It's Tuesday, February 23rd.

Welcome to Market Fullery.

I'm Chris Hell joining me in studio today for my life full rule breakers and

supernova, David Kretsman.

Thanks for being here.

Glad to be here.

We're going to dip into the full mail bag, but we have to start with the machine that is Home Depot,

Holy cow.

Fourth quarter profit and revenue came in higher than expected.

They raised their quarterly dividend 17%.

And their same store sales numbers were, they were breathtaking for a company this big and this mature.

Oh yeah, sales for the quarter up 9.5% to 21 billion dollars.

Just that number alone for a quarter, that's pretty darn impressive for a retailer.

Same store sales at 7.1% that that includes US and international locations.

Just in the US same store sales were up 8.9% so those are numbers you just love to see.

And that's the sort of thing that I would expect in the quarter we are in right now, I don't expect nearly 9% comps in the US in the

quarter that includes, you know, the December holidays.

Yeah, I think a lot of this is reflective of kind of the slowly but surely recovering

housing market in the U.S.

So just to give a little perspective, in December that was the ninth straight month that housing starts were above 1 million units and that's the longest run that you've

Had with that metric since 2007 so that that gives you an indication that housing is improving. Housing starts averaged 1.11 million

units in 2015. Again, that's the highest number since 2007. So the housing market is finally kind of back to the pre-recession levels and that's great for a company like Home Depot and

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