By Jeff Sanford

(September 27 – 17:45 ET) – The selloff continues. As traders dumped Nortel, and the rest of the techs, the TSE 300 took a beating today dropping 228.6 points to close at 10,250.00.

Is the bloom finally off the rose? While some traders predicted Nortel will be trading near $50 by Christmas, investors worried that tech stocks are way overvalued dumped the Brampton networking giant. Nortel finished down $6.80 to close at $88.70. The stock hasn’t been under $90 since June.

Research In Motion also gave up some of its share price dropping $12 to $127. JDS Uniphase was down $735 to $146.50 while Descartes Systems fell $3.875 to $74.25.

Overall the decliners outnumbered advancers, 618 to 461. Today’s volume was 142.5 million shares.

Among the sub-indices, industrial products, Nortel’s home room, was down 5.07%. Overall eight of the 14 sub-indices finished the day in the red. The only upside was the gold sector. In a sign of extreme desperation, the gold sector climbed 3.34% as investors looked for anything other than techs. Also up was the consumer products sector, albeit by only 0.74%

Oil was flat, moving up a slight 0.54%.

The CDNX was also relatively unchanged. It finished up less than a point at 3,535.70.

The loonie also finished lower today, breaking the US67¢ level. It closed at 66.81¢ U.S., compared to US67.22¢, yesterday.

In the U.S. the Dow Jones industrial average was relatively stable, finishing down 2.96 points at 10,628.36. The Nasdaq was down 32.80 points at 3,656.30, while the S&P 500 was down less than a point at 1,426.57.