TORONTO — Strength in the basic materials sector helped Canada's main stock index close higher on Thursday, while U.S. markets lost ground amid a rotation away from large tech stocks.

“It's more of this trend, particularly this week we've seen more of it, you've seen money leaking out of the tech sector a little bit and going into the rest of the indices,” said John Zechner, chairman and lead equity manager at J. Zechner Associates.

He added that since tech stocks are highly represented on the S&P 500, that index is down overall, but most of the losses are coming from mega-cap tech companies, which are all large weights on the index. In contrast, Zechner said other areas of the market are doing better.

“Once in a while you get these rotations, and it doesn't take much of dollars leaking

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