PrefBlog

Jobs, jobs, jobs!

Canada’s labour market delivered a surprise Friday with its biggest one-month employment gain since the government started collecting comparable data in 1976.

The country added 106,500 net jobs in April, the bulk of which were full time, Statistics Canada said in its latest labour force survey.

The rush of new jobs far surpassed market forecasts and helped drop the unemployment rate to 5.7 per cent, down from 5.8 per cent in March.
…
A closer look at April reveals the overall gain was driven by the creation of 73,000 full-time jobs and 83,800 positions in the private sector.

The gains were spread across many industries, with both the services and factory sectors seeing gains. Employment rose by 32,400 in wholesale and retail trade positions, while the construction sector added 29,200 jobs.
…
Year-over-year average hourly wage growth for all employees in April was 2.5 per cent, up from a reading of 2.4 per cent in March.

Rob Carrick has publicized the latest pronouncement of the FP Canada Standards Council and Institut québécois de planification financière:

The return projections for 2019 were recently published by the FP Canada Standards Council and Institut québécois de planification financière. They’re meant to provide an analytical view on returns that is free from the bias of individual planners and investment advisers. You can find expected returns for the major asset classes in this recent post. Now let’s look at how these return expectations come together in portfolios designed for conservative, balanced and aggressive investors. Note: These are after-fee returns, with the fee set at 1.25 per cent.

– Conservative (5 per cent cash, 70 per cent bonds, 25 per cent Canadian stocks): Average net annual returns of 3.16 per cent.

– Balanced (5 per cent cash, 45 per cent bonds, 40 per cent Canadian stocks, 10 per cent foreign developed market stocks): An annualized 3.74 per cent

– Aggressive (5 per cent cash, 20 per cent bonds, 35 per cent Canadian stocks, 25 per cent foreign developed market stocks, 15 per cent emerging market stocks): 4.5 per cent annually.

I highlighted the projection standards when commenting on some Fraser Institute garbage on February 25.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 10th, 2019 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.