Wealthsimple

June 1, 2026

In This Issue

8 min read

Dress-sneaker excess

Trillionaire-club invites

Furious Ferrari fans

Cyle Larin and our men’s World Cup team will bring joy and community to Canada this month — but a financial windfall? Not so fast. | Getty Images

The Week in Markets

Dude, everyone’s getting Dell

Another week, another AI sweepstakes winner — that’s how it’s beginning to feel, right? Well, last week we got two winners: Idaho chipmaker Micron (more on its rise below) and Y2K flashback Dell, whose stock surged 32% on Friday, a single-day company record, thanks to an unexpectedly boffo earnings beat. Unlike this time last year, though, when CEOs could just chant “AI AI AI” and watch their stock price levitate, investors now want receipts. They’re following the money all the way down the AI supply chain, from the sexy microchip companies (Nvidia), to the worker-bee storage companies (Sandisk), to infrastructure companies (Vertiv, Bloom Energy), to hardware companies whose founders are chummy with Donald Trump (Dell). They’re picking winners and losers, not just betting on AI like it’s red on a roulette wheel — and that means a reckoning for anyone whose core products seem ripe for disruption (SaaS-quatches like Salesforce) or whose founder is burning through AI cash much faster than his company can make it.

TSX:	+0.83% (+9.3% YTD)

S&P 500:	+0.93% (+11% YTD)

Meet the Trillionaire Club’s Newest Member
Let’s dwell on Micron for a moment, because its recent run perfectly illustrates investors’ rapid repricing of AI winners and losers. The company was founded in 1978 and has long been a minor player in the memory-chip industry — until the AI data-centre buildout spiked demand for its high-bandwidth memory chips. It took 48 years for the company’s valuation to reach US$500 billion, but, in just 48 trading days this spring, its valuation doubled, vaulting it into the US$1 trillion club. About a quarter of that gain came last week following a bullish UBS analysis.

One Chart That Explains Everything

How Far Would You Go for World Cup Futbol?

What Happened Last Week

Toronto Tech Week Must-Haves: Dress Sneakers and Boundless Optimism

Hello! Jenna here. Last week, C-suiters, scrappy entrepreneurs, and just about every tech journalist in Canada gathered for Toronto Tech Week to spend a few days musing and mingling, flooding the zone with buzzwords (“digital sovereignty,” etc.), and competing to see who could project more optimism. I sat in on some of the week’s most provocative talks to get a sense for why the vibes were so sunny even after a year of trade wars, oil shocks, and AI overload.

The locale: History, an east-end music venue co-owned by Drake, which — thanks Iceman — might explain why it was freezing in there.
The couture du jour: Quarter zips and dress sneakers — so many dress sneakers, all the same muddy shade of brown as the nitro cold brew served at the bar.
The AI discourse: If you haven’t read that viral NYT op-ed about rising fears in Silicon Valley that AI will create a “permanent underclass” of displaced workers, Shopify’s Tobi Lütke says don’t bother. The notion “sounds smart, but it’s dumb,” he assured the crowd, noting that similar unrealized fears have accompanied every new technology.
Some double-talk: Uber COO Andrew Macdonald thinks AI will be “broadly fantastic for society” — even if his company’s 10 million rideshare drivers get replaced by autonomous cars. Quite the U-turn from his podcast remarks just a few days earlier about how Uber’s AI spending is getting harder to justify!
A little rah-rah Canada: “The rest of the world is increasingly interested in getting technology outside of China and the U.S.,” said Nick Frosst, co-founder of Canadian LLM maker Cohere, a torchbearer for the “digital sovereignty” movement that’s making deals in Asia and Europe. No wonder Carney’s a big Cohere fan.
Politicking: Speaking of Carney, the new PM sure got a far warmer reception from the room than his predecessor, and after months of anticipation, they’ll finally get a look at the Liberal’s long-gestating AI strategy this week.

