Wealthsimple

October 26, 2026

Greg Gayne/The CW

In This Issue

8 min read

Six easy ways to go broke trying to keep up with the Joneses

Plus!

Nathan Fielder’s blockbuster doc

Amazon’s cryptic confirmation emails

The Idea of the Week

Did someone call security? Why cyber stocks are roaring back

by Peter Arkle

Stocks took a beating last week, and you can pick a culprit — dimming hopes for a near-term resolution in Iran, rising oil prices, AI overreach. But one notable sector bucked the trend: cybersecurity stocks, as in data and network protection, which spiked 6% during a week when the S&P and TSX both shaved a percent.

Now perhaps you’re thinking: didn’t investors declare these software companies toast six months ago? Well, that was before the AI giants’ latest models started hacking through half the firewalls on the planet, and, presto!, cybersecurity stocks are all the rage again. Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal even pinpointed the exact day that the terrain shifted: April 7, the day Anthropic released its frontier model Claude Mythos, which proved to be so good at exposing security flaws that the corporate world realized, all at once, their potential vulnerabilities. The moral of the story? Stocks are a lot like houses: the neighbourhood matters more than a house’s current price tag. So pick your neighbourhood carefully.

TSX: -1.0% (+12.5% YTD)

S&P 500: -1.6% (+10.8% YTD)

What Happened Last Week

Important

The simple bond dynamic that explains the protests in France. Yes, mass protest is more or less a national pastime in France, but the unrest spiralled this time because of a vicious macroeconomic cycle: soaring debt has driven away bond investors (the French 10-year yield has soared from 3.5% to 5% since January), so the government can’t afford to borrow more for social services, which has enraged the public since the French have one of the world’s highest tax burdens (about 47%). But any unrest gives nervous bond investors even more reason to bolt and the state even less money to dole out. As the New York Times puts it, France is stuck in a “doom loop” — a toxic blend of fiscal mismanagement that feeds investor anxiety and drives protestors into the streets.

Interesting

A Saskatchewan megafarm’s billion-dollar bankruptcy revealed an empire built on debt. A cautionary yarn about Canada’s consolidating farming industry — Daniel Monette was on top of the world: he’d leased 1.2 million acres of cattle-grazing farmland in less than a decade and built one of North America’s largest grain operations. But, The Walrus reports, Monette’s business was debt-financed. With land values soaring, he used his tracts as collateral and borrowed cheaply (thanks to low rates) to expand his empire — only to watch it crumble when the economic winds shifted.

The great mystery of 2026: why are Amazon order confirmations so vague now? Perhaps you’ve noticed that Amazon’s purchase-confirmation emails have gotten oddly hazy of late: your Caudalie Makeup Removing Cleansing Oil and Sony MDR-7506 Headphones get identified only as a “beauty item” and an “electronic accessory.” What gives? According to The Verge, it’s all about thwarting Google, which wants to scrape customer data from Gmail to improve Gemini’s product recommendations.

—Jenna Benchetrit

Humanity is putting more stuff in space. The final frontier is getting a lot closer. Since 2015, both the number of satellites and the sheer mass of objects launched into space have skyrocketed, signalling just how much innovation and activity is being shipped out into the cosmos.

Business 101

The entrepreneurial wisdom of … Seinfeld?

Business pod Acquired veered into showbiz with a four-hour deep dive on Seinfeld. A few takeaways: (1) It’s not too late. Co-creator Larry David was 40 when Jerry tapped him to develop the show. (2) Be ruthless about quality. Larry rewrote every script. And if the studio audience didn’t laugh at a joke, he halted production to rework the punch line. (3) Bet on yourself. Jerry and Larry took modest salaries but got lots of backend points (quasi-equity), setting them up for life when the show went into syndication.

From Our Sponsor

Don't forget to win $1 million. On the to-do list for Thursday, Oct 29: check the Wealthsimple app to see if you won the Monthly Millionaire draw.

