Wealthsimple

June 15, 2026

In This Issue

8 min read

Pricey MANGOS

Wedding witches

Adorable pizzabots

Brides are now paying witches to cast good-weather spells for their wedding day, which left us wondering: how much for Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock? | Warner Bros.

The Week in Markets

The winners keep winning

“There are only two types of stocks in this market,” a popular #fintwit wag called BuccoCapital posted last week. “You are either SpaceX or Adobe. Your TAM is either expanding toward infinity or shrinking toward zero. No there is no in between. Go [bleep] yourself. Have a great weekend.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves!

After a froth-skimmy start to the week that briefly slowed some AI darlings, the S&P 500’s momentum index and the MSCI global momentum index, which mechanically overweight stocks that have been rising steadily over the past year, were both back to nearly +30% for the year. In plain English, that means that investors keep piling money into stocks — but they’re piling into the same small handful of winners who’ve been winning all year. Meanwhile, the “breadth” of winners — as in how widespread the winning goes — is approaching a 10-year low. Or, as another popular #fintwit pundit put it, “Momentum is tall and narrow.” And the taller you climb, the harder it gets to keep clearing the next bar.

TSX:	-0.4% (+9.8% YTD)

S&P 500:	-1.4% (+8% YTD)

One Chart That Explains Everything

Post-IPO performance is all over the place

What Happened Last Week

A Very Special TLDR Yearbook Superlatives Edition!

School is almost out for summer, so we thought we’d pay tribute by shaking up our usual format and cover the news by handing out some coveted honours.

Best contrarian take on the Canadian economy: “Technical recession”? Feh! RBC doesn’t think we’re in one, nor do the big brains at BMO, TD, and KPMG, and it all comes back to GDP-per-capita — a rough measure of individual prosperity. That figure declined when immigration surged sharply in 2023–24. Now that population growth has levelled out, GDP-per-capita is rising again and recovering — meaning the average Canadian household is spending and earning more than previously thought. We know, we know: TLDR reader feedback suggests you do not agree!

Most tortured tech acronym: Farewell, FAANG — we’ll always have 2018. All the cool market kids have moved on to MANGOS — as in Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX — a goofy acronym that, come to think of it, does capture just how fluid the idea of “Big Tech” is, with economic power shifting away from social media and streaming and toward AI.

Cutest driverless vehicles: Food-delivery bots — banned in joyless Toronto — will get a trial run this fall in fun-loving Vancouver. So far, sidewalk bots have proved to be a low-stakes test of how a city’s populace might handle a driverless future. In Philly, some bots got kicked and spray-painted. So please, pizzabot, be safe out there in these streets!

Wildest wedding hack: With weddings now easily costing $30,000 to $100,000, anxious brides are paying self-styled Etsy witches to cast a “perfect weather” spell for their big day, reports Bloomberg. Search “wedding witches for weather” on Etsy, and for about US$25, you can assure yourself clear skies and check off that tricky “something blue” box.

Saddest decentralized currency (tie): Bitcoin is down nearly 27% YTD, and Ethereum is down 43%. Odd Lots co-host Joe Weisenthal offers 12 reasons why crypto is getting killed, from an AI-enabled equity gold rush to anxiety over a rising dollar to a fierce reputational blow (Bitcoin is mentioned over 1,500 times in the Epstein files).

And finally … the AI participation trophy: Apple is — at last — launching an AI-powered Siri, its long-awaited competitor to ChatGPT and Claude, and now that it’s here, Stratechery’s Ben Thompson argues that the company’s oft-criticized slow start might not matter all that much: Apple is betting people will opt for Siri’s convenience (she lives in your phone!) over a stand-alone chatbot app. Investors seem less sanguine. Shares slid by 3% after the announcement.

