On Monday, the Toronto stock exchange was closed. The S&P 500 was down 0.7%.
Apple was down 3.1%. Toll Brothers was down 2.4%. Starbucks was down 2.9%.
Over the weekend, Trump ended Steel and Aluminum tariffs he imposed on Canada last year. This is thought to pave the way for the approval of the new trade agreement and in general should be a positive for Canadian stocks this week.
Ford is cutting out 7000 white collar jobs or 10% of its world-wide white collar work force. Auto companies are usually though of as big blue collar employers. But apparently Ford has some 70,000 white collar workers. And apparently they just woke up and discovered that 10% of these were redundant. In total as of April, Ford has 196,000 employees globally.
Regarding SNC Lavalin: If the Canada Pension Plan and/or Cintra who each own over 40% of highway 407 decide to exercise their rights of first refusal and buy the 10% of the 407 that SNC has agreed to sell to the OMERS pension plan for $ billion then OMERS will receive an $81 million dollar break-fee. That is somewhat mind-blowing. Can you imagine collecting $81 million dollars in this way? Unfortunately for SNC share holders, it seems that SNC has said that there is no possibility of a bidding war. It sounds like SNC would just sell to the others at the same price and SNC would have to pay the break fee. If so, this sounds like SNC made a bad (incompetent?) deal with OMERS. I had bought a small position in SNC on Friday but that may not have been a wise move. When a company sells an asset primarily to pay down debt rather than because they got a good price, that is a red flag.