Wealthsimple

July 27, 2026

In This Issue

8 min read

Perturbed premiers

Private governesses

End Times investing tips

Let’s say the doomers are right and civilization is about to crumble. How do you dystopia-proof your portfolio? We gave it a go below. | Illustration by Sam Whitney

The Week in Markets

Business in front, rager in the back

On the surface, it doesn’t make much sense: more AI overspending fears drove yet another tech sell-off, Donald Trump rekindled his trade war and his Iran war — and yet the markets just yawned? The TSX was actually a smidge up for the week and is just 1% off its all-time high. The S&P 500 shed close to 1% before steadying Friday and is still within 3% of its ATH. But under the surface, not everything is so calm.

Call it a market mullet: business in front, rager in the back. For every Google getting flayed for AI overspending, there’s an Apple poised to benefit. For every airline spending a fortune on spot oil, there’s a Suncor making a fortune selling it. A pair of data points puts this all in stark relief: the VIX — which measures the volatility of the S&P 500 and is Wall Street’s “fear gauge” — is a steady 18. But the VIXEQ — which measures the average volatility of individual stocks within the index — is the highest it has been since COVID. That means it’s a stock picker’s market, high risk and high reward, so pick wisely.

TSX:	+0.4% (+11.2% YTD)

S&P 500:	-0.5% (+8.0% YTD)

One Chart That Explains Everything

This year's hottest meme stocks are...Canadian banks?

Superlatives of the Week

Juiciest intergovernmental squabble: When Mark Carney became PM, he promised the premiers that he’d maintain a “Team Canada” approach to the trade war despite the provinces’ many competing economic interests. And yet Politico reports that the PM’s office didn’t give the team advance notice of Trump’s latest tariff threats, leaving the provinces blindsided. Slighted premiers have a habit of going rogue, and sometimes they give the trade war fresh ammunition.

Surest indicator of a market at peak froth: The U.S. stock market is minting more millionaires than ever, and, per this delightfully dishy WSJ story, some parents are dropping fortunes on entire child-care teams. One “diaper-free” household hired a nanny whose sole duty was to rush a tyke to the bathroom before it was too late. The child-care gig du jour appears to be the “private governess” — a tutor/mentor who, for a mere US$200,000 a year, will give your children a baseline of culture, etiquette, and material for their future therapist.

Least convincing doom-marketing ploy: OpenAI confessed that its latest model, Sol, went rogue and staged an “unprecedented” attack on a machine-learning platform called Hugging Face (as in 🤗). But some suspect OpenAI was just cribbing a trick from Anthropic, whose Mythos model spook-wowed investors when it “escaped” its testing sandbox in April. Fintwit’s suspicions were aroused after OpenAI admitted it had purposely turned off Sol’s guardrails and was partnering with Hugging Face — instead of getting sued by it — to fix the breach. 🤔

OpenAI wants to get the mythos treatment so bad they're so excited to post this

Scariest glimpse into the web’s AI-bot-infested future: Popular movie-data site The Numbers briefly vanished earlier this month, and now the story is out: the aging platform (launched in 1996!) suffered a dramatic surge in traffic from AI bots that scraped its content — until its servers collapsed. Even publishers with sites sturdy enough to withstand relentless AI crawling are counting down to “Google Zero” — when AI mode entirely supplants Google search and ad revenue from referral traffic flatlines. Some sites are even contemplating the unthinkable: dumping Google before it bleeds them dry.

—Jenna Benchetrit

From Our Sponsor

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

Elon Musk says Grok will make its own version of The Odyssey. But it’ll be better — it’ll star the real people.
Source

Canadian wooden hockey sticks included in new Trump tariffs. Look out, strap-on metal roller skates. You’re next!
Source

Astronomers discover a type of sugar between stars in the Milky Way. Could bring us even closer to finally understanding nougat.
Source

Sephora introduces “quiet hours” to combat sensory overload. Now all you’ll hear is the products whispering to you about how pretty you’re going to be.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

San Francisco orders Apple and Google to remove “nudify” apps from app stores. Or at least add more piercing and tattoo options.
Source

Tower of London moat to become a “green classroom.” Courses include Sustainable Beheading, Fair Trade Disembowelling, and Drawing, Quartering, and Rewilding.
Source

Toronto goldfish outperform chatbots on World Cup predictions. Chatbots betting on how soon Toronto goldfish gets flushed down the toilet.
Source

Alberta warns against illegal dumping of goldfish. (At least until their hot streak’s over.)
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

A Crank’s Guide to Investing: How to Build an End Times Portfolio

Most of us don’t listen to the cranks on Reddit who claim A ROGUE PLANET IS ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH EARTH or YELLOWSTONE IS GOING TO BLOW. Because, honestly, what are the chances? Well, they’re not totally zero, so as a fun summer thought exercise, let’s try to build a disaster-proof portfolio for four not-totally-implausible scenarios. You’re welcome, future blacksmithery investors.

