Canadian equities extended their gains for a second day on Thursday after the Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem’s optimistic comments that “we are getting closer” to interest rate cuts boosted investors’ confidence. As investors also continued to watch corporate earnings, the S&P/TSX Composite Index climbed up by 95 points, or 0.4%, yesterday to settle at 21,823.
Despite continued weakness in the healthcare stocks due mainly to Bausch Health’s downbeat first-quarter financial results, solid intraday gains in other key market sectors, including industrials, known consumer cyclicals, and utilities, lifted the TSX benchmark.
Top TSX Composite movers and active stocks
Thomson Reuters (TSX:TRI) surged by about 7% to $222.72 per share, making it the top-performing TSX stock for the day. This rally in TRI stock came after the Toronto-based information services giant announced its significantly better-than-expected quarterly earnings.
In the March quarter, Thomson Reuters’s revenue rose 8.5% year over year to US$1.9 billion, along with a solid organic growth of around 10% for its big three segments. Strong profitability in all its business segments, except Global Print, drove the company’s adjusted quarterly earnings up by 30.5% from a year ago to US$1.11 per share, helping it beat Street analysts’ expectations of US$0.95 per share by a wide margin. On a year-to-date basis, TRI stock is now up 15% and offers an annualized dividend yield of around 1.4%.
Brookfield Renewable Partners, Paramount Resources, and GFL Environmental were also among the top-performing TSX stocks yesterday, rising by at least 4.5% each.
In contrast, weaker-than-expected financial results drove the shares of Air Canada and Bausch Health down by over 8% each, making them the session’s worst performers on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Based on their daily trade volume, Enbridge, Air Canada, Suncor Energy, BCE, and Baytex Energy were the five most active stocks on the exchange.
TSX today
Commodity prices were going sideways early Friday morning, pointing to a flat opening for the resource-heavy main TSX index today.
While no major domestic economic releases are due, Canadian investors may want to closely monitor several important economic releases from the United States, including average hourly earnings, non-farm payrolls, unemployment rate, services PMI (purchasing managers index), and non-manufacturing PMI data, which could give further direction to stocks.
On the corporate events side, many large TSX-listed companies, such as TC Energy, TransAlta, Brookfield Business Partners, and Magna International, will announce their latest quarterly results on May 3.
Market movers on the TSX today
