By Jeff Sanford

(August 4 – 17:45 ET) – The Toronto Stock Exchange extended Thursday’s ascent today and effectively wiped out the Wednesday night decline. News that Canada’s unemployment rate crept up slightly seemed to have traders convinced there won’t be an interest rate increase any time soon, giving them confidence to buy.

The TSE 300 opened at 10516.05 and advanced steadily to close at 10569.23, a gain of 153.82 or 1.48%. The advance brings the TSE 300 back to the highs it hit Monday.

The advance was fairly broad based. Among the 14 sub-indices, only utilities, real estate, paper and conglomerates finished lower. Leading on the upside were the pipelines, due mostly to the performance of TransCanada PipeLines, which climbed 6.17% in the session. The company’s ongoing selloff of non-core assets seems to be what marketwatchers want to see.

The industrial products index also did well as Nortel Networks tacked on a healthy $3.30 to close at $111.55, pulling up the rest of the market. RIM rose $2.35 to close at $78.60.

The consumer product group was up a strong 2.21%. In individual stocks, Heritage Concepts was by far the most heavily traded stock
with over 8.7 million shares changing hands. HCI has been invited to demonstrate its facial recognition system to the U.S. immigration department.

Though Xillix reported that second-quarter sales were only about half of the year-earlier period, the medical-equipment maker realized a loss of only $1,739,000 compared with $2,131,000. The company also said a dispute with Olympus Optical Co. of Tokyo has been resolved. Trading was halted for more than an hour this morning but the stock managed to soar 63¢ to close at $1.13, an impressive
increase of 126%.

The loonie, which closed at 67.42¢ yesterday, sunk to 67.124¢ today on absolutely dead quiet trading. Currency traders seemed to digest the morning jobs news and then fly out of their desks for the long weekend.

In the U.S., markets advanced but much more timidly than the TSE. Anxiety over this month’s Fed meeting kept some traders on the sidelines. Nevertheless, NASDAQ pulled off a 27 point advance to close at 3787.36, leaving it just slightly above the 3700 mark where it began the week.

The Dow Jones average rose 61.17 points to close at 10767.75. Considering it began the week around the 10500 mark, that’s also a good advance on the week. The S&P 500 managed to scrape out a 10.37 point increase to close at 1462.93, a steady week-long climb from roughly 1425 at Monday’s opening bell.