On Monday, the S&P 500 was down 0.1% and Toronto was down 0.4%.
Linamar recovered 2.75%. There was not much movement of particular note in most of the stocks on our list.
A headline this morning on BNN television said that U.S. consumer spending increased 6% in June. That is a huge increase. However with inflation running around 3% it is more like 3% in volume terms plus 3% for price increases. I was skeptical that it could really have grown that fast.
Looking into the details I found that U.S. retail trade increased by 0.5% in June versus May. So, then I thought maybe the 6% came from annualizing the one month’s gain, which would be basically bogus. But the details claim that year on year the increase was 6.6% in June. And May growth was 5.9% year on year. Unless that is some sort of statistical anomaly, it is truly an impressive rate of growth.
Statistics Canada reported new motor vehicle sales numbers for May. For each od Canada, Ontario and Alberta, the number of new vehicles sold in May 2018 was relatively similar to 2017 (Ontario was down about 1% and Alberta up about 1%). This was not at all a bad result given that 2017 had been significantly stronger than 2016 (11% Canada , 11% Ontario and 17% Alberta). So May 2018 faced a “tough comparable” versus 2017.