By Jeff Sanford

(October 27- 18:00 ET) – The TSE opened this morning slightly under yesterday’s close and didn’t stop falling until the final bell. It closed off 360.43 points at 10,132.60, down more than 3% and its lowest close since June.

Comments by Bill Gross, the influential bond manager from Pacific Investment Management Co., are credited for sparking the selloff. Add to that continued worries about earnings, concerns about whether U.S. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan can really engineer a soft landing, tensions in the Middle East, and a close presidential race and jittery investors resembled patrons in a burning theatre. They couldn’t get to the exits fast enough.

All of the TSE 300 sub-indices were down except for metals which was up 0.62% and transportation which was flat. The rest of the market trended down, led by industrial products, which was off 5.09%, paper and forest off 4.59%, and utilities, down 3.55%.

Today’s only bright spot today was Alcan, the most heavily traded stock of the day. It was up 3.52% in front of its acquisition of Swiss aluminum maker Algroup.

Pretty well the all of the rest of the market was in the red. The number of declining issues says it all, 773 were down compared to 355 that advanced.

Not even the announcement of a $1 billion deal to supply optical equipment for a 20,000-mile nationwide U.S. broadband network could help Nortel. It dropped 6.31%. Some of the other blue-chips down on the day were Bombardier, off 2.87%, Franco-Nevada, down 6.02%, BCE, down 4.46%, Rogers, down 6.26%, and Abitibi, off 5.68%.

Research In Motion still managed to attract investors, rising 5.08%.

The CDNX was also off on the day. It dropped 46.79 points to close at 3,275.82. Trading was heavy on volume of 66.9 million shares.

The TSE selloff seemed to have an effect on the loonie. If seesawed for most of the day but then plummeted an hour before close to US65.67¢ That’s down from yesterday’s US65.82¢ U.S. Global volatility has caused a flight to quality run on the U.S. dollar.

With respect to equities, the story was similar in the New York. The Nasdaq composite was down double digits. It fell 76.35 points to close at 3,213.93 points. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 149.09 points to close at 10,089.71. The S&P 500 was also down. It closed at 1349.97, off 24.65 points. The drops were blamed mainly on earnings worries.