Canada’s main stock market got a boost on a shortened trading day, but Wall Street wasn’t able to build off of yesterday’s rally.
TMX Group, the owner of the TSX, closed down all its markets just before 3:00pm EST because of an unspecified issue that the company said impacted all traders equally. Before that the TSX was up 31 points to 15,668 with financials doing well as bank shares were higher, but energy was down with lower oil prices. There’s concern the U.S. could put sanctions back on Iran, affecting the oil supply.
In New York it was a flat day. Tech stocks were up early after Amazon reported a massive first quarter profit of $1.6 billion, and the company’s shares surged nearly eight per cent. It gave up most of that though, but still closed more than 3.5 per cent higher. Reports that the U.S. economy only grew by 2.3 per cent and a dip in energy shares, led the Dow Jones to close down 11 points at 24,311.
RBC is raising rates on a few of its fixed-rate mortgages. Five-years are going up from 5.14 per cent to 5.34. This comes after TD Bank raised some of its mortgage rates earlier this week as well.
At press time oil is down 12 cents to $68.07 U.S. per barrel, gold is up $6.60 to $1324.50 an ounce, and the loonie is up close to a third of a cent, to 77.91 cents U.S.
