Financial guru and Gartman Letter editor Dennis Gartman, in a discussion about copper demand and copper stocks, dropped this bombshell: The U.S. will soon face a housing shortage.
“Housing (is) all the way down to 400,000 units now,” Gartman told CNBC.
“I think we’re going to have a shortage of housing in the not too distant future.”
“We’re going to run out of housing so quickly it’s going to be frightening.”
Gartman also likes "stuff," ie, commodities, especially when the stuff in question is copper.
"Even when the news is awful, it doesn't make new lows." Gartman points out.
"As a trader, as an investor, I think you have to own it."
Copper stocks, not futures, are the easiest way to play copper, Gartman says, now that commodity markets have evened out because hedge funds have largely quite speculating in them.
“The way to look at (copper) is where is the demand not going to fall any farther?” Gartman says.
“How many fewer cars can we sell, how many fewer houses can we build?”
Just getting the number of available housing units back to 1 million a year — which is a very low number by historical standards — will drive up the demand for copper, says Gartman.
The number of contracts to buy existing homes in February rose 2.1 percent, according to the National Association of Realtors, Bloomberg reports, a possible signal that the worst of the recession may have passed for an industry that has been in steepest decline.
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