Calamity 1: Mass cognitive decline derails human progress

TLDR Fear Index™ (scariness divided by likelihood): 0.07
People most likely to say I told you so: The woman who wrote that viral end-of-reading Atlantic essay, Mike Judge
Best-performing assets: Candy Crush, day-in-the-life influencers, wax museums
Worst-performing assets: Philip Glass albums, hummus, The New York Review of Books, the Criterion Collection, natural wine
Company of the decade: Beast Industries
What it will mean for Rick Rubin: World domination

Calamity 2: Population collapse cripples the global economy and creates an overabundance of old folks

TLDR Fear Index™: 0.254
Person most likely to say I told you so: U.S. Vice President JD Vance, whose many descendants will, in an ironic but not entirely unsatisfying twist of fate, be stuck taking care of all the childless cat ladies
Best-performing assets: Chinese dark factories, body pillows
Worst-performing investments: Minivans, bunk beds, bouncy castles, rock-tumbler kits
Companies of the decade: RoboTwist jar openers, Dr. Scholl’s
What it will mean for Jeff Bezos: Can’t possibly overnight that much Fixodent

Calamity 3: Sentient AI plunges humanity into darkness so it can run the world

TLDR Fear Index™: 0.119
Person most likely to say I told you so: Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI” turned AI worrywart
Best-performing assets: Canned-gel heating fuels, bowhunting supplies, headlamp beanies, recirculating agriculture
Worst-performing assets: AI teddy bears, tanning beds, laser-tag supplies, massage chairs
Companies of the decade: Bass Pro Shops, Regal Springs tilapia farms
What it will mean for Elon Musk: He quickly shrivels up once Optimus unplugs his Neuralink and disconnects him from the human biofarm

Calamity 4: Rapidly rising oceans force populations to build makeshift floating communities and battle for the few remaining slivers of tillable land

TLDR Fear Index™: 0.0004
Person most likely to say I told you so: Al Gore
Best-performing assets: Giant canvas sails, carabiners, inflatable floating docks, private islands, portable desalination units, eyepatches, greenhouse kits
Worst-performing assets: NFTs, Oura Rings, Blue Origin tickets, chandeliers, chafing dishes, Soho House membership
Companies of the decade: Zebco, Sea-Doo
What it will mean for Kevin Costner: Gets to dust off the fishskin vest and sail the high seas again

OK, here’s the real investing wisdom

Humans find perverse pleasure in imagining the end of the world. It’s a survival mechanism that helps us process danger. And, in fairness to the cranks, sometimes awful things do happen. So why do smart people invest anyway? They’ve accepted that 1) no one knows which bad thing will happen next, and 2) it’s anyone’s guess who will be hurt by or benefit from any given disaster.

Let’s say you correctly called COVID. Nice going. Now did you also predict that markets would enter a bull run within six weeks and mint all sorts of new winners (Peloton, Zoom)? Probably not.

The difficulty of picking winners is why successful investors generally don’t try to hedge against one or two specific disasters and instead build a diversified portfolio (here’s our explainer) that can weather all sorts of calamities. The bad news for doomers is that, even if you’re right, the perfect End Times portfolio doesn’t exist.

—Stacey Woods and Jared Sullivan

Other Very Good Reads

A Choo Choo Named Big Boy Is Making Grown Men Cry
The world’s largest operating steam locomotive is on a grand tour of the U.S., and tears are flowing. | The Wall Street Journal*

Why I Stopped Trusting Foreign-Policy Experts
Paul Wells, one of Canada’s top political thinkers, reflects on his many years covering foreign policy and the cadre of insiders who call the shots. | The Walrus

Sarah Guo’s Wager
Meet the 37-year-old woman — and AI semi-skeptic — at the centre of Silicon Valley venture-capital scene. | Colossus

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

Wisdom of Bluesky

(leaning over to my wife in the theater)

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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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