Back to normal – and re-indexing

Examining the price action of the past couple business days, I think there is a better chance than not that we have received the “flush-out” that I wrote about last week. The morning was packed with market selling before everything went up again. S&P 500 volatility spiked up to the 40% level. The trading was a bit panicky in two waves (how appropriate for COVID-19!). For the most part, I have been content to watch. There might be another ‘wave’ but I think the slow and gradual force exhibited by the central banks will force more capital into the markets.

I have been mildly tweaking my portfolio here and there, but in very minor ways. I’ve lightened up my USD portfolio concentration slightly.

Finally, I note that the TSX will be re-indexing their TSX 60 and Composite indexes next week. I always look at the entrails of index discards because typically if a company is getting trashed out of the index, the stock price tanks because of the automatic supply that gets sent to the market. However, if the underlying company has value, this is a better time than not to add. The only problem is a bunch of other institutional investors do exactly the same thing (reducing the effectiveness of this technique). Needless to say, there is a lot of money passively tracking the TSX 60 and TSX Composite, but most of it is concentrated in the top names.

How do you get into the TSX Composite? (I’ll just do a cut-and-paste job here):

To be eligible for inclusion in the S&P/TSX Composite, a security must meet the following two criteria:

1. Based on the volume weighted average price (VWAP) of the security on the Toronto Stock Exchange over the last 10 trading days of the month-end prior to the Quarterly Review, the security must represent a minimum weight of 0.04% of the index, after including the Quoted Market Value (QMV) of that security in the total float capitalization of the index. In the event that any Index Security has a weight of more than 10% at any month-end, the minimum weights for the purpose of inclusion are based on the S&P/TSX Capped Composite.

2. The security must have a minimum VWAP of C$1 over the past three months and over the last 10 trading days of the month-end prior to the Quarterly Review.

… and to get kicked out:

For Quarterly Review deletions the following buffer rules apply.

2. Liquidity is measured by float turnover (total number of shares traded in Canada and U.S. in the previous 12 months divided by float-adjusted shares outstanding at the end of the period). Liquidity must be at least 0.25. For dual-listed stocks, liquidity must also be at least 0.125 when using Canadian volume only.

In case if you were wondering, for the overall composite Index, Royal Bank is still 6% of the TSX and Shopify is currently around 5%, so no fears of over-concentration. I remember at one point Nortel was above 20% of the TSX.

Deleted out of the TSX Composite are:
AFN – Ag Growth International
AD – Alaris Royalty
BTE – Baytex Energy
BBD.B – Bombardier
CHE.UN – Chemtrade Logistics
CHR – Chorus Aviation
EFX – Enerflex
EXE – Extendicare
FRU – Freehold Royalties
FEC – Frontera Energy
HEXO – HEXO
MTY – MTY Food Group
SES – Secure Energy Services
SCL – Shawcor

I will offer some mild and not-so-useful commentary – some of these are compelling values. Some of them I’ve written about here before. I’ve looked at the inclusions and don’t like any of them.