The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that the S&P/TSX Composite Index has kept its head above water for most of this year, but barely. Guest columnist Gordon Pape writes that as of the close on Nov. 17, the year-to-date gain was just over 4 per cent. That is a lot better than last year but well behind the S&P 500, which has gained 17.5 per cent so far in 2023. Mega-tech companies have been the driving force behind the S&P and Nasdaq year-to-date. As of Nov. 17, the S&P 500 Info Tech Index was up almost 50 per cent in 2023. The rest of the S&P was more-or-less flat. Canada has tech companies, and they are performing well. The TSX Capped Information Technology Index has gained 48 per cent this year. That is far and away the best performance among the Toronto subindexes but it does not have much impact on the composite because technology companies have a weighting of only 7.3 per cent. The S&P weighting is 27.5 per cent. Our best-known tech company is Shopify. The stock has almost doubled this year, but that is after an 80-per-cent decline that began in the fall of 2021 and continued through most of 2022. The shares are trading at about half their all-time high, reached in November, 2021.