Friday closed with a story that felt finished. Canada added 75,100 jobs in July against a forecast of 15,000, the unemployment rate fell to a two-year low of 6.4 percent, and the TSX Composite rallied to a record 36,381.23. The same morning, the United States reported an unexpected loss of jobs, and gold posted its largest weekly gain of 2026, up 7.2 percent to US$4,399.70. Brent crude closed the week down 7.3 percent at US$83.55 as traders bid up hopes for an imminent Strait of Hormuz shipping agreement.
By Monday morning, both halves of that story had already started to reverse. Iran's foreign minister said over the weekend that Tehran would not reopen the strait without sanctions relief and war reparations from Washington, ruling out direct talks for now. Brent climbed back above US$84.70 in early trading, up more than 1 percent, while gold eased slightly from Friday's close. The correlation that seemed to break on Friday was already reasserting itself less than 72 hours later.
The Availability Heuristic and the Illusion of a New Pattern
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described the availability heuristic in 1973 as the tendency to judge the likelihood of an outcome by how easily examples of it come to mind, rather than by its actual base rate. A single vivid, recent data point, Friday's record TSX close and gold's sharpest weekly gain of the year, becomes disproportionately weighted in an investor's model of what happens next.
The mechanism is specific to this situation. Friday's decoupling of gold and oil was real and well sourced. The error is not in observing it. The error is in the unconscious leap from one salient data point to an assumption of a durable new regime, before the underlying driver of that data point, the exact terms of a Hormuz reopening, has actually been settled.
What Monday's Tape Already Contradicts
Gold and Brent crude, indexed to their July 10 levels, trace the divergence building through Friday's close. Two events mark the turning points: Trump's weekend comment that a Hormuz deal was imminent on August 3, which triggered oil's steepest single day drop of the period, and Iran's strikes near Qeshm Island on August 6, which began oil's recovery before the jobs data even landed.
Values are indexed to 100 at the July 10 close. The August 7 divergence reflects a shock US payrolls miss and a blowout Canadian jobs report on the same morning.
The Iran-Oman framework the market rallied around last week was never signed. Iran's foreign minister described the two sides as close on Sunday, then immediately attached preconditions that Washington has not agreed to. That distinction, close to a deal versus having a deal, is the part of the story that a chart of Friday's closing prices cannot show.
The Canadian Portfolio Angle
Gold miners led Friday's TSX rally, with Agnico Eagle, Barrick and Wheaton Precious Metals all posting gains between 5 and 14 percent. Energy names lagged on the same day as oil fell. Monday's early reversal flips that relationship: TSX energy names are positioned to open firmer as Brent recovers, while gold miners face a session working against Friday's momentum.
The prescribed rate loan environment is unaffected by any of this. The Canada Revenue Agency held the prescribed rate at 3 percent for a fifth consecutive quarter through September 30, a detail worth separating from the noise of daily commodity swings when a client asks whether now is still a reasonable time to set up an income splitting loan.
The Advisor's Position This Week
A client who watched Friday's close and wants to add to gold miners or trim energy exposure based on that single session is acting on the availability heuristic, not on a change in the underlying Hormuz negotiation. The research on this pattern, and on the costs of performance chasing generally, is unambiguous: reacting to the most recent data point rather than the full distribution of outcomes is a reliable way to buy near a local top and sell near a local bottom.