Even the Occupy Wall Street clowns will admit some benefit from business and globalization:
Liberatos Pizza, a few blocks south, has been taking orders from supporters around the world to have its $15 “OccuPie” delivered to the protesters. Owner Telly Liberatos said since Sept. 18 he’s sold hundreds of the 18-inch pies, lined with pepperoni around the perimeter and through the diameter.
“I have nothing to do with the protest,” Liberatos said. “I don’t take sides. It was a very slow summer. I’m trying to run my business.”
The September jobs number was not a disaster:
American employers added more workers in September than forecast and figures for the prior two months were revised higher, easing concern the economy is tipping into another recession.
Payrolls rose by 103,000 after a 57,000 gain in August, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of economists called for an increase of 60,000. The figures reflected the end of a strike at Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) that brought 45,000 people back to work. The jobless rate held at 9.1 percent.
Treasuries fell as the report added to evidence the world’s largest economy is maintaining its expansion. The pace of job growth is still too slow to push down the unemployment rate as companies hold back on hiring amid the debt crisis in Europe, political gridlock in the U.S. and a decline in stock prices.
The BoC has released a discussion paper by Wei Dong and Deokwoo Nam titled Exchange Rates and Individual Good’s Price Misalignment: Some Preliminary Evidence of Long-Horizon Predictability:
When prices are sticky, movements in the nominal exchange rate have a direct impact on international relative prices. A relative price misalignment would trigger an adjustment in consumption and employment, and may help to predict future movements in the exchange rate. Although purchasing-power-parity fundamentals, in general, have only weak predictability, currency misalignment may be indicated by price differentials for some goods, which could then have predictive power for subsequent re-evaluation of the nominal exchange rate. The authors collect good-level price data to construct deviations from the law of one price and examine the resulting price-misalignment model’s predictive power for the nominal exchange rates between the U.S. dollar and two other currencies: the Japanese yen and the U.K. pound. To account for small-sample bias and data-mining issues, inference is drawn from bootstrap distributions and tests of superior predictive ability (SPA) are performed. The slope coefficients and R-squares increase with the forecast horizon for the bilateral exchange rates between the U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen and the U.S. dollar and the U.K. pound. The out-of-sample SPA tests suggest that the authors’ price-misalignment model outperforms random walks either with or without drift for the U.S. dollar vis-à-vis the Japanese yen at the 5 per cent level of significance over long horizons.
Italy had its foreign and local currency long-term issuer default ratings cut to ‘A+’ from ’AA-’ by Fitch Ratings, which cited concerns about the nation’s vulnerability to the “Euro zone crisis.”
The outlook is negative.
Spain had its credit rating cut two levels by Fitch Ratings, which cited the “intensification” of the euro crisis, slower Spanish growth and regional finances as risks to the nation’s debt outlook.
Fitch cut its rating to AA- from AA+, the company said in a statement today from London. The outlook is negative. Fitch cited similar reasons for also downgrading Italy one level to A+, while maintaining Portugal at BBB-, saying it would complete a review of that ranking in the fourth quarter.
Spain’s rating, which was AAA until 2010, has now been lowered twice by Fitch as the deepest austerity measures in three decades fail to convince investors the nation can stem the surge in its debt burden. Moody’s Investors Service also warned on Oct. 4 “all but the strongest euro-area sovereigns” are likely to see further downgrades, as it cut Italy’s rating for the first time in almost two decades.
Some investment funds are doing OK:
Princeton University’s investments returned 22 percent in the past fiscal year, matching the performance of Yale University, the top-performing Ivy League school so far this year.
The endowment was valued at $17.1 billion as of June 30, the Princeton, New Jersey, school said today on its website.
…
The fund at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, gained 22 percent, while investments at Harvard University, the world’s richest school, increased 21 percent.Over the past decade, Princeton’s investments generated an average annual gain of 9.8 percent, compared with the 9.3 percent increase of Stanford University and the 9.4 percent return of Harvard.
There’s some action in the Maple / TMX deal:
There’s finally some activity around Maple Group Acquisition Corp.’s bid for TMX Group.
