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.

A blowout jobs report pushed Canadian equities to a fresh high. A widening Iran conflict pushed oil and gold to their own. Friday's US retail sales miss cracked one of those stories without touching the other.

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.

Canada's Q2 GDP and jobs beat argue for BoC firmness. The same morning's US payrolls miss cut September Fed hike odds by half. Same week, opposite direction.

Friday's gold and oil decoupling was real. Assuming it holds without the Hormuz deal actually closing is the availability heuristic at work.

A blowout Canadian jobs report and a shock US payrolls miss sent the TSX and S&P 500 to record highs this week, pushed gold to a two-month high, and knocked Brent crude down more than 7%, even as the Strait of Hormuz shipping deal stayed stalled in Iran's parliament.

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.