Wednesday was mostly a positive day on the markets.
The S&P 500 was up 0.9% and Toronto was up 0.4%.
A report this morning indicated that U.S. exports reached a record high in April and the U.S. trade surplus fell modestly but remained at $46 billion. This trade news may have been responsible for some of the rise in today’s markets.
U.S. financial were strong with Bank of America up 3.2%, Visa up 2.0%, Wells Fargo up 2.5%, and American Express and Berkshire each up 1.7%.
WSP Global was up 4.3%.
However, AutoCanada got pounded down another 6.5% to $15.86. The company did not release any news. Possibly there was some new negative news about auto sales in Canada. I thought perhaps more likely there was a negative analyst report. Checking RBC, they are quite positive on this stock. And TD is showing no new analyst views on this stock. Possibly a large institutional holder decided to unload their position. The founder and former long-time CEO had (rather strangely) left the Board and ceased to be an insider in the Spring of 2017. It seems that he left because he was running a separate group of privately owned dealerships which may have caused a conflict of interest and it was reported that he did not like some aspects of running a publicly traded company. It seem quite possible that he was unloading shares.
In the absence of seeing any news, my analysis of the company has not changed and so I added to my position today.
In other developments, the Canadian dollar has been quite volatile. Yesterday it was briefly under 76.8 U.S. cents. Today it got as high as 77.7 cents but closed at 77.2 cents.