Gold bought in August now carries a capital loss worth harvesting in non-registered and corporate accounts, but a repurchase in an RRSP or TFSA can erase the deduction permanently.

Gold dropped 3.5% on a day when Middle East headlines worsened, and the gap between the safe-haven label and the price is a live test of mental accounting and loss aversion.

Crude rose 3.1% and the TSX fell, but the clearest signal was gold dropping 2.9%: a haven priced against a near 5.2% yield stops behaving like one.

TSX Composite closed Friday at 35,800.89, up 94 points, even as the US 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.18 percent, its highest since the financial crisis, and Canadian yields touched a 34-month high before easing.

A 50 percent US tariff on Canadian goods took effect the same month Brent crude spiked above $108 on Strait of Hormuz attacks, and the two shocks are pulling the same index in opposite directions.

Headline CPI held at 3.0 percent in August for a second straight month, but the measures the Bank of Canada actually watches tell a calmer story, and that gap explains a seventh consecutive rate hold.

CPI data the CRA has already published makes the 2027 TFSA contribution limit mathematically certain at $7,500, a number advisors can build into client conversations months before the formal announcement.

University of Michigan sentiment fell to a four-month low in September while the TSX Composite gained 19 percent over the same year, a divergence behavioural finance traces to which information stays most vivid in memory.

WTI fell roughly 5 percent this week and Treasury yields hit fresh multi-decade highs, but neither move explains what happened to the TSX or the loonie.

Five desks, one throughline. A 175 basis point gap between the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada moved the currency, the bond market, the mining sector and client conversations this week, while oil told a stranger story of its own.

USD/CAD closed at 1.4138 Thursday, its weakest level for the loonie since early August, as a hawkish Federal Reserve and a steady Bank of Canada pulled further apart.

Commercial transit through the Strait fell to about one percent of normal this week, yet WTI crude sits more than ten dollars below its September peak. The gap between the disruption and the price is the story.

Government of Canada 10-year yields reached 3.95 percent on Thursday, matching an August high, as markets absorb a widening gap between the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada that has no clear resolution before the two banks next meet.

The rate that governs family income splitting loans has not moved since the third quarter of 2025, regardless of what the Bank of Canada has done with its own rate in the meantime.

Wednesday brought the sharpest single session decline in three months. The pattern behind client anxiety this week has a name, and it is not the index level.

A Hormuz de-escalation report lifted oil and calmed equities this afternoon. It did nothing for the Canadian dollar, because the real story today is in the bond market, not the Persian Gulf.