For those betting on a soft landing, Friday's statistics were the stuff of wet dreams, so blissfully sub-par that you might think the U.S. economy was smoking opium. A slight uptick in joblessness and hourly earnings was gently offset by weak payroll numbers and a six-minute decrease in the average work week. All in all, it was a pretty mellow mix of yin and yang, considering there's a housing bust under way that could implode the U.S. economy and cut global output in half. Such grim prospects obviously were not troubling Wall Streeters on Friday. Far from it. Take a look at what those crazy, zany bulls were doing to the shares of homebuilder D.R. Horton: (Click on charts to enlarge) Quite a spree, eh? As the chart below suggests, this was no one-week wonder either. Horton has been on a tear since November, goosed in perversely contrarian fashion by a steady stream of bad news from the housing sector and perhaps inspired by the old saw that, where wild-eyed investment manias are concerned, too much of a bad thing is never enough. Fortunately, as fatalistic as Rick's Picks has been in forecasting the ugly trend in real estate, we've managed to dodge this bullet and others that have whizzed by as the homebuilders' shares have recovered almost to the threshold of respectability. We were actually long DHI shares before Christmas by way of some January call options, but we exited them for a small profit after misreading an ugly one-day decline as the possible beginning of something worse. Horton's blithe, bouncy demeanor reflects the kind of stupidity that could drive a permabear into therapy. Given the profound weakness of the housing market, shouldn't this stock be plummeting into the low teens by now? Apparently not. Good thing we didn't have a
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