TSX Closes Up 0.91% as Miners and Shopify Outweigh the Big Six Banks
The S&P/TSX Composite closed up 0.91% on Tuesday at 36,335.61, against Monday’s close of 36,009.40. The S&P 500 finished flat at 7,764.64 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.45% to 27,244.28. Canada had a day and the United States did not.
What makes that worth explaining is how the TSX did it. Financials are 34.89% of the index and they closed down 0.83%. Every one of the Big Six banks finished lower. The index still gained nearly a full percent, because materials and one technology stock more than covered the hole. Shopify by itself accounts for 37% of the move.
This page carried the mid-afternoon version of the same rebuild. The figures below are the final ones, computed after the 4:00 p.m. ET close on Tuesday September 22, 2026.
How we rebuilt the close
We can name the stocks that did this because the fund tracking the index publishes its entire book every day. Sector and stock weights come from the iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index ETF (XIC) holdings file as of September 21, 2026, which discloses all 217 names. The S&P 500 weights set beside them are the iShares S&P 500 Index ETF (XUS) look-through of the same date, renormalised to 100.
The arithmetic is one line: each holding’s fund weight multiplied by its price return gives the number of index percentage points that name added or subtracted. Sum those by sector and the day has an anatomy rather than a narrative.
Coverage is 216 names, 99.69% of index weight. The rebuild reproduces +0.904 percentage points against a printed +0.906%, which is agreement to within a fifth of a basis point. That is the check that the name-by-name numbers below are sound.
| Sector | TSX weight % | S&P 500 weight % | Sector return % | Contribution (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Materials | 18.96 | 1.68 | +3.68 | +0.697 |
| Information Technology | 7.85 | 39.01 | +4.84 | +0.380 |
| Industrials | 9.87 | 8.07 | +1.56 | +0.154 |
| Consumer Discretionary | 2.84 | 8.76 | +0.64 | +0.018 |
| Utilities | 3.19 | 1.93 | +0.35 | +0.011 |
| Consumer Staples | 2.99 | 4.36 | +0.34 | +0.010 |
| Health Care | 0.31 | 9.16 | +2.30 | +0.007 |
| Real Estate | 1.18 | 1.73 | +0.42 | +0.005 |
| Communication | 1.50 | 10.12 | -1.40 | -0.021 |
| Energy | 16.11 | 3.38 | -0.43 | -0.069 |
| Financials | 34.89 | 11.78 | -0.83 | -0.288 |
Materials are 18.96% of the index and produced +0.697 of a +0.904 percentage point move. That is 77% of the day from 19% of the market, and the share grew through the afternoon: at 2:30 p.m. the same calculation put materials at 73% of a smaller move.
Left: what each index is made of, by sector weight. Right: what each sector did to the TSX on the day, in percentage points. Sector weights from the iShares XIC and XUS holdings files as of September 21, 2026. Contributions computed at the close on September 22, 2026. Prices from Yahoo Finance.
The ten names that carried it
| Ticker | Name | Weight % | Return % | Contribution (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SHOP | Shopify | 4.56 | +7.40 | +0.3374 |
| AEM | Agnico Eagle Mines | 2.74 | +3.36 | +0.0921 |
| WPM | Wheaton Precious Metals | 1.84 | +4.50 | +0.0828 |
| ABX | Barrick Mining | 1.92 | +3.10 | +0.0596 |
| CLS | Celestica | 1.19 | +3.86 | +0.0459 |
| CNR | Canadian National Railway | 1.77 | +1.96 | +0.0346 |
| FNV | Franco Nevada | 1.38 | +2.35 | +0.0325 |
| K | Kinross Gold | 0.90 | +3.48 | +0.0313 |
| TECK.B | Teck Resources | 0.88 | +3.46 | +0.0304 |
| CP | Canadian Pacific Kansas City | 2.09 | +1.45 | +0.0303 |
Shopify’s +0.3374 percentage points is the second leg of a two day run. It rose 7.83% on its TSX line on Monday and 7.40% on Tuesday, roughly 16% across two sessions. We explained the first leg when it happened, and that piece is the one to read for the cause: Monday’s rally on Meta’s Muse shopping agent. We have no fresh company news for Tuesday, so we are not going to supply a reason for the second leg.
The three names directly below Shopify are Agnico Eagle, Wheaton Precious Metals and Barrick. The index did not need breadth. It needed materials.
The miners moved many times the metal
Here is the part of the session that deserves a second look, and it reads differently at the close than it did at 2:30 p.m.
Gold settled at $4,400.70 USD, up 0.38%. Silver and copper did considerably more. The December silver contract finished at $67.71 USD, up 1.96%, and December copper at $6.90 USD, up 2.07%, both measured close to close on the active December contract.
That matters because it changes which part of the sector needs explaining. Wheaton Precious Metals, which streams both gold and silver, rose 4.50%, and Pan American Silver rose 4.53% against silver’s 1.96%. Teck Resources rose 3.46% and First Quantum 2.85% against copper’s 2.07%. Those are multiples of between roughly 1.4 and 2.3 times the metal, which is ordinary for a producer.
