TSX Stalls as Oil and Gold Cancel Out a Bank and Tech Rally
The TSX looked like it slept through a US melt-up on Monday morning. At 12:31 p.m. ET the S&P/TSX Composite sat at 35,876.38, up 0.20% on the day, while the Nasdaq Composite was up 1.98% and the S&P 500 up 1.32%. The obvious reading is that Canada missed the rally because Canada does not own enough technology. The obvious reading is wrong, and we can show it name by name.
Canadian banks rallied. Canadian tech rallied harder. The index went nowhere because energy and materials, which together make up more than a third of it, fell by almost exactly as much as financials and technology rose. That is not a story about what Canada lacks. It is a story about what else Canada owns.
All figures below are intraday, as of 12:31 p.m. ET on Monday September 21, 2026. They are not the close, and they will not match the close.
Where the indexes stood
| Index | Level | Previous close | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P/TSX Composite | 35,876.38 | 35,806.70 | +0.20% |
| S&P 500 | 7,751.34 | 7,650.50 | +1.32% |
| NASDAQ Composite | 27,046.46 | 26,522.54 | +1.98% |
| iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) | $556.41 | $533.07 | +4.38% |
Semiconductors did the heavy lifting south of the border, with SOXX up 4.38%.
What actually rallied in Canada
The readable version of the day is the sector ETFs. Canadian technology and Canadian financials were both green, and neither was marginally so.
| ETF | Ticker | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| iShares S&P/TSX Capped Information Technology | XIT.TO | $75.39 | +2.03% |
| iShares S&P/TSX Capped Financials | XFN.TO | $94.61 | +0.95% |
| iShares S&P/TSX Capped Materials | XMA.TO | $48.26 | -0.84% |
| iShares S&P/TSX Global Gold | XGD.TO | $58.98 | -1.37% |
| iShares S&P/TSX Capped Energy | XEG.TO | $28.34 | -2.31% |
A Canadian investor who held only banks and tech had a good morning. A Canadian investor who held the whole index had a flat one. The difference between those two experiences is the entire subject of this piece.
The arithmetic, done properly
Here is the method, and it is simple enough to state in one sentence: each holding’s weight in the fund multiplied by its price return on the day gives the number of index percentage points that name added or subtracted, and summing those by sector tells you where the move came from.
We can do this because the fund that tracks the index publishes its entire book every day. Weights come from the iShares S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index ETF holdings disclosure as of September 18, 2026, covering 217 names. The S&P 500 weights alongside them are the XUS look-through of IVV as of the same date, renormalised to 100.
| Sector | TSX weight | S&P 500 weight | Contribution to TSX (pp) | Sector return |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Financials | 34.62% | 11.89% | +0.314 | +0.91% |
| Information Technology | 7.51% | 38.65% | +0.155 | +2.07% |
| Industrials | 9.85% | 8.18% | +0.064 | +0.65% |
| Consumer Staples | 2.97% | 4.45% | +0.027 | +0.92% |
| Consumer Discretionary | 2.84% | 8.76% | +0.025 | +0.88% |
| Real Estate | 1.18% | 1.75% | +0.010 | +0.83% |
| Health Care | 0.31% | 9.24% | +0.001 | +0.47% |
| Communication | 1.53% | 9.86% | +0.001 | +0.08% |
| Utilities | 3.23% | 1.95% | -0.002 | -0.06% |
| Materials | 19.20% | 1.74% | -0.195 | -1.02% |
| Energy | 16.49% | 3.51% | -0.208 | -1.26% |
Financials and technology together added 0.47 percentage points. Energy and materials together subtracted 0.40. Eight of the eleven sectors finished the morning positive, and utilities, down 0.06%, was the only other one that did not. The index still barely moved, because the two sectors that fell are two of the three largest things in it.
Two honesty notes on the model. It reproduces +0.19 percentage points from 99.73% of index weight against a printed +0.20%, which is close but not exact, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. And the fund tracks the S&P/TSX Capped Composite, which caps any single constituent at 10%, so it is a very close proxy for the Composite rather than an identical one.
Left: what each index is made of, by sector weight. Right: what each sector did to the TSX on the day. Sector weights from the iShares XIC and XUS holdings files as of September 18, 2026. Contributions are each holding’s fund weight times its price return, summed by sector, at 12:31 p.m. ET on September 21, 2026.
The composition gap is the whole answer
Set the two weight columns beside each other and the day stops being mysterious.
Information technology is 7.51% of the TSX and 38.65% of the S&P 500. Energy plus materials is 35.69% of the TSX and 5.25% of the S&P 500. Those are not small differences in emphasis. They are close to mirror images.
On a day when chips rip and commodities fall, the US index is built to capture almost all of the first and feel almost none of the second. The Canadian index is built the opposite way. Canadian technology returned +2.07%, which is a real move, but 7.51% of an index cannot carry 35.69% of it. The same arithmetic runs in reverse when the commodity side is the part that is working.
