Tonight's Chat Topic: Have the Homebuilder Stocks Peaked?

In tonight's chat at 8PM, eastern time, we're going to take a look at a number of homebuilders and other real estate-related stock charts to speculate on whether the sector has peaked, or put in "The Top." All fellow guessers are welcome!

Reading Roundup - Shiller Continues to Shill, TraderMike Reflects, The Hype Machine, etc.

Articles I've recently read with my comments in italics, and other miscellany:

Be Warned: Mr. Bubble's Worried Again, by David Leonhardt.
["... Mr. Shiller has unearthed some rare historical housing data for other countries. Using old classified advertisements, he was... able to fashion a chart for the United States that goes back to the 19th century. It all points to an unavoidable truth, he says. Every housing boom of the last few centuries has been followed by decades in which home values fell relative to inflation. {ed. - That's his startling insight? Well blow me down!} Over the long term, the portion of income that families spend on their shelter stays about the same ... 'We do have a shortage of land in the prestige areas, and so there is a potential for them to go up. But I just know that the trend over the last century has been for new prestige areas to appear.'" Note that a picture of Shiller accompanying the article has him posed in front of his vacation home, bought in 2002, which is located in an old "prestige area."]

Thoughts on Day Trading, by TraderMike.
[Mike wrote a good post over the weekend about what he has learned these last several months while day trading: keep commissions down, focus on minimizing initial risk, keep a journal, don't move your stop to B/E too fast, etc.]

Feedster Top 500 Blogs
[I looked through the first 250 blogs in this highly inaccurate list (I wasn't on it, lol) and found one, yes, only one site that interested me: The Hype Machine - Today's Blog Music. It's both well-designed and a great idea: "hear music posted today on dozens of blogs." Bravo, Anthony Volodkin!]

There were a couple of articles at Forbes.com that I thought about linking to, except they still insert these ads into the body of the text, which I think is an awful practice. When are online publishers going to learn to respect their readers? Reserve your precious currency (your links) for publishers who "get it."

Baby T is crawling up a storm these days... there's only one problem: he's crawling backwards. He'll crawl backwards off the bed, back across the room, out the door, down the stairs, etc. The only things that stops him is when he accidentally ends up straddling something like the leg of a table and gets stuck.

Buffett's Small Stake in USG

Berkshire Hathaway holds 6,500,000 shares of USG. You'll recall that at the Shareholder Meeting back in 2000, Buffett answered the question: "How did you become comfortable enough to invest in USG based on the asbestos exposure?" by saying: "It is 1/10 of 1% of our business." Does anyone know what his cost basis is in USG? I think that he was a tad "early" buying this one.

USG, Monthly Chart