{"id":69769,"date":"2026-02-10T18:29:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T18:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/2026\/02\/10\/why-the-canadian-dollar-is-missing-out-on-the-commodity-currency-party\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T18:29:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T18:29:12","slug":"why-the-canadian-dollar-is-missing-out-on-the-commodity-currency-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/2026\/02\/10\/why-the-canadian-dollar-is-missing-out-on-the-commodity-currency-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Canadian dollar is missing out on the commodity currency party"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><\/div><p> \n<br \/><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Canadian dollar and U.S. dollar both under pressure\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sF7s9LEj_NU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p> The <\/p>\n<p>                        Canadian dollar<\/p>\n<p>                         is surging against the greenback again, but currency watchers say that should not be confused with strength despite traders unravelling their bets against the loonie. <\/p>\n<p> \u201cWhen you look at the Canadian dollar on a trade-weighted basis excluding the greenback, it has done nothing over the past two months and, in fact, has badly lagged against many currencies, including its commodity-exporting brethren in Australia and New Zealand,\u201d <\/p>\n<p>                        David Rosenberg<\/p>\n<p>                        , president of Rosenberg Research &amp; Associates Inc., said. <\/p>\n<p> He said the Canadian dollar should be doing a lot better considering what the commodity markets have been doing, referencing historic prices for <\/p>\n<p>                        gold<\/p>\n<p>                        , silver and copper and, more recently, rising prices for <\/p>\n<p>                        crude oil<\/p>\n<p>                        . <\/p>\n<p> The loonie is down 4.5 per cent this year against the Australian dollar and 3.5 per cent against the New Zealand dollar. <\/p>\n<p> Rosenberg said the two Australasian countries have enough internal demand to sustain higher interest rates and have fostered the development of their resource sectors, and their\u00a0closest trading ties are with Asia, where most of the world\u2019s growth is occurring. <\/p>\n<p> \u201cCanada shares none of these attributes, sad to say,\u201d Rosenberg said. <\/p>\n<p> He also said<\/p>\n<p>                        <strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>                        United States President <\/p>\n<p>                        Donald Trump<\/p>\n<p>                        \u2018s apparent loathing for Canada makes the loonie less attractive to investors. <\/p>\n<p> \u201cIf you\u2019re a global foreign exchange investor and you have a choice between two commodity currencies, Canada or Australia, you don\u2019t have to have a degree in finance to know what the obvious choice is,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<p> Shaun Osborne, chief currency strategist at Bank of Nova Scotia, said other distinctions between Australia and Canada include higher interest rates in the former and an Australian dollar that \u201cis more connected to industrial metals,\u201d while Canada\u2019s currency is more closely tied to energy. <\/p>\n<p> He also said the terms of trade in Australia \u2014 a measure of export prices to import prices \u2014 are stronger than in Canada. <\/p>\n<p> \u201cThere\u2019s a bit more leverage for the Australian dollar relative to metals prices,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<p> Despite the Canadian dollar\u2019s lagging performance against most other major currencies, investors appear to have cut it some slack by shifting from net short bets to net long bets for the first time since August 2023, according to Osborne. <\/p>\n<p> Rather than a bet on the loonie, he attributed<\/p>\n<p>                        <strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>                        this shift to a deteriorating view of the U.S. dollar as investors reappraise their exposure to the greenback. <\/p>\n<p> The U.S. dollar index and the trade-weighted U.S. dollar index \u2014 two metrics of the greenback\u2019s performance \u2014 are down 1.6 per cent and 1.3 per cent, respectively. <\/p>\n<p> Those movements have been mirrored by the loonie, which fell below 72 cents U.S. in mid-January, but has since climbed back up and was testing the 74 cents U.S. level on Tuesday. <\/p>\n<p> The trade-weighted index for the loonie, excluding the U.S. dollar, is down one per cent since the start of the year and down three per cent since the summer. <\/p>\n<p> Osborne called the shift to net long \u201csignificant,\u201d but said investors are not materially more bullish on the loonie. <\/p>\n<p> \u201cThe shift in positioning that we\u2019ve seen is relatively minimal,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d say it\u2019s kind of a low-conviction endorsement of the Canadian dollar.\u201d <\/p>\n<p> Rosenberg said what\u2019s more telling about the shift in investor positioning is that long bets on the Australian dollar, Brazilian real and Mexican peso \u2014 all considered commodity currencies \u2014 far outpace those on the Canadian dollar. <\/p>\n<p> For example, net long contracts on the Australian dollar totalled 26,000, while contracts for Canada were \u201cflat.\u201d Meanwhile, long contracts for the peso and the real were 90,000 and 31,000, respectively, Rosenberg said. <\/p>\n<p> \u201cWhy are we so far behind our commodity competitors?\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<ul class=\"related_links\">\n<li>Canadian dollar climbs as one analyst speculates Trump is &#8216;engineering&#8217; greenback&#8217;s decline<\/li>\n<li>How the upbeat outlook for the Canadian dollar likely just got trashed<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> <em>\u2022 Email: gmvsuhanic@postmedia.com <\/em> <\/p>\n\n<br \/>Why the Canadian dollar is missing out on the commodity currency party<\/a><br \/>\n<br \/>2026-02-10 18:29:12<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Canadian dollar is surging against the greenback again, but currency watchers say that should not be confused with strength despite traders unravelling their bets against the loonie. \u201cWhen you&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital\/financialpost\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/no0210loonie.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/69770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pantheregroup.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}