The gold names are the outliers. Agnico Eagle closed up 3.36%, Barrick 3.10%, Kinross 3.48% and Equinox Gold 5.03%, against a 0.38% move in the metal. That is eight to thirteen times, and it is not explained by the bullion price.
The mechanism behind producer leverage is standard and worth holding onto. A miner’s costs are largely fixed in the short run, so a change in the metal price lands disproportionately on the margin rather than on revenue alone. That is why producers amplify the metal in both directions, and it is why a quiet day in gold can be a loud one in gold equities.
What we are not going to do is tell you why the gold equities moved this much on Tuesday specifically. The metal’s own move does not account for the size of the equity move, we have not sourced a driver, and the honest version is the observation without a story bolted to it.
One framing to retire while we are here. Gold is not at a record. Its highest close over the past three months was $4,697.80 USD on August 24, 2026, and Tuesday’s settlement sits 6.4% below that.
Margin per ounce is the thing that separates one Canadian producer from another once you stop looking at the metal, and it is how we sort them on our page covering Canadian gold stocks ranked on margin rather than on ounces in the ground.
Every one of the Big Six is lower
| Ticker | Bank | Weight % | Return % | Contribution (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RY | Royal Bank of Canada | 7.83 | -0.85 | -0.0668 |
| TD | Toronto-Dominion | 5.58 | -0.80 | -0.0446 |
| BMO | Bank of Montreal | 3.40 | -1.44 | -0.0491 |
| BNS | Bank of Nova Scotia | 3.18 | -1.22 | -0.0387 |
| CM | CIBC | 2.90 | -0.99 | -0.0286 |
| NA | National Bank of Canada | 1.61 | -0.16 | -0.0026 |
The six together took 0.2304 percentage points off the index, most of the 0.288 point drag from financials as a whole. Royal Bank, at 7.83% the single heaviest name in the index, accounts for 0.0668 of that on its own, and it recovered into the close: at 2:30 p.m. it was down 1.11%, and it finished down 0.85%. Bank of Nova Scotia went the other way, down 0.81% at mid-afternoon and down 1.22% at the bell.
We have no sourced reason for the move and will not invent one. The standing backdrop for bank investors has not changed: the Bank of Canada key policy rate is 2.25% and has been since October 30, 2025. That is the environment, not an explanation for one session.
If the useful question behind a day like this is how the six actually differ from one another, and which names sit outside them, that is the work on our page covering Canadian bank stocks.
Energy did almost nothing, on a day oil fell
The quietest number in the table is the strangest one. Energy is 16.11% of the TSX, nearly as heavy as materials, and it took only 0.069 of a percentage point off the index while crude fell hard. WTI for November delivery settled at $89.76 USD, down 2.83%, its second sharp drop in as many sessions.
CNBC reported that oil fell for a fifth consecutive session after President Trump said the United States had held hours-long talks with Iran. We have not independently verified the talks, and we are passing on the attribution rather than the claim.
Canadian Natural Resources closed down 0.78% and Imperial Oil 1.62%, which is a fraction of the move in the barrel. Producer leverage cuts both ways and it did not show up here. That is worth filing away rather than explaining away: the energy weight in the index did not behave like a leveraged bet on crude on Tuesday, whatever it does on an average day.
Monday ran the same engine backwards
The cleanest way to read Tuesday is against Monday. The TSX closed at 36,009.40 on Monday, up 0.57% from 35,806.70, and it got there from the opposite end of the index.
Royal Bank rose 1.82% on Monday, Toronto-Dominion 1.53%, Bank of Montreal 1.85%, Bank of Nova Scotia 1.70%, CIBC 1.38% and National Bank 0.83%. Every one of them. Meanwhile Agnico Eagle fell 0.57%, Barrick 0.48%, Wheaton 1.64% and Kinross 0.46%.
In one session the two engines swapped ends. The banks that led Monday are Tuesday’s largest drag, and the miners that dragged Monday did the lifting. Shopify is the only constant, up hard on both days.
What this means if you own the Canadian index
The TSX and the S&P 500 are not two versions of the same market, and Tuesday is a clean illustration of the gap.
Materials are 18.96% of the TSX and 1.68% of the S&P 500, more than eleven times the weight. Financials are 34.89% against 11.78%. Information technology runs the other way, 7.85% against 39.01%. A Canadian holding the broad domestic index owns a materials and banks portfolio with a technology sleeve attached, whatever the fund is called.
So when the two indexes diverge by roughly nine tenths of a percentage point in a session, that is usually not a verdict on Canadian companies against American ones. It is composition doing what composition does, and anyone can check it by multiplying a published weight by a price return. The same structure that produced Tuesday’s outperformance is the one that produced Monday’s very different internals.
That is an explanation of a mechanism, not a case for owning more or less of anything.
What is next
Statistics Canada publishes payroll employment and retail trade for July at 8:30 a.m. ET on Thursday September 24. BlackBerry reports fiscal second quarter results the same morning, before the open. Neither is likely to move a 34% financials weight on its own, but the retail print is the first read in a while on whether the Canadian consumer is doing anything, and that does eventually reach the banks.
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 the close on September 22, 2026. Index weights from the iShares XIC and XUS holdings files as of September 21, 2026.
