moorer1

Case-Shiller Home Prices Rise in May, But Don't Read Too Much into This

"One month does not a trend change make" and this reality is quite easy to see in the chart above where there were many monthly price decreases prior to all 20 cities putting in their price peaks between 2005 and 2007."

True...but I don't know if it's quite proper to compare the 20-city index with the individual city's index in this regard. And, in fact, in the run-up since Jan 2000, the _20-city index_ fell only one month during those 101 months.

Indeed, the seasonality has to be filtered out in order to understand the trend.

One clue as to where we're headed could be looking at the typical seasonal inflection points of summer and winter. If one examines the monthly change chart (the 1st derivative of the price curve) of the 20-city index, one can see that this curve had been making lower lows then lower highs since the winter of 2004(!). However, this trend has been broken this summer, i.e. the maximum monthly change for the summer of 2009 exceeds that of the summer of 2008. I think this does suggest that prices are, at least, trying to bottom.

U.S. Housing Has Bottomed

Mr. Lieberman refers to sales of only new homes, and this indicator is, in fact, seasonally adjusted.


On Jul 27 05:00 PM Alan Young wrote:

> I'm surprised that only one comment has mentioned the seasonality. Okay, home sales are up from January, hurrah. But home sales ALWAYS peak in summer and dip in winter, so that indicates nothing..

Housing Inventories Offer Positive News

On Jan 29 12:44 PM cadoggy wrote:

> 1) shadow inventory held by banks not yet on MLS

cadoggy,

How do banks market properties they've acquired via foreclosure? Is it through the normal listing process via MLS? I hear of this shadow inventory...but it seems to me that data would be available to estimate the size of this inventory.

Equities: Where Are the Bears?

Is the $57 billion in outflows from equity funds (Oct 1 - Oct 15) bearish?!

trimtabs.com/site/fund...

Charts of the Day: Gold, and Baltic Dry Index

"retail shortages being reported worldwide"

Just curious...what is the retail demand versus other types of demand for gold (industrial, central banking, etc)? I know zilch about gold, but I wouldn't expect retail demand to be a large proportion of the overall demand.

Bob

Home Prices See Record Declines in July

"Ok, so I'll call the bottom: We're about halfway there. "

It's a little scary...but I agree.

Home Prices See Record Declines in July

"The news is not all bad, however. Overall declines have actually slowed in home prices in the most recent three-month period."

It's not apparent to me that this is terribly relevant, as the home values are substantially seasonal, and the most recent three-month period just reflects this seasonal strength. The record year over year decline tells the real story. Those declines have to get smaller before any "not bad news" can be declared...