Plus, why it’s silver’s turn to shine January 19, 2026 Sign Up | View online In This Issue 8 min read 🇨🇳 Canola diplomacy 🍷 Restaurant wars 👶 Baby bust facts For Disney, theme parks and cruises — not streaming — are the tail that wags the mouse. We explain below. | Gary Hershorn/Getty Images The Week in Markets Silver and gold are trading places It's time we gave some shine to silver. Yes, silver — the perennial No. 2, the Avis of precious metals. But did you know that silver left gold in the dust in 2025 — a year in which gold dusted everything else, including a gangbusters global stock market? It's tripled in value since the start of last year, and it’s up another 30% just since Jan. 1, its hottest start since 1980, when the oil baron Hunt Brothers infamously tried and failed to corner the silver market (and, yes, inspired the movie Trading Places in the process). Choose your theory behind the boom: is it (a) fears that Trump could add silver to his tariff bender, or maybe (b) a byproduct of the AI boom, or (c) threats to the U.S. Federal Reserve's independence, or (d) a "speculative frenzy" on precious metals in China? Our guess is (e) all of the above. Moves this big can reverse on a dime, of course, and some money managers are already getting skittish that the music is about to stop. But this is also how rallies keep going and going: people think they're over, then they come rushing back in. TSX: +0.94% (+3.63% YTD) S&P 500: –0.05% (+1.19% YTD) The Chart of the Week What Happened Last Week Important Wall Street’s “big five” banks just had their biggest year. Last week, we told you about the “optimistic consensus” for 2026 among pro investors, and wouldn’t you know it, Wall Street’s “big five” banks kicked off earnings season by reporting a combined US$134 billion in revenue from trading alone in 2025 (on top of fees, interest on loans, etc.) — a new record. Four of the five — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi, and Bank of America — beat expectations, with only JPMorganChase coming up short. Then a blockbuster report from Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC reminded investors why they were so optimistic in the first place: AI. Canada’s large-caps take their turn later this month, starting with Rogers, CN Railway, and Imperial Oil. Restaurants still haven’t recovered from the pandemic. class="email-bold" style="font-weight: 600 !important;"> The industry lost tons of bartenders, servers, and hosts — who have the kinds of skills that can take years to master — to other professions after the lockdown, and restaurants are still struggling to fill the gap, according to a sobering episode of Odd Lots. The result: an “arms race” for talent — just one more swelling line item that’s driving up costs and eroding profits. No wonder 41% of Canadian restaurants are operating at a loss or just breaking even, 7,000 went out of business in 2025 alone, and another 4,000 are forecast to shutter in 2026. Interesting Is the baby bust actually just fuzzy math? Canada’s total fertility rate hit a record “ultra low” of 1.25 children per woman in 2024, mirroring a worldwide trend, and population declines tend to be bad for economies. But according to a fresh analysis by The Economist, total fertility rates are like a snapshot in time that doesn’t tell the whole story: U.S. women are having just as many children (1.97 on average) as they did 20 years ago — they’re just having them later in life. That metric — the “cumulative” or “completed fertility rate” — is more like a rolling average and it hasn’t budged. Same goes for Canada, where a woman’s average age at childbirth is now 31.8, up nearly five years since 1976. That sounds less like a fertility crisis than a fertility delay. The solution to our future AI-energy crisis? Data centres … in SPACE. The concept: launch them into orbit and power them with unobstructed solar energy. It’s not (quite) as far-fetched as it sounds — which is why Google and SpaceX have already started working on prototypes. All the necessary tech exists. The hurdles are about scale — transporting and assembling, in outer space, mega-satellites with solar panels that span 4 kilometres and would be exposed to extreme heat and some 100 million pieces of space debris, requiring near-constant repair. So, yeah, there’s some work to do. But the upsides? Way less red tape in space — and way more real estate. —Srivindhya Kolluru From Our Sponsor The FOMO Index by Stacey Woods Important 🇨🇦 Poll shows nearly a third of Canadians fear U.S. will invade. Don’t worry, guys. Canada’s way, way down on the list. Source 🇨🇳 Daily check-in app called “Are You Dead?” is going viral in China. And they say that place is no fun! Source 🎸 Bandcamp becomes first platform to ban AI-generated music. Fake bands fear it might be time to take your day jobs. Source 🏢 Return-to-work