By Jeff Sanford

(November 27 – 18:00 ET) – The TSE 300 opened higher today, maintained momentum, and finished up a strong 102.92 points at 9,127.35.

The advance came on strong performances across the market — nine of the 14 sub-indices finished higher, led by industrials and consumer products.

On the downside were pipelines, real estate, merchandising and conglomerates, though none of those sectors were down more than 1%.

Among individual issues, the market was just about split. While 532 issues advanced on the day, 522 declined. Total volume was a fairly light at 123 million shares.

Nortel helped out the advance with a gain of 2.98% to close at $60.50.

Placer Dome and Bombardier were both heavily traded today, and up substantially. Placer was up a strong 5.84% to $14.50, while Bombardier was up 3.125 to $23.10.

Other gold miners that did well today were Barrick up 4.79% to $22.95 and Kinross up 12.22% to $1.01.
Franco-Nevada gained 4.04% to close at $15.45.

Wi-Lan crashed today on insecurity about the status of an important patent. The patent case is currently before a court). It dropped 19.31% to $14.

JDS was also down on the day. It dropped 4.56% to $99.50. Celestica, though, was up 3.12% at $95.90. Research In Motion was relatively unchanged at $119.25, a gain of 55¢

The Montreal Exchange announced today that the Ten-year Canadian Government Bond Futures contract traded a record 50,880 contracts today. ME officials were hoping that liquidity in the issue would pick up once trading was moved to their new all-electronic exchange, SAM (Montreal Automated System), which the 10-year CGB began trading on at the end of last month. Seems that wish is coming true.

The CDNX dropped 36.79 points today to finish at 3,033.07. Over 334 issues declined compared to the 206 that advanced. Volume was 34.5 million shares traded.

The loonie was up a strong 0.20% at 65.15¢ U.S. today.

In the United States, the Dow Jones industrial average was up as investors snapped up retail stocks ahead of the Christmas shopping season. The Dow finished at 10,546.07, a gain of 75.84 points

The Nasdaq composite though was down tech issues tumbled on negative analyst comments. Nasdaq was down 23.89 points at 2,880.49. The S&P 500 was up slightly at 1348.97, a gain of 7.20 points.