It’s only May, but if I had to pick a chart of the year it would be housing stocks. In fact, housing as a whole has been remarkably resilient this year. If you’d told me that there would be a bank panic and 7% mortgage rates in May I would have predicted that the housing market was cratering. And sure, it hasn’t exactly been a raging bull market. After all, the NAHB Housing Market Index has been cut in half and existing home sales have cratered. Housing market data is broadly negative. Yet homebuilder stocks are up 16% year to date and are only about 18% off the all time highs. A big part of this is that the housing ... (full story)