in this holiday season. To do this, Credio evaluated retail-focused and consumer discretionary mutual funds and ETF ranked them by the highest five-year returns.

The funds included in this analysis all meet the following requirements:

• Unleveraged
• Open to new investors
• Have expense ratio less than 1.5%
• Have at least five years of historical returns

Given that many of the major retail stocks are down when looking at year-to-date performance, this might be a good entry opportunity in the market.

While not all retailers see an increase in stock prices during the holiday season, all of the mutual funds we identified as top performers have seen steady increases in returns since the tail end of the Great Recession. The top-performing funds are ranked from lowest to highest based on a five-year annualized load-adjusted return.

#6. STWAX - Stratus Growth

#5. WTEIX - Westcore Growth

#4. HDPSX - Hodges Small-Cap

#3. XRT - SPDR S&P Retail ETF

#2. PMR - PowerShares Dynamic Retail ETF

#1. FSRPX - Fidelity Select Retailing Portfolio

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