Plus: what’s a prediction market anyway? November 3, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 🏧 Carney’s big reveal 💅 Bieber’s business 👖 Zellers’ latest reboot What’s the difference between losing your shirt at blackjack versus losing it on Elon Musk’s tweet count in December? We explain below. | Warner Bros. Pictures THE WEEK IN MARKETS Why Meta stock took a double-digit hit Earnings season has been pretty sunny so far — more than 80% of companies have beaten expectations, the most upside surprises since 2000, making this the fourth straight quarter of double-digit profit growth. But we’re not here to talk about bright spots. We’re here to talk about Meta. On October 29, its stock had its worst day in three years, dropping 11%. The interesting part is why. Reason one is that the company is spending more than advertised on AI capex. Reason two is that it’s earning much less than forecasted. It’s an interesting lesson in market dynamics at a moment when Nvidia just became the first US$5 trillion company: there seems to be no limit to the AI spending investors will tolerate — so long as profits keep pace, like they did for Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft. So even as Meta set a revenue record in Q3 and only missed on earnings because of a one-time tax technicality, markets seem to be sniffing for any hints of bubble-ness at big-tech firms, suggesting there’s perhaps a limit to their tolerance after all. THE CHART OF THE WEEK WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Carney’s first budget is almost here, and he needs good reviews. Nobody’s in the mood for another election right now, but tomorrow’s long-awaited federal budget proposal is more than just a spending plan — it’s the Liberal minority government’s pitch to stay in power. Whatever the PM puts forward needs the support of another party, so bones will be thrown, but what and to whom? Let’s just say politicos didn’t get much sleep last week, and it wasn’t just because of the Blue Jays. The reports of O&G’s death have been greatly exaggerated. For the fourth year in a row, according to Bloomberg, banks have profited more from financing green products than from oil and gas. The past few weeks have also been filled with headlines about layoffs at oil giants: ConocoPhillips, Imperial, now Exxon. But as the old Alberta proverb teaches us: booming and busting is just what the oil business does. The O&G industry is still forecasting increased near-term demand and plans to produce 4.7% more oil next year. Many of those job cuts, in fact, were designed to free up funds to spend on increased production. INTERESTING Everyone’s gossiping about Hailey Bieber’s new … financial statements. Over the summer, Bieber sold her popular skin-care company, Rhode, to e.l.f. Beauty for US$1 billion, and now, thanks to the transaction, the beauty industry is getting a look at Rhode’s earnings statements. Celeb-brand blogger David Olusegun pointed out that it spends just 11% of its revenue on marketing and has a nine-to-one marketing efficiency ratio, meaning it earns $9 for every dollar it spends. Rhode is, in other words, a textbook case of why celeb brands have become ubiquitous: “When you have 50+ million Instagram followers,” Olusegun writes, “[e]very selfie is an advert.” Zellers is back (again) (but not the diners)! It was a family ritual in the ’90s: a trip to one of Zellers’ 350 discount stores to stock up on back-to-school clothes or holiday gifts, followed by fries and gravy at the diner. The chain got killed off by the short-lived Target expansion, then sputtered through some shorter-lived revivals by The Bay, until HBC croaked this summer. Now the Benitah family has bought the Zellers name at a fire sale for possibly as little as $100,000 and has opened its first store in Edmonton. Can nostalgia fuel a comeback? The market has only gotten more crowded thanks to Dollarama, Walmart, Amazon, etc. — and Zellers isn’t even bringing back the fries and gravy. —Sarah Rieger FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 💻 Elon Musk launches his own AI-powered version of Wikipedia called “Grokipedia.” Perfect for anyone who finds Wikipedia just too accurate. Source 🌐 Microsoft Teams will soon detect and reveal your location. There’s still time to change your Wi-Fi from “Steve’s Stabbin’ Cabin” to “The Office.” Source 👟 Nike unveils a motorized sneaker that’s like an e-bike for your feet. Also toying with new slogan: “Just Screw It.” Source 🌍 Bill Gates says climate change won’t “lead to humanity’s demise.” That’s what Microsoft Teams is for. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 💕 Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry take their relationship public, even though their couple name will probably be something like “Jerry.” Source 🤢 Canada poised to lose its status as a measles-free country. Smallpox, swine fever, there’s hope for you yet! Source ⌨️ Threads is launching “ghost posts” that disappear in 24 hours. Use them for posts that lack the timeless quality of your typical Threads work. Source 💰 Montreal man ordered to pay $1M for falsely claiming his friend profited from Nazi gold. Folks, don’t let your Nazi-gold quibbles ruin friendships. