TORONTO, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Canada's main stock market in Toronto took a deep dive Friday as crude oil prices plunged on oversupply concerns spurred by a pending lift on Iranian sanctions.
The Toronto Stock Exchange's benchmark Standard & Poor's/TSX Composite Index gained 262.57 points, or 2.13 percent, to close at 12,073.46 points. All of the index's eight main sectors ended negative.
International oil prices are near 12-year lows as the market braces for increased Iranian oil exports once international sanctions are lifted, possibly within days. The West Texas Intermediate for February delivery was traded below 30 U.S. dollars a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
TSX index has been washed out of 7 percent in the first two trading weeks of 2016. Friday's losses were widespread as weak oil prices weighed on energy shares as well as banks, miners and industrial stocks.
Energy group led the decliners with a retreat of 3.58 percent. Baytex Energy Corp. lost 12.59 percent to 2.36 Canadian dollars a share. The Calgary-based company is engaged in the acquisition, development and production of crude oil and natural gas in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin and in the Williston Basin in the United States.
TransAlta Corporation lost 13.76 percent to 3.76 Canadian dollars a share after the power generation company slashed its dividend to fund its transition away from coal.
Financial stocks were down 2.85 percent. Heaveyweight movers included Manulife Financial Corporation and the country's largest lender Royal Bank of Canada, down 4.14 percent and 3.62 percent, respectively.
The materials group, which includes precious and base metal miners and fertilizer companies, lost 1.91 percent. It was helped by gains for gold miners, as bullion climbed over 1 percent. Barrick Gold Corp. rose 5.41 percent to 11.49 Canadian dollars a share, and Detour Gold Corp jumped 6.00 percent to 16.25 dollars a share after announcing results late Thursday.
On the economic front, sales of existing homes in Canada fell in December from November, as weakness in Alberta and parts of Ontario offset gains in other markets, a report from the Canadian Real Estate Association showed Friday.
The industry group for Canadian real estate agents said sales activity was down 0.6 percent last month from November. Actual sales for December, not seasonally adjusted, rose 10 percent from December 2014.
But the average price of a Canadian home increased by 12 percent in the year up to December and is now worth 454,342 Canadian dollars or 318,039 U.S. dollars, with price growth across much of British Columbia and Ontario offsetting declines in activity among oil producing regions. House prices in Vancouver went up 17.8 percent and Toronto up 9.8 percent.
The falling price of crude, from more than 100 U.S. dollars a barrel in the summer of 2014, has also been a major reason for the fall of the Canadian loonie.
"Lower oil prices are still a net negative for the Canadian economy and for the Canadian dollar," BMO chief economist Douglas Porter said in a Friday commentary. "The currency is likely to remain under downward pressure until oil prices bottom out, which we don't see happening until (the second quarter)."
"Given the stance that the Bank of Canada is almost singular focused on inflation I doubt there will be any action on behalf of the Bank to stabilize the dollar, I am a firm believer that free markets will dictate the value of the loonie but when I see periods of rapid volatility I also believe that it is the responsibility of the government to restore calm to the markets," said Michael J. Smith, a Toronto currency expert at AFEX, a global non-bank provider of foreign currency services.
The Canadian dollar was traded lower at 0.6882 U.S. dollar, compared with Thursday's closing rate of 0.6963 U.S. dollar.
