Prices for copper on the London Metal Exchange rose to US$7533.75 a metric tonne Wednesday, a bump of 2.2 per cent, to reach a six week high in the wake of Freeport's Grasberg mine disaster on the back of apparent concerns  of constrained supplies.

Stonecap Securities analyst Brad Smith offered his views of the Canadian financial services sector  on Wednesday ahead of the start of the reporting season for the nation's biggest banks later this week, amid an outlook of continued uncertainty. 

Howard Simons of Bianco Research famously illustrated the odds against such an event – postulated as being in the order of 20 trillion to one – as having “a lower probability of occurrence than randomly selecting a [particular] $1 bill out of pile of singles representing the U.S. national debt.”

Gold prices on the Comex continued to slide Friday, with the yellow metal trading down for the seventh consecutive session, the commodity’s most protracted series of losses since early 2009. The most active market, gold for June delivery, dropped as low as $1357.60 per ounce in intraday trading, from an open of $1385.20, shedding almost two per cent.

The World Gold Council says in its most recent report that a global spike in gold jewelry buying over the first three months of the year was insufficient to compensate for sizable net outflows from gold exchange traded funds in the same period.