The Daily Chase: Tilray and BlackBerry heading in opposite directions

Here are five things you need to know this morning.

Robots in Motion: Shares in technology company BlackBerry are springing to life on Tuesday after the company announced at a trade show in Germany that it will soon partner with chip-maker AMD on a new robotics application. It’s an interesting new business for the company, which has been trying to find its future since its long descent from its days as a smartphone pioneer. As things stand now, the company is a player underneath the hood in the automotive sector with its QNX technology, even as cybersecurity is its biggest money maker, along with an Internet Of Things unit that it has been planning to hive off into a standalone entity. Though complementary to a lot of that, using QNX technology to launch a foray into robotics would seem to be a growing new business opportunity, and investors are responding positively to the development, driving up the shares five per cent in premarket trading. That’s barely a dent in the 18 per cent decline the shares have seen so far this year, however.

Tilray shares plunge on weak earnings: Shares of cannabis company Tilray are set for a rough day on the market as the company posted quarterly results that seem to be disappointing investors. While the company says its revenue came in at just over US$188 million for the quarter (an almost 30 per cent increase from last year), it’s still less than the $198 million that analysts were hoping for. Its alcohol division doubled sales from $20 million to more than $54 million, but it wasn’t enough to flip the company into profitability. The company lost 12 cents per share during the quarter. That’s much better than the $1.90 it lost last year, but still twice as much as the five cent loss analysts were hoping for. And Tilray is still burning through cash, to the tune of $24 million during the quarter. That’s a 24 per cent increase from last year and worse than analysts were expecting. Tilray shares were down by 18 per cent in premarket trading.

Rate expectations: What’s shaping up to be a relatively quiet day on Tuesday belies what’s coming down the pipeline, as we’ll get key developments in the inflation and interest rate story in the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday. The Bank of Canada is set to announce its latest decision on interest rates tomorrow morning, and while there’s very little chance of a policy change, it might be the last time we can say that. Canada’s inflation rate has been below three per cent for two months in a row, and when you couple that with an unexpected loss of jobs in March and the jobless rate ticking up to 6.1 per cent, that’s a recipe for a rate cut. The odds of a cut in June are sitting at about 75 per cent right now. That’s very much not the case in the U.S. however, where inflation data on Wednesday is expected to show core inflation continues to tick higher. The U.S. economy is showing a lot of resilience according to the data of late, prompting traders to downgrade their expectations for rate cuts this year. Instead of as many as five earlier this year, only two rate cuts in the U.S. this year are fully priced into markets — and even those odds are falling fast.