Wealthsimple

July 13, 2026

In This Issue

8 min read

Hyperspending hyperscalers

Streamers getting creamed

Martin Short fuses

Here’s a mystery: stock prices creep up while you sleep — but why? Sherlock Holmes and TLDR are on the case! Read below. | Twentieth Century Fox

The Week in Markets

High-stakes chutes and ladders

Chaos, as the saying goes, is a ladder. And while everyone keeps guessing if-slash-when the bottom will fall out of the AI market, the major indexes keep racing up those rungs. The S&P and TSX have each climbed more than 10% on the year, analysts continue to raise their earnings expectations, and each week investors crown a new AI princeling. (This week it was SK Hynix — more on that below.)

But ladders go in both directions, and while some of those princelings mature into steady, market-stabilizing Nvidias, plenty of Icaruses have flown too close to the sun. Super Micro Computer is down 75% since its 2024 peak, because it turns out fraud allegations kind of overshadow profits. CoreWeave, 2025’s hottest IPO, is down 52% since its top customers started building their own neo-cloud capacity. The lesson: surfing the AI wave is harder than it looks — for both the people running the businesses and for investors trying to pick the winners.

TSX:	+0.6% (+11% YTD)

S&P 500:	+1.1% (+10.1% YTD)

One Chart That Explains Everything

What Happened Last Week

Important

PM Mark Carney is putting money behind his big words about how middle powers like Canada can no longer rely on the military protections of their superpower neighbours: at last week’s NATO summit, he announced plans for a “world bank for defence.” The idea is that several allied countries will pool their lunch money to buy military gear, in what The Wall Street Journal called a new model to fund war. Unsurprisingly, Ottawa’s renewed interest in defence spending has companies eager to cash in. Even Canadian lenders, traditionally allergic to military financing, have warmed up to defence. But what we’d really like to know is who’s funding another Carney-adjacent industrial complex?

Interesting

Two more signs that YouTube ate everyone’s lunch in the streaming wars. Sign one: Netflix — whose stock has fallen by some 25% since its aborted pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery — has struggled so mightily to get viewers to stick with its ~~schlock~~ original shows beyond season one that it’s trying to re-engage them by farming short-form content from places like BuzzFeed and by churning out livestreaming podcasts. What it’s not doing, execs insist, is trying to be another YouTube.

Sign two: freshly minted Xbox CEO Asha Sharma slashed 1,600 jobs last week, her first major move at the helm of the sputtering gaming platform. The pink-slipping comes just days after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Sharma’s boss) admitted that YouTube, with its army of Xbox content creators, is better at monetizing the games than Microsoft’s own gaming platforms, despite a recent US$20 billion injection. “We simply spread ourselves too thin,” Sharma said in a company memo. In Call of Duty terms, they’re taking heavy fall damage.

South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix popped on its Nasdaq debut after the firm raised US$26.5 billion — the largest-ever U.S. listing of a foreign company. Memory stocks are up 127% on the year, and SK’s share price rose a meteoric 13% on Friday, suggesting investors are confident the AI memory supply crunch has long legs.

China and Russia — the A-team of democracy-destabilizing sh*t-stirrers — are flooding social media with misinfo-laden slop warning that new AI data centres will be the downfall of the U.S., according to this fascinating New York Times investigation. Of course, many communities across the U.S. and Canada have legit concerns that data centres will gorge themselves on resources — but U.S. officials think the China-Russia misinfo is designed to stymie North American tech progress by fanning public opposition to AI.

—Jenna Benchetrit

From Our Sponsor

The FOMO Index

by Stacey Woods

Important

AI actor Tilly Norwood will star in a film made by the studio that created her. Still, she’s not sorry she slept with the director.
Source

Video of sleeping B.C. driver prompts Mounties to remind public not to sleep and drive. You might miss a funny text.
Source

Quebec fishery surprised to learn Taylor Swift served their frozen lobster at her wedding, but it paired beautifully with the instant caviar.
Source

New app will lock your fun apps until you hit your daily steps. Or until you take that one easy step and delete it.
Source

Crash & Burn

To the Moon

Trump asked FIFA chief to overturn red card of U.S. soccer player. It’s not an abuse of power — he had a lot of money on that game.
Source

Sixty-seven-dollar Oribe shampoo recalled across Canada over potentially harmful bacteria. If you have any, you should immediately tell us how you got so rich.
Source

There’s a great white shark in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. When asked what it was doing there, it said, “The backstroke.”
Source

Martin Short is mad about a proposed development near his house in Ontario. That subdivision is as doomed as doom can be, I must say!
Source

Who Cares?

