Canada’s TSX closes down; energy, gold shares help pare losses

Toronto Stock Exchange closes down 23 points or 0.09%

Market fell almost a percentage point in early trade

Energy stocks up 0.87%, mining stocks gain up 0.1%

Barrick Gold shares up 2.5% after Mali government deal

By Promit Mukherjee and Pranav Kashyap

Canada’s main stock index closed marginally lower on Wednesday, after a global equity sell-off was largely cushioned by energy shares, recovery in mining stocks and minutes of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s January meeting.

The S&P/TSX Composite index lost 0.09%, or close to 22.68 points, to end at 25,626.16.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced

tariffs on automotive imports

“in the neighborhood of 25%” and said that more details will be revealed on April 2. Duties will be slapped on pharmaceutical and semiconductor imports, he added.

Asian and European markets closed sharply lower on Wednesday, with the pan-European STOXX 600 index

, its biggest single-day drop this year.

closed higher in a rebound after the Federal Reserve released the

, with the S&P 500 posting its second straight all-time closing high.

Fed policymakers expressed concern about U.S. economic growth due to Trump’s policies, the minutes showed.

“The big picture here is that the markets continue to exhibit a surprising degree of resilience to all the headline risk,” said Elvis Picardo, portfolio manager at Luft Financial, iA Private Wealth.

Investors in this bull market do not want to miss any buying opportunity, he said.

Some analysts said the Fed’s concerns on growth hint at a potential interest rate cut, boosting investor optimism.

In Canada, the financial sector, with a weight of nearly one-third of the composite index, lost 0.27%. Royal Bank of Canada, the biggest company by market capitalization, fell 0.02%.

The sell-off was largely softened by energy stocks , which rose 0.87% as oil prices held near a one-week high of $76 per barrel on worries about supply disruptions in Russia and the U.S.

Mining stocks also helped to contain the slide in the main index, led by higher gold prices and an over 2.5% jump in Barrick Gold shares.

Reuters reported that the

a new agreement with the Mali government to end an almost two-year-old dispute over its mining assets. (Reporting by Promit Mukherjee in Ottawa and Pranav Kashyap in Bangalore; Editing by Sahal Muhammed and Richard Chang)