Wealthsimple

August 10, 2026

In This Issue

8 min read

Gen Z’s $8 pastry habit

Shopify’s blowout earnings

A crypto-hack confessional

Nobody asked for another Ocean’s Eleven sequel, but here’s our script idea anyway: Danny Ocean steals $140M worth of Bitcoin (then, you know, returns it all at the end). More on crypto heists below. | Warner Bros. Pictures

The Week in Markets

Surprise! Situational Awareness was the bottom

The AI trade is blowing up. Or at least that was investors’ big worry this summer. And who could blame them! Chip stocks collapsed 26% in a month. Korea got margin-called. Then, late last month, AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness blew up like a Grucci firework display, compounding the it’s-so-over vibes. But did the AI-fuelled rally die in July? Nope, thanks to one thing — stellar earnings. So far, 86% of U.S. companies have hauled in more cash than expected this earnings season, the highest share since 2021. (Similar story with TSX companies.)

The earnings surprises vaulted the major indexes to fresh all-time highs last week, and chip stocks jumped +17% off their recent lows. So, in effect, July cleared out a bunch of risky, market-destabilizing leveraged bets, à la S.A., which helped investors relax and refocus on corporate profits and, wow, were they strong. Some analysts are calling it a bull-market reset. The question everyone is now fighting over is whether earnings can keep the bull market charging ahead at this same furious pace.

TSX:	+2.6% (+14.4% YTD)

S&P 500:	+3.9% (+12.8% YTD)

One Chart That Explains Everything

Superlatives of the Week

Best reminder to be greedy when others are fearful: Last week, we told you about Ken Griffin, the deca-billionaire hedge funder/dinosaur-bone collector whose über fund, Citadel, swooped in to save the sinking-ship fund Situational Awareness after it vapourized US$35 billion. (Mazel tov to the firm’s wunderkind founder, Leopold Aschenbrenner, who is now officially married — our gift’s on the way.) Griffin, considered one of Wall Street’s most cunning operators, famously chartered a jet to Houston after Enron collapsed and poached its best quantitative researchers. (He also hires 300 brainiac interns a year so that older staff have to defend their seats.) Last week, we learned Griffin’s latest gambit paid off: Citadel’s flagship fund, flat for most of July, ended the month up almost 6%, thanks in part to the discounted AI stocks it bought from S.A.

Most emphatic “told you so” in Canadian tech: While other tech giants struggle to justify their AI spending, Shopify is seeing major benefits. The company’s stock surged by 25% on Wednesday after it beat Q2 revenue-growth expectations (its fifth consecutive quarter of 30%+ growth), partly thanks to its AI tools — like one that helps merchants swiftly build their online storefronts. Its strong revenue from payment processing also strengthened its case to investors that it controls the plumbing of the e-commerce economy.

Most “I can’t afford a house, so an $8 pastry it is” trend: Gen Z doesn’t have much in the way of savings, but it does love to spend on little treats, per fresh Bank of America data. (The trend looks similar here in Canada.) Whereas millennials had avocado toast and fingerstache tattoos, zoomers burn cash on beauty products, snacks, and jewelry. Economists are calling it the “little treat economy,” the result of joyful splurging on frivolous purchases to fill the void left by unaffordable big-ticket items, like homes. Gen Z’s average spending on little treats grew by more than 6% YoY in June, compared to 3% for all generations. And, really, who needs a house when you can wait in line for an hour to eat a Brodflour sticky-toffee pudding danish?

—Jenna Benchetrit

From Our Sponsor

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

Disney signs deal to let TikTokers incorporate its content into their posts. Watch for instant classics like Snow White and the Seven Kitchen Workflow Hacks.
Source

The ultimate tie-in machine: BMW is putting ads for the new Spider-Man movie on dashboard screens.
Source

Biotech startup creates gene-edited beagles for people allergic to dogs. “Can you make us more allergenic?” ask cats.
Source

Two-dollar Canadian Tire bags sell out after Heated Rivalry star is seen carrying one. Store wishes it was a band saw or patio set, but whatever.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

NYT investigation finds that Crocs keeps an office in Malta to dodge taxes. Not, as one would assume, to dodge ridicule.
Source

U.S. chain “Salad and Go” closes all locations. “Lettuce and Explode” still hanging on.
Source