If you hold a broad Canadian index fund and this is the first time you have seen its sector shape laid out, our guide to Canadian index ETFs and what sits inside them walks through the composition of the main options, which is the difference between the fund you think you own and the one you do.
Weight and return doing different jobs
The individual names make the point sharper than the sectors do.
| Name | Ticker | Weight | Return | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Bank of Canada | RY | 7.73% | +1.27% | +0.098 |
| Shopify | SHOP | 4.25% | +2.23% | +0.095 |
| Toronto-Dominion Bank | TD | 5.53% | +1.14% | +0.063 |
| Bank of Montreal | BMO | 3.35% | +1.50% | +0.050 |
| Celestica | CLS | 1.15% | +4.27% | +0.049 |
| Bank of Nova Scotia | BNS | 3.14% | +1.27% | +0.040 |
| Brookfield | BN | 2.20% | +1.29% | +0.029 |
| CIBC | CM | 2.88% | +0.87% | +0.025 |
| Dollarama | DOL | 0.92% | +2.42% | +0.022 |
| First Quantum Minerals | FM | 0.58% | +2.98% | +0.017 |
Royal Bank added +0.098 percentage points on a 7.73% weight. Shopify added +0.095 on a 4.25% weight, a little over half the size. Celestica added +0.049 from a 1.15% position while CIBC added +0.025 from a position two and a half times larger. Size and speed are two different ways to move an index, and on Monday morning the small fast names matched the large slow ones.
Celestica and Shopify are also where a good deal of the listed Canadian exposure to the AI trade sits, so the natural follow-up is which other Canadian names carry it. We keep that list on our page covering Canadian AI stocks.
The other side of the ledger was concentrated and commodity-driven.
| Name | Ticker | Weight | Return | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canadian Natural Resources | CNQ | 2.80% | -2.25% | -0.063 |
| Wheaton Precious Metals | WPM | 1.88% | -2.47% | -0.046 |
| Suncor Energy | SU | 2.23% | -2.08% | -0.046 |
| Agnico Eagle Mines | AEM | 2.77% | -1.01% | -0.028 |
| Cenovus Energy | CVE | 1.17% | -1.91% | -0.022 |
| Franco-Nevada | FNV | 1.41% | -1.45% | -0.020 |
| Nutrien | NTR | 1.01% | -1.90% | -0.019 |
| Pan American Silver | PAAS | 0.57% | -2.57% | -0.015 |
| Whitecap Resources | WCP | 0.45% | -3.23% | -0.015 |
| Intact Financial | IFC | 0.89% | -1.48% | -0.013 |
Eight of those ten are oil producers or precious metals names. The other two are a fertilizer producer and a property and casualty insurer, and between them they account for less than a fifth of the drag on the list.
What was reported to be driving it
These are reported drivers, per Yahoo Finance’s live market coverage for Monday September 21, not conclusions of our own.
Chip stocks rallied ahead of a dinner between AI leaders and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week, with the PHLX Semiconductor index reaching its highest level since September 9. AMD was up 9.38% and Meta Platforms up 9.37%, the latter after Wells Fargo reiterated Overweight and raised its price target to $796 from $640, citing new AI releases including the Muse personal AI agent and a coding agent, ahead of Meta Connect on September 23 and 24. Nvidia was up 1.68%, Alphabet 1.92%, Amazon 1.67%, Tesla 2.92%, Apple 0.82% and Microsoft 0.21%. The chip complex moved together, and we have no verified company-specific catalyst for AMD’s move, so we are not going to supply one.
Oil retreated on hopes that the US and Iran would resume diplomatic talks. The November WTI contract was $91.49, down 4.78% from Friday’s $96.08, and the December contract was $88.33, down 4.04%. Gold futures were $4,391.90, down 0.75%, and the Canadian dollar was US$0.7129, down 0.26%. Crude has to be priced by its own contract month rather than the continuous front-month series, which rolled from October to November between Friday and today and prints a drop on a screen that did not happen in any actual contract. We went through that curve in detail this morning in our piece on why Canadian energy stocks are falling with the oil futures curve, which is the better place to read the crude story than this one.
Separately, eight Fed speeches are scheduled through Friday, and the 10-year Treasury yield is just below 5%.
What this does and does not tell you
It explains a mechanism, and that is all it does. A flat Canadian index on a day the Nasdaq gained 2% is not evidence that Canadian companies underperformed. On Monday morning, most of them did not. It is evidence that the index is weighted toward sectors that were moving the other way, and that is checkable by anyone willing to multiply a published weight by a price return.
Nothing here says a Canadian investor should own more technology or less energy. Concentration cuts in whichever direction the commodity complex happens to be moving, and this particular version of it will look different at the close.
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. Market data as of 12:31 p.m. ET, September 21, 2026. Index weights from the iShares XIC and XUS holdings files as of September 18, 2026.
