stock pickers

CAMECO CORP., $17.00, symbol CCO on Toronto, has suspended uranium shipments by truck from its Rabbit Lake and Key Lake mines in northern Saskatchewan. The company made the decision in response to forest fires in the region. Cameco is the world’s largest uranium producer. It has large, high-grade reserves, low-cost operations, significant market share and a number of mines. The company halted shipments after travel restrictions were imposed on some northern roads because of low visibility....

SUN LIFE FINANCIAL $41.43 (Toronto symbol SLF; Shares outstanding: 612.1 million; Market cap: $25.6 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; Dividend yield: 3.7%; www.sunlife.ca) sells life insurance, savings, retirement and pension products to individuals and corporations. It has $812.6 billion of assets under management and mainly operates in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. It’s also expanding in Asia. In the three months ended March 31, 2015, Sun Life’s revenue rose 2.2%, to $3.72 billion from $3.64 billion a year earlier. Earnings per share gained 16.7%, to $0.84 from $0.72. The company continues to expand its asset management business, which generates high profit margins and requires little capital investment. It recently paid $560 million for Bentall Kennedy Group, which manages more than $27 billion in real estate for over 550 institutional clients across the U.S. and Canada....

AMAZON.COM INC., $437.71, symbol AMZN on Nasdaq, plans to set up cloud data centres in India by next year. Amazon Web Services already has what it says are “tens of thousands” of customers in India using its cloud services at one of its 11 data centres worldwide. However, Indian customers are looking for lower latency—delays between computer input and output unnoticeable by humans but key for real-time processing in Internet services such as online trading, gaming and voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology....

ALAMOS GOLD $4.36 (Toronto symbol AGI TSINetwork Rating: Speculative) (604-681- 2802; www.alamosgold.com; Shares outstanding: 127.4 million; Market cap: $1.5 billion; No dividends paid) is the company formed by the merger of Alamos Gold and Stock Pickers Digest recommendation AuRico Gold.

The combined firm owns the Mulatos mine in Mexico and the Young-Davidson project in northern Ontario, which holds as much as 5.6 million ounces of gold. Young- Davidson started up in 2013 and will reach full production in 2016. But meanwhile, it’s moving from open-pit to underground mining, which will sharply increase its costs.

Alamos Gold holds cash of $358.0 million, which it will use to fund the Young-Davidson mine and boost the combined firm’s gold output from 400,000 ounces this year to 700,000 in 2018.

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As the “Internet of Things” grows, Texas Instruments’ strong focus on analog chips makes it one of our top U.S. stocks to invest in.

Typically, changes to the indexes are announced a couple weeks before they come into effect. Some academics have analyzed past price movements and concluded that after the announcement is made and before the effective date, stock prices typically rise for companies added to indexes and fall for those that are dropped. After the effective date, however, the studies show that the price changes mostly reverse themselves. The added firms give up some gains and the deleted firms recover nearly all of the ground they lost....

Thanks to the essential service it provides for pipelines, we rate this Canadian growth stock highly even with low oil prices.

CALIAN TECHNOLOGIES LTD., $18.54, symbol CTY on Toronto, has won a $10-million contract with the City of Toronto to provide a software system for managing city employees’ hours. Calian will deliver this project over an 18-month period. To put the deal in context, the company reported revenue of $61.0 million in the three months ended March 31, 2015, up 19.3% from $51.2 million a year earlier. Earnings fell 6.6%, to $2.21 million, or $0.30 a share, from $2.36 million, or $0.32. That was mostly because Calian added workers to fulfill new contracts. This latest deal will add to the company’s revenue and demonstrates its ongoing ability to win recurring orders from all levels of government....

As it improves the performance of a big 2013 acquisition, ConAgra solidifies its position as one of our top stocks to buy in the U.S.

The 2014 purchase of Shoppers Drug has increased the value of Loblaw’s stock and confirms it as one of our top Canadian stocks.