September 2006


I just found this great bit of data on The Big Picture Real Estate blog, an enjoyable read. I’ll present it here as they did, since it’s just startling (these figures cited below are just out in Sept), and REITs are still chugging upward like little engines that could.

Housing by the numbers

Housing Stat Year Over Year Change
Builders? sentiment -52.2%
New-home sales -21.6%
Purchase-mortgage applications -20.9%
Building permits -20.8%
Housing starts -13.3%
Existing-home sales -11.2%
Existing-home inventories +39.9%
New-home inventories +22.4%

There are quite a few ways to look at inflation and the general inflation expectation of various markets. Most people think of CPI or Core CPI as “inflation”, or they look at interest rates or the price of gold. Perhaps more important than the official statistics is what inflation expectations are…

There’s an easy way to see what the market expectations currently are for inflation — look at the relative performance of inflation adjusted bonds versus normal bonds. The easiest way to look at this is with a chart of TLT:TIP. (more…)

I’ve always wanted to write a post on the topic of probability in the markets but this guy summed it up pretty well.

I just noticed this… Sara Lee Completes Hanesbrands Spinoff.? The new Hanes stock is trading under the symbol HBI and is currently priced at a market cap around $2 billion.? The Sara Lee mother ship weighs in at a market cap of $11 billion (after the spinoff), so they basically just sold 18% of their company in one fell swoop.

Sara Lee has been going through some very painful restructuring, but the price makes it attractive to some value buyers right now.? It had a dividend yield over 4% earlier this year before they lowered their dividend — it’s currently yielding 2.5%, well above the market average.

I’m sure this information can be found in many places online, but I just got this via e-mail from TradingMarkets and found it to be a useful quick summary of what’s coming up this week. I’ve pasted it below and followed with my comments (brace yourselves, this is a very long post!!!):

(more…)

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