Plus: an Olympics quiz! Match the athletes to their sponsor! February 9, 2026 Sign Up | View online In This Issue 8 min read ❓ Mystery CEOs 👖 Wall Street waistlines 🧫 Biotech bets The good news? Global tourism is surging. The bad news? Paris isn’t the only European city being flooded with aggravating Emilys. | Netflix The Week in Markets SaaSapocalypse now? The biggest story in the markets last week, and perhaps so far this year, was the so-called “SaaSpocalypse.” That’s “SaaS” as in “software as a service” — finance-speak for software companies like Adobe, Salesforce, and Docusign. Those three companies got pummeled in a sector-wide sell-off triggered by Anthropic’s latest Claude AI plug-ins and are now trading nearly 50% below their peaks. It could be worse: Figma is down 80% from its much-hyped IPO last summer. That’s not quite an extinction-level event, but, boy, it hurts. The prevailing explanation is that investors feared that software companies are (wait for it) SaaSceptible to losing lots of business to Anthropic’s potent new tools. But don’t sleep on this more nuanced take (pod version here) from Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway about modern market mechanics and how much narrative momentum — think silver, crypto, the wild Liberation Day swings — exacerbates stretches like these. Maybe software stocks are just a temporary victim? Feb. 2 – Feb 6. TSX: +0.9% (+1.8% YTD) S&P 500: -0.01% (+1% YTD) 📈 Who’s Up: Walmart (finally) figured out how to leverage its giant scale to expand its same-day delivery options and loosen Amazon’s e-commerce stranglehold. For that, its shares shot up 9.5%, vaulting it into the US$1-trillion club. 📉 Who’s Down: Thomson Reuters got hammered extra hard by the SaaSpocalypse thanks to a new Claude tool that automates myriad legal tasks. Shares cratered by -20.5%. Pop Quiz What Happened Last Week Important Everything we know about Brookfield Asset Management’s new CEO can fit into 100 words. His name is Connor Teskey, and he’s 38, making him one of the youngest-ever US$1-trillion asset managers. But he’s about as anonymous as the famously low-key longtime leader he’s replacing, Bruce Flatt. Here’s what little we do know: Teskey hails from Vancouver, studied at Western University, and climbed Brookfield’s ranks to CEO of renewables in 2020. He worked so tirelessly with Mark Carney on green-finance policy that Carney described him (or maybe teased him?) as “virtually always accessible.” Maybe he can ask Teskey what he does for fun. Y Combinator caves to TLDR pressure. We did it. Last week, we published an item about a decision by Y Combinator, the incubator behind Airbnb, Stripe, etc., to no longer invest in startups incorporated in Canada. Was its reversal days later all thanks to us? We can’t say for sure, but, yes, it absolutely was. Interesting Good news: tourism is back! Bad news: tourists are back. Last year, international tourism finally topped its 2019 pre-pandemic high with 1.52 billion tourists vacationing abroad, per the UN. But this Bloomberg piece was a colourful reminder of the downsides for locals. Portugal’s 120-year-old Livraria Lello — often called the world’s most beautiful bookstore — draws more than a million visitors a year, but fewer than 10% bought a book until it started charging a small entrance fee (deductible against a purchase). The city of Rome, meanwhile, is now charging €2 if you want to get close to the Trevi Fountain for a good photo. (Crappy ones are still free.) Two ugly splits for Two Sigma’s co-founder. Easily the most entertaining story we read last week concerned the sordid saga of John Overdeck, the famously private quant-fund multibillionaire, who’s embroiled in not one but two of Wall Street’s most public breakups in years — one involving his wife, the other involving his Two Sigma co-founder-turned-nemesis David Siegel. Secret notebooks! Trust-fund schemes! Foolish labelling of secret notebooks! Read it all here. Wall Street fat cats are slimming down, thanks to GLP-1s. Business Insider illustrated this fact by making a clever chart using data from an esteemed Manhattan tailor. We’ve got more on the drugs below. From Our Sponsor The FOMO Index by Stacey Woods Important 😵 Coroner’s office says Ontario has a “troubling” number of unclaimed bodies, as if there’s a number that would be “untroubling.” Source 🏰 Disney promotes its head of resorts and theme parks to CEO. Guardians of the Breakfast Bar and Avatar: Way of Shuttle Bus already in the works. Source 💰 Canadians are sitting on $2B in uncashed federal cheques. Claim your cash, and while you’re at it, how ’bout a dead body or two? Source 🥃 Toronto restaurants will serve booze starting at 6 a.m. during the Olympics. Anyone who can drink that early deserves a medal. Source Crash & Burn To the Moon ❄️ Preeminent American and Canadian groundhogs disagree on the continuance of winter. And the American keeps calling