Market action in January enough to curl your hair

One only has to look at the numbers to see that this past January was a hair-curling month on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

With 603.1 million shares trading hands that month, a new all- time record was set. The last time the exchange chalked up anything close to that share volume was in March, 1986, with 587 million shares churning over.

Dollar value traded amounted to $8.5 billion, the second highest on record. In December, $4.5 billion was traded.

An average daily value of $403.8 million traded in January and an average of 28.7 million shares changed hands daily on the TSE compared with $264.4 million and 19.6 million shares traded a year ago.

The total number of issues listed on the TSE was 1,573 on Jan 30 compared with 1,570 on Dec 31. Of the nine new companies listed for the first time in January, five were resource companies: Cliff Resources, Levon Resources, Novamin, Pioneer Metals Corp. and Sikaman Gold Resources.

Looking at activity on the four Canadian exchanges in the month of January, total value of trading reached $11.2 billion, the second highest ever traded in any one month. According to preliminary figures, this represents a whopping increase of 86.7% over the $6 billion traded in December, 1986, and is 44.5% higher than January of the previous year.

The TSE accounted for 75.7% of the total value on the Canadian exchanges in January, an increase from 75.2% in December. The Montreal Exchange accounted for 19.6% of the total value traded, up from 18.1% market share in December.

The Vancouver Stock Exchange accounted for 4.2% of the total value traded, down from the 5.6% market share it had in December.

The Alberta Stock Exchange accounted for 0.55% of the total value traded, down from 1.1% of the total value in December.