—Jenna Benchetrit

From Our Sponsor

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

Ferrari’s stock falls with the release of its first fully-electric car, the widely-mocked Luce. One thing’s for sure: it’s the Ferrari of brand devaluation.
Source

Starbucks apologizes for promotion that evoked a South Korean massacre. Immediately pulls plug on new Double Chocolate Tiananmen Squares.
Source

Installs of DuckDuckGo, a search engine with a “no AI” option, are surging. Sorry Google, but you made it weird.
Source

Tim Hortons is bringing back the grilled cheese. Stop in and get one if you’re not full from the grilled cheese you had at Dunkin’.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

Mussolini’s granddaughter wins Italian version of Celebrity Big Brother. Says she can’t wait to team up with Der Bachelor and invade Eurovision.
Source

Doug Ford demonstrates howling like a wolf to scare off coyotes. The coyotes hear it and run to a wolf den to laugh about Doug Ford.
Source

There’s a new fitness/self-defense class in Chicago called “Pistols and Pilates.” It’s good, but it’s no CrossBow CrossFit.
Source

AI companion startup is hiring “consultants” to test their guided masturbation feature. Very hands-on, growth mindset a plus.
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

The World Cup Will Be a Party for Canada — But Not a Cash Cow

On June 11, the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup will get underway here in North America, bringing with it billions of dollars in presumed economic impact via packed stadiums, giant sponsorship deals, and fully-booked hotels. Culturally, this is North America’s biggest soccer moment in decades. But, as authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski revealed in their 2009 bestseller Soccernomics, which they’ve updated for this year’s World Cup, the tournament is a mixed bag for host cities. Kuper recently told us why.

Toronto and Vancouver have each spent hundreds of millions of dollars to host World Cup matches, and the feds chipped in another $473 million to help. Is that a good investment?

It doesn’t pay off financially. Many studies have shown that hosting has no lasting effect on tourism, jobs, or foreign investment. The fans who travel often just stay a night, because it’s expensive and they’re not in Vancouver to see Vancouver. At the same time, tourists who would normally visit Toronto or Vancouver skip out, thinking, Well, I won’t go because prices will be higher, hotels will be full, security will be a hassle. And FIFA takes almost all the money. They get the TV rights, the sponsorship rights, even the match tickets, and they try to stop any city putting sales tax on tickets.

So what's the benefit to hosting games?

Studies show an increase in happiness. Even lonely people get welcomed into the national conversations. There’s actually a fall in suicides in countries that participate in World Cups. You don’t throw a party because you think it’s going to make you rich. You throw a party to have a good time.

This year ticket prices are the highest in World Cup history, with finals tickets going for nearly US$11,000 face value. Prices have fallen recently on the secondary market, but there are still thousands of unsold tickets. Did FIFA misread the market?

To create a sense of scarcity, FIFA didn’t initially put all the tickets up for sale. It was quite an amateurish attempt to starve the market to encourage people to buy at high prices. [But] I saw a Cape Verde/Saudi Arabia ticket today for $7.

For decades, FIFA has sold the World Cup partly on the idea that soccer is uninterrupted. But this year for the first time, FIFA is allowing commercials during water breaks. Why?

FIFA does various youth World Cups, and it does the Women’s World Cup. But the Men’s World Cup is its only really lucrative property, so this is their money for the next four years. They’re hoping to get about US$11 billion, which they’ll funnel down to the national federations, which in 2027 will vote on whether to keep FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, in power. That’s the promise FIFA makes: we give you the money, then you vote for the president. So the commercial breaks? The voters love it.

Soccernomics debuted nearly two decades ago. Looking back, what did you get right in the first edition and what did you whiff?

Hosting doesn’t pay off; we got that right. What we got wrong is we thought that Western European countries with small populations would not keep winning and that wealthier countries with bigger populations would start winning. That hasn’t happened. With the exception of Messi's Argentina, we still see the Western Europeans remain dominant.

This interview by Ian Frisch was edited and condensed for clarity.

The TLDR Personal-Finance Starter Pack

Last week, news broke that Canada has slipped into a technical recession. Don’t freak: the economy is still expected to grow in 2026. But a little financial housekeeping never hurts. These gems from the TLDR archives can help.

Post of Wisdom

the em dash is no longer the clearest sign of ai-generated writing. honestly? it's this.

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 (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).

Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Micron.

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

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⚽ Is the World Cup really worth it?