On Monday the S&P 500 was up 0.85% and Toronto was up 0.7%.
Oil was up about 5%.
Penny stock Ceapro was up almost 8% after announcing that a research institute in Boston would do some pre-clinical evaluations of Ceapro’s products. No detail was provided as to timing or who would pay for the cost of the research or who would own the findings. Therefore it’s not clear that this development is of any real significance.
An interesting development today was National Bank announced it would eliminate trading fees for its discount broker customers. A number of U.S. brokerages had done that but this is a first for Canada. It’s apparently a loss-leader strategy. It’s not at all clear to me how they will make a profit doing this. It’s interesting that these trading fees have always proven to be so competitive and prices have come down. Given that discount broker customers would tend to be “sticky” it’s a surprise to me that the industry is so price competitive. Compare that to fees on mutual funds where there seems to be little impetus to compete on price.