Embrace the Stability of... Toll Brothers???

This is not intended to be an endorsement of buying Toll Brothers (TOL) for your portfolio, but rather as a post demonstrating the utterly bizarre nature of the stock market at times.

In this instance, Toll Brothers, one of the companies most at the center of the housing boom as a luxury homebuilder, has proved to be one of the most stable stocks out there since the real estate crisis started in earnest in mid-2007. For most of the last 2 years and nine months, it has basically hugged relatively closely to where it started the period:

Compare this to many other companies so directly tied to the fall of the housing boom and you would be forgiven for thinking that Toll Brothers must be involved in something other than real estate. Of course, it did have a large fall between mid 2005 and mid 2007, which proved to be a solid leading indicator of the crisis. However, since then it has relatively consistently held up better than the broad market even as housing construction has imploded.

Just goes to show that simplistic analysis does not do one's investments justice.