Just added a new Life Cross chart for the retail sector a few minutes ago. If you missed it, it's here. I chose to work on retail today because of the news that Macy's (M) is cutting guidance forecasts and closing even more stores, falling by more than 10% after hours. I had sold my Macy's stock a little more than a month ago, and used the proceeds to grow my holdings in Mattel (MAT). Macy's is now down 25% from that point. I'm saving some information for a later posting about the overall state of the retail industry and whether it can survive the growth of Amazon (AMZN). For now, I wanted to talk about some of the odd things that I am seeing in some of the ETFs I went through today. Going through the holdings in major indexes is revealing some odd contradictions.For example, the SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT), which is benchmarked against the S&P Retail Select Industry Index contains Macy's, but in its top holdings is also Netflix (NFLX). I suppose that Netflix would be in competition for revenues related to sales of DVDs, but you can't otherwise buy anything from them except the service.Does that meet your definition of a retailer? What about the companies that transports goods to those retailers, like McKesson (MCK) and Sysco (SYY)? Those two companies are listed in the VanEck Vectors Retail ETF (RTH), which tracks the MVIS US Listed Retail 25 Index. I would have sooner listed them in a "transportation" or "logistics" index.Home Depot (HD) and Lowe's (LOW) are also in the MVIS index, but not S&P's version. I would have considered those retailers, even though they are also heavily tied to the construction sector. For similiar reasons CVS/Pharmacy (CVS) and Walgreens (WBA) make sense in these indexes because, while revenues are tied to the pharmaceutical industry, they also turn a profit on reselling goods. What are your thoughts?