Earnings season winners: Consumer discretionary stocks

The consumer has been faring better than many analysts had been expecting. So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that consumer discretionary stocks are among the best performers this earnings season so far. Yahoo Finance Markets Reporter Jared Blikre takes a closer look at the charts.

Video Transcript

- The strength of the consumer-powering discretionary earnings so far this quarter. Jared Blikre is on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with the details, Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah. So retail trade has been very strong. And let's go to the YFI interactive where we can see what has evolved in the space so far this early in earnings season. Now consumer discretionary, what I'm calling retail here, is having a beat rate of 13.3%, or that's how much they are beating above the consensus.

Now you take a look at the other retail sector, which is staples, they're beating about half of that, or 7%. But also notable, we see industrials have really done well. And communications, that's really a Meta story. But I want to stick with consumer discretionary and retail.

So I'm going to go to our YFI interactive, and I'm going to show you first how the sectors have evolved because retail really picked up over the last two months. What we're looking at here, the top four sectors all up 12% over the last two months. We got industrials, materials, energy. And XLY is consumer discretionary.

XLP, by the way, is down here at 4% That's more of a boring sector that tends not to get as much attention. But it does make the items that we need to eat and drink every day.

Let's take a look at the retail board here. And we can see a few standouts. I'm going to sort by performance so they stand out.

Just take a look at W here. Wayfair up 76%. That has been an interesting stock here to date. We had this build-up into the early part of February, a big knock down. And then, a rise over the last two months. I keep saying two months here because that's when there was a big rotation out of-- or at least not solely into the mega-caps. And they started diversifying into other sectors here.

This chart is going to be a little bit familiar. Let me take a look at AEO. That's the wrong one. ANF. There we go. Abercrombie and Fitch.

We do have that rise into January. And then, we have this really big lift off into the-- over the last two months. Also want to point out that Kohl's and Nordstrom each have more than 45% return over the last two months. Pretty impressive story, considering they're largely brick and mortar footprint there.

But it's not just these retail stores. We can take a look at apparel. Apparel has really been flying. And there's going to be a little bit of overlap with this board from the previous one.

But Children's Place, number one. That's up 121%. RealReal up 108%. And you can see here, a lot of these stocks, or at least some of them that I'm highlighting here, have been knocked down into the red.

And I'll tell you another thing. If you take a look at a longer term chart of some of these, they're not looking that good. In other words, a lot of these names are just climbing out of a very, very big hole.

I could go on here. But it does extend into the food space, the beverage space. We'll have to see what comes of the consumer staples because we haven't gotten a lot of those earnings just yet. But be really interesting to see if this trend does indeed continue, guys.

- We will be watching for that. All right, Jared Blikre. Thanks.