Shopify shares dropped 11% Tuesday on little fresh news. The Wall Street Journal Tuesday did, however, publish a largely favourable ‘Heard on the Street’ column on the Canadian company. “A temporary pullback in shares is likely warranted, but the longer term bull case remains,” the column read, concluding, “More than a pandemic winner, at the intersection of consumer, technology and fintech, its shares may be a future staple.”
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Bank of Nova Scotia is up nearly 5 per cent in early trading after kicking of the banking earnings season with a significant beat.
Bank of Nova Scotia's second-quarter profit plunged by 41 per cent as funds earmarked to cover loan losses soared in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The bank added about $1-billion to loan loss reserves for fiscal second quarter, bringing total provisions for credit losses to $1.85-billion, up 111 per cent from a year ago. Adjusted to exclude certain items, including the costs of acquiring and selling businesses, Scotiabank said it earned $1.04 per share. That surpassed analysts’ consensus estimate of $1.00 per share, on an adjusted basis, according to Refinitiv.
The bank held its dividend steady at 90 cents per share, but its return on equity fell to 7.9 per cent, compared with 13.8 per cent a year earlier.
Investors bolstered share prices of other Canadian banks, betting that more earnings beats are to come. Royal Bank of Canada was up 4 per cent at midday.
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CI Financial Corp. shares were up 6 per cent after agreeing to acquire an interest in Congress Wealth Management, a Boston-based high-net-worth advisory firm with US$2.3 billion in assets under management. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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Merck & Co Inc. shares advanced about 1 per cent as it announced plans to develop two separate vaccines.
The drug giant, which has largely kept to the sidelines of the race for COVID-19 treatments, said it was buying Austrian vaccine maker Themis Bioscience and would collaborate with research nonprofit IAVI to develop the two separate vaccines.
It also announced a partnership with privately held Ridgeback Biotherapeutics to develop an experimental oral antiviral drug against COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
It did not disclose the terms of the acquisition of Themis, a privately held company.
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U.S. biotech group Novavax Inc. was up 13 per cent in late morning trade as it joined the race to test coronavirus vaccine candidates on humans and enrolled its first participants.
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With files from Reuters
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Darcy Keith