Air-conditioned clothing shown during Paris Fashion Week. But don’t worry, your flame-retardant high-waters will never go out of style.
Source

Myspace is coming back. Great news until you remember you no longer have eight friends.
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

How I Lost $1.6 Million in Bitcoin in 8 Minutes

On July 31, Toronto-based entrepreneur and personal trainer Jonathan Goodman, 40, discovered that he’d lost $1.6 million in a major Bitcoin hack. The thieves targeted offline-password devices made by the Canadian company Coinkite and stole roughly $140 million worth of Bitcoin across 7,300 accounts. Goodman, author of Unhinged Habits, spoke with TLDR’s Jenna Benchetrit about the experience.

I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Canada. My dad’s an engineer, and my mom’s a teacher. My relationship to money growing up was: you’re a professional, you have a salary, you invest it prudently, and you can be reasonably assured that you’re going to be taken care of.

I first looked at crypto in 2017, after my personal-training business had taken off. But the risk profile wasn’t what I was looking for, so I didn’t buy any. A few years later, it seemed like the risks had evolved enough that it made sense to buy, so I started putting 10% to 15% of my company’s excess profits into Bitcoin. Over a year and a half, I put in over a million dollars, and my holdings grew to $3 million at one point.

Around this time, I bought a hardware device called a Coldcard wallet, made by Coinkite. It generated and stored a complicated offline password that I used to access my Bitcoin on the public digital ledger. That kept my Bitcoin safe, in theory, because you would need the physical hardware to access the password.

Jump ahead to this July, and I was in a public library with my wife and kids when I saw a Facebook post from a friend who’s a big Bitcoin guy. The post basically was like: there’s been a hack, so if you use a Coldcard wallet, move your money immediately.

I thought, There’s no way this affects me, but I’ll just check. I hadn’t looked at my accounts in a while; I never paid attention to the ups and downs in the crypto market, because my philosophy was that this was a long-term bet. But when my account loaded, I saw the red lines, and I knew that everything was gone. It had happened over eight minutes two days earlier.

My wife and I went for a walk and processed it, then I got to work creating a digital paper trail. I sent a message to Coinkite right away. I sent a message to my financial advisor and accountants to tell them what happened. We were out of town at the time, so I decided that night that I needed to go back to Toronto and file a police report.

Talking to the police was a funny experience. They were like, “Oh, did somebody get into your safe-deposit box?” I had to explain that Bitcoin exists on a digital ledger and that to access that ledger, you need a password that is supposedly impossible to crack.

What I did not know was that a vulnerability in the device’s code made the password much less random than it should have been. A group of hackers was able to guess the password millions of times, at scale, until they cracked it. A lot of the early reports said that AI was likely used to identify the code vulnerability. Whether that’s true, I have no idea. For me, the scariest part is no one even knows where these people are in the world.

One reason I haven’t jumped off a cliff is because I invested in Bitcoin knowing that it could go to zero — though, of course, I didn’t think it would happen like this. Fortunately, none of this was money that my family depended on; it was literally locked away for my kids in the distant future.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is that Usain Bolt ate over a thousand chicken nuggets during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which sounds insane. But he did it because he was afraid that the food in China would upset his stomach, and the only thing that could stop him from winning was getting sick. I like that story because that’s basically my financial philosophy: eliminating the smallest amount of catastrophic risk is often worth sacrificing some of the upside. And I don’t think that’s changed. But am I going to buy Bitcoin again? Probably not.

Wisdom of X

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS MAKES INVESTING RETURN WITH $400M BET

this time with 8x TRS leverage

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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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TLDR is offered by Wealthsimple Media Inc. and is for informational purposes only. Any views expressed are those of the individual author and/or of Wealthsimple Media Inc., not of Wealthsimple Financial Corp or any of its other subsidiaries or affiliates. The content in TLDR is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell assets or securities, nor any other kind of professional advice. TLDR is not a research report and should not serve as the basis for making investment decisions. Wealthsimple Media Inc. does not endorse any third-party views referenced in this content. When you invest, your money is at risk and it is possible that you may lose some or all of your investment. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Historical returns, hypothetical returns, expected returns and images included in this content are for illustrative purposes only. Always research before investing.

🧁 Just a little treat?