Oil prices fell Friday, taking Canadian markets with them, but giving Wall Street a welcome boost by offsetting some blue-chip profit warnings.

Toronto’s S&P/TSX closed down 25.41 points or 0.3% to 8368.62 for a gain of 0.29% on the week. The TSX Venture Exchange ended the day up 14.66 points or 0.97% to 1520.82.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average closed 23.97 points or 0.23% higher at 10313.07 — for a gain of 0.51% on the week. The technology-heavy Nasdaq was ahead 24.66 points or 1.32% on the day to 1894.31, while the S&P 500 advanced 5.54 points or 0.5% to 1123.92.

The Canadian dollar was down in late trading, off 0.22 of a cent to US77.43¢. The dollar wasn’t helped by a Statistics Canada report that Canada’s August unemployment rate came in at 7.2%, the same as July. Employment fell by 7,000 last month, versus expectations of a 20,000 increase.

In Toronto, technology stocks made a valiant effort to bring the TSX into the black. They finished up 2.14%, with Nortel Networks Corp. doing most of the work. Nortel gained 16¢ or 3.23% to $5.11 after it said it has hired giant consulting firm Accenture to help fix its troubled financial organization. Accenture, a global firm that operates in 48 countries including Canada, will review elements of Nortel’s worldwide finance organization and will help identify improvements to business processes and systems.

The gains in tech stocks failed to offset the fall in energy shares, however. The influential sub-group lost 0.78% as a whole after crude futures tumbled. Futures prices fell 4%on the day to close under US$43 a barrel with most traders betting that Hurricane Ivan won’t hurt output in the Gulf of Mexico and that OPEC will agree to raise its production quota next week. Crude for October delivery closed at US$42.81 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, down $1.80 for the session — losing almost as much as it gained on Thursday.

Financial stocks lost 0.36% as all the major banks lost ground, including Royal Bank of Canada, which fell 30¢ or 0.5% to $59.60 after it announced a high-level executive shakeup.

In New York, stocks bounced back in a late-afternoon rally thanks to reversal in oil prices.

Weighing on the Dow was a 7.5% loss in shares of Alcoa after the aluminum giant cautioned that third-quarter earnings would fall short of Wall Street forecasts due to a strike, a fire and restructuring costs.

The Alcoa warning quashed enthusiasm over a Labor Department report that prices of U.S. wholesale goods and services fell 0.1 percent in August. The core producer price index — excluding food and energy goods — also fell 0.1%. Economists were expecting slight gains in each measure of inflation for finished goods. The Commerce Department, meanwhile, said the U.S. trade deficit narrowed 8.9% to $50.1 billion in July — the sharpest decline in the deficit since December 2001.

Elsewhere on the Dow, shares of Walt Disney climbed 1.7% on news its chief executive, Michael Eisner, plans to step down when his contract expires in September 2006.