On Wednesday the S&P 500 was down 0.3% and Toronto was down 0.1%.
Most of our stock picks were down.
Canadian Tire was down 1.5% to $92.39. But earlier in the day it reached a new high of $94.93. As mentioned under September 16, I had placed an order to trim my position at $94 and a bit more at $95. So about 10% of my Canadian Tire shares were automatically sold as the price hit $94. My offer at $95 is for about 5% of my shares.
Back on September 5 I had placed an order add a little to my Melcor position at $19.17. Until today the price refused to drop that low and instead seemed to hover around $19.30. But today it dipped below $19.17 and my buy order was filled.
While I can never be sure of where prices will head, Melcor seems like a better bargain than Canadian Tire right now and so I am happy with the above trades.
It seems the market dropped in part due to fears that the U.S. government would have difficulty passing legislation to raise the debt limit and would therefore run out of cash. But I don’t think the market will react all that much this time around. After all we went through this nonsense in August 2011 and it got resolved so the market will likely assume it will get resolved. Still it could be a catalyst for a “correction” (also often know as a buying opportunity but occasionally is the start of something worse).
Apparently there was also a rumor that Wal-Mart had curtailed orders to lack of sales but Wal-Mart denied this.