Wealthsimple

May 19, 2026

In This Issue

8 min read

Huang hitchhikes

Dunkin’ returns

Warsh arrives

Canadian queen Sandra Oh is long gone from Grey’s Anatomy, but as our population ages, her profession — health care — is booming. We explain below. | Ron Tom | ABC

The Week in Markets

Is the IPO drought finally over?

We hope you had a nice holiday! All eyes last week were on AI infrastructure firm Cerebras, an Nvidia rival known for its powerful, dinner-plate-sized processors, whose monster US$5.5 billion IPO on May 14 was the 15th biggest in U.S. history. The company’s shares popped 68% after listing, with interest in its stock outweighing supply by 25 times. It’s the clearest sign yet of insatiable demand for AI stocks — and it presages even bigger blockbuster IPOs for Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which are expected to go public later this year. With some non-AI IPOs also in the offing for 2026, this year’s debuts could rival those of 2021, the biggest IPO fundraising year on record — provided resurgent inflation and rate hikes don’t get in the way.

TSX:	-0.8% (+6.3% YTD)

S&P 500:	+0.6% (+7.7% YTD)

📈 What’s Up: Cisco, internet hardware maker of yore, rounded out strong earnings with a timely AI pivot — the kind propping up markets right now. Its stock soared nearly 27% last week.

📉 What’s Down: Home Depot, in contrast, is among the retailers floundering over lukewarm discretionary spending (i.e., wants, not needs) as oil costs climb. Its share price fell almost 8%.

One Chart That Explains Everything

What Happened Last Week

Important

Relax, says the BoC — AI is not taking your job. Here’s a pattern we’re seeing a lot lately: CEO blames AI for job cuts, 5,000 news outlets print the headline, people freak out, rinse and repeat. But here’s the (good) thing: the Bank of Canada, in a new report, says it hasn’t seen a shred of evidence that AI is displacing workers en masse — if anything, it’s making them more productive. In fresh survey results, more than half of workers say AI saves them one to two hours a day and about a third use it for creating and editing content. Meanwhile, here we are, writing this newsletter with our brains and fingers like a bunch of doofuses.

Jensen Huang’s China invite must’ve gotten lost in the mail. After the media noticed that Nvidia’s CEO was curiously absent from the list of 16 business delegates travelling to Beijing for last week’s big U.S.–China summit, Donald Trump rang him up and personally invited him. Air Force One had already taken off, though, so Huang had to catch up with the jet in Alaska during a layover. Awkward! But also a handy metaphor for the U.S. government’s ambivalence about letting Nvidia sell its chips to China. So far, it has sold zero. Huang would like that number to go up. But so far Beijing has seemed unmoved by Huang’s visit.

Interesting

Trump gets his new Fed chair. But will Kevin Warsh, a Trump-appointed Fed deputy, give him the interest-rate cuts that Warsh’s predecessor, Jerome Powell, refused? Or will spiking inflation spook him into defying the president like Powell did? Warsh was narrowly confirmed by the U.S. Senate last week, with Democrats labelling him a “sock puppet” who will compromise the Fed’s independence and Republicans insisting that he’s not as pliable as he may seem. (Canadian officials will be closely watching Warsh’s decisions.) His first test might come soon: investors are now betting that the Fed’s next move will be a rate hike, not a cut.

Eww, you’re still typing? Time to get “voicepilled.” It’s Silicon Valley’s productivity hack du jour: making a habit of speaking to, as opposed to typing on, your computer or smartphone, aka getting “voicepilled.” The term comes from a social-media post written (spoken?) by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in October, in which he claimed the shift had changed his life with a Matrix-style clarity. Dictation is faster than pressing keys, and a handful of startups, including Toronto-based Superwhisper, have built AI-powered apps that can translate even your most incoherent 2 a.m. voice note into crisp, readable text. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy apparently swears by it.

—Jenna Benchetrit

From Our Sponsor

Last chance to change your (financial) life!

