Well it was certainly a banner day on the markets today to end the second quarter.
The DOW was up 2.2%, Toronto was up 1.5%. Oil was up 9% (although one figure showed a staggering 18% late Friday).
The Canadian dollar was up a remarkable 1.6%.
Walmart was up 2.2% to a new closing record of $69.72. I have not seen this mentioned yet in the financials web sites that I view (mostly Yahoo)/ The last record close was in 1999! Not Walmart’s fault it took so long. Idiot investors has WAY over-priced Walmart back then.
Among our stock picks the biggest gainers were Bank of America up 5.7%, Stantec up 4.8%, Toll brothers up 4.7%, FirstService up 4.6%. Research in Motion was down 20%.
Shaw Communications is updated and rated Speculative (higher) Buy at $19.24. It reported a 3% decline in earnings and revenues in its latest quarter. It continues to lose basic cable customer at a rate of about 1% per quarter. Meanwhile telephone customer growth has slowed to the point where it only about offsets the loss of cable customers in termns of numbers. Internet growth is about zero. The television business also declined about 3%. This is of concern. I believe the television shows are strong but it may indicate advertisers switching away from television as people increasingly have the ability to speed past commercials as they watch. However Shaw blamed it on the weak economy. Shaw has the ability to increase earnings by lowering their advertising dollars and are doing this but this could worsen the sales outlook. Overall however Shaw appears to be offer good value. We call it speculative due to technology risks.