What is actually listed in Canada

TMX publishes a spreadsheet of every listed issuer once a month. The August 14 edition carries market values as of July 31. Here is what is in it.

Most listings are not companies

There are 3,765 listed issuers. 1,756 of them are funds: 1,404 exchange-traded products worth C$929 billion, 133 Canadian depositary receipts of US stocks worth C$21 billion, 60 closed-end funds, and 158 capital pool companies on the Venture exchange, which are shells looking for a business. Take those out and 2,009 operating companies remain.

The TSX: 666 companies, C$6.0 trillion

The ten largest are worth 32 percent of the exchange. The fifty largest are 73 percent. The top ten, in billions of Canadian dollars: Royal Bank 407, TD 278, Shopify 199, BMO 176, Enbridge 173, CIBC 152, Brookfield 150, Scotiabank 150, Canadian Natural 138, Suncor 111.

By TMX's own sector labels:

• Financial services: 63 companies, C$2.06 trillion. A third of the exchange. The six largest financials are five banks and Brookfield.
• Mining: 182 companies, C$1.01 trillion. Agnico Eagle 103, Barrick 85, Wheaton 69, Franco-Nevada 58, Cameco 53.
• Industrial products and services: 102 companies, C$665 billion. This is where the railways and the industrial conglomerates sit.
• Oil and gas: 51 companies, C$589 billion.
• Utilities and pipelines: 17 companies, C$505 billion. Seventeen names, half a trillion dollars.
• Technology: 54 companies, C$423 billion, and Shopify is 47 percent of it. Constellation Software is 64 billion and Celestica 53.
• Consumer products and services: 57 companies, C$420 billion.
• Communications and media: 19 companies, C$159 billion.
• Real estate: 54 companies, C$102 billion.
• Clean technology and renewables: 28 companies, C$51 billion.
• Life sciences: 39 companies, C$33 billion. Pharma and biotech are one half of one percent of the exchange.

The median TSX company is worth C$828 million. 108 of the 666 are worth less than C$100 million.

The Venture exchange: 1,343 companies, C$126 billion

The TSXV is a different country. 892 of its 1,343 companies, two-thirds, are miners, and they account for C$79 billion of the C$126 billion total. Technology is next with 132 companies and C$20 billion. The median Venture company is worth C$15 million, and 546 of them are worth less than C$10 million.

If you have ever wondered why "Canadian insider buying" so often means a director of a company you have never heard of buying $40,000 of stock at 30 cents, this is why. Most Canadian public companies are very small, and most of those dig.

What that means for reading the data

A US sector heatmap and a Canadian one are not the same picture. In the US, technology is the biggest bucket by value. On the TSX, financials are a third and the miners and the pipelines together are another quarter. A day when gold moves is a day the TSX moves, and a day when the banks report is most of the index reporting.

It also means Canadian insider signals concentrate. Of the roughly 2,000 companies, a few hundred trade enough for an insider buy to be meaningful. The Insider Tracker flags clusters, three or more insiders buying within a week, for this reason.

[ADAM: your read]

The full list feeds the Canadian side of the heatmap, where the TSX's eleven sectors are drawn to scale. Sector labels are TMX's, mapped to the same eleven buckets used for US names so the two maps can be read side by side.

Opinion and personal record, not investment advice.