Plus: SpoOooky telecoOoom monoOOOoopoOOolies October 31, 2022 Made in Canada IN THIS ISSUE Estimated read time: 7 mins 🚀 Crypto’s taste for regulation 🐦 Elon’s Twitter decapitation 📞 Telecom’s slight de-oligopolization WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK Did Zuck just get unfriended by investors? It was a bad week for tech companies. And a very bad week for Meta. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images THE WEEK IN MARKETS Happy Halloween! Billie — that’s our name for the TLDR emoji — is all dressed up for you this week. Is she smiling? Well, the TSX and the S&P 500 both finished last week up a not-bad 3-ish%, while more speculative stuff, like $ARKK and bitcoin, did even better. So what sparked this little pre-trick-or-treat rally? For one: Canada! Or, rather, the Bank of Canada, which furthered the narrative that policymakers may be slowing their painful interest-rate hikes by announcing a lower-than-expected 50-basis-point (or 0.50%) increase. More uplifting news came via earnings reports, which were mostly bad but, mercifully, not apocalyptic (with two big semi-exceptions we discuss below). But the movement this week was small, and the same existential market questions still ominously hang over everyone like one of those giant yard skeletons: How stubborn will inflation be? And how much will the fight to tame it hurt future corporate profits? Certainty, in other words, continues to ghost us. IMPORTANT The one uncoupling that could have bigger repercussions than Tom and Gisele? The West and China. The American ban on exporting semiconductors to China didn’t help the relationship. Neither did President Xi’s canning all the moderates from his new regime. A return to isolationism could really mess with, well, the conditions that shaped a lot of the world (and brought us $11 Shein sweatshirts). The markets already moved to take some decoupling into account, with both U.S. chip stocks and Chinese tech stocks sinking. Your merger could not be completed as dialled. Roger's acquisition of fellow telecom giant Shaw hit another snag last week when Canada's industry minister added some new hurdles to the $26-billion deal, sending Shaw share prices ... up 7%. Huh? It was a matter of wording: the minister said he’d approve the deal “only if” another stipulation was met. Investors got all Lloyd Christmas, especially when that stipulation — that whoever buys Shaw’s wireless business promises to lower prices for 10 years — was met later in the day. It’s a small olive branch for oligopoly-weary Canadians, and the deal is still far from assured. Granny cottages for everyone! As part of its strategy to ease one of the world’s worst housing shortages, Ontario overrode municipal zoning laws to encourage the building of more multifamily homes and properties. The move means up to three units can now go on a single plot, which is bad for fights about the shared driveway but good for introducing more smaller-scale — and hopefully more affordable — options. Assuming anyone can find a contractor. INTERESTING Remember how we said earnings reports weren’t terrible? We weren’t talking about tech. The sector saw earnings forecasts revised down by billions of dollars per quarter, and stock prices tumbled enough to cost investors nearly US$1 billion in lost wealth. Amazon ($AMZN), Alphabet ($GOOGL), and Intel ($INTC) may face particularly strong headwinds for the rest of the year, since they rely so heavily on things like consumer spending and ad revenue, both of which look likely to fall. And Meta ($META)? It’s Zucked. Among all this tech sadness, Meta still stands out. TV stock guy Jim Cramer (in a video that went viral ) actually cried when telling CNBC viewers that Facebook’s parent company revealed that its revenue continues to be disappointingly flat. The cause(s)? TikTok long ago ran off with Facebook’s audience, Apple kneecapped its ability to make money off ad tracking, and Zuck’s own US$15 billion metaverse moonshot hasn’t yet made it off the launch pad. Meta stock crashed 25% in response. Black Adam’s superpower is turning brutal reviews into box-office gold. Dwayne Johnson’s DC Comics debut is a continuation of his remarkable run of not really making a good movie (besides “Moana”) while still dominating the box office. Johnson’s superhero genre twist — Black Adam is violent and merciless, more Revenger than Avenger — was No. 1 in the world after an opening-weekend haul of US$140 million. That’s a good sign for an industry that’s still 30% below pre-pandemic earnings, says Daniel Loria of Boxoffice Pro (a magazine all about movie theatres!) THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🐦 Elon Musk buys Twitter “to try to help humanity,” which apparently he’s part of. Source 🎮 Study: Kids who play video games have better memories than kids who don’t. They mostly remember to play video games. Source 👟 Ye stops by Skechers uninvited to pitch his shoes. Crocs, Teva lock doors. Source 🇨🇳 Brave: China stops publishing some of its economic stats, because your economy can't stall if you don't report it. