Falling gold and oil prices dragged Canada’s stock exchange today.
The TSX wobbled as it tried for a fifth consecutive winning day, losing 30 points with the heavyweight energy and financials sectors slipping into the red.
A sharp drop in gold futures factored into a down day on Bay Street. A tumble in the yellow metal’s value impacted mining companies such as Kinross Gold and Barrick Gold, which were down 3.6 and 3.2 percent, respectively.
Oil prices edged 37 cents lower to $56.79 US on news of U.S. domestic supplies rising for a fifth straight week. This pressured the TSX’s energy sector, which finished 0.8 percent lower.
Meanwhile, Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz said the path for future interest rate hikes is uncertain, adding that housing activity has been a weaker than expected, and that business investment has been “less robust” than the central bank’s models indicated for the past couple of years.
Poloz said that given these uncertainties, Canada’s central bank has kept interest rates unchanged at 1.75 per cent since last October, and will remain decidedly data-dependent as the domestic and international situations evolve.
In New York, it was a losing day for U.S. markets as the Dow dropped 103 points and the Nasdaq was off by 29 points, driven lower by weak economic data from the US Commerce Department.
This comes despite signs of progress in U.S./China trade negotiations, as the world’s two largest economies begin to map out a blueprint to end their seven-month long tariff dispute, with the March 1 deadline for an agreement closing in.
Elsewhere, shares in Nike slipped after college basketball star Zion Williamson fell and sprained his knee during a game on Wednesday. The Duke Blue Devils centre’s fall came as a result of his Nike PG 2.5 shoe splitting in half. Nike’s stock lost just over a percent today.
Gold saw its biggest one-day drop in seven months, losing $23.30 to $1,320 an ounce while the loonie weakened by 24/100ths of a cent to $0.7564 US.
