On Wednesday, the S&P 500 was up 0.3% and Toronto was down 0.2%.
Liquor Stores N.A. was up 1.6% to $14.91. Looking at the earnings and looking at the low level of business at their stores in my area and looking at the extreme level of competition in Alberta I would use the price rise to sell this. I sold at lower prices…
I notice Agrium was down 1.8% to $109.20. I sold last week at $116.69, so with one week down and infinity to go, my sell looks like a good move so far.
Today, Manulife was out with an IPO of 5 year rate reset preferred shares. With a yield of 3.8% I did not buy any. Some of the rate reset shares that I bought earlier this year had yields as high as 4.5% and seemed like safe companies. My threshold is 4%. At 4% or more I don’t mind grabbing some of these as an alternative to cash. But given some risk that they could trade under the issue price I am not going to bother buying any under 4.0%.
The one investment that has been a noticeable negative for my portfolio in the last several months is my investment in the oil sands ETF, that trades under the symbol CLO. This ETF is not on my list above but has long been on my list of Canadian Exchange Traded Funds.
In 25 years of investing I have rarely owned any energy or mining stocks or any other commodity stocks. And that was working well. I bought this one for perhaps a silly reason, to get “exposure” to this sector. This spring I was sitting on about a 30% gain and considered selling but I kept it. Now I am sitting on a 5% loss. I certainly had no ability to predict short-term oil prices. At this point there seems to be a lot of pessimism around oil prices. At this point I will likely keep this and will even add to it if it goes down much more. At some point oil prices will likely rise again but I have no idea when. Also perhaps this one will rise if Keystone pipeline is approved in January. I am not in a big hurry to buy more commodity companies.