The Daily Chase: Lyft's wild ride up and down

Here are five things you need to know this morning.

Lyft has a whoopsie: It was a wild ride for investors in ride-hailing company Lyft on Wednesday, as the company posted quarterly numbers that mostly beat analyst expectations. But on one metric — its outlook for profitability — it truly obliterated them, with the company saying in its initial press release that it expects margins to expand by 500 basis points this year. That sent the shares up as much as 67 per cent at one point, before the CFO clarified on a conference call with analysts that the number was in fact a much more subdued 50 points, not the initial figure reported in filings, which he attributed to a “clerical error.” The stock gave up most of its gains after the about face but was still in solidly positive territory as markets were set to open. Wedbush’s Dan Ives, a frequent commentator on the tech sector, told Bloomberg that the mix-up was “a debacle of epic proportions” unlike anything he’s seen in his 25 year career and a “black-eye moment” for the company. While the company has corrected the numbers with regulators, the initial screw-up might overshadow an otherwise solid set of quarterly results for the company.

Rough day on TSX: Canada’s benchmark stock index had its worst day in more than a year on Tuesday, so the story on Wednesday will be whether or not it was a one-off pressure release, or the start of something more. The S&P/TSX Composite index fell by 2.3 per cent yesterday , its biggest decline since September 2022. There was nowhere to hide either, as all 11 subsectors were lower. The biggest mover was SSR Mining Inc. which shed half its value after it halted production at a mine in Turkiye following a landslide. Numerous workers are still unaccounted for. Tech giant Shopify, which has spent much of the last few months dragging the TSX higher, was instead a force to the downside on Tuesday, after a gloomy earnings outlook moved the stock down 13 per cent — its own worst day in more than a year.

January home sale numbers: We know most of what to expect from the already-released numbers from local boards in big cities across the country, but the national home resale numbers from the Canadian Real Estate Association are set to be released this morning and they’re worth watching. The narratives in Toronto and Vancouver likely offered a glimpse of what happened in most markets, with both cities reporting a double-digit surge in sales for the typically slow month. Prices mostly moved sideways, but recall that’s from a baseline that has moved generationally higher from frenzied activity in 2020 and 2021. Predicting what’s going to happen in the housing market is something of a national obsession in Canada, but given expectations of rate cuts some time in 2024, it will be interesting to parse the numbers for January to see how home buyers and sellers are managing their expectations for the year.