Wealthsimple

September 28, 2026

Minh Connors/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In This Issue

7 min read

Muse is a jolly big hit — but what does it actually do?

Plus!

On steals a Nike star

Diesel supplies run short

The Idea of the Week

Stocks and interest rates are both racing ahead

by Peter Arkle

Welcome to a brand-new, fresh-faced TLDR! After four years, we decided to give the newsletter a little makeover. We’ll be running some new features over the next few weeks to showcase the redesign, so please let us know what you think in the feedback module below! Anyway, on to the idea of the week…

Even if AI doesn’t kill us all, even if the bubble doesn’t burst, even if the End Times are not, in fact, nigh, investors are starting to accept the likelihood that the Soaring Interest Rate Times are very much upon us, and they’re here to stay for a while. The U.S. Fed is already in rate-raising mode and the Bank of Canada is expected to follow suit, and bond-market pricing — an indicator of where investors believe rates are headed in the future — suggests people are betting rates will stay high for the next decade.

So is that … bad? Conventional wisdom says “yes”: higher rates increase borrowing costs, slow the economy, and (usually) drag down the stock market. Recent history says “it’s more complicated than that.” And so far the markets are saying “no”: the S&P and TSX remain up more than 12% on the year, and, notably, they haven’t budged since August when the rate surge started. If investors were worried about rates, they wouldn’t be gobbling up stocks. So who are you gonna trust — logic, history, or your lyin’ eyes?

What’s Up

PayPal

The payment processor got a needed boost (+4.6% on the week) from investors thanks to (1) partnering with Meta on its new personal agent, Muse (see below), and (2) renewed rumours that an unnamed U.S. company “based on the West Coast” is targeting it for acquisition — welcome news to investors who worry that PayPal is losing its edge to fintech upstarts.

What’s Down

Oracle

The cloud giant’s stock tumbled by 9% last week after it sent a “force majeure” notice to the developer behind its US$165-billion Project Jupiter data centre in New Mexico, which allows Oracle to stall payments if the site doesn’t come online in 2028. That amplified investor fears that proposed AI data centres are hitting permitting and construction snags.

TSX: -0.2% (+12.5% YTD)

S&P 500: +1.1% (+12.6% YTD)

What Happened Last Week

Important

Muse wants to restock your fridge and find you a bargain on an ottoman. Turns out, while rivals were busy building Q&A-style chatbots, Meta was working on a “personal agent” that would do “everything” for you (provided you give it access to your email, calendars, credit-card info, and apps). That promise drove its new Muse agent to No. 1 on Apple’s App Store and rocketed Meta shares up 27% this month. So why exactly did Muse pop (besides its adorable mascot, Jolly)? Stratechery’s Ben Thompson says it’s all about the difference between chatbots and personal agents, the latter of which are way harder to extract from your life once they are...

…setting your fantasy-football lineups!
…cancelling the gym membership you never use!
…haggling over used furniture with real humans on Facebook Marketplace!
…ordering groceries without judging your choice of poutine-flavoured Kraft Dinner!
…applying for dental insurance!

Muse’s administrative skills sent stock prices sliding among companies whose services are deliberately hard to cancel. Case in point: Planet Fitness (-11%), the gym chain whose business model all but relies on so-called “ghost memberships.” But are real people as obsessed with optimization as tech CEOs? Will they even know what to use a personal agent for, much less feel comfortable handing over their life to Zuck et al.?

The entire world is facing a diesel drought. While gasoline fuels most cars, diesel powers just about everything else in our economy, from farm equipment to fishing boats. And so the meteoric rise in diesel prices — which hit an all-time high this month — is a bad inflationary omen. The diesel crunch will get far worse if America, the world’s No. 1 diesel producer, follows through on its threats to cap exports at the same time that Russia, the world’s No. 2, already has a hard ban in place. How does this end? To quote JPMorgan’s commodities desk: 🤷.

Diesel races ahead, and the economy pays

Interesting

Mbappé to Nike: Game On. Kylian Mbappé was just eight when he signed with Nike, so his defection from the Swoosh for the tech-forward Swiss sports brand On is still reverberating around the world. In one move, On nabbed the new global face of its brand and planted its flag in the soccer market. Then at On’s Investor Day last week, it projected US$7 billion in sales by 2029, which pushed its stock up 10% — another kick to Nike’s shins. (To be fair, Nike remains the industry leader, and it added a fashion-industry scion to its board earlier this month.) Back in 2019, tennis champ Roger Federer also left Nike to join On (and bought a 3% stake in the company). So for those keeping score, it’s now 2-nil.

—Jenna Benchetrit & Brennan Doherty

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

OpenAI fires humans for using AI to train AI, manage to lose only job safe from AI to AI.
Source

New trend: smoking cigarettes to quit vaping. Future trend: guzzling gin to quit mocktails.
Source

The Celica is coming back. It’s gonna street race the new Prelude and go beat up some Teslas.
Source

LinkedIn makes it harder to lie on your profile. Unless you’re a highly mendacious prevarication technician and lead duplicity ninja specializing in dynamic curriculum vitae fabrication.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

Loblaw lit up the night sky over Toronto with a drone show for a health chatbot. Either that or we’re being invaded by some very dull aliens.
Source

Health Canada recalls styling mousse over injury hazard. Has anyone checked on Justin Trudeau?
Source

AI actor Tilly Norwood glitches during Piers Morgan interview, starts speaking Cantonese. Proves she’s human enough to hate talking to Piers Morgan.
Source

Kraft Dinner collaborates with Craft Soda on a cheese-flavoured soda. Kraft might also want to try collaborating with someone on a cheese-flavoured cheese.
Source

Who Cares?

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The Big Important Story

You Asked Us What to Do With Your Money. We Made a Flowchart

It’s Relaunch Day here at TLDR! In the spirit of trying new things, we challenged ourselves to answer, in a novel way, one question we hear often from readers: How do I even begin managing my money and saving for the future? To that end, we crammed the most important stuff Canadians need to know about money into a single flowchart. Let us know what you think below!

If the chart is tricky to read on mobile, check out this larger version.

—Jenna Benchetrit

How to be a certified super responsible money person

Listen, Read, Watch

Listen: How Russia forged its way around war sanctions 🏴‍☠️
A probe into Kremlin-backed financial firm A7, which funnelled US$7 billion through Western lenders. | Financial Times

Read: A lesbian bar’s new masking policy didn’t go over well 🍺
The owner of a Greenfield, Mass., lesbian bar loosened a stringent masking mandate, sparking backlash — and this viral story. | Boston Globe*

Watch: Jensen Huang thinks AI alarmism has gone too far 💻
Nvidia’s CEO is both cerebral and cocky in this wide-ranging chat. | The New York Times

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

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.

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

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