Gold miners, not trade negotiators, drove Friday's gains, and the currency signal underneath it tells advisors which crisis is actually live heading into the weekend.

The U.S. Treasury's debt buyback briefly eased global yields and lifted gold on Wednesday, but Canada's own 10 year yield climbed to a fresh high Thursday regardless, and gold's pullback on a fresh Iran escalation shows the week's rally was a rates trade, not a war trade.

A Treasury buyback and a tariff truce produced a clean risk-on session across equities, oil and the loonie. Gold rose more than all of them, and that gap is the story.

A genuine Strait of Hormuz escalation and a fresh 19 year high in long yields hit the tape on the same afternoon. Only one of them moved gold.

Statistics Canada's July inflation surprise and the Geopolitical desk's Hormuz toll deadline were written up this morning as two unrelated stories. They are the same mechanism, a few hours apart.

Friday's sector rotation mirrored Thursday's record close in reverse, and oil's refusal to react to stalled Hormuz talks confirms the story has moved from supply to demand.

Wednesday's fourth consecutive record close paired financials with gold miners. Thursday broke the pairing apart, and a cooler U.S. inflation print did not do for Canadian yields what it did for the Fed.

A cooling US CPI print eased yields across North America Wednesday, but the TSX's fourth straight record now runs on gold, not oil, and Canada's own economic data still sits underneath the Fed's good news.

Deal-hope optimism sent the TSX to a financials-led record while Canada's 10-year yield spiked to a 26-month high on the same day, pricing the same story two different ways.

WTI and Brent jumped roughly 4 percent as Washington and Tehran each pointed to the naval blockade as the actual obstacle, a sharper claim than either side has made in weeks. Gold barely moved and the Canadian dollar stayed flat, leaving the loonie without the lift its own yield advantage and oil's rally would normally provide.

USD/CAD broke to its lowest level since June on today's jobs divergence, but the five-year yield that sets mortgage renewal rates gave back most of its spike by midday, leaving two markets pricing two different stories from the same data.

Financials have gained 22% since the war began in February while materials fell 25%. The rotation behind that split, not Wednesday's single session, is what built the TSX's record, and Thursday's oil whipsaw shows the war that caused it hasn't actually ended.

Every major index closed higher Wednesday on Hormuz de-escalation hopes, but gold's largest single-session gain of the week and oil's near-flat close tell a more cautious story than the record headlines do.

The TSX gained more in one Tuesday session than it lost all of Friday, and gold did the heavy lifting again. But the Government of Canada bond curve eased instead of rising, and the loonie could not hold Friday's level, which is the more useful signal for what happens at the Bank of Canada's September 2 decision.

The TSX, the S&P 500, oil and the Canadian dollar all finished higher Friday. Gold, the number both the Behavioural and Tax and Wealth Desks led with this morning, was the exception, and the vessel data the Geopolitical Desk cited as evidence of calm reversed just as fast.

The VIX gave back the entirety of Wednesday's Fed-and-Iran shock in a single session. The market pricing an actual rate decision did not follow it down.