Barron's on Housing

Barron's cover article (click on the title to read the whole story) this weekend was about the homebuilders. They make the case that while housing is pretty bad right now, the stocks are very cheap and may present an opportunity. We don't have an opinion about the group as a whole, although we are investigating a few individual names that are trading at steep discounts to book value. For those who want to play the whole sector, Barclay's now has an IShare for the group. The symbol is ITB and the top ten holdings are:

Pulte Home (PHM)
Centex (CTX)
Lennar (LEN)
DR Horton (DHI)
Toll Brothers (TOL)
KB Home (KBH)
Ryland Group (RYL)
NVR (NVR)
Mertiage (MTH)
Standard Pacific (SPF)

Full disclosure: AIM does not own any of these stocks, but we have one client who owns ITB.