Plus: robotaxis are headed for Toronto February 2, 2026 Sign Up | View online In This Issue 8 min read 🤝 All-cash mega-deals 🚕 Autonomous taxis 🍿 First Lady doc flops RIP to the mighty Catherine O’Hara, our Canadian queen of comedy — we’ll always think of your Home Alone face whenever financial news is pushing us to the brink. Read the Big Important Story below. | The Walt Disney Company The Week in Markets Hard times for metal heads What a decade last week was! Gold and silver surged early — putting gold up 96% since this time last year and silver up 160%. The era of precious metals is here! The greenback is dead! Oh wait. Just kidding — on Friday gold and silver got absolutely clobbered. Speaking of clobbered: Bitcoin — which topped US$100,000 just over a year ago — remained in free fall, dropping below $78,000 by week’s end. And stocks? Halfway through earnings season, the markets have sent a clear message by splurging on anyone who makes hardware to power AI and hammering anyone who makes software that seems bound to get cannibalized by it. It’s hard to tell which is moving faster than normal: markets or market narratives. Either way, it’s a whirlwind. Jan. 26 – Jan. 30 TSX: -4.5% (+0.1% YTD) S&P 500: +0.4% (+1.2% YTD) Who’s Up 📈: Meta assured jittery investors that AI isn’t just a giant money pit by raking in US$60 billion in Q4 (a 24% jump YoY) with help from its effective new AI-generated ads. Its shares popped 10.5%. Who’s Down 📉: Microsoft, meanwhile, fuelled fears that it’s overspending on AI after it reported high data-centre costs — and a slowdown in its AI-powered cloud business. Its shares fell by 7%. The Chart of the Week What Happened Last Week Important Your morning coffee costs a full dollar more than it did a year ago. Food prices surged by 6.2% YoY in December — that’s double the U.S. rate and the highest in the G7. And some items really spiked: coffee is up 31% since last year. Beef: 17%. The causes are myriad: tariffs, supply-chain issues, severe weather. In response, PM Mark Carney wants to top up the GST credit (now rebranded the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit) by 25% over the next five years to ease the strain on 12 million lower-income Canadians. The downside? A temporary tax break isn’t going to solve our food-insecurity issues, and it could make food inflation even worse. Y Combinator says it won’t invest in Canadian startups that won’t leave Canada. The world’s most lionized incubator (Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase) quietly changed its deal terms and now requires Canadian startups to reincorporate in the U.S., the Cayman Islands, or Singapore. That’s reincorporate, not entirely relocate, and there’s a big difference. But the news still lit a fire in the fintwit and startup communities. One founder accused YC of “sell[ing] a story that implies ‘Canada can’t win unless you leave.’ That’s not only wrong, it’s corrosive.” But in a series of X posts, YC CEO (and Winnipeg native) Garry Tan defended the move: “Where you are incorporated increases your access to capital. That’s it.” Interesting Hello, Toronto, your Uber Lyft Waabi is arriving soon. First things first: it’s pronounced WAH-bee, which is Japanese for “simple.” File away the name, because the Toronto-based autonomous-vehicle startup just scored a $1 billion funding round — among the largest in Canadian tech history — to put more than 25,000 self-driving cars on Toronto streets, like, really soon. The obstacles from here are mostly regulatory. In San Francisco, L.A., and Phoenix, passengers are already adjusting to the surreality of getting picked up by an empty car. The Heated Rivalry Team Canada fleece is coming soon. You know the one. Episode 2. Hollander’s wearing it in the coffee shop at the Sochi Olympics. The viral zip-up was originally created by the show’s costume designer, Hanna Puley, and fans have been thirsting for it ever since, even making their own knockoffs. And now, just ahead of the Milano Cortina Olympics, HR’s creators are teaming up with clothier Province of Canada on a limited-run version. No word yet on a drop date or a price tag. Province of Canada announced the news with a single-sentence bomb: “We’re releasing the fleece.” —Srivindhya Kolluru From Our Sponsor The FOMO Index by Stacey Woods Important 🕛 Doomsday Clock moves closer than it’s ever been to midnight, at which point we’ll hit snooze on the Doomsday Clock. Source 🧑🏻‍💻 LinkedIn adds feature that lets you tout your ability to vibe code. And be sure to list your extensive experience in asking Siri things. Source 🇫🇷 France close to banning social media for kids. They fear all that scrolling will stunt the development of important smoking muscles. Source 🦅 Viewers delight as Big Bear’s nest-cam eagles welcome first