Or: why you shouldn’t put $50K in a shoebox March 25, 2024 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 📺 Beastly TV 🤖 Apple-y AI 😈 Scammy scammers Criminals have developed increasingly clever ways to steal your money. None of their tactics are quite as entertaining as the Ocean crew’s ploys, but they are nonetheless effective. We explain in the Big Important Story, below. | Warner Bros. THE WEEK IN MARKETS Powell keeps the rate-cut dream alive Yet another heater of a week: all the major U.S. and Canadian markets were up about 1% last week, and now even Canada’s exchanges are approaching all-time highs. Why the gains? It was mostly thanks to optimism about rate cuts: U.S. Fed chair Jerome Powell signaled that not one, not two, but three rate cuts are still coming fairly soon, despite stubbornly high inflation in the States. That news added to investors’ enthusiasm about corporate profits and productivity that has been building for months. According to Bank of America’s closely monitored fund-manager survey, investors haven’t been this bullish since November 2021, but they’re not crazily, stupidly bullish. They’re trying not to get ahead of themselves, and for that reason maybe stocks aren’t overheated and racing toward a painful reversal. Let’s hope! THE WEEK IN ONE NUMBER 7% Canadians who reported owning crypto in 2023 specifically to pay a ransom to a hacker. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Inflation inches down. Canada’s annual CPI slowed from 2.9% in January to 2.8% in February, which came as a pleasant surprise to economists, who were expecting an increase to 3.1%. But does the inflation slowdown mean we’ll all feel a little richer, or at least a little less poor? Probably not, unfortunately! Hourly wages in Canada have risen by about 10% since 2019, but inflation has risen by 12% over that time, and wage growth now seems to be slowing. Has Canada gotten too popular? A population boom is typically great for an economy — it boosts the labour force, and the children of immigrants tend to over-deliver relative to native-born citizens. Economists worry, though, that for Canada gaining almost a million people in less than a year is too much of a good thing. (Ottawa seems to agree, announcing last week that it’s reducing the number of temporary residents it lets in.) It takes time to absorb new arrivals into an economy, and Canada’s swelling population may be deepening the housing crisis and straining hospitals and schools. The bright side? In about 20 years, our economy should be absolutely crushing it. INTERESTING Amazon shows MrBeast the money. The YouTube über-creator known for his outlandish, and debatably “icky,” stunts has struck a US$100-million deal with Amazon Prime to produce a competition show called Beast Games. Is this just a ploy by Amazon for eyeballs? Almost certainly! MrBeast’s YouTube channel sometimes gets two billion views a month and has 246 million followers. And Prime, like other streaming platforms, needs dedicated followers now more than ever as it shifts into its ad-supported era. If dropping US$100 million on a YouTuber’s contest show seems like a big gamble, consider the fact that US$100M is US$615 million less than what Prime squandered on that Lord of the Rings series. Nvidia wants to be the Apple of AI. And it doesn’t want to be the next Cisco, the router maker that was briefly the world’s highest-valued company in 2000 until the competition started copying its core product. To avoid the same fate, Nvidia is following a two-pronged, Apple-aping strategy. Step one: make hardware, like the iPhone, that no one else can duplicate; last week the US$2-trillion chipmaker teased its new flagship AI processor, the Blackwell B200 GPU, due out later this year, which it promises will be 30 times speedier than its predecessor. Step two: diversify revenue streams by creating tightly integrated software for its hardware. Which explains why last week Nvidia also announced a new software platform called NIM for designing and deploying AI models. NIM is to the B200 what iOS is to the iPhone. Or so Nvidia and its investors hope. —Srivindhya Kolluru & Abigail Covington FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🍎 U.S. files landmark antitrust lawsuit against Apple over iPhone monopoly. Apple trying to respond but the text is still green. Source 💉 Undervaccination has put Canada on the verge of a major measles outbreak. Whooping cough eyes exciting reboot opportunity. Source 🤖 Apple in talks to add Google’s AI, Gemini, to iPhone. Perfect for the deepfaker on the go. Source 🕶️ One million expected to watch eclipse in Niagara Falls and then wonder how to fill remaining 1,436 minutes of day. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🍫 Get ready to pay more for your basic needs: the global chocolate shortage is worsening. Source 🛑 Dude, you’re getting passed over: Dell says remote workers are no longer eligible for promotions. Source 🍦 Unilever dumping Ben & Jerry’s. Look for new flavours, Costs S’more Dough and Dark Divestment Chunk, coming soon. Source 👉 People are poking each other on Facebook again. Mark Zuckerberg throws remaining VR headsets off bridge. