Yahoo Finance Why RH (RH) Stock Is Trading Up Today
What Happened:
Shares of luxury furniture retailer RH (NYSE:RH) jumped 7.5% in the afternoon session after investors seem to be rotating out of large-cap tech winners like NVDA, GOOGL, and MSFT and into smaller cap stocks, with housing stocks as a bright spot in particular.
The rotation was likely sparked by today's inflation report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It revealed that CPI (Consumer Price Index - a gauge of the average price consumers pay for goods and services) for the month of June 2024 came in better than expected at 3% year on year (the lowest level in more than three years). The recent inflation prints supported the argument that the Fed will start cutting rates this year as the headline figures moved closer to the 2% target.
Lower rates greatly impact the housing market, which has been tepid in the last year-plus. Specifically, lower rates make homebuying more affordable for consumers because on the same value home, monthly payments are less with a lower mortgage rate.
Before rates began to rise 2022, many potential homebuyers anchored on a home value they could afford--let's say $450,000. As rates rose, the home they could afford with the same monthly payment fell--let's say towards $300,000. However, they weren't very excited about buying a lesser home after having their eyes on higher-value homes. Many chose not to transact. On the other side of the coin, many homeowners with mortgage rates in the 2-3% range chose not to sell because of the prospect of having top buy a new home with a 6-8% mortgage rate attached to it. Demand suffered. Supply suffered. Today's inflation report could be an early sign that the housing market could thaw and even become hot if the Fed cuts rates.
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What is the market telling us:
RH's shares are very volatile and over the last year have had 24 moves greater than 5%. In context of that, today's move is indicating the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 14 days ago, when the company gained 8.9% on the news that CEO Gary Friedman bought more than $10 million of the company's shares at an average of $216.10 per share. The recent purchase put his ownership at a little above a quarter of all the company's outstanding shares. The CEO's purchase of RH stock can be considered a bullish signal, as it demonstrates increased confidence in the company's future. It could also indicate that the CEO thinks shares are undervalued at the current price.
RH is down 7.1% since the beginning of the year, and at $265.54 per share it is trading 33.9% below its 52-week high of $401.84 from August 2023. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of RH's shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $2,194.
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