Plus, Lululemon’s got coal in its stockings February 19, 2024 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 7 min read 🧘 Yoga pants 🦘 Leap years 💔 Tech breakups After a nine-month honeymoon phase, the Magnificent Seven appear to be drifting apart. We’ll explain how and why (but not who gets to be Ryan Gosling) in the Big Important Story, below. | New Line Cinema THE WEEK IN MARKETS The Burden of Hope This week we took a break from the 2024 rally (markets were basically flat) because of what a parenting expert might call double dip feelings. On one hand, corporate earnings continued to come in strong (Coke, Cisco, Manulife, et al.), which means: Yay economy! On the other, U.S. inflation came in hotter than expected, putting a damper on the hope that interest rate cuts are juuuuuust about to happen. Which means: anxiety. But to channel our inner child psychologist: conflicting emotions are normal, and they can both be legit. Guess we’ll just have to see which vibe (😍 or 😬) starts to pull ahead as more data comes in. THE WEEK IN ONE NUMBER $1.07 trillion U.S. commercial real estate debt that’s coming due by the end of next year. Office vacancies are at record highs in the U.S. and Canada, and losses from the sector could dent the earnings of the Big Six banks. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Is Lululemon a liar-liar yoga pants on fire? Yes, according to Vancouver non-profit Stand.earth, which filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau accusing the athleisure brand of “greenwashing” after it ran ads in 2020 touting its plans to reduce carbon emissions. These ads were misleading, the complaint alleges, because Lulu’s emissions actually grew by 129% from 2018 to 2022, mostly due to fossil fuels used in its supply chain. Lulu’s stock hit record highs in December, but how the downward dog-set responds to the allegations (or if they’re too smug to care) remains to be seen. Don’t let your leap year go to waste. One extra day of the worst month of the year does have a silver lining: an extra day to max out your RRSP contributions for 2023. Canadians have until February 29 to contribute up to 18% of their 2023 income, with a cap of $30,780. INTERESTING Pension funds are filling the lending void. One of the biggest investment trends of late has been the expansion of private credit. That’s when non-banks make loans like banks normally do when they’re not spooked by high interest rates and too cautious to make the loans themselves. Now Canada’s biggest pension funds are looking for a larger piece of the US$1.7-trillion private-credit market. Last week, Alberta-based pension giant AIMCo announced that it’s opened a New York office to expand its private-lending operations. But regulators are keeping a close eye on things. They tend to worry when pension funds (which manage real people’s nest eggs) get involved with alternative assets, which are riskier and aren’t as tightly regulated. Shopify’s revenue makes a leap, but its stock takes a dive. Last week, Shopify announced that its Q4 revenue was 24% higher than last year: US$2.1 billion. Which is a fortune! So of course, its shares fell by 13%. Why? Investors were expecting (that’s the key word here) the company to continue its strategy of combining revenue growth with cost-cutting. But when Shopify’s CEO said the company wanted to spend more on marketing to grow faster, the market bared its teeth. —Sarah Rieger FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 👔 Corporations are trying to rebrand layoffs as “involuntary career events,” “rightsizing,” and “corporate outplacing.” Only secure job is “euphemism architect.” Source 🚘 Typo in Lyft earnings report causes brief stock surge. Company sorry, wishes it had added two extra zeros. Source 😍 There’s a new dating app, Score, for people with good credit, in case you’re looking for another way to get rejected. Source 🥽 Mark Zuckerberg takes break from making teens feel bad to mock people who bought Vision Pros instead of Meta goggles. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 📱 Felt young, might delete later: Joe Biden joins TikTok. Source 🐱 Man suffers “car-crash-level injuries” after tripping over his cat. “Next time, he dies,” says cat. Source 🧸 Squishmallows and Build-A-Bear suing each other over lookalike plushies. Trial starts as soon as Lola the Unicorn passes the bar. Source 🪼 Female stingray with no mate in her aquarium is pregnant. Three wise man o’ wars are swimming in from the east. Source WHO CARES WHAT’S UP THIS WEEK New inflation numbers (Tuesday)! If they keep falling, investors can keep hoping for rate cuts. Nvidia reports earnings (Wednesday). Tune in to see if the chipmaker, which just became America’s third-most-valuable company, keeps up its winning streak; stay for CEO Jensen Huang’s signature fashion look. THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY MARKETS The Magnificent Seven Is Probably Breaking Up. Investors Should Learn From It If you had money invested in 2023, chances are good that you did pretty well. And chances are also good that your doing well had something to do with the so-called Magnificent Seven — a group of giant U.S. companies whose stocks shot up in tandem. The M7 stocks, as we’ll call them, were responsible for more than 60% of the S&P 500’s growth in 2023, grew by 107% on average, and got mentioned about a billion times on CNBC. But now it’s looking like some of the stocks in the group might be