Plus: the latest Neanderthal news January 12, 2026 Sign Up | View online In This Issue 8 min read 🇨🇳 Carney heads East 👗 Aritzia lifts off 🏒 Crave hangs on What impact will PM Carney’s upcoming rendezvous in China with Xi have on the trade dyna—oh sorry, this is a still photo from Heated Rivalry. | Bell Media / Crave The Week in Markets Wall Street’s ‘optimistic consensus’ for 2026 You’d think when a year begins with regime change atop one major oil producer (Venezuela), civil revolution in another (Iran), increasing bluster between rival superpowers (the U.S. and China), and a brutal war of attrition rapidly approaching its fourth anniversary (Russia and Ukraine), financial markets would respond with a sell-off, or at least a hiccup — none of these problems, after all, are getting solved anytime soon. Instead, the TSX and S&P 500 picked up right where they left off in 2025, and, according to Bloomberg, “an optimistic consensus has taken hold” among professional investors that the rally will continue through 2026. What gives? For starters, here’s your first reminder of the year that stocks can go up even when the headlines are scary, depending on what those headlines are and why they’re scary. None of these geopolitical migraines has dented the AI bonanza that’s still driving growth. So maybe the Debbie Downers who sat out last year’s surge are learning from their mistakes, focusing on rising profits, and tuning out political noise? Or maybe they were right all along but a year too soon? Last night we got yet another test to see whether anything can upset the apple cart of optimism: the Trump administration is threatening criminal charges against U.S. Fed chair Jerome Powell. Will this, or any future spectacle, be enough to rattle investors? That’s the multibillion-dollar question of 2026. Jan. 5 – Jan. 9 TSX: +1.7% (+2.9% YTD) S&P 500: +1% (+1.8% YTD) The Chart of the Week What Happened Last Week Important A crude explainer about Venezuela. It feels as though there’s been more news coverage of Venezuela’s oil than the fate of its 31 million citizens. The reason Canada keeps getting pulled into the conversation is because our sulfur-heavy crude is very similar to Venezuela’s — so for U.S. refineries that rely on heavy crude, a captive Venezuela is suddenly a theoretical alternative to Canada, and we become a theoretical alternative oil seller to China, which currently gets much of its heavy crude from … Venezuela. We’re going to use “theoretical” a third time, though, because Venezuela’s infrastructure is in shambles and would require years to repair. Canadian oil stocks tumbled at the uncertainty before levelling off late last week. Carney makes more nice with Beijing. He departs tomorrow for the first official visit by a Canadian PM since 2017 — a diplomatic thaw years in the making after not one but two major spats with China. The mere invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping was a major gesture following their neutral-turf handshake in October; Carney’s acceptance was another. And while best-friendship isn’t in the cards — the feds still consider China among our biggest security threats — the visit could mark a turning point with Canada’s No. 2 trading partner. Especially given how rocky things have become with No. 1 on the list. Interesting Aritzia is pulling an inverted Lululemon. That’s not a yoga pose (not that we know of anyway), but it is a tidy shorthand for the two Vancouver-based fashion retailers’ divergent fortunes. On an earnings call last week, Aritzia CEO Jennifer Wong reported that the company generated just over $1 billion in net revenue last year and — despite tariffs — almost 60% came from American shoppers. While Lululemon’s stock price was see-sawing and its CEO was getting shoved aside, Aritzia’s au courant celeb campaigns, viral closet staples, and a slow-and-steady U.S. expansion have been paying off. Even Heated Rivalry might not be hot enough to save Crave. The homegrown gay hockey drama — produced by and for Canada’s biggest homegrown streaming platform — is currently barnstorming the planet. So of course it arrives amid an existential crisis for Crave, which has survived thus far thanks in large part to its licensing deal with HBO — a deal it will surely lose if HBO’s corporate overlord, Warner Bros. Discovery, completes its sale to Netflix. HBO would go to Netflix. What would happen to Crave? 🤷 Rest assured, it won’t affect season two, which is already in the works. See you back at the cottage. — Srivindhya Kolluru and Brennan Doherty From Our Sponsor The FOMO Index by Stacey Woods Important 🐽 McDonald’s hit with a class-action suit that claims the McRib contains only low-quality pork products. And the McFlurry is more of a McDrizzle. Source 🛣️ Parts of Ontario are facing a road salt shortage. The McRib has graciously offered to step in and dissolve what it can. Source 📚 New Google Classroom tool lets teachers turn lessons into podcasts. Call Her D-Day promises to be very popular. Source 🎶 Grammys reintroduce Best Album Cover award after 53 years. Not sure what this means for Best MP3 Thumbnail award. Source Crash & Burn To the Moon 🪧 Government workers chant “work-life balance!” to protest Ontario’s return-to-office mandate. (They’re saving “When I say