If history is any guide, retail stocks should lead a gain in the U.S. stock market over the next week and month after March's consumer confidence reading blew past the Wall Street consensus Tuesday morning.

The Consumer Confidence Index for March was 125.6, according to the Conference Board, compared with the 114 level expected by economists polled by FactSet. The beat was more than two standard deviations higher than the average surprise. Using hedge fund analytics tool Kensho, we looked at what happened to the and a key retail ETF in the wake of just a one standard deviation beat by the index.

Here's the average performance of the S&P 500 and the SPDR S&P 500 Retail ETF (XRT) one week later.

