Popular pot stocks and rallies in the key energy, financials, and health care sectors pulled the TSX out of the red today.
Cannabis producers helped Canada’s stock exchange rebound from yesterday’s losses as Aurora Cannabis jumped 5.2 percent, Aphria Inc. increased 5.8 percent, and Canopy Growth rose 8.1 percent.
The TSX finished the day 54 points higher with gains in five of 11 sectors.
In New York, newly released economic data showing a spike in U.S. private sector employment in September helped lift the Dow which ended 54 points on the plus side, while the Nasdaq moved up 25 points.
Gains in key market movers Boeing, Caterpillar, General Electric, Apple, Intel, and American Express paced American markets.
Oil rose 99 cents to $76.22 US a barrel as supply concerns caused by upcoming American sanctions on Iran overshadowed a surprise stockpile of eight million barrels of U.S. crude oil inventories.
Both the Canadian dollar and gold weakened against the greenback, after a top U.S. policymaker said inflation expectations haven’t grown as much as he’d like and that he’d be comfortable with a December interest rate increase.
The loonie, which climbed substantially earlier in the week after the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement was struck on Sunday, slipped 28/100ths of a cent to $0.7769 US while gold lost $4.70 to $1,199 an ounce.
Meanwhile, Canopy Growth has teamed with the Ontario Long Term Care Association to develop and implement a long-term care medical cannabis pilot that will treat pain and cognitive function in seniors in care facilities.
According to a release, the six-month pilot aims to measure how medical cannabis use “can potentially displace other, less-desirable therapeutics for both pain and cognitive function for residents in a select group of homes.”