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

Quebec’s Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve is dry. The Great Sugar Crash is expected to last until the tanks get liquid.
Source

Tesla and SpaceX are discussing a merger. Might just scrap everything and make one big superintelligent humanoid rocket named “TeX.”
Source

Driverless Waymos are slowly rolling out on the streets of Toronto, giving residents time to get used to seeing something they’ll never, ever get used to.
Source

ChatGPT will now let you lock up chats you don’t want people to see. So there are chats you do want people to see?
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

Drone delivers McNuggets, fries, and booze to inmate’s cell window at Quebec prison. Too bad he’ll be in solitary when it comes back with his Rolaids.
Source

Chinese crime ring allegedly hacked Staples for $5 million in gift cards. Guys, there are easier ways to get paperclips.
Source

Mark Wahlberg is opening a longevity gym. Enjoy the Dirk Diggler Feel My Heat infrared sauna, get a Wahlburger B12 drip, and test your biomarkymarkers.
Source

New trend alert: Nixonmaxxing. It’s where you catch a career-ending cortisol spike and start leaking aura like a jester while getting framemogged on TV by a prime-tier Chad.
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

Six non-investments that make affluent families feel poor

Let’s say you worked your butt off, got a decent job, and are making a solid living. And yet you still can’t get ahead. You might be falling victim to what the data scientist Nick Maggiulli calls the upper-middle-class trap: as incomes rise, people spend more money chasing better versions of stuff they already have, ostensibly for some measurable benefit, when in reality this new stuff just vaporizes cash. Sure, sometimes the kitchen really does need a refresh, and if you’ve got the money, go for it. But if you’re feeling squeezed, you should probably skip these six splurges.

Home remodels. Heated bathroom floors are a modern marvel, but such extravagances tend not to pay for themselves. Homeowners typically recoup only about 42% of their money from an upscale bathroom remodel and 18% from a fancy primary-suite addition.

Moving into a bigger house. It’s a classic tale: a city couple has kids and flees to the suburbs, expecting more space for lower costs. According to a University of Virginia economist, though, people with comparable incomes but smaller homes in denser neighbourhoods tend to save more — largely because more space means more maintenance. Which is why, over time, families in larger homes tend to accumulate less wealth.

Lavish weddings. Want to reach your Golden Anniversary? Skip the 10,000 imported roses on Day 1. Economists found a correlation between pricier weddings and shorter marriages, often because wedding debt strained their marriages (and because they lacked financial discipline to begin with). So if you and your beloved manage to stay on budget, that’s an auspicious sign.

Travel sports. Don’t let daydreams of your child turning into the next Sidney Crosby be the reason you drop $10,000 (or more) a year on travel hockey. A number of surveys have found that between 27% and 49% of parents expect their kids to earn an athletic scholarship, even though only 2% of high school athletes actually do. The odds are just as long for gymnastics, modelling, and pageants.

Storage units. Families pay hundreds of dollars a month to store stuff that’s worth less than the rental fee. This colourful New Yorker piece tells of grown siblings who’d planned to store their late mother’s furniture temporarily until they could sell it, then left it there for 20 years, paying US$50,000.

Fancy private school. We’re well aware that parents have, let’s say, strong feelings about their kids’ education, but Maggiulli points out that the elite private schools have no meaningful effect on academic outcomes. A stable home life, socioeconomics, and the parents’ educational attainment matter infinitely more. Statistics Canada has reached similar conclusions. One asterisk is that school quality really matters at the bottom of the income bracket: getting low-income kids into good public schools can pay off big.

—Abigail Covington

Read, Listen, Watch

A handy post-viewing You Can See Everything rabbit-hole guide 🩸

Canadian darling Nathan Fielder’s captivating, confounding documentary about prison-bound Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is the kind of pop-culture phenomenon that only begins when you leave the theatre. A few recs to help you process what you saw:

Read: Fielder talks fact and fiction in this Q&A with WIRED*, and author John Ganz plumbed deep into the minds of the film’s central trio.
Listen: A granular analysis of the year’s most category-defying movie, courtesy of The Big Picture.
Watch: Elamin Abdelmahmoud leads this lively postmortem panel on CBC’s Commotion.

*Article is paywalled, which, yeah, is kind of annoying. But we think good journalism is worth paying for.

Wisdom of X

if you doomscroll twitter all day of course it looks like the world is ending but if you just get off the internet and go outside you’ll find that the world is actually ending oh god this is it

Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Jenna Benchetrit (news 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), Lauren Edwards (production coordinator), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (editorial lead), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief).

Total returns shown in local currency, via TradingView.

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🧾 Amazon’s cryptic confirmations