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY VICE Prediction Markets Are, Suddenly, Everywhere. Wall Street Wants In We assume by this point you have some familiarity with prediction markets — you know, those yes/no bets folks make on news events, like the one last year on whether Donald Trump would win the U.S. presidential election. That wager was many people’s first exposure to Polymarket, a leading prediction market. In the time since, prediction markets have not only gone mainstream; they’ve moved beyond news and are stealing turf from online sportsbooks, like DraftKings. Last week, the NHL announced a partnership with two top platforms — a seal of approval for the industry. Right now it’s unclear what Canada will do about prediction markets; they’re not available at the moment. But these fast-growing platforms have upturned sports betting, and they could do the same to finance, so it’s worth knowing what makes these platforms so potentially disruptive. Let’s dive in. First, the basics: Prediction markets let users make bets on yes/no questions — like whether Elon Musk will post 960 to 999 tweets in December. Odds are expressed as a percentage, and that percentage is (usually) the cents it costs to buy a single share of a bet. Once the event happens (or doesn’t!), whoever was right gets $1 for every share they own. For instance, if the odds of Musk posting 960 tweets in December are 17%, $1,000 will buy you 5,882 “yes” shares at $0.17 each. If you’re right, you’ll get back $5,882 — a profit of $4,882, or a 488% return. Why prediction markets are Uber and sportsbooks are taxis: That metaphor comes via a (now-deleted) tweet by a Polymarket employee. What he surely meant is that prediction markets represent a marked improvement over sportsbooks — in convenience, transparency, and availability. And he might have a point. Sportsbooks annoy gamblers by restricting sharp bettors, charging high fees (usually 4% to 10%), and sometimes refusing to pay out winnings. Prediction markets, as a rule, don’t do that sort of stuff, and their fees run about half that of sportsbooks. The main difference is philosophical: with sportsbooks, the house takes the opposite side of every bet, so it sets odds to balance money on both sides and lock in profit. Prediction markets don’t put their thumbs on the scale; they’re truth-seeking mechanisms that let users set prices themselves through their bets, producing odds that reflect the crowd’s, not the house’s, best estimate. That’s why some news outlets quote Polymarket odds; they (probably) better reflect sentiment than Vegas odds. Here’s the hitch: Prediction markets have sidestepped a lot of U.S. gambling regulations by arguing that they’re not betting platforms at all — they’re trading platforms that deal in futures contracts. (The Atlantic published an explainer last week.) And so far U.S. regulators haven’t stopped them from effectively making sports betting legal nationwide under this argument. In Canada, Polymarket operated illegally in Ontario for three years before authorities cracked down. Prediction markets are rekindling some old debates about trading: The point of this story isn’t to inform you of exciting new ways to lose your shirt. What’s fascinating to us is that there has always been a fuzzy line between investing and gambling, and prediction markets are just making that line blurrier. Robinhood, the major U.S. brokerage, now runs prediction markets. CME, the operator of a giant futures exchange, is launching its own prediction market. And the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company invested US$2 billion in Polymarket. But perhaps the most striking example of how prediction markets are melding together traditional finance and gambling is that you can now bet on equity prices on Polymarket, like you would a futures exchange. It’s not our place to tell you what to make of any of this stuff. What we can say is the debate over what everyday folks should or shouldn’t be allowed to bet on/invest in goes back decades. Prediction markets are just the latest development. Will people lose money on them? No doubt. But as Bloomberg Opinion’s Matt Levine noted, if you believe in the democratization of finance, as Robinhood certainly does, that means letting people do what they want with their money, even if they don’t always make the wisest decisions — like, say, betting on Elon Musk’s tweeting habits. —Brennan Doherty OTHER VERY GOOD READS 💸 The Doom Spenders Faced with uncertainty, young Canadians are racking up debt. | Maclean’s 🚜 What It’s Like to Farm in 2025 From wildfires to trade wars. | The Narwhal ⚾️ When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve That time scientists asked: are curveballs real? | Pioneer Works THE WISDOM OF SOCIAL 💔 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), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (lifecycle marketing manager), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (lifecycle marketing associate), 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 Amazon and have family members employed by Meta. 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. 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