Friday was another positive day in the markets. The S&P 500 was up 1.1% and has clawed its way back to a small positive gain for the year to date. Toronto was up 0.5% but remains down 4.6% year to date.
Melcor was up a hefty 9.0% but we should not read much into that because the volume, although somewhat larger than a typical day, was still very thin. Still, it’s nice to see.
Amazon released earnings and rose 6.2% to $599. The GAAP earnings were 17 cents per share and year to date were 24 cents. Apparently there are big market value gains to be had while selling massive quantities of goods at basically a break-even level. Apparently its okay for Amazon to basically keep on promising profit tomorrow while offering basically no profit today. This for a company that is about 20 years old now. It reminds me of the White Queen who offered Alice jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but said there would never be jam today. Except with Amazon there was also very little jam yesterday as well as approximately none today. Perhaps special rules apply to such a game-changing company as Amazon. The likes of Walmart and Best Buy must feel like they are the victim of a competitor who is completely mad. Or perhaps the jam will indeed flow with great abundance tomorrow.
American Express was up 2.9%.
And Valeant rose 6.0%. I don’t know if there is anything to the accusations of accounting irregularities. I think, probably not. But I still had my own concerns about the company in regards to how it calculates cash earnings, how it avoids income tax and how it pays obese executive compensation. And I think the investigations into price gouging are very serious matters. Also there is the very high debt level. We may see a nice bounce when they explain things on Monday but I am not touching this one myself.