Copper Barely Moved. Seven Canadian Miners Worth 2.67% of the TSX Did as Much as 26 Worth 12.14%
The S&P/TSX Composite was at 35,449.4 at 2:31 p.m. ET on Friday, up 0.84% from Thursday’s close of 35,154.8. Materials was the largest contributing sector, and most of what Materials contributed came from seven companies that together make up 2.67% of the index. Six of the seven dig copper. If you hold a broad Canadian index fund, your biggest sector gain of the afternoon was built in a corner of it that almost nobody who owns the fund could name. The metal itself gives no hint of it. Copper was down 0.18% at the same hour.
Friday’s figures are live readings taken while the market is still open. Equity prices are as of 2:31 p.m. ET, metals as of 2:34 p.m. ET, and none of them are settlements. They will not match the close.
The day was broad, not a metals day
Eight of eleven sectors were positive. Of the 216 index names in the model, 147 rose and 65 fell. South of the border the S&P 500 was up 0.65% and the NASDAQ up 1.11% on a 2:34 p.m. ET reading, so the TSX was running ahead of the S&P 500 and behind the NASDAQ. The single biggest contributor to the TSX move was not a miner at all. Shopify, at a 5.11% weight and up 1.76%, added 0.090 percentage points on its own.
That context matters because the finding below is easy to overstate. The base metal miners punched far above their weight inside a broad advance. They did not carry it, and nothing needed carrying. Thursday had gone the other way, with the index down 0.23%.
Here is the sector arithmetic. Each holding’s weight in the fund multiplied by its price return gives the index percentage points it added, and summing those by sector shows where the move came from. Weights are from the iShares S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index ETF holdings disclosure.
| Sector | Index weight | Sector return | Contribution (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Materials | 18.14% | +1.22% | +0.222 |
| Financials | 34.31% | +0.46% | +0.157 |
| Industrials | 10.10% | +1.54% | +0.155 |
| Information Technology | 8.71% | +1.78% | +0.155 |
| Energy | 16.37% | +0.78% | +0.128 |
| Utilities | 3.27% | +0.76% | +0.025 |
| Consumer Staples | 3.00% | -0.34% | -0.010 |
Sectors above 3% of the index. Weights and returns at 2:31 p.m. ET on Friday October 2, 2026.
Materials led. Financials, Industrials and Information Technology were bunched tightly behind it. The model reproduces +0.83 percentage points from 99.79% of index weight against a printed +0.84%, which is close enough to work with and not identical.
Materials is two different trades wearing one label
Split the sector by what the companies actually pull out of the ground and it stops behaving like one thing. The three groups below are ours, drawn by hand across the sector’s 60 constituents, and their contributions foot to the +0.222 in the sector table above.
| Group | Names | Index weight | Contribution (pp) | Weighted return |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Precious metals | 26 | 12.14% | +0.1071 | +0.88% |
| Base and diversified metals | 7 | 2.67% | +0.0979 | +3.67% |
| Everything else in Materials | 27 | 3.33% | +0.0168 | +0.50% |
A reader who does not want to trust our hand-drawn lists can check the split in two listed funds instead. The iShares S&P/TSX Global Base Metals Index ETF was up 2.32% on the afternoon and the iShares S&P/TSX Global Gold Index ETF up 0.84%, which is the same divide showing up in portfolios nobody here assembled.
The base metal group carries 22% of the precious group’s index weight and delivered 91% of its index contribution. Per unit of weight, it did 4.2 times the work. Seven companies worth 2.67% of the index supplied 11.8% of the day’s modelled move.
Left panel, each group’s share of the index. Middle panel, each group’s contribution to Friday’s move in index percentage points. Right panel, the base metal group at +3.67% and the precious group at +0.88% against the day’s changes in copper, gold and silver futures. Weights from the iShares XIC holdings file. Contribution is each holding’s fund weight times its price return, summed by group. Equity prices at 2:31 p.m. ET and metals at 2:34 p.m. ET, live bars rather than settlements. Prices from Yahoo Finance.