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🗳 It’s like people just want to stay home and order Uber weed! Toronto sees record low turnout for last election. Source 🛞 Canadian Tire founder lists mansion for $28 million. Probably not accepting CTM, but bring your Triangle Rewards card anyway. Source 🏃‍♂️ Treadmills across Canada recalled for unexpectedly changing speed. They do still work as clothes racks, though. Source 🎭 Guy who devotes life to playing dead on TikTok lands dream role as corpse on CSI. He can die happy now. Source WHO CARES WHAT'S UP THIS WEEK The U.S. Fed announces its next rate hike (Wednesday). Is Powell going to surprise us with a Bank-of-Canada-style lower-than-expected rate hike? Probably not. Restaurant Brands International reports third-quarter earnings (Thursday). Tim Hortons, Burger King, and Popeyes may sound like a great breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but its stock performance is likely to give you bubble guts. THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY CURRENCY Maybe, Just Maybe, the Crash Changed Crypto? It’s hard to know whether an investment is good or garbage when you’re in a bubble and everything is rising and rising and rising. That proved true in the dot-com boom, and it happened all over again with crypto. Well, now in the clear, sobering light of the crypto winter, Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, who writes Money Stuff, arguably the most influential financial column in North America, did some serious thinking about crypto's future. The result is a 40,000-word DeFi opus, which took up the entire issue of “Businessweek” last week, and which is free of the boosterism that often accompanies crypto writing. TLDR spoke with Levine about the future of digital currencies and how the crypto crash has changed the industry. You’ve covered the implausible potential uses for crypto. What’s a compelling bull case? One is crypto being able to substantiate financial objects or transactions — the idea of a bank, say, connecting to a universally available database to check that you own the title to a home before giving you a mortgage. That stuff has a lot of appeal. OK, backing up a bit: what’s a big thing about crypto that the recent downturn has illuminated for you? It’s philosophical, but something I’ve thought a lot about is how important trust is in life generally — like how much of our day-to-day life is about trusting institutions [like banks or a municipal clerk’s office]. Well, crypto is, in ways, about rejecting social trust. Early Bitcoiners didn’t want to trust banks; [they wanted to trust code and the blockchain instead]. But we’re seeing a shift because people have realized that a lot of crypto platforms aren’t “trustless” — humans run them, just like they do other institutions. Right. So you write about the Celsius scandal. That and other blowups illustrated that many crypto platforms rely on code and the blockchain, yes, but also on people, right? That’s right. This year was crypto’s 2008, where people built these opaque interconnected platforms, there was a downturn, and a lot of them blew up. So investors learned quickly that you really shouldn’t trust some of the people running these centralized platforms, because they’re not all just open-source code on the blockchain. There’s always some level of trust involved when you give money to a platform like Celsius. So is the crypto industry trying to change following these scandals? Crypto has been pretty averse to regulation. But now that regulators are wanting to do something because of the crash — people lost money! — a lot of mature players in the industry are saying, “It’s better for us in the long run if there’s more trust in this industry.” And more regulation will help achieve that. —Interview by Sarah Rieger This interview was edited for length and clarity. SHARE TLDR WITH FRIENDS 🤝 Put this link in your group chats, in your Slack threads, on a tattoo on your back — whatever works for you! ASK US A QUESTION! We get hundreds of questions from readers every week (including: “will this get any better?” 😂). And we want to answer them! Ask us anything (what's a bond yield? when will the market improve?). We'll pick a question and have our experts answer in TLDR — and Twitter, too. Submit your questions HERE and be sure to follow us on Twitter @wealthsimple. SPOOKY GOOD READS 🎃 The History of Candy Corn Everyone’s least-favourite Halloween treat | The A.V. Club 👻 How to Live with a Ghost* A must-read in this housing market | The New York Times 😱 True Scary Stories That’ll Creep You Right Out It’s even spookier when it’s real | Jezebel *Article is paywalled, which, yeah, is kind of annoying. But we think good journalism is worth paying for. THE WISDOM OF TWITTER Complete the fit with AirPods and cold brew… THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), Kat Angus (managing editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Full disclosure: contributors to this newsletter own stock in Apple. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Replies to this email address are not monitored. Have questions? 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