A weekend tanker strike and a damaged Saudi pipeline pushed WTI toward $103, but stocks, gold and the Canadian dollar all moved the other way, pointing to Wednesday''s Fed decision as the real driver.

The composite closed at 35,906.56 Wednesday, down 0.6% and in its fourth decline in five sessions, even as WTI crude climbed toward $100 on the tanker war.

A blowout US payrolls print reverses a week of rate-cut optimism that had pushed gold toward $4,700 an ounce, and the swing reaches Canadian portfolios directly through TSX-listed precious metals miners.

Materials stocks led a rebound Wednesday even as the Iran conflict widened, and the index remains within striking distance of the record it set three weeks ago.

A safe haven story investors have relied on for months is not holding up against this week's escalation, and the data shows exactly where the mechanism broke down.

A hawkish hold moved the loonie by six hundredths of a cent. Gold, silver and the TSX miners moved on something else entirely: a second wave of US strikes on Iran and Iranian retaliation across the region.

Barber and Odean’s research on attention-driven buying explains why gold’s surge past $4,650 and retreat below $4,370 is landing hardest on investors who bought the headline, not the asset.

Gold fell as the U.S. and Iran exchanged strikes over the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, a break from precedent that says rate expectations, not geopolitics, are now driving cross-asset pricing into the Bank of Canada's Wednesday decision.

Friday's close at 36,553.92 marked a third straight down session from the August 25 record. Monday's session opens with oil up more than 3% on the weekend's Iran-US exchange, a direct reversal of what pulled energy names lower Friday.

WTI jumped over 3% Monday after the first American strike on Iranian territory in a month. Gold barely moved. That gap tells Canadian portfolios exactly what kind of shock this is, and what it is not.

The weekend's first US-Iran military exchange in a month caught portfolios positioned for calm. Kahneman and Tversky mapped exactly why quiet weeks make the next shock feel unprecedented.

A GDP beat erased the recession debate and bank earnings set a record Tuesday. Neither survived contact with Kevin Warsh's first Jackson Hole speech.

Statistics Canada delivered the strongest quarterly growth number in three years this morning. By afternoon the TSX was down anyway, tracking gold and the loonie lower on new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's first Jackson Hole speech, while Wall Street read the same remarks and rallied.

The exact marker Geopolitical named this morning as the line between diplomatic pressure and real supply risk fired Tuesday. WTI's muted reaction says the market is not buying the supply story, and the VIX did not move either.

The TSX Composite closed positive Monday even though decliners outnumbered advancers. Three gold miners masked the gap while Linamar, Magna and BRP absorbed the week's clearest trade war losses.

The trade collapse did not just move headline numbers Monday. It reversed a two week bond rally and a two week currency rally that had nothing to do with each other, while gold kept climbing on a completely separate story.