Homebuilder Lennar Reports Quarterly Earnings

Homes under construction at the Lennar Bridgeway home development (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Down with the homies

Lennar erases 2024 gains as high rates hamstring US housing

The challenges facing Lennar and other homebuilders shed light on a large vulnerability for the US economic outlook.

12/19/24 11:18AM

Shares of homebuilder Lennar Corp. are down more than 5% in early trading after the company issued underwhelming quarterly results and had a relatively dour outlook on what awaits in the near term.

Their estimated deliveries in Q1? Below Wall Street’s projection. New orders? Also disappointing.

And margins on home sales — something we’ve flagged as a critical difference between the outlook for US homebuilders compared to the rest of the stock market — are expected to sink to their lowest level since the second quarter of 2018.

Selling fewer units than expected as profitability deteriorates is not a recipe for success. Accordingly, shares of Lennar have erased its 2024 gains with Thursday’s big decline.

“In the course of our fourth quarter, the housing market that appeared to be improving as the Fed cut short-term interest rates proved to be far more challenging, as mortgage rates rose almost 100 basis points through the quarter,” said Stuart Miller, co-CEO. “Even while demand remained strong, and the chronic supply shortage continued to drive the market, our results were driven by affordability limitations from higher interest rates.”

Lennar’s business challenges are also indicative of one of the most visible vulnerabilities facing the US economy at large should high interest rates continue to hamstring the housing market.

Housing starts are not trending higher. Total units under construction are trending lower amid a wave of multifamily completions. Employment in residential construction has held up very well amid these softening trends, but may be hard-pressed to do so in a world where would-be homebuyers face “affordability limitations” and homebuilders have weakening margins.

Matt Phillips1m

Space stocks rip amid speculation on Altman joining race

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

Matt Phillips1h

Intel sinks on news it will hang on to networking unit

Intel dropped in early trading Thursday after it disclosed plans to retain ownership of its networking unit following a strategic review of operations.

The unit, known as NEX, makes products like infrastructure processors, which do needed “housekeeping” tasks like running security checks, thereby freeing core Intel CPUs to do the higher-value operations. It also produces switches and controllers that manage and direct the flow of data to CPUs.

Intel Shelves Plans to Sell Networking Division After Review

Luke Kawa2h

Quantum computing stocks soar on return of bullish options bets

The calendar says December, but the price action is starting to look a lot more like September to me:

Quantum computing companies IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are all up at least 7% as of 11:04 a.m. ET, buoyed by a wave of bullish options activity.

Nearly 50,000 calls in IonQ have already changed hands, well above the 20-day average for a full session, with activity concentrated in strikes from $50 to $55 in contracts that expire between Friday and mid-January. Its put/call ratio is near 0.2, versus an average of over 1 for the past 20 sessions.
More than 65,000 calls have traded in Rigetti, a hair shy of its full 20-day average. Like IonQ, options activity has a bullish tilt, with a put/call ratio of about 0.7 versus a 20-day average of roughly 1.2.
D-Wave, which received positive commentary from Evercore ISI on Wednesday, isn’t seeing call activity as elevated as its peers, but the options action is also very skewed toward the bull side, with a put/call ratio of less than 0.3 versus a 20-session average of 0.7.

Pure-play quantum computing stocks nearly doubled from late August to late September amid heavy options market activity thanks to reports on government support for the sector, M&A activity, tech breakthroughs, and a flurry of price target hikes by Wall Street.

Luke Kawa

Retail traders are killing it this year because of both what they’re buying and when they bought it

Buy the dip. Buy AI. Buy gold.

J. Edward Moreno3h

Hims announces acquisition of Canadian telehealth firm Livewell

Hims & Hers rose in early trading after it announced its acquisition of Livewell, a Canadian telehealth company, marking its official entrance to that market.

The company announced in July that it would expand into Canada by 2026, taking advantage of the patent expiry for semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster GLP-1s, Ozempic and Wegovy. Hims said Thursday that it would do that through an all-cash acquisition of Livewell.

Novo’s patent on semaglutide is set to expire in Canada in January. It would be the first time generics for the blockbuster GLP-1 drugs are available anywhere, and generic drugmaker Sandoz International has already announced plans to make copies of the drug. In the US, Hims sells copycat versions of Novo’s drugs, which has led to conflict between the companies.

On Wednesday, Hims announced that it would purchase YourBio, a device that uses “bladeless microneedles thinner than an eyelash” to collect blood samples, in another all-cash deal. According to its latest quarterly filing, the company had $345.8 million in cash and cash equivalents.