After near silence for the past few months, Maple announced on Friday that it has submitted applications for review to four provincial regulators (Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta) and that it expects these bodies to hold public hearings in December, with decisions released in early 2012. If that time line holds, the rulings will come about a year after London Stock Exchange Group first announced its deal with TMX.
Spin it out, boys!
There’s some weeping over the turn-out in the Ontario election:
Although it could be weeks before elections officials provide a the final tally, back-of-envelope calculations suggest the turnout in Thursday’s Ontario provincial election may have dropped to an unprecedented and dispiriting low.
Of the roughly 8.5 million citizens who were eligible to vote, about 4.1 million, or 48 per cent, appear to have cast ballots. This despite fine weather across the province.
Here’s a bold solution: give us some leaders who aren’t morons and some policies that aren’t nonsense. Then it might be worth voting. However, we in Ontario now have the best possible result: legislative log-jam, no more Big Bold (albeit moronic) Ideas … for a while, anyway.
This post was delayed because I went to see Chess, the Musical last night. Twenty-five years I’ve been waiting for that show to come to Toronto. Twenty-five years! Loved the music, loved the book, hated the production. The costume designer was inspired by a low-budget Gay Pride parade and to see the Arbiter prancing around topless like he was the Queen of May was more disconcerting than interesting. Having the chorus play instruments themselves was just an annoying affectation. The show’s blockbuster number, “One Night in Bangkok”, was sung without zip and the staging … well, somebody should whisper in the director’s ear that the overwhelming majority of theatre-goers do not find homo-erotica particularly erotic. I certainly don’t. Sorry, buddy, but the queens you used did not excite me. Thumbs down. Well … perhaps in another twenty-five years, there’ll be a production in Toronto worth seeing.
It was a quiet day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 6bp, FixedResets down 5bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 8bp. Volatility was good. Volume was very low.
| HIMIPref™ Preferred Indices These values reflect the December 2008 revision of the HIMIPref™ Indices Values are provisional and are finalized monthly |
|||||||
| Index | Mean Current Yield (at bid) |
Median YTW |
Median Average Trading Value |
Median Mod Dur (YTW) |
Issues | Day’s Perf. | Index Value |
| Ratchet | 0.00 % | 0.00 % | 0 | 0.00 | 0 | 0.3497 % | 1,966.6 |
| FixedFloater | 0.00 % | 0.00 % | 0 | 0.00 | 0 | 0.3497 % | 2,957.7 |
| Floater | 3.66 % | 3.67 % | 157,833 | 18.18 | 2 | 0.3497 % | 2,123.4 |
| OpRet | 4.88 % | 4.12 % | 60,813 | 1.58 | 8 | 0.0735 % | 2,432.9 |
| SplitShare | 5.51 % | 1.82 % | 55,683 | 0.39 | 4 | -0.5355 % | 2,434.2 |
| Interest-Bearing | 0.00 % | 0.00 % | 0 | 0.00 | 0 | 0.0735 % | 2,224.6 |
| Perpetual-Premium | 5.71 % | 4.62 % | 108,413 | 0.63 | 13 | 0.1830 % | 2,118.1 |
| Perpetual-Discount | 5.44 % | 5.52 % | 109,265 | 14.66 | 17 | 0.0599 % | 2,218.8 |
| FixedReset | 5.18 % | 3.37 % | 204,260 | 2.69 | 61 | -0.0455 % | 2,311.6 |
| Deemed-Retractible | 5.12 % | 4.64 % | 222,503 | 7.73 | 46 | 0.0824 % | 2,174.5 |
| Performance Highlights | |||
| Issue | Index | Change | Notes |
| CIU.PR.B | FixedReset | -2.29 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Call Maturity Date : 2014-06-01 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 26.85 Bid-YTW : 4.03 % |
| HSB.PR.E | FixedReset | -1.71 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Call Maturity Date : 2014-06-30 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 26.45 Bid-YTW : 4.41 % |
