By Jeff Sanford

A profit warning from Sun Microsystems and a spate of analyst’s warnings hobbled the tech sector today.

Canadian markets were not immune to the sell pressure. The TSE 300 plunged 150 points to close at 8,101 on heavy volume of 256 million shares.

Although the losses were spread across sectors, they were concentrated among the industrial sub-index, down 4.7%, and the gold sub-index, down 2.6%.

The oil and gas, metals and minerals, transportation, communications and conglomerate sectors were all down more than 1%. Only pipelines advanced on the day.

Overall, the market trend among individual was strongly negative with decliners outpacing advancers 718 to 369.

Among the techs, Nortel Networks lost 7% of its value to close at $20.65. Celestica fell 9% to close at $75.50, 360networks slid 8% to $1.98, and Research In Motion dipped 8% to $49.38.

The banks were split today. While the Bank of Nova Scotia advanced 2.76% to $42.80, Royal was off 0.76% at $48.58 and TD shed1.51% to close at $39.20.

An announcement from Geac computer today that it appointed a new COO and CFO was met with little enthusiasm. It ended the day off 13.19% at $1.98.

Northern Financial fell 9% to close at 10¢. Perhaps it was punishment for going public with concerns about the CDNX/TSE merger.

Northern Financial made it clear over the past week that it was against the merger as it was laid out, arguing that CDNX shareholders who didn’t hold shares in the TSE (as most do) were getting a bad deal.

Perhaps they shouldn’t have been so loud. The CDNX/TSE merger was approved by CDNX shareholders yesterday, and that seems to have left an impression that Northern Financial got stuck with some money on the table.

The CDNX was also down on the day. It dropped 5.6 points to close at 3,317. Advancers outpaced decliners 281 to 209.

The loonie had another bad day. It lost over half a cent to close at US64.70¢.

On Wall Street, profit warnings and negative analyst talk sent the Nasdaq composite index tumbling 91 points to close at 2,084, a drop of 4.2%.

The Dow Jones industrial average was off 5%, dropping 166 points to 10,873. The S&P 500 lost 19 points to close at 1,248, a drop of 1.6%.