By James Langton

(March 5 – 13:00 ET) – Markets opened a little higher this morning and have been slogging their way up through the trading day. At midday, the TSE 300 is up 69 points to 8,076.

Volume has been strong for a Monday morning at 70 million shares, with buyers beating sellers about three to one. Winners are outnumbering losers about five to four.

With little earnings or economic news to guide traders the gains are broad-based, with every group save pipelines and consumer stocks on the upside. Technology, oil and gas services, miners, energy and financials are particularly strong. The biotechs are dragging the consumer group down.

As buyers flock back to tech stocks, Nortel Networks has cautiously resumed its role as market leader. At midday the firm is up 2.6% on 4.2 million shares. Also gaining today are a variety of tech stocks including Alcatel, Celestica and Ballard Power.

Today’s buying has also spread to a variety of sectors, with strong gains in names as varied as Alliance Atlantis, Burlington, Weyerhaeuser, Gulf Canada, Finning and Methanex.

With techs and telecoms rebounding, bank stocks are bouncing back, too. Bank of Montreal is recovering most aggressively, followed by Scotiabank, but all the banks are up. The larger insurers, Manulife and Sun Life, are falling as the banks rise, although Canada Life and Clarica are slightly up.

On the downside today is an eclectic mix of stocks. Biotechs such as Biovail and QLT are down. Transport equipment maker Bombardier is down sharply.

Tech names such as Descartes Systems, Pivotal, Siebel and Rogers Wireless are down. Enbridge and Veritas are sliding, too.

In New York, stocks are generally up, although traders are preoccupied with the massive snowstorm swamping the city. Volume is rather light today, a fact attributed to the notion that many traders elected to stay home.

The New York Mercantile Exchange is closing at 13:00 ET due to the storm, although the more rugged NYSE has no such plans.

At midday, the Dow Jones industrial average is up 64 points to 10,530. The Nasdaq composite has gained 27 ticks to 2,145. The S&P 500 is up four points to 1238.

The U.S. market gains can generally be traced to some strength in technology with additional buying in cyclicals. The Nasdaq is powering higher with help from gains in Cisco Systems, Oracle, JDS Uniphase, Intel, Sun and Dell. Amazon.com is up sharply. The NYSE’s big winners include Nokia, Nortel, GE, AOL Time Warner and Lucent.

Bank in Canada, the CDNX is up 10 points to 3,101. Volume is relatively soft at 15.6 million shares. Techs and oils are up, mines are flat. Neptune Capital Corp. is up 55% to 31¢ on 1.5 million shares.