On Thursday, the S&P 500 was down 0.1% while Toronto was up 0.4%
Bank of America rose again today, up 1.3% to $16.57.
The Canadian dollar was down close to a cent and that pushes up the value of American stocks when valued in Canadian dollars. For the most part, it’s probably not worth worrying about what the dollar does. It’s very hard to predict. A while back I toyed with hedging against a rise in the Canadian dollar which would reverse my gains from holding U.S. stocks. I bought an ETF called FXC to do that. As mentioned previously I have sold out of that. Since I will someday need U.S. dolalrs in retirement. I rally don’t need to hedge the currency risk anyhow. It’s only because my portfolio is reported in Candain dolalrs taht there is an apparent risk there. The reality is that my future need to spend U.S. dollars provides a natural hedge agaisnt the currency change.
Speaking of currency, I am not at all in favor of currency trading which is a zero sum leveraged game. Many times I have been approached to place links on this site to forex trading sites. I would never do that. The whole notion of forex trading is at odds with the mind set that as investors we should seek to make money by owning profitable companies. Many people think that stock market investing is all about making money from other investors. They think that stock investing is a zero sum game. They are wrong. In stock investing we should think mostly about making money from the customers of the businesses we own (as the company provides valuable goods and services) and not so much about making money from other investors (though we are OK we doing some of that as well).
An old article of mine explains this in more detail.