Friday was also the end of the third quarter. Within a couple of weeks we start to get U.S. Q3 earnings reports followed by the Canadian companies mostly late September and well into October in many cases. There is always news coming out to move individual stocks.
On Friday, the S&P 500 and Toronto were both down about 0.25%.
West Texas Oil has declined a little bit but is still about $91 U.S. which is very good for Alberta.
The 5 year government of Canada yield has been around 4.3% for a few days. Interest rates are one of the most powerful force when it comes to stock and especially bod (and fixed income ) prices. The ability to borrow is the grease of the economy and higher rates will eventually slow the economy. And Canada’s GDP in real (inflation adjusted) dollars has been about flat for several months. GDP per capita is declining. GDP seems likely to decline modestly in the months ahead.
In my updates I will continue to pay mores attention to debt levels than was the case for the last 15 years or more. Very few companies got into trouble with debt in recent years due to low interest rates. Prior to and during the financial crisis in the U.S. there were a lot more companies that basically blew their brains out with debt. One that I followed back in the day was Ainsworth Lumber. This was a long-established Canadian family controlled publicly listed lumber company that over-invested in OSB (Oriented Strand Board) plans and went broke because of too much debt. I imagine family gatherings are painful to this day. Imagine blowing a huge family fortune like that.
Starbucks was in the news and is off-side with regulators / courts because after certain stores unionized Starbucks excluded those stores from raises given at all the other stores. That technically looked legal because it was up to the union to negotiate higher wages. But it’s basically dirty pool. But I doubt that this is any huge issue for Starbucks. They will pay a fine and some back-pay and move on.