The homebuilder sector edged higher Tuesday, to buck the selloff in the broader stock market, after data on new home sales came in well above expectations. The iShares U.S. Home Construction exchange-traded fund ITB inched up less than 0.1% toward a 15-month high in morning trading, reversing an earlier intraday loss of as much as 0.2%, even as the S&P 500 SPX shed 0.7%. Among the ETF’s more active homebuilders, shares of PulteGroup Inc. PHM climbed 2.0%, Toll Brothers Inc. TOL tacked on 0.4% and Lennar Corp. LEN rose 0.1%, while D.R. Horton Inc. DHI slipped 0.4%. PulteGroup’s stock also got a boost from better-than-expected first-quarter earnings. New home sales in March rose to an annual rate of 683,000 from a revised 623,000 in February, well above expectations of 634,000.
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