ITB News and Press, iShares U.S. Home Construction ETF From 05/25/19

I never recommend trading lumber futures because of the lack of liquidity in the lumber futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. However, lumber is a critical commodity when it comes to construction and building all over the world. The current level of open interest in the lumber ...

By Robert Hughes Sales of new single-family homes fell 6.9 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 673,000, down from a multiyear high of 723,000 in March. Sales had posted three monthly gains in a row after hitting a low of 564,000 in December (see top chart). Sales are u...

Continuing a trend of declining since late last year, the  30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 4.06% for the week ending May 23, 2019, down from 4.07% in the prior week and 4.66% at this time a year ago, according to Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey. More news on: UBS ET...

The graph here shows the point at which I said early last summer housing sales had turned over (for the worst) and would remain on a downtrend indefinitely, and it shows how that prediction has panned out. Existing home sales were down again nationally (4.4%) in April (fourteenth month in a ...

We've began tracking existing home sales over the last several months, using Zillow's seasonally adjusted price and sales volume data to estimate the total aggregate valuation of these sales at the regional and state level in order to get a sense of the relative health of the real estate...

Pres. Trump abruptly cuts off a White House meeting with House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer, saying he would not negotiate on infrastructure legislation with Democrats while he remains under investigation by various committees. More news on: Fluor Corporation, M...

By Robert Hughes Sales of existing homes fell 0.4 percent in April to a 5.19 million seasonally adjusted annual rate. Sales are down 4.4 percent from a year ago and 8.0 percent from the recent peak of 5.64 million in November 2017. Sales declined in two of the four regions tallied: sales f...

The Industrials sector ranks seventh out of the 11 sectors as detailed in our Q2'19 Sector Ratings for ETFs and Mutual Funds report. Last quarter , the Industrials sector ranked sixth. It gets our Neutral rating, which is based on an aggregation of ratings of the 426 stocks in the Industria...

Don't be confused by the title. Homebuilding stocks have been showing strength since the start of this year. What I am going to discuss in this article are leading homebuilding indicators that finally point to the return of growth. The the numbers are still weak, but it's looking better and be...

Real Estate Weekly Review Following the worst week of 2019 for the major equity indexes, the S&P 500 ( SPY ) finished the week lower by another 0.7% as trade talks have reportedly broken down between the US and China. Progress on North American trade relations and a delay of the European...