Markets were little changed on Monday with the S&P 500 about unchanged and Toronto up 0.1%.
First Republic Bank which was somewhere around the 15th largest bank in the U.S. was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on the weekend and most or all of its assets and deposits sold to J.P. Morgan at a fire sale price and there will be no recovery for shareholders or even bond holders. This was no bailout.
Penny Stock RIWI had previously announced it would miss a filing deadline for its annual results. In a somewhat cryptic fashion it appears to have just announced that it will cease trading at least until it gets the results filed. Quite possibly headed to zero unfortunately.
My next update will be for TFI International.
Last week I attended the annual meeting of Melcor Developments and made sure to meet with their executives. I continue to remind them that results are not good and I have been pushing them to do certain analysis which could provide useful insight. It’s been a long time waiting for better results. The Alberta oil economy is strong but higher interest rates are a headwind in terms of housing starts. still, I saw a headline today that Calgary home prices edged up to a record high so that’s positive. Melcor will report Q1 results on May 10. I don’t think we can expect anything too positive. They did reveal at the Annual meeting that they have closed on some U.S. lot sales (which will boost earnings) but it was not clear if that occurred by the end of Q1 or subsequent to March 31.
A lot of Canadian companies will be reporting Q1 results in the next week or two.
After that the banks report around the end of May and there will be a focus on loan losses, interest rate spreads and what is happening with all the variable rate mortgages.