BLBG: Canadian Dollar Falls Most in Four Weeks With Commodities
The Canadian dollar fell the most in four weeks even as a report showed Canadian factory sales rose to a six-month high in November.
The Canadian currency declined against the majority of its most traded peers along with the Australian dollar and the South African Rand, other so-called commodity currencies. Futures on stocks and crude oil, Canada’s largest export, fluctuated after declining earlier today.
“There’s no obvious story or driver of this, I think it’s just a stop-driven move,” said Shaun Osborne, chief currency strategist at Toronto-Dominion Bank by phone from Toronto. A stop is a pre-established order to buy or sell when a specific price level is reached.
The Canadian dollar, called the loonie for the image of the aquatic bird on the C$1 coin, fell 0.5 percent to 99.03 cents per U.S. dollar at 8:44 a.m. in Toronto, after weakening the most since Dec. 21. One loonie buys $1.0099.
The Australian dollar lost 0.3 percent to $1.0519, while the rand depreciated 1 percent to 8.8904 per U.S. dollar.
Factory sales climbed 1.7 percent to C$49.9 billion ($50.4 billion), Statistics Canada said today in Ottawa. The gain exceeded all 17 forecasts in a Bloomberg economist survey that had a median projection of a 1 percent increase.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ari Altstedter in Toronto at aaltstedter@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dave Liedtka at dliedtka@bloomberg.net
