Daily roundup of research and analysis from The Globe and Mail’s market strategist Scott Barlow
Loblaw, Brookfield among RBC top ideas
The RBC Capital Markets research team updated their list of top 30 global stock ideas:
“Our Top 30 Global Ideas is a list of high-conviction, long-term ideas with quarterly updates that enable dynamic changes into names where we see higher-conviction upside potential. The Top 30 list is built around bottom-up best ideas that we also view as offering attractive positioning in the current environment … The best-performing Top 30 stock selections in Q3/25 were Barrick (+58%), EDP Renovaveis (+18%) and GE Vernova (+16%). Since inception of our quarterly list at YE2019, the Top 30 has delivered a total compound annual return of +14.7%, above the benchmark at +12.7% …
Additions: Air Products & Chemicals (APD US), CSX Corp. (CSX US), Loblaw (L CA), L’Oreal (OR FP), Nike (NKE US), Palo Alto Networks (PANW US), Ventas (VTR US)
Deletions: Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI BB), Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CP CN), GE Vernova (GEV US), Gitlab (GTLB US), London Stock Exchange (LSEG LN), Shell (SHEL LN)
Maintains: Alimentation Couche-Tard (ATD CN), Barrick Mining (B US), Biogen (BIIB US), Boston Scientific (BSX US), Brookfield Corp. (BN US), ConocoPhillips (COP US), Constellation Software (CSU CN), DuPont de Nemours(DD US), EDP Renovaveis (EDPR PL), Ferrari (RACE IM), HubSpot (HUBS US), Microsoft (MSFT US), Moody’s (MCO US), PayPal (PYPL US), Pembina Pipeline (PPL CN), RB Global (RBA US), Safran (SAF FP), Schneider Electric (SU FP), Snowflake (SNOW US), U.S. Bancorp (USB US), Wells Fargo (WFC US), Wix.com (WIX US), Xylem (XYL US)”
Top U.S. stock ideas from BofA Securities
BofA Securities also published a top picks review, this time of top 10 short-term U.S. trade ideas:
“We present our new list of ten short-term stock recommendations among US stocks under coverage based on our view that these stocks could have significant market and business-related catalysts in the quarter ahead. For 4Q25, our Top 10 Ideas include eight Buys and two Underperforms across nine industries. Our Buys are Amazon.com, Gitlab, ITT Inc, Generac Holdings, NVR Inc, SharkNinja Inc, Dycom Industries, and Tradeweb Markets. Our Underperforms are MarketAxess Holdings, and Illumina Inc.”
TSX returns owe a lot to gold
The Scotiabank strategist Hugo- Ste-Marie looked at TSX performance attribution by individual stocks,
“While the TSX rally is broad, with 79% of stocks up this year, beating the benchmark is more complicated. If 41% of stocks are outperforming this year, that percentage goes down to a mediocre 26% when excluding gold equities. This means that with low or no gold exposure, one had better have great stock-picking abilities. Large-cap gold names alone are responsible for approximately 40% of the TSX’s YTD performance…. Meanwhile, the TSX SmallCap Index is soaring, up 34% this year, largely driven by junior gold stocks, which have surged +128%. In contrast, non-resource small cap stocks have posted a much more modest gain of +7.5%”
Macro trades from Citi
Citi strategist Dirk Willer’s trade ideas tend towards the esoteric but his most recent trades are more intelligible although not easy to put on in most cases,
“Our recent client conversations revolve around the idea of the cyclical US slowdown for the next 1-2 quarters, followed by risks of a H2US reflation. For equities, the story seems clear–the Fed will likely be cutting into a bubble when they hiked into every previous one, stay long. UST [US Treasury] and curve shape depends largely on Fed independence, labour market and eventually risks of US Treasury creativity to ensure the third mandate, ‘moderate long-term interest rates’ are met … The Dollar appears to be in a tug of war between upside risks from equity flows and downside risks from US real rates and FX hedging. Copper looks like an attractive reflation asset, we add topside in line with house-views. [We] add a new custom basket with long copper and short oil betas”
Bluesky post of the day
Bluesky post of the day:
Booming electricity demand driven by AI is causing a shortage of gas turbines worldwide, Stephen Stapczynski and Akshat Rathi explain why on Zero podcast.
— Bloomberg News (@bloomberg.com) October 3, 2025 at 4:00 AM
https://bsky.app/profile/bloomberg.com/post/3m2blyzsnkl2l
Diversion
“Scientists Warn: Bottled Water May Pose Serious Long-Term Health Risks” – SciTechDaily