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY SECURITY Scammers Are Getting Smarter. AI Is Helping. Here’s How to Avoid Getting Swindled One person that you did not want to be on the internet last month was New York magazine financial-advice columnist Charlotte Cowles. If you missed her February 15 story and the collective surge of schadenfreude it powered, what happened is that phone scammers posing as an Amazon service rep and a U.S. federal agent convinced her to withdraw US$50,000 from her bank, put it in a shoe box, and give it to a stranger. Whether or not you think you, personally, would have fallen for that ruse, there’s no denying that phone, text, and social-media scams are becoming increasingly common: Canadians lost something like $567 million to fraud last year, a 7% uptick from 2022. Since it’s extraordinarily tough to know when you might be in a scammer’s crosshairs, we sat down with Shardul Desai — a former prosecutor specializing in cybercrime who now works for the multinational law firm Holland & Knight — to go over some dos and don’ts that will help you protect yourself from next-generation cons. NEVER trust someone who says a transaction must be completed RIGHT NOW. The success of many scams, like the one that victimized Cowles, hinges on creating a sense of urgency — that “something bad is going to happen and the only way to address it is to immediately send out money,” Desai says. Don’t buy it. There’s no legitimate financial transaction that has to be conducted while you’re on the line with someone. ALWAYS confirm who you’re talking to (which is not so simple these days). The New Yorker recently wrote about a couple who received a call that seemed to be from a relative being held for ransom at gunpoint. The couple paid US$750 to free the person only to discover that — surprise! — a fraudster had used AI to impersonate the family member’s voice. If someone asks you to make a similar high-stakes transaction, simply texting or calling the loved one in question might foil the plot. (Creating a family password that scammers wouldn’t know should help too.) You’d be smart to take similar steps when dealing with businesses or banks. That said… NEVER automatically trust a phone number you find online. Scammers have changed the numbers that show up for airlines on Google search results, directing customers to money-stealing faux-airline agents. So make doubly sure you’re using the right number. One way to do that is to bookmark your bank, travel, and other important sites instead of navigating to them through search. ALWAYS have a multifactor authentication code sent somewhere besides your phone. In SIM-swapping scams, hackers use personal information about you to convince a phone company to switch your number to their phone. That way, “[scammers] can receive the two-factor authentication codes to reset logins or use stolen passwords,” says Desai. Having log-in codes sent to your email is a better idea but not foolproof, since email accounts can get compromised too. Your best bet is using a trusted authentication app, which operates independently of your phone number or email. NEVER assume someone is not an AI deepfake. Weird hands are an AI giveaway right now, but AI-generated photos and videos will become more convincing, says Desai. You’d be wise to double-check anytime someone on a video call asks for money or sensitive data. A business guy in Hong Kong recently gave US$25 million to scammers after he joined a video conference in which everyone else present was a deepfake of one of his real-life colleagues. The list goes on and on. Never use a public USB charging station, never trust someone who tells you to keep an investment or transaction secret from family members, and never speak to a spam caller in case they try to use AI voice-cloning tools on you. Always use a mobile hotspot instead of public Wi-Fi, always look out for credit-card skimmers, and always contact law enforcement if you’re threatened. Stay vigilant, and whatever you do, do not, under any circumstances, stuff money in a shoe box and give it to a stranger. OTHER VERY GOOD READS 🕵️ The Double Life of Former Wirecard Executive Jan Marsalek How a former tech COO became a wanted man — and a spy | Der Spiegel 🍼 Parental Leave Is Broken It’s a privilege, but the system is far from equal | The Walrus 💔 Dating Apps Have Hit a Wall Can they turn things around? | The New York Times THE WISDOM OF X Paying for a double double with a slightly damp torn-up piece of cardboard is as Canadian as griping about how gross double doubles are. 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), Clare Douglas (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (senior lifecycle specialist), Matthew Karasz (markets editor) Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), Kat Angus (managing editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Amazon and Google. 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 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. 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