SNC Lavelin announced a delay in selling part of its stake in highway 407. The reason is that the other owners of the 407 want to exercise their right of first refusal. That supports the valuation of the highway. Analysts have said that SNC’s share price is about equal to or slightly below the value of its 407 stake with essentially no value for the engineering business. SNC faces years of troubles and litigation and so perhaps that low value is quite appropriate. Nevertheless, as a definitely speculative move I bought a modest amount of SNC this morning.
Meanwhile Statistics Canada released the March figures for large retailers. In this release they did not give any text to explain whether the results were up or down. And the main table show just five months and does not indicate if the figures are seasonally adjusted or not. That could certainly lead to misinterpretations of the data especially when looking at February versus March. Expanding the table to show March of 2018, I see that the overall sales were up just 0.7% which is weak.
A show on Business News Network this morning was mentioning that Ontario is having a late Spring. That would be somewhat negative for Canadian Tire but I don’t think unfavorable weather is a good reason to buy or not buy Canadian Tire. Weather impacts on their sales tends to even out over time.