TSE 300 sheds 89 points

It must be the end of summer. With traders returning to their desks, volume was a respectable 187.5 million shares today. Overall, there were 570 advancing issues compared to 544 that declined — another 269 closed flat.

With the volume came the volatility. Nortel was up and down throughout the day, taking the rest of the TSE with it. But when the closing bell rang, the heavily-weighted networking giant was down $1.55 at $112.75.

That pulled the industrial products sub-index down 1.3%. The losses though were market-wide. Pipelines, transportation and the paper and forest sub-indices all finished down more than 2%.

Overall, nine of 14 of the TSE’s sub-indices finished the day down.

Like yesterday, strength on the upside came from conglomerates, and the oils. The conglomerates index was up another 2.59%, after a 2% gain yesterday.

Among individual issues, Repap continues to move in the wake of takeover news. It closed flat at 20¢.

Placer Dome was popular gain today, putting on 6.34%.

The CDNX closed down slightly today at 3,614.37, a loss of 6.88 points. Overall 302 issues advanced while 3167 declined. Over 47.2 million shares traded.

The Canadian dollar strengthened slightly today, rising to US67.70¢ from its close of US67.49¢ yesterday. The gain came in front of expected good economic news to be released Friday and strength in the Australian dollar and the euro.

In the U.S., the Dow slid while Nasdaq composite reversed some of the losses of the last few days. The Dow was off 50.77 points at the closing bell — it finished at 11,259.87. The Nasdaq was up 85.01 points to finish at 1,098.35. The S&P 500 finished at 1,502.51, a gain of 10.26 points.