Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who made and lost fortunes targeting some of the largest U.S. explorers over the past 40 years, has cashed out because the worst crude market downturn in decades drags on. Pickens who has sold all his oil holdings and is waiting for the best moment to get back in, he said Thursday within an interview ...
Read More »Cross-border flights, reversed: With low loonie, more Americans flying out of Canadian airports
Many hands happen to be wrung in recent years about the countless Canadians who choose to save money by flying out of U.S. border airports. Senate committees happen to be struck to examine the problem, while stakeholders point fingers at each other over who’s to blame. As it happens the solution was breathtakingly simple: a lesser loonie. Don’t let the low loonie clip ...
Read More »How airlines are cutting fares to offset the weak economy and boost demand
Airlines in Canada and round the world are using discounted airfares to stimulate demand, trading fuller planes for lower yields as the economy weakens. Air Canada and WestJet Airlines Ltd. reported strong load factors in January, with both airlines filling 80.1 percent of their available seat capacity recently. But strong load factors don’t necessarily mean a powerful bottom line when ...
Read More »Extending flow-through shares to the technology sector: The whys and the why-nots
If nothing else, opinion on extending the idea of flow-through shares to the technology/bio-technology sector – a theme that was the subject of a current column – is mixed. Here would be the comments in one reader who likes the concept that, if implemented provides capital to companies and tax breaks to investors C with the hope being that the ...
Read More »‘Zombie’ stocks haunt Canada’s oil patch, but buyers aren’t biting in worst bear market in a generation
Last year Michael Binnion considered selling his company’s assets to pay attention to its core play in Alberta, however changed his mind as oil prices kept plumbing new lows. “In retrospect we actually wished we had sold,” the CEO of Questerre Energy Inc. said last week. “It’s hard for me to envision many people saying ‘I would like to sell ...
Read More »U.S. job growth slows, unemployment rate at 8-year low
WASHINGTON – U.S. employment gains slowed more than expected in January because the boost to hiring from unseasonably mild weather faded, but surging wages as well as an unemployment rate at an eight-year low suggested the labour market recovery remains firm. Nonfarm payrolls increased by 151,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate what food was in 4.9 per cent, ...
Read More »American spending in Canada poised to rise to highest level in more than a decade: TD
Americans will expend more money visiting Canada this season than any reason for more than a decade as a low loonie makes heading north more appealing. Total visits in the U.S. to Canada were already up more than 1.6 million in the first 11 months compared with the year before, said TD Economics inside a new report. The bank expects ...
Read More »A dying breed: Currency traders left out of new Wall Street as jobs decimated
Charlie Stenger, a currency-broker-turned-recruiter, has witnessed it all. One fired trader wept in the office. Another admitted he hadn’t told his wife he was unemployed, and left the home every day in a suit to sneak off to a coffee shop. There are the delusional guys, who carefully explain how they are not thinking about jobs that don’t pay as ...
Read More »