Markets continued to be “on fire” on Wednesday. The S&P 500 was up another 1.1% and Toronto was up 0.8%.
Some of the notable gainers included:
Toll Brothers up 6.2%.
AutoCanada up 6.6%.
CRH Medical up 4.2%.
Linamar, up 2.7%.
With the markets roaring ahead, it might be prudent to trim some positions especially stocks that have become too large a portion of a portfolio.
Linamar will definitely see a negative impact in Q1 of the Coronavirsus both due to its sales in China (which is a far smaller market for it than North America and Europe but still…) and due to problems it will have getting shipments from its factories in China out. Linamar has six factories in China.
I added a little to my position in Couche-Tard today.
The latest rail car loading statistics are out. The latest week showed a strong rebound in traffic in the U.S. versus the prior week. However, the total is still below the 2017 and 2018 levels for same week but was above the 2019 level. The rebound was driven by Inter-modal, Forest products, metallic ores&minerals, and motor vehicles.
Canada, you may recall, had been relatively stronger in terms of rail car loading growth or decline for most of 2019 and into 2020. In the latest week the loadings were up noticeably in Cananda and are higher than the levels in the same week in any of the past three years. There was strength in inter modal, and particularly in petroleum and also metallic ores and minerals.
P.S. Our one Penny Stock company, Ceapro announced that its clinical trial of beta glucan as a cholesterol reducer will now include the use of beta glucan alone. Previously the study was going to always combine the beta glucan with staten drugs. This is a good change because beta glucan is a natural product. Ceapro has proprietary technology to extract beta glucan from oats and put it into pill form. Although the press release did not say so, I was able to confirm that some patients are already enrolled in the drug trial. But, for some reason some patients will not begin the trial until almost a year from now. Any results from this trial are probably at least 18 months from now if not longer.
Costco announced January same-store sales figures after the close. It was another strong month with a gain of 5.3% year over year in same-store sales. This was after adjusting for volatile gasoline prices and for foreign exchange fluctuations. This continues a long strong of excellent same-store sales gains. What is not known is how much of it is related to higher prices versus higher volume. In any case this is a positive report.