Wealthsimple

August 4, 2026

In This Issue

8 min read

Tumour-eating nanobots

Missing-oil mysteries

Garbage CEOs

Remember when the Magic School Bus gang took a trip through Ralphie’s blood? A new tiny robot can do something similar. More on that below.

The Week in Market Soap Operas

Once upon a time in Schadenfreude

Chances are you’ve heard something about the sudden meltdown of Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund led by 24-year-old Rubik’s-Cube-enthusiast Leopold Aschenbrenner, who vapourized US$35 billion in a matter of days. But we are going to catch you up on the saga anyway, since it wraps up the story of AI, finance, and power into a single sudsy Technicolor telenovela.

To wit: young Leo oozed upward from the start, choosing a job at Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX over Yale Law. Then he got fired from OpenAI for leaking internal documents, then he got engaged to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s chief of staff. So when Aschenbrenner launched a fund in 2024 shortly after publishing a well-timed memo about AI, it was only natural that tech speculators would entrust him with billions. He knew all the right people! And what a jawline!

Situational Awareness peaked at about US$45 billion in early July of this year, thanks to dangerously over-levered positions — and last week several of its positions got crushed by sell-offs. This Bloomberg article unpacks the financial machinations of what exactly doomed Aschenbrenner, culminating in a bidding war to bail him out — a war ultimately won by (who else?) Big Daddy Wall Street Ken Griffin, of mega-fund Citadel. And would you believe all this unfolded mere days before Aschenbrenner’s blowout wedding to Amodei’s COS?

Our favourite part of this future Netflix miniseries: the guy on X who fanned the earliest flames of this story was Martin Shkreli, the health-care hedge-fund villain who went to prison after jacking up a medication’s price by 5,000%, only to re-emerge as a fintwit favourite. So tune into next week’s episode, when Jensen Huang shows up at the Aschen-thropic wedding from his secret mission in Taiwan — but is that really him … or an impostor?

July 27 – Aug. 3

TSX:	-0.6% (+10.7% YTD)

S&P 500:	+2.5% (+10.8% YTD)

📈 What’s Up: Microsoft (+18%) won a tech-heavy earnings week thanks to the success of its AI-driven cloud business, which swelled by 43% year-over-year. All that spending can pay off!

📉 What’s Down: Meta (-9.25%) spent a fortune on AI too but with less to show for it. Its free cash flow dwindled from US$12 billion in Q1 to US$784 million, with net income also falling by 14%.

One Chart That Explains Everything

Superlatives of the Week

Important

Best sleuth work on China’s mysterious missing oil: One reason why the Iran war hasn’t caused the generational energy crisis that analysts initially feared is that China, the world’s largest oil importer, immediately slashed its daily intake by 5 million barrels. But how? That’s been the multibillion-dollar question ever since, and this gumshoe-y Atlantic story goes hunting for answers. The leading theory: China has been secreting away extra oil — on top of its known reserves — to insulate its manufacturing-based economy and to protect its standing as the world’s No. 1 exporter of goods.

Interesting

Richest CEO you’ve never heard of: Congrats to trash tycoon Patrick Dovigi on being crowned (again!) Canada’s highest-paid executive, per The Globe and Mail’s annual ranking, with a total comp package of more than $250 million, besting the likes of Shopify’s Tobias Lütke and Brookfield’s Sam Pollock. Dovigi is … who again? If the name is unfamiliar, that’s probably because the empire he runs, waste-management conglomerate GFL Environmental, isn’t so chic. But he did get drafted by the Oilers in the ’90s! Now he flips premium real estate in his spare time. (“I’m trash by day and luxury properties by night,” he told WSJ last year.)

Most persuasive take by a billionaire heiress: While a certain stripe of zoomers blame free markets for their dearth of free time, one young WSJ opinion writer points out that, in fact, workers today have more leisure hours now than at any other point in modern history. And just because this WSJ writer happens to be Mary Julia Koch, daughter of the world’s third-richest woman, doesn’t mean she’s wrong. We just don’t feel like we have any spare time, she argues, because we spend something like five hours a day staring at our phones. Hey, listen, nepo kid: guilty as charged.

