On Thursday, the S&P 500 finished the day down 0.1% while Toronto was up 0.2%.
Toll Brothers had a strong day, rising 4.3%.
WSP Global jumped 11.6% after announcing it will acquire the large environmental consulting firm Golder Associates. Golder has 7000 employees in 155 offices across 30 countries. In most cases the stock price falls when a company makes an acquisition. Clearly the analysts like this deal. It was apparently done at a good price. And WSP is issuing only a relatively modest amount of shares (in a private placement) and funding most of the purchase with debt. WSP has certainly been an impressive growth-by-acquisition company.
I notice most of the rate reset preferred shares on our list were up today and in general have been up lately.
After the close, RioCan announced it will cut its distribution by one third. Given the recent price increase of RioCan this news presumably was not anticipated by the market. The various shut-downs in Ontario were likely a trigger for this move. RioCan indicates it will reevaluate the distribution over time. with a view to increasing it from this “new base” (which probably means it will not be returning to the old base anytime soon). It will be interesting to see how far the units fall on this news.
Yesterday there was a Brookfield rate reset preferred share that reset at 5.5%. It would have reset at about 5% but it has a 5.5% minimum. This is BIP.PR.B and closed today at $25.24. Actually these are preferred limited partnership units rather than shares. I believe they are quite a bit more complex in terms of taxes and so I would rather buy these in a non-taxable account to avoid the tax complexity. The 5.5% minimum and with these trading near the $25 par seems attractive and could be considered for part of the fixed income allocation of a portfolio. But note that unlike bonds these will not necessarily ever be redeemed at par. And they can certainly trade lower than $25 in certain circumstanced. This security held its value very well over the first 5 years of its existence – except during the panic of this past March and it took several months to recover from that. They were issued 5 years ago.