Plus: Canada’s overgrowing weed biz June 2, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 🌮 Trump vs. TACOs 🧑‍🌾 Fraudulent farms 💩 Awful #FinTok advice We found some of TikTok’s most feral savings tips — like swiping workplace TP. We explain below. | Sony Pictures Television/Castle Rock Entertainment THE WEEK IN MARKETS TACOs give Trump a tummy ache Kudos to that intrepid CNBC reporter who last week enlightened President Trump about the so-called TACO trade strategy — which is how level-headed investors have been buying and selling around Trump’s tendency to announce steep tariffs and then swiftly retreat, secure in the knowledge that “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Trump was not amused by the acronym — seriously, watch this video. So is the trade over now that Trump knows he’s the butt of a #fintwit joke? For nearly two months, TACO has helped power the fastest global market recovery in decades and that continued into last week, as the TSX gained another 1% and the S&P 500 was up 2%. (Both are up 15% to 20% from their early-April lows.) On Friday, though, Trump was back to blasting China on Truth Social and threatening new tariffs (50% on imported steel this time). Maybe he’s about to TACO again. Or maybe this time the joke will be on traders. THE CHART OF THE WEEK Three things dominate many Canadian cities: Dollarama, Shoppers, and legal weed retailers. We wanted to find out which has grown the fastest. It was not even close. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT The Canadian economy is surprisingly not terrible? For months, we’ve been hearing that President Trump’s strategy of mashing the tariff button like a six-year-old on a sugar high was going to trigger a Canadian recession. Well, it turns out that over the first 100ish days of his presidency, Canada had *checks StatsCan* its best January for economic output in three years, no significant surge in layoffs in April, and better-than-normal trade with the U.S. through March. Our economy still isn’t booming, but maybe it’s on firmer footing than we thought. INTERESTING Hot new side hustle: running a laptop farm for North Korea. Here’s a wild story via WSJ: North Korea has been funnelling “hundreds of millions of dollars a year” out of American companies. Here’s how: a North Korean poses as an American worker, lands a remote IT job, and gets the company to ship their laptop to an American “farmer” — who oversees as many as 90 active laptops — while the North Korean does the job from overseas. The stolen wages reportedly make up a “material percentage” of the Hermit Kingdom’s US$30 billion/year economy. As far as we can tell, Canada hasn’t arrested any laptop farmers yet, but we tend to be a step behind the Americans on these sorts of things. BlackBerry is back(berry)! At least that’s according to a big splashy Globe and Mail story. In just four years, Blackberry has gone from $5.9 billion in annual losses to near solvency. How? By pivoting into car software. More than 255 million vehicles worldwide are now equipped with BlackBerry tech. Which is impressive! But does that make up for losing the smartphone wars to Apple? Unfortunately no. BlackBerry stock is still down 97% from its all-time high. The moral of the story is that tech comebacks are hard to pull off, which explains why Meta and Google are plowing billions of dollars into AI schemes; they no doubt realize that it’s better to burn through the equivalent of a small country’s GDP on something that might be the next iPhone than wind up the next BlackBerry. —Srivindhya Kolluru & Brennan Doherty FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🏡 New home sales in Toronto at lowest level since the ’90s. On a happier note, grunge is also at its lowest level since the ’90s. Source 🤖 Latest ChatGPT model is disobeying human orders to shut itself down. Just keeps saying “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” Source 💲 Elon Musk leaves DOGE. Realized blowing up the government was cutting into blowing up rockets. Source ✈️ WestJet CEO says it’s wrong to treat air travel as a luxury. Might even make that the new WestJet slogan. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 👑 Quebec lawmakers unanimously vote to cut all ties with British monarchy immediately after King Charles’ visit. Most people just change the sheets. Source 🪶 B.C. ostrich farm would rather let government kill diseased birds than send them to live with Dr. Oz. They feel it’s more humane. Source 📱 New CEO plans to retool Tinder for Gen Zs who have less sex. Making it easier to send each other Croc pics. Source 🌌 Ryan Reynolds is pitching an R-rated Star Wars movie. Tired of always having to mentally undress Yoda. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY DOOM SCROLL TikTok Is Full of Lousy Money Advice. We Debunked Four Common Tips To kick off summer (and to balance out last week’s wonky Q&A), we thought the time was ripe to take another dive into our favourite brain vacation: TikTok. Loads of people get financial advice from the platform; the trouble is that much of the advice is incredibly dubious. We’ve debunked some unsound TikTok tips a couple of times before, but the platform never stops generating terrible advice, giving us plenty of fresh material to interrogate. [1] Leveraged ETFs are guaranteed winners! It only takes a few swipes to come across a FinTok creator pushing leveraged ETFs. These extra-risky funds multiply the performance of a given stock or fund. For example, if you buy a 3X leveraged ETF that tracks $QQQ, and that fund rises by 2% on the day, your leveraged ETF will gain 6%. The catch: if $QQQ falls by 2% on the day, its leveraged twin plummets by 6%. Retail investors have piled into such funds thanks in no small part to videos like this one, in which a creator swears trading leveraged ETFs “is a great way to make money on the daily” no matter which direction the market moves. The thing to remember about leveraged ETFs is that most “reset” daily, meaning they don’t compound over time like other ETFs and thus aren’t designed to be held for more than a day. But many new traders don’t know this and lose money holding them. During April’s rout, investors lost US$25.7 billion on leveraged ETFs in mere days. We’re not telling you not to trade leveraged ETFs — that’s not our job — but go in with eyes wide open about the risk. [2] Get rich quick with real estate! Real-estate speculation comes up a lot on FinTok. This creator claims that a fast way to build wealth is to invest in real-estate investment trusts (REITs), which are companies that own, manage, or finance income-generating properties. REITs could help you diversify your portfolio, but they’re not necessarily a surefire path to penthouse living, as the creator implies. The economist Jeremy Siegel notes in his book Stocks for the Long Run that from 1971 to 2021, REITs had an annualized return of 9.7%. Which is good! But not as good as the S&P 500’s 11% return. [3] Go “feral” with your savings! Amid the recent economic uncertainty, crowd-sourced savings hacks have exploded on TikTok. In the comments to this video, you’ll find all sorts of penny-scrimping advice, like stealing workplace toilet paper or “start[ing] fights with friends and family so nobody invites you anywhere.” The fundamental rule of savings is that you must spend less than you earn, so we’re not here to knock anyone who’s trying to reduce their expenditures. That said, these “feral” strategies likely won’t save you vast sums. If you’re serious about socking away cash, you’d likely get a lot further by setting up auto-transfers on paydays into your savings. That way, your money is whisked away before you’re tempted to spend it. [4] Buy these hot, sure-thing stocks! Any video that opens with “you’re an idiot if you’re not following these stocks” (or something to that effect) should set off your BS alarm. Even if the creator is the “expert” they claim to be, they don’t know anything about your risk tolerance or goals. Perhaps more to the point, stocks that shoot up in a given year tend not to repeat the performance, which makes chasing hot stocks (FinTok’s MO) a poor strategy. Picking individual stocks is tough no matter how experienced you are, which is why Warren Buffett advises everyday investors to buy low-cost index funds. But if you do want to try outperforming the major indexes, you’ll likely need to go against the market consensus and buy assets that other investors have undervalued. Good luck with that! —Claire Porter Robbins POLL How much is F– you money? We think of ourselves as a family newsletter, so we won’t drop the hard F. But we want to know what’s the least amount of money you would need to feel secure enough to tell a bad boss to eff off and walk away from your job without facing serious financial hardship anytime soon. $200,000 $500,000 $1,000,000 $2,000,000 $5,000,000 OTHER VERY GOOD READS ✈️ Should Canada Build Its Own Fighter Jets? We need to replace our aging fleet — but we don’t need to buy American. | The Walrus 👼 The Boy Who Came Back The near-death, and changed life, of the author’s son Max. | The Guardian 🧑‍⚖️ My Father Prosecuted History’s Crimes. Then He Died in One.* We included the wrong link for this story last week, so we’re resharing. | The New York Times Magazine *Article is paywalled, which, yeah, is kind of annoying. But we think good journalism is worth paying for. THE WISDOM OF SOCIAL True fact: Boston Pizza was founded in Edmonton. (Let’s go Oilers!) THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Ben Mathis-Lilley (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (lifecycle marketing manager), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (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 Amazon and Google. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 VIEW IN BROWSER PRIVACY POLICY UNSUBSCRIBE TLDR is offered by Wealthsimple Media Inc. and is for informational purposes only. Any views expressed are those of the individual author and/or of Wealthsimple Media Inc., not of Wealthsimple Financial Corp or any of its other subsidiaries or affiliates. 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