| IAG.PR.C | FixedReset | -1.70 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Call Maturity Date : 2013-12-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 26.00 Bid-YTW : 4.39 % |
| RY.PR.H | Deemed-Retractible | -1.41 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Call Maturity Date : 2016-05-24 Maturity Price : 25.25 Evaluated at bid price : 26.50 Bid-YTW : 4.59 % |
| BNA.PR.E | SplitShare | -1.39 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2017-12-10 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 22.01 Bid-YTW : 7.43 % |
| MFC.PR.F | FixedReset | -1.07 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 24.15 Bid-YTW : 3.91 % |
| IGM.PR.B | Perpetual-Premium | 1.03 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Call Maturity Date : 2018-12-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 25.54 Bid-YTW : 5.51 % |
| SLF.PR.D | Deemed-Retractible | 1.08 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 20.52 Bid-YTW : 6.96 % |
| CIU.PR.A | Perpetual-Discount | 1.11 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Limit Maturity Maturity Date : 2041-10-07 Maturity Price : 22.42 Evaluated at bid price : 22.75 Bid-YTW : 5.10 % |
| MFC.PR.C | Deemed-Retractible | 1.36 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 20.88 Bid-YTW : 6.82 % |
| SLF.PR.C | Deemed-Retractible | 1.67 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 20.66 Bid-YTW : 6.88 % |
| SLF.PR.E | Deemed-Retractible | 2.20 % | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 20.90 Bid-YTW : 6.79 % |
| Volume Highlights | |||
| Issue | Index | Shares Traded |
Notes |
| ENB.PR.B | FixedReset | 71,935 | Recent new issue. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Limit Maturity Maturity Date : 2041-10-07 Maturity Price : 23.19 Evaluated at bid price : 25.20 Bid-YTW : 3.66 % |
| BMO.PR.Q | FixedReset | 55,944 | TD bought blocks of 14,000 and 17,100 from Nesbitt, both at 25.00. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 25.01 Bid-YTW : 3.27 % |
| TD.PR.N | OpRet | 38,611 | Called for redemption. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Call Maturity Date : 2012-04-30 Maturity Price : 25.25 Evaluated at bid price : 25.46 Bid-YTW : 2.50 % |
| IFC.PR.C | FixedReset | 38,000 | YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 25.00 Bid-YTW : 4.14 % |
| BNS.PR.Y | FixedReset | 37,576 | TD bought 13,500 from Nesbitt at 25.00. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Hard Maturity Maturity Date : 2022-01-31 Maturity Price : 25.00 Evaluated at bid price : 24.90 Bid-YTW : 2.94 % |
| CU.PR.C | FixedReset | 37,284 | Recent new issue. YTW SCENARIO Maturity Type : Limit Maturity Maturity Date : 2041-10-07 Maturity Price : 23.21 Evaluated at bid price : 25.27 Bid-YTW : 3.65 % |
| There were 19 other index-included issues trading in excess of 10,000 shares. | |||
| Wide Spread Highlights | ||
| Issue | Index | Quote Data and Yield Notes |
| FTS.PR.E | OpRet | Quote: 26.50 – 28.99 Spot Rate : 2.4900 Average : 1.4392 YTW SCENARIO |
| IAG.PR.C | FixedReset | Quote: 26.00 – 27.00 Spot Rate : 1.0000 Average : 0.6380 YTW SCENARIO |
| BNA.PR.E | SplitShare | Quote: 22.01 – 22.90 Spot Rate : 0.8900 Average : 0.6607 YTW SCENARIO |
| CIU.PR.B | FixedReset | Quote: 26.85 – 27.40 Spot Rate : 0.5500 Average : 0.3389 YTW SCENARIO |
| W.PR.H | Perpetual-Discount | Quote: 24.58 – 25.18 Spot Rate : 0.6000 Average : 0.3990 YTW SCENARIO |
| PWF.PR.K | Perpetual-Discount | Quote: 23.86 – 24.31 Spot Rate : 0.4500 Average : 0.2896 YTW SCENARIO |
[…] delayed because I’m going to go see Chess again. Yes, I know that when I reviewed it on October 7 I said I didn’t like the production … but six months ago when I heard it was coming to […]