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

Canadians are being warned about an influx of ticks from America. So those pesky bloodsuckers that get under your skin? They might bring ticks.
Source

eBay rejects GameStop’s takeover bid. It won’t even combine shipping to Buy It Now with Depop.
Source

Dunkin’ is returning to Canada with healthier options to appeal to Canadians. If you like Boston Kreme, you’ll love Barrie Peptide!
Source

A San Francisco startup is making mini data centres for outside your house. Your neighbours will love not having to travel so far to protest.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

Gen Z is on a big hacky-sack kick. Gen X parents are kicking themselves for raising kids who like hacky sack.
Source

French police warn people to look out for drunk deer. Bambi’s been hitting the grapes pretty hard since his mother died.
Source

A Wordle game show is coming to NBC. Grand prize is a heated toilet and a year’s supply of the word ADIEU.
Source

Fox Sports is offering $50,000 to watch all 104 World Cup games in a plexiglass cube in Times Square. “Can’t be done,” says David Blaine.
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

Canada’s Hottest Job Market? Taking Care of Old People

If you spend any time poking around fintwit, you’ve likely seen posts about how health-care jobs have been propping up the U.S. labour market. But did you know an identical trend is playing out here in Canada? From April 2025 to April 2026, the health-care and social-assistance industries alone added 119,000 jobs — a more than 4% YoY jump. Without those jobs, total employment would have contracted by 52,000. And this isn’t some weird blip. Health care has been one of Canada’s fastest-growing job segments for decades. But just how big has it become — and what does health care’s job dominance tell us about Canada’s economy?

In the 1970s, manufacturing led the way, employing about 20% of the Canadian workforce. Today, the care sector — nurses, social workers, nannies, etc. — is the largest employer in every province except Ontario. All told, about 14% of Canadians work in the sector, and the total number of care-related jobs has more than doubled since 1997. That tells us two big things about Canada: we’re getting old! And we’re rich enough to afford lots of quality care!

One of the few sectors that has rivalled care’s growth is professional services, a catchall term for fields like architecture, advertising, finance, law, and tech. These white-collar jobs now employ 7% of Canadians, up from 4.7% in 1997.

Now let’s see which jobs are carrying the economy…

Canada’s economic engine? White-collar work

Health care and social assistance employ armies of people — but the sector contributes just 8% to the GDP. White-collar industries employ about half as many folks but generate 21% of Canada’s economic output. Why? A real-estate firm, say, can generate heaps of money with minimal head count or overhead. Health care cannot.

The Upshot
The clearest micro takeaway is that if you’re in a care or white-collar industry, job opportunities should be abundant (maybe not right now but generally speaking). But unlike white-collar employees, care workers make below-average pay — in part because it’s a labour-intensive career and technology can only do so much to increase productivity, which gets reflected in wages.

Then there’s the macro trade-off: health care and elder care are largely cost centres (i.e., they’re not products that can be exported or scaled the same way as software, goods, or financial services). Don’t get us wrong: quality care improves living standards, which is good. Still, whatever cash we spend on care isn’t being invested into higher-productivity sectors, like R&D, where we’ve fallen behind. So care’s soaring growth says more about what Canada isn’t building than what it is.

—Brennan Doherty

Other Very Good Reads

The Iran war is causing tons of shortages — and based on these articles below, it sure seems like birthday parties are very much ruined until further notice.

Japanese snack packages turning black and white as war depletes ink supply
Ultra-popular snack maker Calbee is going grey scale. | NPR

Is there a Diet Coke shortage? What to know about India ‘candemic’
The drink has become something of a status symbol. | CBC News

In a helium shortage, balloon stores scramble to stay afloat
Party store owners say the supply of gas is tight. | The Globe and Mail*

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

Wisdom of X

I don't know if I have the bandwidth right now to listen to three Drake albums. Just tell me if we have a summer bop or not.

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 Nvidia.

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

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🎤 Let’s all get voicepilled! (It’s safe)