heading in different directions. Let’s take a look at what’s happening and what it teaches us about the stock market. Where did the Magnificent Seven come from, anyway? The term “Magnificent Seven” was coined in May 2023 by Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett to describe seven high-growth tech and tech-adjacent companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla — that were benefitting from the hype around generative AI. As these companies’ stocks kept rising, the Magnificent Seven nickname caught on. So what’s the problem? Wall Street loves giving nicknames to groups of stocks that don’t have much in common except that they’re hot. In the ’60s and ’70s, there was the Nifty Fifty, a collection of companies that were as diverse as Coca-Cola, Xerox, and Pfizer. More recently, we got FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), which became shorthand for “big tech” — never mind that Amazon is, at its core, a retail company and Netflix is a subscription entertainment service. The fact that all these companies were doing well at the same time didn’t necessarily speak to anything their businesses had in common. Something similar happened with the Magnificent Seven. While they have all been successful, they’re not equally positioned to profit from AI, and they make money in different ways: Nvidia designs computer chips; Meta and Google generate most of their revenue from advertising; Apple sells phones and now goggles; Tesla makes electric cars. And now, after a booming 2023, these companies are facing headwinds or enjoying tailwinds particular to their specific business, and this has pushed their stocks in different directions. Which directions, exactly? Nvidia and Meta (which are up 51% and 37% YTD, respectively) are benefitting from optimism around AI (and, in Meta’s case, a hot ad market). On the other hand, Apple (-2% YTD) is suffering from a China slowdown, and Tesla (-20% YTD) is getting undercut by BYD. The others are somewhere in the middle. So what’s the takeaway here? Don’t take hype too seriously, whether it’s for dogecoin, Enron’s innovations in the derivatives market, or a group of tech-related stocks that are all doing well at the same time. Getting swept up in such hype can be costly: stock funds that gain 100% or more in a single year have tended to lose money in the years that follow. Successful stock pickers worry less about nicknames and clusters of hot stocks than the fundamentals of individual companies’ businesses. Still, they can get blindsided by things like a government banning the use of a company’s products, which happened to Apple. Such unforeseen developments are partly why most pro stock pickers fail to beat the broader market. Index funds, on the other hand, spread money around widely so that investors benefit from growth wherever it happens to pop up, which helps explain why historically diversified, low-cost index funds have done so well. That’s a roundabout way of saying: if you want to take a more active hand in managing your own money, filling a portfolio exclusively with the names that show up most in the news is probably not the best way to go about it. —Ben Mathis-Lilley OTHER VERY GOOD READS 💸 How I Got Scammed Out of $50,000 “I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.” | The Cut 🤖 The Text File That Runs the Internet And how AI is destroying the social contract of the web. | The Verge 🍼 The Rise of the One and Done Family Canada’s population is getting greyer and its labour market is shrinking. | Maclean's 🤑 Five Tax Enigmas That Confuse Basically Everyone The things most likely to trip you up when it comes time to file. | Wealthsimple THE WISDOM OF TWITTER X If we hit movie-theatre-snack-bar levels, then we’re really in trouble. THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Ben Mathis-Lilley (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Nikki Holmes (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Tyler Hamilton (lifecycle manager), Matthew Karasz (markets editor) Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), Kat Angus (managing editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Replies to this email address are not monitored. Have questions? Visit our Help Centre or submit a request to our Client Support team. VIEW IN BROWSER PRIVACY POLICY UNSUBSCRIBE Pro plan is not available in French or for residents of Québec.One-on-one consultations with Pro plan are subject to availability and are guaranteed only if booked on or before March 31, 2024. TLDR is offered by Wealthsimple Media Inc. and is for informational purposes only. Any views expressed are those of the individual author and/or of Wealthsimple Media Inc., not of Wealthsimple Financial Corp or any of its other subsidiaries or affiliates. The content in TLDR is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell assets or securities, nor any other kind of professional advice. TLDR is not a research report and should not serve as the basis for making investment decisions. Wealthsimple Media Inc. does not endorse any third-party views referenced in this content. When you invest, your money is at risk and it is possible that you may lose some or all of your investment. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Historical returns, hypothetical returns, expected returns and images included in this content are for illustrative purposes only. Always research before investing. © 2024 Wealthsimple Media Inc.