By Jeff Sanford
(July 10 – 16:30 ET) – The TSE 300 composite index finished the day down 144.89 points at 10,235.59. Volume was only 102 million shares. Decliners outnumbered advancers, 596 vs 472.
The sub-indices were also mainly down, only gold, metals and merchandising were up. On the down side, industrial products, led by the tech component was the big loser of the day. It dropped 2.24% to finish at 13,275.47 points.
Nortel dropped $2.60, to slide to $103.60, while Ballard Power was down $8.50 to $147 and JDS Uniphase, on news it is acquiring SDL Inc. for $41 billion, was down $17.95 to $154.65.
The JDS deal, the biggest in the tech sector so far, is another sign that JDS is aggressively fighting for space in what is becoming the hottest tech sector: fibre optic routing and switching. In the race to offer high bandwidth net connectivity, an all-optical network is the Holy Grail. While the backbone is all fibre, the so-called “last mile” of cable, is still largely wire, creating a huge bottleneck in data transmission. Whoever can figure out how to convert the last mile to optical seems to be in for a windfall.
TD and CIBC both shed points today also, falling to $35.30 and $41.40 respectively.
The CDNX was also down on the day. It dropped 31.67 points to finish at 3,402.09.
The Canadian loonie ended the day at US67.61¢.
After some early morning losses, the Dow Jones industrial average pulled out a gain for the day, rising 10.60 points to finish at 10,646.58. The NASDAQ composite ended the day down 42.91 points at 3,980.29. The S&P 500 also shed 3.28 points to finish at 1,475.62.
In U.S. individual stocks shares in SDL (the target acquisition of JDS) rose 10%. Alcoa was up US$8.45 on good earnings news. Barnett Inc. was up 17% on news of a takeover by Wilma Industries. Internet play, Women.com was up 21% and Veeco, another maker of network equipment, was up 7.5%.