On Tuesday, the S&P 500 was about unchanged while Toronto was up 0.15%.
TFI International was up 3.7% regaining most of what it lost yesterday. Seems a bit odd, but then again lots of odd things happen in the markets.
The composition of my own portfolio has been updated. This is just to be transparent. To be clear, if I were starting fresh today I would not have such a concentrated portfolio.
A small rant: I see a press release from Bank of America that they are redeeming (one year early) $850 million of floating rate notes. The questions that leap to my mind as a shareholder and as an observer are, oh what is the rate and why are they doing this? I find it hard to believe that anyone would write and/or approve a press release like this without addressing those obvious questions. It seems they just went with the bare minimum legally required. Checking their annual report, I don’t see the details for this debt. It appears to be lumped in with other debt in the brief information in the notes. Maybe it is just normal practice to structure debt to be redeemable in the last year and to redeem it. But I just don’t understand why they would not mention the interest rate that they will now avoid or provide any hint of a reson for the redemption.
After the close, West Fraser Timber announced that is (small) dividend would increase from 20 cents per quarter to 25 cents. They also announced an increase in the buyback program. This should be viewed as positive news for the stock. What I also liked is that their press release was very informative. It was meant to convey information not merely to tick a legal box as was the case with Bank of America.
The price of West Texas Intermediate just poked it head above U.S. $70 for the first time in two years. And many economic indicators in Alberta continue to improve. I’m becoming more optimistic about the outlook for Alberta companies including Melcor and Canadian Western Bank.