AI Analysis: International transactions in securities, portfolio transactions in foreign bonds, by currency of issue, monthly

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 36100034 tracks 21+ years of Canadian portfolio investment in foreign bonds across 254 monthly periods (January 2005 – February 2026), revealing a highly active and volatile market where gross purchases and sales routinely reach tens of billions of dollars but largely offset each other, yielding a long-run average net flow of just $1,333 million CAD per month. The data shows a notable upward trend in recent activity, with the 12-month average net flow rising to $1,645 million and a peak single-month inflow of $11,041 million in July 2025, punctuated by a sharp reversal of -$7,521 million during the COVID-19 shock of March 2020. Foreign-currency-denominated bonds dominate the market at roughly 53 times the scale of Canadian-dollar-issued foreign bonds, and outlier analysis flags only 8 of 254 months as statistically anomalous, underscoring that extreme swings — while dramatic — are relatively rare.

Key Findings

• The dataset covers 254 monthly periods from January 2005 to February 2026, comprising 2,286 records with values ranging from -$316,034 million to +$326,076 million CAD — a total range of $642,110 million — reflecting the enormous scale and volatility of Canada's foreign bond transactions.
• Purchases and sales are nearly perfectly negatively correlated (r = -0.998), indicating that high gross trading volumes are the norm but largely cancel out, leaving net flows — averaging only $1,333 million per month — as a small residual of total activity.
• The long-run monthly net flow average of $1,333 million has risen to $1,645 million over the most recent 12 months, suggesting a strengthening trend in Canadian investor appetite for foreign bonds heading into 2026.
• The single largest monthly inflow was $16,561 million CAD (outlier analysis) / $11,041 million (time trend analysis) and the deepest outflow was -$7,521 million in March 2020, directly coinciding with the COVID-19 market shock.
• Foreign-currency-denominated bonds vastly outscale Canadian-dollar-issued foreign bonds: average monthly purchases of $81.75 billion versus only $1.54 billion, meaning Canadian-dollar bonds represent less than 2% of gross foreign bond activity.
• Only 8 out of 254 months (approximately 3%) were flagged as statistical outliers using a Z-score threshold of 2.5, with extreme net flows ranging from -$11,281 million to +$16,561 million CAD against a mean of ~$2,000 million and a standard deviation of ~$4,308 million.
• The overall value distribution is heavily right-skewed, with a mean of $888 million far exceeding the median of $276 million, driven by the large purchase and sale clusters that create a bimodal histogram with net flows concentrated near zero.