Boy this is fun!
I love it when a plan comes together and all that tedious waiting has finally paid off as our bull trap has sprung and we are enjoying the ride down with all of the “wheee” and none of the nasty gnawing off of legs in order to get our money out. While Jim Cramer decides to shamefully deflect the issue by CELEBRATING his call of a June housing bottom, his poor sheeple are getting hammered as wave after wave of sellsellsellers hit the wires.
It was, in fact, the BS housing data (sorry Jim but read past the headlines before you make a fool of yourself) that led us to get MORE bearish yesterday morningas it was reported RIGHT ON CNBC, that analyst Ivy Zelman said the following:
50 percent of sales in May were on spec. She says we’re seeing a lot of spec homes now because, “today’s consumer wants to touch and feel the house.” The positives are that cancellations are down, sales are better and there’s less negative pricing, although discounts are still prevalent. “The patient was without a pulse in the fourth quarter,” Zelman notes, “and now the patient’s in ICU.” So why all the spec now? Because builders are trying to jam all these homes into buyers’ pockets before the expiration of the $8000 first time home buyer tax credit. It turns into a pumpkin November 30th.
So 50% of the sales (which were up 17%) were not sales at all! That means that sales to ACTUAL people declined 33% in May. We shorted the Qs right out of the gate and made our target 30% for the day trade and we had the usual fun with our oil shorts but, otherwise, all our bearish bets were working and there was little to do. I called almost the exact finish for the day in my 2:58 comment to members where I said: “…since we need to sell off 5% and since NOT selling off more than 1.5% today would make it very unlikely we sell off 5% overall, then I think we need to finish lower than our lows so far. Of course, Mr Stick knows this too so they will likely be fighting like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen while Mr Fund who wants to move to cash may take advantage of that and look to sell into the close so, if we can punch…
