By Jeff Sanford

(April 16 – 18:00 ET) – It was a quiet Eater Monday on the Toronto Stock Exchange today as only some 103 million shares were traded. Nevertheless, stocks drifted lower during the session. The TSE 300 lost 44.76 points to close at 7,790.46.

Many traders stayed home for the holiday. Those who come into work were selling techs, as the industrial products sub-index was off 3.9%.

That loss was in contrast to the rest of the market, which trended up. Industrials and pipelines were the only two sectors down on the day. Leading on the upside was the gold sub-index with a 2.7% advance.

Nortel Networks was the most active issue today, with 7 million shares changing hands. It fell 7.39% to $23.82. Celestica was off 6.89% to close at $50, and RIM slid 4.86% to close at $41.86.

The management of Hurricane Hydrocarbons Ltd. announced that a bid by Central Asian Industrial Holdings to buy up a controlling share of Hurricane was unacceptably low. Hurricane was bid up 14.96% to close at $10.45.

News of a board reorganization at Travelbyus.com saw that stock jump 51.72% to close today at 22¢.

None of the financial stocks were movers today, except for C.I. which gained 5.16% to close at $13.25.

The CDNX inched up 0.4% today at 2,987.02, on volume on 34 million shares. Even though the index was up, the market trended down in terms of individual issues, with decliners outpacing advancers 229 to 216.

In New York, volume was also light and the major indexes closed mixed. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 31.62 points to 10,158.56. The Nasdaq composite index slipped 51.86 points to 1,909.57. The S&P 500 was off 3.82 points at 1,179.68.