Rallying gold and oil prices give TSX a triple digit boost, loonie strengthens + MORE Feb 14th

The Canadian real estate market got off to a good start this year with house prices rising in January, as Toronto saw its first gain in six months, according to a bank measurement.

Sun Life reported earnings per share of $1.05, up from $0.91 the previous year

Andy Yan is a 42-year-old East Vancouverite who came up out of the proud working class ranks of Van Tech high school, toiling on weekends in the kill tank at the old Hallmark Poultry Factory on Clark Drive. He set out on a career in urban regeneration and applied demographics that took him to projects in New Orleans, New York City and San Francisco.
Nowadays he’s the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, and while he’s too modest to boast about it, along the way he’s picked up a couple of exceedingly rare civic distinctions.
The first is the enduring enmity of all the politicians, real estate speculators, white-collar currency pirates and money launderers who have turned Vancouver into a global swindler’s paradise for real estate racketeering, a city that is now also one of the world’s most hopelessly pathetic urban landscapes of housing affordability. The second thing Yan has earned is an unfettered and unimpeachable right to say “I told you so.”
Three years ago, Yan was anxious to get a handle on the role foreign capital was playing in Vancouver’s weirdly convulsing real estate market…

Ride-hailing giant Uber’s full-year net loss widened to $4.5 billion in 2017 as the company endured a tumultuous year that included multiple scandals, a lawsuit alleging the theft of trade secrets and the replacement of its CEO.
The results also showed that Uber cut its fourth-quarter net loss by 25 per cent from the third quarter as new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi moves to make the company profitable ahead of a planned initial public stock offering sometime next year.
The full-year loss grew from $2.8 billion in 2016, a year with results skewed by a gain from the sale of Uber’s unprofitable business in China. Uber also said its U.S. ride-hailing market share fell from 82 per cent at the start of last year to 70 per cent in the fourth quarter. Uber said the share has now stabilized.
Gross revenue for the year rose 85 per cent over 2016, to $37 billion.
For the fourth quarter, Uber’s net loss was $1.1 billion, down from $1.46 billion it lost in the third quarter. Bookings from fares rose 14 per cent to just over $11 billion for the quarter…

TORONTO _ Surging gold and oil prices helped give Canada’s main stock index a triple-digit boost, as the loonie strengthened against a weakening greenback.
The S&P/TSX composite index advanced 111.80 points to 15,328.27, led by strong gains in the gold, base metals, materials and energy sectors.
The March crude contract climbed US$1.41 to US$60.60 per barrel and the April gold contract soared US$27.60 to US$1,358.00 an ounce.
South the border, American stocks capped off their fourth day of gains amid a U.S. government report that consumer prices climbed in January at a rate faster than economists expected. But there were few signs of the worries about inflation that sent stocks falling in the last few weeks.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 253.04 points to 24,893.49. The S&P 500 index added 35.69 points to 2,698.63 and the Nasdaq composite index was up 130.11 points to 7,143.62.
The Canadian dollar closed at an average trading value of 79.61 cents US, up 0…