Steve Jobs finding out that the new Siri AI features - 16 years after he acquired the company - are a calendar reminder, photo finder and contact list search

—Jenna Benchetrit

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The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

Study finds the iPhone might be the cause of declining birth rates. Whatever, at least the iPhone will be there for you when you’re old.
Source

The British Film Institute has curated an archive of culturally significant memes. Can’t wait for the digitally restored director’s cut of Hawk Tuah Girl.
Source

Human trials begin for an injectable age-reversing drug. Clear some space on your body among your Botox, filler, and Ozempic jabs.
Source

Software engineer gets a religious exemption from using AI. She must belong to that church, Our Lady of Perpetual Work.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

Air Canada pilot accused of flying for 17 years without the proper licence. Apparently, 10,000 hours of Microsoft Flight Simulator doesn’t cut it.
Source

Study reveals about a third of millennials and Gen Xers are confused by pill-bottle directions. (It beats having to admit they need glasses.)
Source

Frozen juice concentrate will make its triumphant return to Canada. It heard everybody was really into slop.
Source

For the first time, a real dog will play Scooby-Doo. Says he’s not opposed to nudity or butt-sniffing if it’s integral to the scene.
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

Loathing AI Won’t Help You in the Long Run. A Silicon Valley Insider Explains Why

Über-rich tech tycoons are notorious for their batty takes, which makes the analyst Benedict Evans something of a rarity. He’s a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which invested early in Airbnb, Facebook, and Lyft. You might recall back in 2023 when Evans’s old partner, co-founder Marc Andreessen, published that viral (and pretty extreme) Techno-Optimist Manifesto? Evans is known for taking a softer tack. He’s a careful pragmatist who periodically grabs the tech industry’s attention with his incisive reports about emerging technologies, and he’s been right enough over the past decade that he’s gained a reputation as a tech insider’s insider. His latest dispatch is called “AI eats the world,” and he followed it up with a thoughtful conversation on the Lenny’s Podcast. All of it’s worth your time — especially if you’re a skeptic — but here are five of the biggest takeaways.

[1] Reflexively loathing AI won’t help you. “Don’t stick your head in the sand and say ‘I hate all this stuff,’ ” Evans says. “That gives you a great feeling of moral superiority,” but it’s not going to help you ride out the inevitable AI job churn. Imagine you’re a young lawyer interviewing at a firm that hired 100 new associates last year but plans to hire only 50 this year. “If you go into the interview and say ‘Well, I think AI is bulls*!t, and I’m never going to use it,’ [that’s] probably not the right mood. So that may not be particularly comforting, but I don’t think there’s an alternative.”

[2] The jobs of the future always sound silly. If you told a child born in 1790 that they would grow up to be a railway engineer instead of a dirt farmer, they’d laugh and say, “That sounds dumb.” And also: “What’s a railway?” This friction, Evans says, helps to explain some of the public’s (misplaced, in his view) animus toward AI.

[3] AI adoption has been fast. The layoffs will not be. Doomers exaggerate the speed at which AI will erase jobs, Evans says, since the typical white-collar worker has a wide range of non-automatable skills. Software engineering was the first career to get hit, he says, because it was secretly “boring manual labour.” He’s also skeptical that AI startups will swiftly kill incumbent companies; he points to Frame.io, a cloud-based editing software that challenged Adobe (before Adobe acquired it in 2021). That product could have been built 10 years earlier, but it takes time for people to recognize and solve a problem within any given industry.

[4] ChatGPT and Claude are commodities. Sure, says Evans, some frontier models are better than others, but they’re still more or less interchangeable. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has even described AI in commodity-like terms. So why should anyone expect these platforms to win the AI age? Evans draws a comparison to telecom companies, which initially thought they’d dominate the cell-phone era — until software companies, like Facebook, built higher-value products on top of their infrastructure.

[5] Young people always learn to adapt. If you’re entering the job market right now, AI might present challenges — but in five or 10 years, Evans says, “things will have settled down a lot … It’s going to be a big fuzzy mess, and, yes, it will change a bunch of stuff and we’ll need to worry about it.” But welcome to the modern world, he says. “This is going to be completely different from everything else, just like everything else.”

—Jared Sullivan

Wisdom of X

fun fact: if you invested $1.00 into the American stock market when it first opened in 1790, today you would be dead

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 (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).

Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Nvidia and Google.

Robot photo courtesy of Serve Robotics.

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

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