For most of the last four years the market has greatly cheered the Trump Presidency. In the lead up this election it cheered the hoped for a decisive Biden victory. Today as it appeared that we will instead get a squeaker of a Biden win, the market (to my surprise) cheered some more. And that was in spite of Trump staring to make good on his promise not to accept the election results. (We shall fight them in the courts, we shall fight them on television, we shall fight them on twitter, and we shall never surrender … or something like that).
It seems the market, most of the time at east, is an incurable optimist.
The more notable gainers today included:
Intact Financial – up 6.3% after releasing earnings.
Shopify – up 5.4%
Toll Brothers – up 5.3%
Constellation Software – up 4.7%
Amazon – up 6.3%
Going the other way, CN Rail was down 2.8%.
CRH Medical -down 2.6%.
RIWI Corporation was out with an interesting announcement. It is in the business of basically predicting the future based on its proprietary random sample methods and it provided evidence that it had correctly predicted for clients that Biden would win in a tight race and not the big win that others were predicting.
After the close, Couche Tard announced a small but important acquisition in Hong Hong. For many years (pre-dating the chain’s acquisition by Couche-Tard) Circle-K has licensed its name in Aisa which resulted in a lot of Circle-K branded stores there but it seems very little revenue from the licensing fees. Couche-Tard has now acquired one such licensee in Honk Kong. Couche-Tard never seems to rest and is always hungry for more growth.
Also after the close, Costco announced another month of blow-out same store sales . Same-store sales were up an average of 16.5%. That is astounding growth. Surely people can’t still be stocking up. I don’t know if this is in groceries or more in general merchandise. Clearly Costco continues to gain market share.
Also after the close, Stantec reported modestly higher earnings. And WSP has also reported.