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The U.S. mid-season shopping season is getting off to a historically quick start. Parents with children and college students have been loading up carts weeks in advance, transforming a previously drowsy period between July and September into a multibillion-dollar shopping binge.
As of early July, nearly 67% of consumers had already started shopping, up from 55% last year and the highest recorded level since tracking began in 2018, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF).
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This pre-season activity is not a tale for shoppers. It’s an implicit but significant cue for ETFs tracking consumer purchases, technology and even gastronomy. With electronics being at the top of shopping lists for both college and K-12 households, chip exposure is receiving an indirect benefit. Laptops, tablets, and cameras are among the largest-ticket items, fueling demand all along the chip supply chain.
That makes funds such as the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SMH) worth monitoring. It contains top chipmakers that provide the brains behind virtually every new device students use.
Retail is another easy winner. Almost half of households intend to do their shopping online, but discount and department stores are hot on their heels. Diversified retail plays like the ProShares Online Retail ETF (NYSE:ONLN) and the VanEck Retail ETF (NASDAQ:RTH) track both digital-native sellers and brick-and-mortar chains that rule household shopping trips.
Food is a sleeper category. College families spent over $9 billion on groceries and snacks, according to NRF numbers. That may translate into a quiet tailwind for the Invesco Food & Beverage ETF (NYSE:PBJ), which owns packaged food, beverage and agricultural stocks that power dorm fridges and late-night study binges.
Combined, these ETFs offer focused exposure to where seasonal expenditures are really going. They also temper the risk of putting your bets on one retailer or chipmaker in an economy that’s still sorting through tariff talk, rate projections, and a shaky economic environment.
For investors seeking opportunity before the start of the holiday season, this shopping cycle is more than a curiosity for retailers. It’s an early, high-tech, value-sensitive spending wave, and for the right ETFs, it could translate into new momentum long before Wall Street begins thinking in terms of Black Friday.
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