By Jeff Sanford

(August 16 – 17:40 ET) – The TSE 300 meandered its way through the day, fairly close to the break-even line, before closing down 1.23 points for a measly drop of .01%. Can you say summer doldrums?

The only action in was in gold and pipelines, both of which moved up over 2%. Overall six of 14 sub-indices moved up and six moved down, with two remaining flat, one of those being the normally volatile industrial products sub-index.

The market was also split on individual issues; 543 were up on the day and 542 moved down.

Volume on the day was a heavy 183 million shares. But if you consider that 42 million of those shares traded were in just two stocks, Heritage Concepts and William Multi-tech, the action in the rest of the market was quiet.

Videotron was heavily traded, at 5 million shares, and ended up down 12% at $41.90. That’s still slightly under the $45 a share Quebecor is offering.

TD Bank was up today, in advance of its earnings announcement this week. Shares in the green machine were up $1.05 to close at $38.50.

Rising gold prices helped push Placer Dome stock up 7%.

Opinions about Michael Cowpland’s leadership abilities came in today: Corel stock was up 6.48% at the close of trading. The company he left to start Corel, Mitel, also finished the day up as well. It gained another over 8% after announcing last week that it had developed a working prototype of a chip that could boost the performance of fiber-optic networks.

Wire services reported after markets closed that Tahera Corp’s Nunavat diamond exploration project has produced positive test results. Tahera stock was the third most heavily traded issue today, finishing up 30% on no news for most of the day. Must have been some lucky guessing.

The CDNX was up 4.59 points to close at 3,323.33.

Good news from the Bank of Canada today. Theissen and company are predicting growth of 4.75% this year, up from the 4.5% predicted in May.

The news helped out the beleaguered-of-late loonie today. It closed at US67.73¢, up from US67.35¢ yesterday. The strength in the dollar precipitated by the strong fundamentals will temper core inflation by lowering costs for imports said the bank.

The only sign of economic danger may be that the U.S. Commerce Department reported housing starts dropped by 3.3% in July. Experts had predicted an increase to a level of 1.56%. Does this mean the beginning of calls for a reduction in interest rates? Stay tuned to next week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

Not much news in stocks south of the border today. The Dow slumped 58 points to 11, 008, the Nasdaq composite was up a trivial 0.2% to 3,861 and the S&P 500 was off 0.3%.