By James Langton
(November 12 – 13:00 EST) – Perhaps it’s time to rename it the Nortel 300. As Nortel goes, so goes the TSE 300. Today, Nortel is down sharply, and the TSE 300 has dropped 25 points.
Volume has been strong at almost 60 million shares, although the buying is outstripping the selling about 3:2. The split between advancers and decliners is virtually even once again.
On a sector basis, six of the 14 subgroups are down, led of course by the utilities and industrials, also known as Nortel and BCE. Nortel is down more than 4%. The drop is attributable to some general negativity trained on the Nortel-Cisco-Lucent triumverate, and doubts about techs in general after some disappointing results from Intel. This trend is dragging down Celestica, JDS Uniphase and Delrina.
Newbridge is one of the few techs showing gains. It is up strongly on takeover talk.
Conglomerates are just about the only sector trading up convincingly, thanks to CNR and Onex. Select stocks are generating some interest though. TD Waterhouse is doing well after some Wall Street talk in favour of it and a few other online rivals. This has filtered through to some active buying in TD Bank itself. Air Canada is trading well again today.
On the heels of the TSE, the ME is down 14 points. Vancouver is off less than half a point. Alberta is up less than a point.
In New York, techs are driving down, opposed by the old school Dow stocks. While Nasdaq is off 15 points, the Dow is up 46 points on this morning’s good productivity data. The S&P is up two points.