mandate generating a huge spike in Toronto office rentals. Instant oatmeal, chewy granola bars hoping they’ll see some action too. Source Crash & Burn To the Moon 📈 Skip the bedroom and get straight to the boardroom: New Vancouver dating event lets you give a PowerPoint presentation about your single friends. Source 📬 Ontario men can soon mail in their sperm for fertility testing. Sorry to anyone who was planning a romantic afternoon at the clinic. Source 🌚 California startup is booking rooms at future hotel on the moon. Phase 1: book the rooms. Phase 2: build hotel on the moon. Source 🍟 Heinz introduces french fry carton with built-in ketchup well. Funny, they can put a well on the fry carton, but they can’t put a hotel on the moon. Source Who Cares? The Big Important Story These Five Companies Have Secret Profit Engines. They Taught Us a Lot About How Business Really Works Here at TLDR, we’re always interested in learning about how companies make money, especially when they do it in ways you wouldn’t expect. There’s an entire class of corporations — Disney, for instance, as The Wall Street Journal recently outlined — whose profit centres have little to do with their core product, or at least what most people consider their core product. So let’s examine Disney and a few more like it, partly because they’re fun and surprising, and because each one illustrates something about how smart businesses thrive. Disney is a theme-park and cruise company that also makes movies Disney is among the distant runners-up in the streaming wars; its combined platforms (Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+) have at least 100 million fewer subscribers than Netflix. The real profit engine is its roster of “Experiences” — aka its 12 theme parks, six resorts, and seven cruise ships. Last year, Experiences generated US$10 billion in operating income (aka profit). That’s 57% of the company’s total, while its studios, networks, and streaming platforms contributed only 19%. Disney movies are still indispensable as IP drivers for its premium experiences, of course. They’re the reason Disney cruises can charge double the competition. Car dealerships and jewelry stores are basically banks A 2026 Ford 150 can easily cost $60,000, and yet Ford’s net profit margin on new vehicles is generally around 2%. That’s $1,200 in profit on a $60,000 truck. Financing saves the day: it’s responsible for something like 58% of dealership profit. Large jewelry chains, like Peoples Jewellers, depend on financing in much the same way. Fast-food companies are landlords An oldie but a goodie: generally speaking, the parent company buys the land and then leases it to franchisees, who operate the restaurants built on top of it. McDonald’s is thought to be the fifth largest landowner in the world, and real estate generates about 36% of its profits. Sports stadiums are really big malls Almost every new pro-sports stadium is a mixed-use development these days. The Atlanta Braves illustrate why: in a single quarter, the team’s stadium complex — which includes a movie theatre, restaurants, a distillery, and a music venue — generated US$25.1 million in revenue for the team, in large part through rental income. Airlines might as well just be loyalty programs The Wall Street Journal estimates that airlines earn about $13 in profit from each passenger. That’s not a huge margin. The big money lies in rewards programs. How it works is that airlines create travel points out of thin air and sell them to the banks that manage the carrier’s co-branded credit cards. Then the airlines and the banks split the money from the swipe fees whenever travellers use their cards to accumulate points. And people use their cards a lot: in 2023, consumers charged nearly 1% of U.S. GDP — or US$268 billion — to Delta’s co-branded Amex cards alone. —Jared Sullivan The Big Read 🍔 The Uber Eats app turns 10! A look at Canadians’ evolving cravings Corporate anniversary announcements aren’t typically the most scintillating content, but this Uber Eats PR blast celebrating its 10th anniversary delivers (ahem) nugget after nugget about 🇨🇦eating habits. The politest city (as measured by who says “thank you” or “merci” the most): Edmonton. Best tippers: Calgary. Most popular order: burrito bowl. Click through to find out how many millions of bananas we’ve ordered as a national populace in the past decade. Many, many bunches. 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). TWIM: Price returns shown for January 12 - 16 in local currency, via TradingView. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Have questions? Contact us. VIEW IN BROWSER PRIVACY POLICY UNSUBSCRIBE No purchase required. Register by March 31, 2026. Must be Canadian resident, age of majority and Wealthsimple client. Contest: STQ required. 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