CHART OF THE DAY: Dr. House-ing (2nd Derivative HPI Matters!) - CoD2

This is an excerpt from today's Morning Newsletter written by Hedgeye U.S. Macro Analyst Christian Drake.

Anyway, after being on the right side of the acute housing demand infarction in 2014, we reversed our diagnosis for 2015 in November of last year alongside our expectation for a recession and reversal in many of the industries underlying maladies.  

Since much of what we like about 2015 is what we didn’t like about 2014, juxtaposing the two years across a selection of key factors should sufficiently capture the core of our call.

HPI | 2nd Derivative Trends Matter:  Housing demand leads home price growth and housing stocks follow the slope of price growth.  Since 2008 the correlation between housing equities and the year-over-year rate of change in HPI has been 0.90. 

  • 2014:   Home price growth decelerated sharply in 2014, slowing from ~12% YoY in February to ~5% in October according to CoreLogic data.  The housing complex (XHB/ITB) underperformed the market by ~15% alongside that expedited deceleration in HPI.
  • 2015:  Home price growth stabilized in Oct/Nov across all three of the primary price series (CoreLogic, Case-Shiller, FHFA) and have, in fact, shown modest re-acceleration in December.   Performance has again followed suit with the XHB and ITB outperforming the SPX by +12% and +10%, respectively, since the 2nd derivative HPI stabilization began in November.  Ongoing inventory tightness, with months of supply on the existing market holding below 5 months, remains supportive of stable to improving price growth trends over the immediate/intermediate term.  

Net: In the Chart of the Day we show the inflection in housing equity performance following the 2nd derivative inflection in HPI.