$LOW Is Quietly Getting Wrecked — And the Housing Market Is Dragging It Down
Lowe's faces a perfect storm of frozen housing, inflated lumber, and shoppers who've stopped showing up to the hardware aisle
Ticker Ratings
| Ticker | Rating | Entry Price | Current | $ Gain | % Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BA BOEING CO | hold | $219.92 | — | — | — |
$LOW bulls, we need to talk. Jeremiah Babe's Lowe's walkthrough this week was basically a horror movie for home improvement retail: lumber up 10% year-over-year, a single 2x4 running $3.48, plywood sheets cracking $11, and boards so warped they look like hockey sticks fresh off a bad power play. Meanwhile, the lumber aisle? Crickets. On a Saturday. The garden center was packed — people are still buying petunias — but nobody's swinging a hammer on a new kitchen reno right now.
The culprit is a housing market in what Babe calls a three-year deep freeze, and nothing from the Trump-Xi summit is thawing it out fast. Sure, China's buying ~200 Boeing planes and some soybeans, but $BA investors aren't exactly popping champagne — the order came in well below the 500 planes originally hoped for, and the stock reflected the disappointment immediately. The 'Beans and Boeing Summit,' as Patrick Boyle's channel dubbed it, delivered underwhelming results for a trip that had the CEOs of Apple, Tesla, Qualcomm, and Nvidia in tow.
If the Fed stays higher-for-longer (and TheChartGuys flagged a potential rate hike as a bearish tail risk this week), mortgage rates stay punishing, home sales stay frozen, and Lowe's garden center better start selling a lot more petunias.