eggs of the year. This season is shaping up to be a real talon-biter. Source Crash & Burn To the Moon 🍿 Early numbers suggest no one’s going to see Melania. Trump asks theatres to find him 11,780 more ticket sales. Source ✈️ Air Canada not required to compensate man who burned his hand on the airport-lounge oatmeal. But future passengers will undergo extensive ladle training. Source 🏥 Ottawa Hospital replaces its old menu with quality food that tastes good. Hoping no one dies of shock. Source 🎶 Neil Young makes all his music free to Greenland. Residents say thanks, they’ll take everything except that electronic one. Source Who Cares? The Big Important Story How to Consume and Discern Information in Our Slop-Infested World Note: Brent Donnelly, the author of this piece, is a longtime FX trader. He writes the very good Friday Speedrun newsletter. The internet is a fun place to learn about money. It’s also a minefield of lousy takes and, increasingly, AI slop packaged as brilliant analysis. This poses a huge problem for traders. Good investing requires you to stay informed without getting emotionally hijacked. And what you read shapes how you think and how you invest. So you need to be a savvy consumer of financial media. Here’s a crash course. Ignore financial nihilism One long-running issue is that financial media has a negative bias. Why? Because negativity drives engagement. People claim to prefer positive news but habitually consume negative coverage. Even infants react more strongly to negative stimuli. Studies agree that humans tend to perceive people who present pessimistic opinions as more intelligent than those who express optimistic ones. That explains why bearish market analysts are often viewed as having “cut through the noise,” while bulls are dismissed as naive Pollyannas. “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell,” economist Deirdre McCloskey once said. “Yet pessimism has consistently been a poor guide to the modern economic world.” Indeed, over the past 200 years, the global poverty rate has plummeted, and stocks have steadily climbed. Human progress trends upward. Of course, it’s not always unwise to be bearish. Just remember that if a forecaster is shouting that a crash is imminent, ask yourself whether he or she is preying on our innate fondness for negativity, whether they have a verifiable track record, and whether they’re providing analysis supported by evidence. Prioritize legitimate gatekeepers Platforms like X and Substack have removed the traditional guardrails around publishing. Hence any rando can now disseminate objectively wrong information in essay form. And if the essay taps into the right vibes — fear, nihilism, cynicism — it can go viral. That’s why it’s important to subscribe to Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, or other outlets of high journalistic quality. Financial media has a negativity bias, yes. But professional editors, reporters, and fact-checkers still have tremendous value in upholding standards around clarity, accuracy, and quality control. Independent thinkers with long track records — like the Marginal Revolution guys, Michael Mauboussin, or Ben Carlson — are also solid bets. Filter relentlessly I recently wrote about a market analyst who often pumps out three to four long essays a day on Substack. He was unknown just months ago and now has 13,000 subscribers — and his articles are likely written by a chatbot, at least according to AI-detection program GPTZero. This is hardly an isolated case. Plenty of smart people are on Substack and X, but you need to curate carefully and mute aggressively. Know the bias of every author you read. Consider deleting social media from your phone. And remember that permabears, permabulls, and clickbait merchants all thrive on attention, not truth. Successful investors are flexible, open-minded, and forward-looking. Don’t be perma-anything. —Brent Donnelly The Big Read 🚫 Why Banning Kids From Social Media Is a Mistake It’s the trendy new policy approach in countries like Australia (and, if some Ottawa legislators get their way, Canada as well) for reducing all the bad stuff that we know social media does to young brains. But in this counterintuitive conversation, TLDR alumnus Sarah Rieger (💔) spoke with one of Canada’s smartest tech-policy minds about why a ban would be a mistake — in his view anyway. | BetaKit 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). Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Google. TWIM: Total returns shown for Jan. 26 - 30 in local currency, via TradingView. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Have questions? Contact us. 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. 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. © 2026 Wealthsimple Media Inc.