Wednesday was a positive day in the markets with the S&P 500 up 1.2% and Toronto was up 1.5%.
Oil (West Texas) was up 4.8% to $37.89. This was apparently due to a surprise decease in oil inventories.
AutoCanada was up 4.7% although it had not released any news.
Retail sales were reported for October and were about flat. They were up 0.1% in dollars but down 0.3% in volume. The impact of the lower Canadian dollar is starting to be seen and is causing some inflation. There will surely be more to come. The figures above would appear to suggest inflation of 0.4% in the month – that’s equivalent to 4.8% annualised.
Restaurant sales were reported for October and were up 0.3% in Canada although down 1.7% in Alberta. This is slightly negative for Boston Pizza but does not suggest any material decline in sales.
Boston Pizza is in the process of renewing its unit buy-back program. I don’t expect a lot of buybacks but any support for the unit price is welcome given that the units appear to be under-valued in the market.
I transferred some funds from U.S. dollars to Canadian dollars in my RRSP. In this transaction, I was completely captive to my broker TD Direct and the exchange rate was about 0.93 cents under the wholesale rate, or about 0.66% below. I only got that good of a rate by transferring what amounted to more than $30,000 Canadian. Apparently even at $25,000 Canadian the rate would have been closer to a charge of 1.5%.
In a non-registered account it might be possible to set up an electronic transfer of U.S. dollars to an external currency broker, make the exchange at a much lower fee and then transfer the Canadian dollars back to a Canadian dollar brokerage account.
Canadian Forex offers something like this and I am investigating exactly how it works. The banks are smart though, they know that I might rather just pay the 0.66% rather than risk sending say $25,000 off to Canadian Forex and trusting to get it back in U.S. funds or the opposite. It’s not clear to me why Canadian Forex would not transfer the money instantly rather than taking four days as their site indicates they do.