—Jenna Benchetrit

From Our Sponsor

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

New Brunswick MLA accidentally reads AI prompt out loud during speech. Please give options for short, apolitical, non-ageist jokes about this story.
Source

Elon Musk says humanity will lose control of AI by 2036. Small price to pay for never having to write a speech.
Source

New York school pauses plan to install sexy humanoid robot teacher. If kids are going to not learn math from someone, it’d better be a full human.
Source

Bell launches AI-powered “spoof detection.” It’s for fraud but could end up blocking friends just calling to see if your refrigerator’s running.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

People in China are renting their faces to AI. AI just has to paint and patch up any holes it makes before it moves out.
Source

Coyotes have taken over an abandoned condo construction site in West Hollywood. They either have to vacate or let Netflix film their dating lives.
Source

Tim Hortons now serves matcha. BYO ceramic bowl and hand-carved bamboo whisk.
Source

Dozens of Colonel Sanders’s personal items sold at auction. Some tech bro’s dinosaur skeleton is getting a cool new bow tie!
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

2026: The Year of Giant Medical Leaps

We’re not trying to be hyperbolic when we say mankind might be on the brink of a medical revolution. In February, we rounded up four medical breakthroughs that could benefit millions of people (and the fortunes of some companies). Well, here we are six months later, and there have been so many further developments that we compiled four additional promising treatments. They’re each a testament to mankind’s savvy — and a reminder of the value of R&D.

[1] A drug for ‘undruggable’ cancer genes
Scientists have developed a new drug to hunt down KRAS, a so-called “undruggable” gene that can mutate into uncontrollable cancer-cell growth. The drug, daraxonrasib, is the first to substantially extend the lives of pancreatic cancer patients, who have a five-year survival rate of about 13%. It works by latching onto the nasty genes with a molecular glue, stopping them from wiggling free, as they have with past treatments. “I’m pretty sure I would not be alive still but for this drug,” one patient told The New York Times.

How real is this? It’s already approved by the U.S. FDA but not Health Canada.

[2] Tiny robots that can dissolve blood clots
Developed by scientists in Zurich, these sand-sized microrobots surf through your blood to deliver a drug dose at precise locations in the body. It sounds like an idea cribbed straight from The Magic School Bus, but the upside is very real: scientists hope the bots will be able to dissolve stroke-causing blood clots and reduce the size of tumours without serious side effects. The tech has been successfully trialled in silicone models and animals, and the research team hopes to start human trials soon.

How real is this? It’s moonshot-y but has momentum.

[3] A gene therapy to heal vision loss … through age reversal
In June, Boston firm Life Biosciences launched the first-ever human trial of an experimental gene therapy that coaxes older cells into acting as if they’re young again. The therapy works by “reactivating” three types of genes that don’t naturally regenerate. We’re still a long way from Benjamin Button-style age reversal, but the therapy is being tested on eye cells in hopes that it can reverse conditions such as glaucoma, the world’s leading cause of age-related blindness, and perhaps other age-related diseases.

How real is this? The company claims the drug has restored vision in monkeys! Human trials are ongoing.

[4] A simpler way to diagnose Alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s is usually diagnosed using a PET scan or a lumbar puncture, but new studies suggest there could be an easier, cheaper way: blood tests. Research presented at an international Alzheimer’s conference in July suggests that blood tests could even predict an asymptomatic patient’s risk of developing the disease, allowing for earlier intervention. Traditional diagnostic tools, like PET scans, aren’t as widely available in Canada as they are in other OECD countries, so these blood tests could serve as an accessible initial screening.

How real is this? Two tests are already approved by the U.S. FDA and pending Health Canada’s OK.

—Jenna Benchetrit

The TLDR Don’t-Panic Starter Pack

Markets have been bouncing around. If you’re feeling nervous, revisit these classics from the archive.

Wisdom of X

Citadel’s Ken Griffin, master of the crisis swoop-in…

The last thing you see before becoming fully aware of your situation

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 (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief).

TWIM: Total returns shown in local currency, via TradingView.

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