Friday’s action saw the S&P 500 down 2.3% and Toronto down 0.95%.
Costco was down 3.6%.
AutoCanada was down 4.4% to $11.09.
Statistics Canada reported large job gains for November. And this is NOT explained by Christmas hiring since these figures are always seasonally adjusted. I mentioned a few times in the last few years that the monthly lob creation numbers are just a statistical estimate. Their recent volatility suggests that the sample is no longer representative or reliable. And what seldom gets mentioned is that even if the sample were highly representative the small sample size still leads to a large statistical uncertainty in the order of plus or minus 30,000 jobs nationally.
Speaking of jobs: A call center just closed in Sydney Nova Scotia. About 650 jobs gone which is a vicious blow to that small City of some 32,000 people. There are only about 100,000 in the whole Cape Breton metro area. And probably no more than half are in the work force (after deducting children, students, the retired and those medically unable to work or otherwise not wanting to be in the workforce – like stay-at-home parents. So this is probably an increase to the unemployment rate of over 1.0% just from this one event. This was a contract call center. I don’t know if there was mismanagement but I can easily imagine that it is a brutally competitive industry where the customers shop around for the lowest bid. In this case the customers were GM OnStar, Sirius XM satellite radio, AT&T and Allstate Insurance. Was the Call Center competing against India? I don’t know. I don’t know if this Call Center was enticed to Sydney with subsidies (I suspect so). If so, it would seem to go to prove a region cannot “purchase” jobs.
It was another bad day for Trump in terms of the mounting evidence that his campaign had much contacts with Russians. And the news on that front and the uncertainty it causes could certainly get a lot worse.
Rate reset preferred shares were mostly down today and have declined significantly lately. This leads to some fairly high yields. (Considering that the highest quality rate reset preferred shares got issued at yields under 4.0% when these were popular.)
ENB.PF.A issued March 13, 2014 yielding 4.4%. Now, due to the price drop to $16.95 it yields 6.5%. It is due to reset a year from now on December 1 and at the current Bank of Canada rate would reset to a slightly higher dividend to yield 6.9%. If someone today were putting together a portfolio to spit off dividends, these shares (and many other rate reset preferred shares) would be worth considering.