Trading Summary (July 10, 2002)

Toronto Stocks closed lower on Wednesday led by a battered technology sector, which fell 5.7% to 15.64. The golds ended the day alone in black, up just 1.83 points or 0.9% to 198.44. The base metal issues suffered a 5.6-point or nearly 4% loss to 137.57. By the end of the session the S&P/TSX Composite Index was 118.43 points or 1.7% lighter at 6,916.41 points.

Kinross Gold assumed its regular place atop the mining issues with a 17 gain to $3.63 on just more than 7 million shares. After that, it was a sea of red ink.

Placer Dome, after shedding $1.21 earlier in the day, settled at $17.08, down 16 with about 6.3 million shares on the go. Similarly, Barrick Gold recovered from a $1.60 loss earlier in the day to end at $29.15, down 35 from its previous close.

Nickel miner Inco sang the same refrain dropping as much as $3.10 during the day. Inco didn’t rebound as nicely ending $2.78 lower at $31.12. Aluminum giant Alcan ended at $52.05, off $2.15. The company had sunk as low as $50.75.

The carnage was spurred by credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s decision to replace five Canadian companies with U.S.-based ones under a decade-old policy to move to an all-American S&P500 Index. Battered Nortel Networks, off 27 or 11.7% at $2.04, will also be shown the door.

Barrick tried to temper the bad news by announcing a doubling of its resource estimate at its Alto Chicama discovery in Peru. The resource now stands at 135 million tonnes grading 1.85 grams gold per tonne, equivalent to 7.3 million contained ounces of gold.

The rest of the country’s gold miners generally put in decent gains. The same couldn’t be said for the base metal miners, which were lower across the board. Noranda dropped $2.78 or 8.2% to $31.12 after announcing that it will close its CCR copper refinery in Montreal for three weeks beginning July 28 because of reduced supply of copper anodes from its strike-stricken Horne copper smelter in Quebec. Production is slated to resume on Aug. 18.

The S&P TSX Venture Exchange composite index finished the day down 9.65 points or 0.83%, and closed at 1,147.75 with a volume of 25.4 million shares.

American Bonanza Gold Mining was the day’s volume leader with 773,000 shares traded. The junior miner lost 2 and closed at 19. The company has $2 million set aside for advancing the Copperstone project in Arizona, which hosts an estimated total resource of 2.1 million tons grading 0.58 oz. gold per ton.

International Barytex Resources found a penny and closed at 31 on 550,000 shares. The company recently reached an agreement Northern Orion Explorations to issue 300,000 shares in its capital at a deemed price of $0.30 per share in full payment of the its indebtedness.

Seahawk Minerals lost half of its value and closed at a penny with 394,000 shares traded. Seahawk is in discussions with its debenture holders in the hope of rescheduling or refinancing $2.3 million in principal and interest.