I got an interesting email from a local business.
“Evolution Golf Sherwood Park will be closed for the month of August due to a shortage of staffing. The hours at the North and South locations will remain unchanged.” (This is an indoor golf simulator facility.)
Okay a shortage of staff when the unemployment rate in Edmonton and Alberta (Sherwood Park is an Edmonton suburb) is at a high not seen in decades. Presumably this is due to the Canada Emergency Response (CERB )benefit of $2000 per month. By necessity that program was never nuanced enough to reflect that some people were only working part-time. Many part-time workers would lose money if they went back to work. Clearly, the SERB benefit needs to be at least nuanced if not tapered away before long.
In other news this morning HSBC Canada (which is a bank) reported a 95% drop in profit due to loan loss provisions. This may be contributing to CWB being down 3% to $22.11 this morning. CWB will likely come out the other side of this and continue to grow. But meanwhile no one really knows how bad the loan losses can get.
Ceapro (our one penny stock on the list) has announced publication in a scientific journal of positive benefits from their propriety formulation that treats “exercise-induced inflammation”. This is positive but is far from the stage where they have a product that they can actually start advertising to the athletes of the world. It’s progress but revenues from this are far from imminent unless they were to do a licencing or partnership deal and get upfront money which may be possible. Perhaps it is very interesting and promising that “the study was co-funded by Ceapro and Pepsi co”.