Top 10 Canadian stocks, ranked by price-based X-Ray score

The ranking reads only what a share price and its trading volume show: how firmly the price is trending, how far it has moved over three, six and twelve months, how calm it has been (volatility and the deepest fall of the past year) and how easily the shares change hands. A fifth lens, income, counts only for companies that pay a dividend. Each score is a percentile rank against every share on the Toronto Stock Exchange, so a trend score of 85 means the price is behaving better than roughly 85% of the shares on that market.

It cannot look inside the company. We hold no company accounts for Canadian-listed businesses, so profits, debt and valuation play no part, and we do not store an industry for them or their membership of the S&P/TSX Composite or the TSX 60. That matters on this market in particular: Canada's large companies cluster in a few industries, banks, energy and mining among them, so shares within the same industry tend to rise and fall together. If several names in the table come from the same industry, the list is partly a bet on that industry's price, and you will need to look at the company names to see it.

Of the 356 lines on the Toronto Stock Exchange that trade at least $1 million a day, only 310 end up ranked here. 28 are Canadian Depositary Receipts: Canadian-dollar receipts on large US companies such as Microsoft or Nvidia, priced to follow the US share with the currency effect hedged away. They are the US company's stock in a different wrapper, and the US market sets their price, so they belong on a US page. Another 10 are companies registered outside Canada (the United States, Bermuda, the United Kingdom and others) that list in Toronto as well, and 7 are split-share corporations, bullion trusts and similar vehicles whose price follows a portfolio or a metal rather than a business.

The registration test uses the country code at the start of each share's ISIN, the international securities identifier, which is "CA" for Canadian companies. Newer listings often have no ISIN stored in our data, so a missing code is accepted and a non-Canadian one is not; a company run from Canada but registered abroad is therefore treated as foreign. Split-share corporations and bullion trusts are removed by name and by a reviewed list, so a vehicle with an unusual name can still slip through; tell us if you find one.

Toronto is Canada's main market, but it is not the only one. Together the TSX Venture Exchange, the Canadian Securities Exchange and the NEO Exchange list well over a thousand mostly small companies, many of them early-stage, and only 30 of their lines trade at least $1 million a day, against 356 in Toronto. A ranking that mixed the two would put thinly traded juniors next to established companies on one scale, so this page covers the Toronto Stock Exchange only.

Many Canadian companies have more than one class of share: a voting class and a subordinate or non-voting class, with tickers such as BBD-B, RCI-B or CTC-A. Counting both would let one company take two places, so we keep one line per company, the more heavily traded, and merged 1 duplicate line on this basis. Real estate investment trusts and income trusts trade as "units" with tickers ending in -UN; they are ranked here like any other operating company, since they own and run property or businesses.

Toronto prices are in Canadian dollars. Each company's daily traded value is converted into US dollars at the latest exchange rate before the $1 million cut-off is applied, so the threshold means the same here as on the UK, German or US lists. The figure counts trading on the Toronto listing only, and many large Canadian companies also trade in New York, so a share that is heavily traded across the border can look less liquid here than it is in practice. All ten of today's leaders trade more than $5 million a day in Toronto.

The leader is Whitecap Resources Inc., and its strongest lens is trend. The top three are Whitecap Resources Inc., Bank of Nova Scotia, Manulife Financial Corp. All three sit near the top of the trading-volume lens, which is where the largest Toronto names score close to 100. All 10 pay a dividend; the income lens is worth only a tenth of the score, so a company that pays nothing is not heavily penalised.

The ten stocks returned a median 74% over the last twelve months, against 18% for all 310 eligible Canadian companies. That gap shows how much of this score is momentum: a ranking built on price behaviour has usually already risen, which is information about the past and not a forecast, and a market where the winners have run this far is one where the same scores can turn quickly.

Use the table to pick companies for a closer look, then read the company's own annual report and latest quarterly report; Canadian public companies file them on SEDAR+, the national filing system, and on their investor pages. A price-only ranking is most useful for removing shares that are hard to trade or stuck in a downtrend, and least useful for judging whether a price is fair. For income, the Canadian dividend list ranks the same companies on a different rule.