On Friday, the S&P 500 and Toronto were each up 0.4% (but futures suggest markets could open lower by close to 1% on Monday morning).
Canadian Tire was down 2.6% as analysts digested its Q1 results which featured very good same-store sales growth but with earnings that did not meet expectations. Having looked at the earning report it looks to me like management remains very confident in how things are progressing.
AutoCanada was up 4.5%.
Stantec was up 2.0% after releasing Q1 earnings. I attended Stantec’s so-called annual general shareholder meeting on Friday morning. Well, it turned out that this was a meeting in form only and not in substance. I learned that for the last five years or so they stopped bothering to have any kind of management presentation at the annual meeting. They simply go through the process of officially recognizing the votes for directors and a few other standard items, all of which are pre-ordained as essentially all the votes have come in in advance of the meeting. It was disappointing that they appeared to have basically no desire to attract any retail share owners to their meeting. (And extremely few showed up.) This is probably the future for most companies. No financial journalists showed up – possibly because there no longer are any in Edmonton? At least I got a look at their new building the tallest in Edmonton by far – They don’t own the building but are the main office tenant and have their name on the building.
On Friday, Statistics Canada released the latest labour force survey and the results were eye popping!
“Employment rose by 107,000 in April, with notable gains in part-time work for youth. The unemployment rate declined by 0.1 percentage points to 5.7% as more people participated in the labour market.
On a year-over-year basis, employment grew by 426,000 (+2.3%), with gains in both full-time (+248,000) and part-time (+179,000) work. Over the same period, total hours worked were up 1.3%.”
Even considering that this is a survey rather than a count and that it incorporates seasonal adjustments and is generally subject to some level of error and uncertainty – this was undeniably a very strong report. It bodes well for Canada’s economy and corporate profits.