TSX down triple digits

Valeant Pharmaceuticals stock plunged 19.2% to $154.21 on Wednesday after short-seller research firm Citron Research compared the Canadian pharmaceutical company to the collapsed energy giant Enron and accused it of creating a network of phantom pharmacies to fool auditors.

The drug company denied the allegations.

Valeant shares have fallen from a peak of $347.84 in August, with American political figures including Hillary Clinton turning their focus in the last month to price increases in the pharmaceutical industry.

Kash Pashootan, portfolio manager at First Avenue Advisory in Ottawa, a Raymond James company, said investors can do all the research in the world but they can never really predict a company’s fortunes.

“What you’re seeing is another reminder of why diversification is so important in any investing,” he said.

In New York, the Dow Jones average of 30 stocks closed down 48.50 points at 17,168.61, while the broader S&P 500 index fell 11.83 points to 2,018.94 and the Nasdaq index dropped 40.85 points to 4,840.12.

Pashootan said that ever since the American economy began to recover in 2010, North American equity markets have shown strong results.

Now, he said, the market is changing as investors become more aware that those returns are unlikely to last.

“After five years of phenomenal gains in the markets, especially the U.S. markets, it’s unrealistic to expect that for the next five years growth will come at the same magnitude,” he said.

On the commodity markets, the December gold contract ended trading down $10.40 to US$1,167.10 an ounce, the December crude contract fell US$1.09 to US$45.20 a barrel and the November natural gas contract fell 7.2 cents to US$2.404 per thousand cubic feet.

Pashootan said the oil market is still suffering from worldwide oversupply and that he foresees a rough time for oil company stocks as they continue to adjust to the lower oil price.

Many oil companies have been protected by the long-term hedges they invest in as insurance against an oil price decline and many of those hedges are beginning to expire, he said.

“Then they will really feel the impact of selling oil into a market at half the price of what they were used to selling it at,” Pashootan said.

The loonie fell by 0.91 of a cent to 76.24 cents US.

The Bank of Canada announced on Wednesday that it would keep its key overnight interest rate at 0.5%.

The bank said in its economic forecast that it will take several years for the Canadian economy to adjust to the impact of persistently low commodity prices.