On Thursday, the S&P 500 and the Toronto stock index were both about unchanged.
Canadian Tire was up 4.5% on its earnings release.
Stantec was down 3.4% also on an earnings release.
Melcor did not react much to the earnings release and was down 1.5%. The volume was higher than normal. Although it is already my largest position, I added a few shares today. The company still has not reported any share buy-backs through its normal-course issuer bid.
Statistics Canada released certain GDP data by industry by province today.
Alberta’s GDP fell by 4.0% in 2015. This is measured in chained 2007 dollars which effectively attempts to measured the volume of activity while removing the impacts of price changes. Another way to measure GDP is in current dollars. Statistics Canada only reports current dollars after about a 33 month delay due to the difficulty of compiling and estimating the data. Unfortunately when measured in current dollars I expect Alberta’s GDP fell by a lot more than 4%.
Statistics Canada did provide today a table that shows the percentage contribution of each industry to GDP in current dollars. This table indicates that in current dollars the contribution of the energy industry to Alberta’s GDP fell from 30% in 2014 to 22% in 2015. Perhaps it is the volume measure with the 4% reduction that is most relevant. The Energy sector value added is down dramatically. But as long as they keep extracting the oil and gas even at much lower profits, then perhaps the spin-off effects to the rest of the Alberta economy remains very strong. It is hard to imagine that the actual contribution of the energy sector has really fallen to 22% of Alberta’s GDP.