Canada “the 51st burrow.” Source 💋 Coldplay kiss-cam woman is giving a $1,200 lecture called “Taking Back the Narrative.” Afterward, stop by the lecture called “Taking Back Your $1,200.” Source 🌹 McDonald’s is offering free caviar to pair with McNuggets for Valentine’s Day. If “McDonald’s” and “free caviar” didn’t hook you, maybe “McNuggets” will. Source 🐕‍🦺 A New Jersey community is using DNA to track down people who don’t clean up after their dogs. And then whacking them. Source Who Cares? The Big Important Story GLP-1s Conquered the World. These Medical Moonshots Could Win Next One of our pet theories here at TLDR is that, while computer tech — PCs, smartphones — has made life easier in a trillion different ways, the biggest life-improving breakthroughs have come in the field of medicine. After all, it’s not computers that explain the sharp decline in infant mortality or the dramatic increase in life expectancy over the past 200 years; it’s better medical care and diet. One of the latest major breakthroughs, of course, is GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, which have all sorts of health benefits and have been a boon for the companies that developed them. There are so many other new treatments that could, fingers crossed, be no less consequential; we compiled a list of four standouts. 1. A cancer-hunting immune cell — made in a lab The startup incubator Y Combinator is currently funding more than 100 cancer startups. One of the most ambitious is Montreal-based Modulari-T, which is developing a new form of CAR-T immunotherapies for blood cancers. How these treatments currently work is that doctors remove T-cells (a type of white-blood cell) from a patient’s body, modify them in a lab, and then return these new super cells to the bloodstream, where they hunt down and gobble up, Pac-Man-style, the cancer cells. The therapy is effective, but it’s a long, costly ordeal. Modulari-T is developing synthetic T-cells that would do away with the complex lab work and blood back-and-forth and increase the availability of treatment. 2. A pain pill could put opioid addiction in the rearview mirror One of the great tragedies of our time is that the most effective painkillers are addictive opioids. Perhaps that won’t always be the case. Last year, the U.S. FDA approved, for the first time in decades, a new non-opioid for treating acute severe pain. It’s called — and they probably could’ve workshopped this name more — Journavx. Rather than bliss out your mind as opioids do, Journavx stops pain signals in the nerves so your brain doesn’t know that your foot, or whatever, is hurt. Something like 10% of long-term opioid users initially use the drugs post-surgery, so preventing folks from taking opioids in the first place is bound to save lives. Health Canada has yet to OK the drug, but it tends to be slower than the FDA. 3. Bioprinted organs could mean no more life-or-death waitlists Organ-transplant waitlists are long and fraught with ethical and logistical challenges. A workaround may come from bioprinting, which uses 3D-printing techniques to produce living tissue and blood vessels — and perhaps whole organs one day. At Toronto’s University Health Network, researchers have already grown 3D-printed retinas to study vision loss, while teams at the University of Saskatchewan have bioprinted lung tissue. On the startup side, Victoria-based startup Axolotl is producing so-called bioinks that are used to print tissue. 4. A novel way to avoid knee-replacement surgeries Knee replacement is one of the most common surgeries in Canada. The trouble is that the demand has strained the medical system. One potential fix: prevent knee cartilage from degrading in the first place. Stanford Medicine is developing an injectable protein that in tests regrew cartilage in the knees of old mice, and several startups — Theradaptive, Hy2Care — are moving ahead with human trials. The global knee-replacement market is valued at around US$10 billion, so the stakes are high to get the science right. —Claire Porter Robbins The Long Read 🚔 The Violent Life of a Tow Truck Driver Turns out, towing in Canada’s biggest city is a surprisingly lucrative, and at times dirty, business. Drivers get paid only if they arrive first on the scene, but if you know a guy who runs a body shop or taxi service, it’s quite easy to, let’s say, diversify your income through kickbacks. This colourful feature gets into all the gritty details. | Toronto Life Post of Wisdom Thoughts on Today’s Issue? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Brent Donnelly (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Srivindhya Kolluru (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (specialist, product engagement), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). TWIM: Total returns shown for Feb. 2 – Feb 6. in local currency, via TradingView. 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