All seven were up, and six of them are copper producers
| Ticker | Company | Weight | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| ERO | Ero Copper | 0.11% | +5.81% |
| TECK.B | Teck Resources | 0.89% | +4.30% |
| LUN | Lundin Mining | 0.45% | +4.12% |
| CS | Capstone Copper | 0.19% | +3.70% |
| HBM | Hudbay Minerals | 0.33% | +3.41% |
| IVN | Ivanhoe Mines | 0.18% | +3.40% |
| FM | First Quantum Minerals | 0.52% | +2.00% |
Ero, Lundin, Capstone, Hudbay, Ivanhoe and First Quantum are copper producers. Teck is the diversified one, spanning copper, zinc and steelmaking coal, and it is also the heaviest name on the list. That is the short list making up the base and diversified side of Canadian mining stocks, and it is worth knowing which names sit in it, because a reader who owns the index owns all seven whether they meant to or not.
The obvious objection is concentration, and it is a fair one. Teck alone accounts for 39% of the group’s contribution. If this were one company’s news, that is exactly what the numbers would look like. The answer is breadth. All seven rose, in a band running from +2.00% to +5.81%, and the smallest weight in the group posted the largest gain. A single-company story does not usually take the other six with it.
The gold side is bigger and moved less
The precious block is 12.14% of the index, more than four times the base metal weight, and it is where most Canadian investors think their mining exposure lives. Its five heaviest names:
| Ticker | Company | Weight | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| WPM | Wheaton Precious Metals | 1.72% | +1.88% |
| AEM | Agnico Eagle Mines | 2.60% | +1.56% |
| FNV | Franco-Nevada | 1.29% | +1.00% |
| K | Kinross Gold | 0.81% | +0.20% |
| ABX | Barrick Mining | 1.87% | +0.18% |
Six of the 26 fell outright. The worst were Montage Gold at -3.18%, DPM Metals at -3.10% and Perpetua Resources at -2.86%.
Set the two tables beside each other and the point is visual before it is arithmetic: the best Friday return among our 26 precious names, Wheaton’s +1.88%, sits below the weakest of our seven base and diversified names at +2.00%. Both lists are groupings we drew rather than official classifications, and the line between them is not the only one available. NovaGold Resources, a gold development company we filed outside the precious 26, was up 2.18%. If you want the full picture of what sits inside the larger block, our page on Canadian gold stocks covers the producers and royalty companies that dominate it.
The metals themselves went the other way
| Metal | Contract | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copper | HGZ26 | $6.555/lb USD | -0.18% |
| Gold | GCZ26 | $4,165.90 USD | -0.94% |
| Silver | SIZ26 | $60.545 USD | -1.50% |
Those are December futures, priced from Yahoo Finance trade data at 2:34 p.m. ET. Copper was close to unchanged and its Canadian producers were up between 2% and 6%. That gap is the ordinary condition of mining equities rather than an anomaly: a miner’s share price and the price of its metal are two different instruments, moved by production costs, debt, grades, mine-level news and the same risk appetite that moves every other equity. Our guide to what actually moves a stock price is the right starting point for anyone who has ever opened a miner and wondered why it did not track the commodity on the screen beside it.
The easy explanation does not survive the data
The reflex read is that beaten-down names bounced. The week before says otherwise. Measured from the Thursday September 24 close to the Thursday October 1 close, on real closes rather than live bars:
| Change | |
|---|---|
| Gold, December contract | -2.23% |
| Copper, December contract | -3.71% |
| iShares S&P/TSX Global Gold Index ETF (XGD.TO) | -5.85% |
| iShares S&P/TSX Global Base Metals Index ETF (XBM.TO) | -2.96% |
| S&P/TSX Composite | -1.55% |
Both of those funds hold miners worldwide, so that pair measures global gold miners against global base metal miners rather than our seven Canadian names. On that measure the gold side went into Friday roughly twice as damaged, and it was the less damaged side that moved harder.
Running it formally across the 53 Materials names weighing at least 0.05% of the index, the correlation between last week’s return and Friday’s return is +0.257. A bounce would have produced a negative number, so the sign points away from mean reversion. That is as far as it goes. The t statistic is 1.896 on 51 degrees of freedom, which is roughly a one-in-sixteen chance of turning up in noise alone, short of the conventional bar for calling a relationship real, and it is a single afternoon either way. The thirds say the same thing with the same caveat: the worst third of last week returned +0.27% on Friday and the best third +1.35%, across groups of 17 names.
What this does and does not tell you
Seven companies worth 2.67% of a Canadian index fund produced nearly as much of Friday’s move as twenty-six worth 12.14% of it, while the metals those companies sell were lower. None of that is a view on any of the seven, and a day is not a trend.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. Figures are live intraday readings taken on Friday October 2, 2026: equities at 2:31 p.m. ET and metals at 2:34 p.m. ET, not closing prices. Prior-week comparisons use actual daily closes.
