Home builders' stocks double

Here's another one of those undeniable green shoots: the Bloomberg index of the stocks of 18 leading home builders is up 100% from its low of last November (which doesn't show up on this chart since it uses only month-end figures). We've seen lots of tentative signs of late (e.g., housing starts, new home sales, the Case-Shiller index) that the housing market has hit bottom, and this adds a lot of weight to that conclusion. Surely we have seen the worst of the news; it's highly likely that if we haven't seen the bottom in residential construction, we are getting very close.