By James Langton
(September 1 – 13:00 ET) – Traders are bidding good bye to summer with a heavy Friday rally. The U.S. job report for August, released this morning, was mildly positive.That sent traders to the races.
At midday the TSE 300 is up 140 points to 11388. Volume is light, although that’s to be expected on the Friday before the last long weekend of the summer, at 58 million shares. The up volume is outweighing the down more than 3:1. Advancers outnumber decliners 13:9.
Every group is up except the transports. Everything else is up led by strength in the oil and gas service stocks, cable stocks, techs and utilities.
Nortel Networks is doing its usual bit. It’s up 1.5% in relatively light trading on general good feeling for tech stocks. Joining it are Research in Motion, Descartes Systems, Exfo Electro, Sierra Wireless and C-MAC.
Repap continues to trade strongly in anticipation of its takeover. Bid.com has returned to prominence, rocketing up 40% on 1.8 million shares, on news that AOL is buying Quack.com, a firm in which Bid.com has a stake. The other popular penny stocks – Heritage Concepts, William Multi-Tech, Adrian Resources and Plaintree Systems – all continue to be active too.
The financials are up, led by the banks, notably TD Bank. The insurers though are backing off yesterday’s heady gains. Though, TD Waterhouse and Merrill Lynch are down as the hype over U.S. brokerage stocks peter out.
The CDNX is joining the rally today, too. It’s up 35 points to 3549. Volume is rather strong at 19.5 million shares. Techs are booming, up 2.4%, while oils are down and miners are slightly positive. CSW Ventures Corp is the hot trader, up 56% to 39¢ on volume of 1.75 million shares.
Volume is very light this morning in New York, too. Many traders left Manhattan once the jobs report came in. The Dow Jones industrials composite index is up 60 points to 11275. The NASDAQ composite index gained 22 points to 4228. The S&P is up six ticks to 1523.