Wealthsimple

June 8, 2026

In This Issue

8 min read

Sleepy AI policy

Creepypasta IP

Semiconductor sell-off

Now here’s a scary thought: the success of Backrooms has Hollywood scrambling to find the next hit based on creepypasta IP. See the chart for more. | Asterios Moutsokapas | A24

The Week in Markets

Parabolas go in both directions, ya know

Here’s hoping you resisted the temptation to peek at your portfolio on Friday, because if not … yikes. The S&P 500 suffered its worst day since April 2025, snapping a nine-week winning streak. The so-called “Parabolic Seven” — a bundle of white-hot chip and memory companies comprising AMD, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, Marvell, Micron, and SanDisk — took the hardest hit, with each surrendering at least 10%. It was a sharp, but not altogether unforeseeable, reversal from the previous five months, when the AI data-centre boom drove their shares up around 250% on average. What’s curious is that the fall came after a week of mostly positive economic indicators. So why did the markets turn on a dime? Is the AI rally over, or did we just skim off the froth? There’s a lot to unpack, so we’ll go through all of it in the Big Important Story.

TSX:	-0.4% (+8.2% YTD)

S&P 500:	-2.6% (+7.4% YTD)

One Chart That Explains Everything

Hollywood's summer movie slate: mostly sequels and reboots

What Happened Last Week

Ottawa’s new AI plan aims to please everyone. That may be a problem.

Canada’s AI minister, Evan Solomon, is an ex-journalist, so we feel duty bound to note that he blew his first big government deadline by five months — but finally, the national AI strategy he’s leading has been unveiled. You’ve probably heard the top-line goals: free AI-literacy training for all by 2031, 90,000 new AI-related jobs, and a 60% AI-adoption rate for small/medium businesses by 2034.

While some cheered its release, others pointed out that it’s pretty light on actual legislative or regulatory proposals. What the strategy really did is highlight the impossible tasks ahead for Ottawa: pacifying regular Canadians who don’t like or trust AI, appealing to domestic tech firms that are hungry for wider adoption and less red tape, and keeping Big Tech at arm’s length without alienating it further. Good luck pushing that boulder up Parliament Hill!

next up: the ai strategy remediation strategy

Interesting

Why is the youth unemployment rate so high? Blame WFH. The number remains worrying — 13.4% — and new research points to one overlooked culprit: working from home. It turns out recruiters are far more reluctant to hire young grads into a WFH role, in part because it takes longer to train them from afar. And because of that, young remote workers can seem like worse investments than in-office ones. WFH is far from the only factor that’s left youth out of work. Still, maybe think twice before clicking that “remote only” box on Indeed.

The GLP-1s have quickly gone from “thing celebrities do to lose weight” to “possible cancer-fighting tool.” Studies showcased at a major oncology conference last week found that GLP-1s might reduce the spread of breast, lung, bowel, and liver cancers, while a study of 110,000 women concluded that the drugs may also reduce the risk of breast cancer by up to 35%. This comes weeks after Eli Lilly claimed that its newest weight-loss drug, retatrutide, helped trial patients lose 25% to 35% of their body weight on average (that news pushed its stock up 16% on the month). But don’t call GLP-1s a miracle drug quite yet: it’s unclear whether the drugs themselves lower risk or weight loss generally improves a person’s well-being.

—Jenna Benchetrit

It's actually normal to give away $1M a month

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

The UN urges ditching the niceties in AI prompts to save energy. No way — if we’re going down, please make it quick, thanks!
Source

A protein-powder shortage is looming. Cold foam wonders what it’s even doing if it’s not getting proteinmaxxed.
Source

Google wants to release millions of good mosquitoes to fight mosquito-borne illnesses. Yes, they’re tackling malaria while maintaining their stranglehold on “sushi near me.”
Source

Android will now warn you if a caller is impersonating someone you know. Guess we’ll have to find other ways to have fun with Mom.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

Tim Hortons apologizes for not melting the cheese in some of its reintroduced grilled cheeses. It’s not up to speed on all the new grilled-cheese technology.
Source

Scientific research finds that birds masturbate. “Scientific research” is one way to describe what sometimes happens between a lonely scientist and his budgie.
Source

Annual list of things Canadians left in Ubers released. It includes stuff like “a dozen pizzas” but somehow not “dignity.”
Source

There’s a new Gerber Baby, aka a future adult who peaked at one.
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

Why did the AI rally just hit a wall? And what comes next?