self-care, you say sweatpants!” for the hunger strike.) Source 🫦 Toronto sex shop warned by U.S. Dept. of War to stop sending buttplugs to a U.S. base in Bahrain. At least buy it dinner first. Source 🧠 Lego launches high tech “Smart Bricks” that can sense motion and communicate, But they’re still too dumb to avoid the bottom of your foot. Source 🐄 Nova Scotia researchers are using AI to understand cow language. So far cows seem to be saying the point is moot. Source Who Cares? The Big Important Story Two Indicators to Follow in 2026 (And One You Can Probably Ignore) Every year around this time, market watchers gaze into their crystal balls and opine about the future. We are generally not big fans of predictions here at TLDR for the simple reason that most tend to be wrong-o. That said, we do find it helpful to track economic data to gauge what’s happening. We reached out to two of our favourite money experts to see which indicators they’re watching extra closely this year — and we examined one indicator that’s likely overhyped. Weekly GDP Nowcast This first indicator comes from Trevor Tombe, an economics professor at the University of Calgary. He closely follows the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Weekly GDP Nowcast. This nifty index aggregates data from 45 indicators — manufacturing shipments, commodity prices, etc. — to provide a realish-time estimate of Canada’s GDP growth months ahead of the official release. GDP, of course, is a key measure of a country’s economic activity, and, Tombe says, having an early read on it is crucial when conditions are uncertain, as they are now. The good news is that the economy currently looks to be strengthening more than expected, with quarterly GDP growth (annualized) at 2.26%. Which likely means business leaders are feeling confident and making investments — a bullish sign for markets. Tombe is watching to see if a fresh wave of economic uncertainty drags on growth, as it did this time last year amid the trade war. Retail Sales Control Group In 2026, the No. 1 thing to watch is consumer spending. That’s according to Brent Donnelly, a (Canadian-raised!) pro trader who writes Friday Speedrun, one of our favourite market newsletters. (Sign up here.) His go-to indicator is the Retail Sales Control Group, which tracks core U.S. consumer spending. Canada has a similar indicator, but the U.S. version is the standard and offers the “cleanest read on spending,” says Donnelly. Plus U.S. consumer spending affects our economy a whole bunch. At the moment, the indicator looks OK. One concern moving forward involves Trump’s tax-slashing One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), which investors suspect will juice the economy in early 2026. The potential hiccup is that non-wealthy consumers have been pummelled by some of Trump’s policies, and they could pull back on spending and derail the OBBB-fuelled momentum. If that happens, “there could be an outsized reaction in bonds and maybe stocks,” Donnelly says. One indicator you can mostly ignore: the Zweig Breadth Thrust Lately, folks on fintwit have been posting all sorts of obscure indicators — the Hindenburg Omen!, the Lipstick Index! — that they insist are very important. Most are not. One notable example: the Zweig Breadth Thrust. Named after trader Martin Zweig, this indicator is designed to spot a brewing bull run by tracking when money flows into the market broadly and urgently. Traders get excited by a Zweig Breadth Thrust (as they did in November; see below) because each one has driven a 25% surge (on average) in the S&P 500 over the following 11 months. The problem is that the Zweig Breadth Thrust has missed some giant bull markets, including the ones in the 1990s and the mid-2000s. Point being: little-known indicators should be one of many data points you consider when investing, not the sole basis for decisions. —Brennan Doherty and Jared Sullivan Other Very Good Read The Year in Neanderthals 🖍️ The New York Times’* mesmerizing roundup of recent discoveries about our pre-finance-era ancestors contained this pearl: evidence suggests Neanderthals used crayons 42,000 years ago — primitive ones, just to be clear, not Crayola — and appear to have interbred with Homo sapiens in a pleasant, non-traumatic way. Researchers found evidence of “prolongued engagement and saliva swapping.” Aww. Less adorable: they ate maggots. *Article is paywalled, which, yeah, is kind of annoying. But we think good journalism is worth paying for. Post of Wisdom Thoughts on Today’s Issue? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Srivindhya Kolluru (news writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (product engagement manager), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (product engagement associate), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), 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 Google and The New York Times Company. Five-day returns via TradingView. YTD returns via SP Global. Total returns in local currency. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Have questions? Contact us. VIEW IN BROWSER PRIVACY POLICY UNSUBSCRIBE TLDR is offered by Wealthsimple Media Inc. and is for informational purposes only. 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