AI Analysis: International transactions in securities, portfolio transactions in Canadian and foreign securities, by geographic area, monthly

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 36100030 tracks 38 years of Canada's international portfolio securities transactions (January 1988 – February 2026), encompassing 92,652 records across 10 instrument types and 7 geographic regions valued in millions of Canadian dollars. Canadian securities dominate cumulative net flows at approximately 2,537,595 million CAD, while extreme volatility — values swinging nearly ±$900 billion CAD — reflects the outsized impact of major market events, most notably the COVID-19 shock of March–April 2020. The dataset's 189 unique time series and near-perfect inverse correlation between Purchases and Sales (-0.992) underscore the tightly coupled, high-volume nature of cross-border securities activity.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 458 monthly periods from January 1988 to February 2026, containing 92,652 records with values ranging from -900,875 to +915,949 million CAD and a standard deviation of 53,873 million CAD, confirming extreme long-run volatility.
• Canadian securities recorded the largest cumulative net flow of approximately 2,537,595 million CAD, making them the single dominant instrument category across all 38 years of data.
• Purchases and Sales are nearly perfectly inversely correlated at -0.992, indicating that gross transaction activity rises and falls in tandem while net flows capture the directional difference between the two.
• March 2020 produced the largest single-month net outflow at -212,899 million CAD, immediately followed by April 2020's inflow of +314,843 million CAD — the most dramatic back-to-back anomaly in the dataset, driven by the COVID-19 market crash and recovery.
• January 2026 recorded the largest single-month net inflow at 332,880 million CAD, surpassing even the post-COVID recovery spike and standing as the most extreme positive outlier in the entire series.
• Outlier detection using a 3×IQR method flagged 3,318 records (10.7% of 30,884 net flow observations), with a normal transaction range of approximately -3,690 million to +4,248 million CAD — meaning the largest outliers are 50–80 times beyond typical bounds.
• The distribution of transaction values is heavily right-skewed, with a mean of 464 million CAD versus a median of just 12 million CAD, indicating that a small number of very large transactions drive the aggregate totals across the dataset.