As we mentioned up top, the plight of the “Parabolic Seven” got all the headlines on Friday, but perhaps more disconcerting than the size of the losses (-10%!) was the speed (-10% in one day). To predict what it means for the AI rally, first let’s examine how we got here.

First, AI earnings went bananas. As regular readers know, 2026 has been defined by mid-tier chipmakers (e.g., Micron) hulking out into world beaters. The Parabolic Seven plus three other tech companies drove 80% of the S&P 500’s gains YTD through May 31, and it wasn’t just frothy speculation — they’re also swimming in cash. Dell’s Q1 earnings grew 214% year-over-year. AMD: 91%. And so on.

Overall, the S&P added 16% in two months after April 1 — one of the fastest climbs in its history — with oversized earnings easing fears of an AI bubble. As Steve Chiavarone, Federated Hermes’s deputy chief investment officer, recently put it in the Financial Times: “A bubble would laugh at the valuations that we’re paying right now.”

It wasn’t just the chipmakers, though. The entire S&P 500 got in on the profit bonanza, growing Q1 earnings 28.6% year-over-year. Nearly every sector brought in more money than Wall Street anticipated — which only boosted everyone’s confidence higher.

Meanwhile, retail investors bought the dip — and then kept buying and buying. In March, when stocks tumbled following the U.S.’s and Israel’s attack on Iran, retail traders shrugged off the downturn and snapped up a record US$39 billion in U.S. stocks and ETFs. Then, with momentum on their side, retail traders kept piling into high-flying chip stocks — using lots of leverage/borrowed money. In fact, by May 1, retail traders had bought more stock with leverage in 2026 than they did during the ultra-frothiness of 2021, pouring extra gas on the rally.

surging retail margin account balance GS

Next, the rally got narrow. Despite strong corporate earnings, by late May, very few S&P 500 stocks beyond the Parabolic Seven were moving much at all, and two-thirds of the index’s stocks were down at least 20% from their all-time highs. The bull run didn’t have “much breadth,” in Wall Street speak, the implication being that it wouldn’t take much to knock the market off course.

Then, Broadcom went a smidge less parabolic. Fast forward to Wednesday of last week, when Parabolic Seven’er Broadcom posted a merely diagonal 48% year-over-year revenue growth at a market moment when, as trader/TLDR friend Brent Donnelly put it, “anything less than perfection means you get Old Yellered.” For Broadcom, that looked like a 15% drop in ONE DAY. Which sapped enthusiasm for the chip rally.

And then on Friday, markets got killed because people got jobs. A strong U.S. jobs report on Friday was welcome news for workers and the economy but bad news for markets, because it basically gave the U.S. Fed permission to raise interest rates at its next meeting. And with stocks priced to perfection and leverage juicing the rally, the possibility of higher borrowing costs was enough to cause a Squid Games-style bloodbath.

THE UPSHOT
If there’s a practical takeaway, it’s that even if a stock has good reason to rise, it almost never soars perfectly straight up and to the right, and if you’re an active trader who’s bought lots of stock with borrowed money, you might lose your positions if you can’t cover a margin call. And even if you’re a normie investor who doesn’t make extra-risky leveraged trades, the market can turn against you quickly when lots of other investors are leveraged and a rapid market drop forces them to sell. So be prepared for that sort of turmoil, even when strong fundamentals, like earnings, underpin a rally.

So, do Friday’s results mean the market has turned for good? Were the permabears right about the AI bubble after all, and is the proof coming this week? It’s certainly possible! But right now the consensus seems to be that semiconductors just got overbought. Which explains why analysts were sanguine-ish on Friday. As Ohsung Kwon, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo, phrased it: “I don’t think it’s the end of the semi bull market.”

We’re about to find out.

—Jared Sullivan

The Big Listen

🚙 Why Are We Still Driving?

Driving is a frustrating and expensive headache. So why do we still do it? Andrew Miller, a Toronto-based expert on self-driving cars, makes a utopian — and dystopian — case for a future where all cars are fully autonomous. | The New York Times

Wisdom of X

"dating out of your league" isn't real. dating is a marketplace. it's called price discovery. your value is whatever clears the market

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 Broadcom and Micron (😢).

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

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🤮 Markets plunged. Now what?