The Big Important Story

The Mystery of Overnight Drift, and Two Other Market Conspiracies

Investors aren’t usually the type to sport tin-foil hats or attend flat-earther conferences, what with their belief in efficient markets and all. Still, they love a good conspiracy theory every now and then. Last week, the Financial Times highlighted a classic one — overnight drift — but before we dive into that, let’s quickly investigate two of our other favourites.

Conspiracy #1: The Hindenburg Omen
Named for the 1937 airship catastrophe, the Hindenburg Omen involves a combination of market indicators that are said to foretell a crash: if at least 2.5% of the companies on the New York Stock Exchange hit a 52-week high while a minimum of 2.5% hit a 52-week low, and the NYSE’s 10-week moving average is on the rise, and the McClellan Oscillator (a market-fluctuations indicator) has gone negative, then it’s omen time. (Cue spooky organ!)

Those conditions were present for every major stock market crash between 1987 and 2010. But the omen has also occurred many other times when there was no giant downturn. As one analyst explained to The Wall Street Journal, the Hindenburg Omen does often signal that rising indexes are masking individual stock weaknesses, but it’s not a surefire indicator of impending calamity.

Conspiracy #2: The January Effect
Seasonal patterns are more superstition than conspiracy. We’ve written about the spooky September curse, and fintwit recently claimed that stocks never peak in June. But perhaps the most famous seasonal curiosity is the January Effect — it’s supposedly a banner month, especially for small caps. One theory is that savvy investors dump their loser stocks in December for tax-loss harvesting and then rebuy them in January. The hitch is that seasonal patterns aren’t consistent enough to make money off them reliably.

Conspiracy #3: Overnight Drift
Now let’s turn to overnight drift — the so-called “grandmother of market anomalies.” It describes a stock market pattern in which the largest returns occur in the dead of night while markets are closed.

Market analysts first observed a version of this phenomenon at least 40 years ago. Then, in 2025, a research team analyzed 23 of the most popular stocks and ETFs among retail investors (so-called “attention stocks”). Their experiment showed that if you had invested US$1 from the market open to the close every day over the past 30 years, it would have grown to a mere US$1.20. But over that same period, that same dollar invested at the close and then sold at the open would have generated a US$17.27 return.

What goes bump in the night? Stock prices

A couple of sane explanations for overnight drift:
1) Public companies report earnings after the bell, and most beat estimates — sending share prices up. 2) Europe starts trading around 2 to 3 a.m. Eastern, at which point U.S. markets have their largest positive returns. 3) Studies show that, though retail investors often make small trades early in the day, institutional investors tend to trade at the close, meaning stocks are repriced overnight.

Then there’s the juicy (but far-fetched!) theory that quant funds cheaply push up prices on stock they already own during overnight trading and then unload those positions into the market’s deeper daytime liquidity without giving back all the gains.

What does it all mean for you?
You probably shouldn’t fixate on any one market conspiracy. Why? Investors behave one way for a while, a pattern emerges, people try to take advantage of said pattern, then the advantage stops working. Just take the overnight drift: the Fed published a paper this month saying the anomaly has faded, as most market anomalies do over time. So if you hear of another market “conspiracy,” don’t fret — it might be gone by the time you wake up.

—Jenna Benchetrit

The Big Read

🫥 Invisible Companies

The stock market mints new media darlings every day — but this is a love letter to the invisible, boring profit machines that keep the economy chugging along. | Colossus Magazine

Wisdom of Bluesky

Meanwhile, in Newfoundland…

pictures from a friend of mine who works on a crab-fishing boat off the coast of Newfoundland. I love the nightmare crab door.

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 Micron.

Correction: A chart in TLDR’s June 29 issue, titled “Where do you land on Canada’s income ladder?” mistakenly labelled the data used as “total household income” when it was in fact total individual income. We regret the error.

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

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👻 Why stocks go bump in the night