Loonie

A market nickname, in the same family as cable for sterling against the dollar and aussie for the Australian dollar. It comes from the common loon stamped on the Canadian one dollar coin, which gave the coin its own nickname first and the currency its name afterwards. Dealers use it for the currency and for the currency pair it is most often quoted in, which by convention places the US dollar first, so a rising quote in that pair means a weaker Canadian dollar rather than a stronger one.

What is habitually discussed alongside it is oil and the border. Canada is a large crude exporter and the United States takes the overwhelming majority of what it sells, so the currency is treated as a commodity currency and commentary pairs it with crude benchmarks and with the gap between the Bank of Canada's policy rate and the Federal Reserve's. The mechanism runs through terms of trade and through that rate differential, and both work over months rather than within a session.

Two things trip readers. The relationship with crude is a tendency and not a rule: episodes of falling risk appetite pull flows into the US dollar and can carry the pair higher while crude is rising, and an interest rate differential moving the other way does the same. And the word itself is ambiguous in exactly the way cable is, because it names both a currency and a pair. A sentence reporting that the loonie rose can mean the currency strengthened, which is the pair falling, or that the quote went up, which is the currency weakening, and only the surrounding text settles it.