Coronavirus causes retail stocks to suffer biggest monthly drop ever

The XRT retail exchange-traded fund has fallen 33 percent in March, its worst month ever, with some companies including Guess, Kohl’s and Macy’s experiencing share price declines of more than 60 percent. Highly-leveraged clothing and specialty retailers are experiencing the most difficulties as many close their doors due to the coronavirus outbreak. “It’s very concerning. It means that simply they’re not able to pay their bills, and so they’re tapping credit lines, they’re tapping any means possible to try and stay in business,” said Quint Tatro, president of Joule Financial. “Then we have debt defaults and then ultimately the equity follows. So I think that the market is telling us that a lot of these companies are in trouble if we don’t return to some sort of normalcy very quickly.”