Strong Housing Market Data for February
Pre-market indexes are giving back some of the gains made over the past two regular trading sessions. We're currently hovering in a range following this morning's economic reports (more on them below). The Dow is down -45 points, the S&P 500 is -10, the Nasdaq is shedding roughly -65 points, and the small-cap Russell 2000 is -8 at this hour.
Google parent Alphabet GOOGL has announced its largest-ever acquisition: it is purchasing New York City-based cloud security firm Wiz, for a princely sum of $32 billion — all cash. The synergies look clear enough: Wiz will now support Google's cloud security platform. What might be even more interesting is whether this big move leads to other corporate buyouts in the near future.
Back during the Biden administration, Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan was an anti-monopoly hawk, and routinely worked to break up big conglomerate moves like this one. She was also very effective, and likely deterred many other corporations from making similar business deals. How many will now see the coast as clear now that Khan has returned to her Ivy League professorship?
Despite mortgage rates hovering above 7% last month, Housing Starts jumped +11.2% to 1.50 million seasonally adjusted, annualized units, from expectations of 1.38 million starts, and the downwardly revised 1.35 million for January. This is the second 1.5 million print in the past three months; we haven't seen performances like these since late 2023/early 2024.
Single-family units grew +11% while Multi-family were +12% — a welcome balance, whereas these figures have often leaned more Multi-family, which doesn't tend to bring the same profits. Both are still down year over year, however. Even more surprising about this housing report is that it follows Homebuilder Sentiment yesterday, which fell to its lowest level in 7 months.
Building Permits were slightly above estimates: 1.456 million versus 1.45 million expected, but still down -1.2% from the downwardly revised 1.7 million from the prior month. Gains in the Midwest (+8.9%) and South (+1.0%) made up for the declines in the Northeast and West, and may reflect a snap-back from cold weather issues in January.
Another surprise this morning came from the Import Price Index for February: +0.4% versus the consensus of 'unched.' This matches the previous month's +0.4%, which are the highest prints since April of 2024. Ex-volatile fuel prices, we still see +0.4% for last month. Year over year, Imports are +2.0%.
Exports swung to a positive +0.1% from an expected -0.1% in February, which followed January's very strong +1.3%. In fact, it's the fourth positive read in the past five months. For the year, Exports are +2.1%. It should be interesting to see what happens to both Import and Export figures on a monthly basis once tariffs are added into the mix.
NVIDIA NVDA CEO Jensen Huang will once again deliver the keynote address at today's GPU Technology Conference (GTC), at which time he will have the opportunity to re-set the table in terms of expectations for things like AI development. NVIDIA shares are down -11% year to date, after catapulting more than 2200% over the past five years.
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