Plus: everyone is talking about 1929 (the book) October 20, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 📉 Buzzy biz books 🍷 Puppy pino ⛏️ “Salmon Gold” Thanks to poor cybersecurity, Jodie Foster knows whenever someone is watching Contact on in-flight Wi-Fi. | Warner Bros. Pictures THE WEEK IN MARKETS All your debasement trades are belong to us The parabolic rise of gold continued last week as the price of an ounce neared $6,170. It was already the top-performing major asset in the world this year, but after last week’s jump, it’s now the top performer over the past 20 years, besting U.S. stocks. We’ve talked before about the chief reason why: it’s a safe haven in uncertain times. The peculiar part here is investors usually take shelter in gold when the stock market is sinking and the VIX (its fear gauge) is rising, and right now both are going in the opposite direction. The worry is that money itself may be at risk of losing its value. This so-called “debasement trade” (betting on gold at the expense of money, particularly USD) has become “Wall Street's latest obsession,” and some financial titans fear it’s gone too far. Citadel’s Ken Griffin likened it to a “sugar high,” and those tend to end with a crash. THE CHART OF THE WEEK WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT What can 1929 (the book) teach us about 2026 (the year)? The buzzy business book of the moment is, of course, journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929, about the prelude to the Great Depression, and while he began working on the book eight years ago, all the dialogue about it is whether it’s a parable for today. The impulse is understandable: 1929 is, after all, a cautionary tale about investors piling money into an exciting new technology (radio, the AI of the Roaring ’20s) while CEOs clamour for rate cuts so they can pile even more. “Every crisis is ultimately a function of too much leverage — that’s always the accelerant,” Sorkin told Air Mail. “Then you marry that with runaway speculation.” Sounds familiar so far, but speculation and risk have always been a part of the market. At some point, a crash will happen, but the question is when. “Buy Canadian” hasn’t included Canadian startups — yet. We’ve yanked our tourism dollars from the U.S., but when it comes to venture capital? Not so much. Two-thirds of Canadian VCs’ Q3 investments this year went to non-Canadian companies, with those in the U.S. topping the list; local VCs backed just 66 local companies, down from 104 last year. Why? Because “at the end of the day,” Gideon Hayden, co-founder of the Leaders Fund, told The Logic, “the job of venture capital is profit maximization.” And, like it or not, they still believe the big potential profits are next door. INTERESTING Meet the companies turning Yukon mining trash into treasure. Toronto jeweller Mejuri is teaming up with a Washington-based “re-mining” company called Regeneration to extract traces of gold from the waste material in abandoned mines and, in the process, restore the surrounding natural habitats. Canada’s got 10,000 such mines, but decontaminating them has always been too costly, especially in the absence of technology to process the gold. Regeneration has figured it out, though, and so far the company’s off to a promising start, generating more than $1 million worth of gold for Mejuri, which the jeweller now sells as $598 “Salmon Gold” rings and earrings. Apparently, all you need to be a spy is an $800 satellite dish. Wired published a disturbing story last week about how a team of U.S. university researchers managed to access thousands of T-Mobile customers’ private calls, texts, and in-flight Wi-Fi browsing data using just a US$800 off-the-shelf satellite receiver — because the telecom providers’ cybersecurity had left all of it unencrypted. The researchers titled their paper “Don’t Look Up,” one of them told Wired, “because that was their method of security. They just really didn’t think anyone would look up.” TLDR reached out to Canada’s Big 3 telcos to check on their encryption practices; only Bell responded, saying that 99% of its network is wired and encrypted. (The other 1% is in the far North.) —Sarah Rieger FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🫦 Adults will soon be allowed to get more erotic with ChatGPT. All those dinners you bought it might finally pay off! Source 🤖 Slackbot is about to get a lot more AI capabilities. Is it cool if it joins you and ChatGPT? Source 🌀 Toronto naturalists get the city to draft an anti-rave action plan. Mushroom foragers: 1; mushroom takers: 0. Source 🧪 Quebec considers imposing a limit on sperm donations. Unclear if they mean visits or volume. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🏋 Consumer Reports finds a concerning level of lead in popular protein powders. No wonder those peanut butter energy balls are so heavy. Source 🏦 MrBeast files for a trademark for his own bank. Open an account and fight 100 snakes for 100 days to win the whole vault! Source 🍷 New Zealand company launches nonalcoholic wine for pets. Now your dog will never shut up about freshly opened cans of tennis balls. Source 🔑 New product alert: a belt buckle/Ford F-150 key fob holder called the “Truckle.” (That name tested better than “Buckob” and “Keyckle.”) Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY NARRATIVES Stock Market Giants Don’t Last Forever. (Just Ask GM.) If you’ve followed markets at all over the past two decades, you’ve likely noticed that many of the tech titans that dominated the 2010s — Google, Meta, et al. — now look primed to be the winners of the AI age too. Since 2020, shares of the seven largest U.S. tech companies have shot up by something like 420% (!) on average. The index’s 493 other companies, meanwhile, have grown by just 42%. The so-called Magnificent 7, along with three other jumbo companies (e.g., Berkshire Hathaway), now make up a staggering 40% of the entire S&P 500, a level of concentration never seen before, or at least not in many decades. A big reason for Big Tech’s overperformance is that these few companies, and U.S. companies broadly, are just so dang profitable. And because of that, it’s easy to feel as if the tech giants have a fortress-like position at the top of the stock market. But, as the chart below recently reminded us, there has been a surprising (to us, anyway) amount of upheaval at the top of the market over the past decade. As you can see, 60% of the companies that were in the top 10 in 2015 have dropped off the list entirely. Poof. Gone. And (though not pictured) in the past five years alone, three of the U.S.’s 10 largest companies — Walmart, Visa, and Johnson & Johnson — have been replaced by Nvidia, Broadcom, and JPMorgan. That’s a 30% turnover. Globally the turnover has been 40% in that time. Why staying on top is tough New technology can change the fortunes of companies radically, and fast. Five years ago, almost everyone was still stuck at home during the pandemic. Would you have bet on Nvidia back then, when the e-commerce giants were ascendant and no one had yet heard of ChatGPT? If you’re like most investors, you probably didn’t — just like few people would have guessed in 2005 that Meta would one day be worth more than Exxon. But — and this is the first main point of this article — new technology is always fuelling the rise of some companies and leading to the decline of others. In the 1950s, General Motors, the tech giant of its day, soared to the top of the market as it launched one revolutionary new product after the next: automatic transmission, climate-control air conditioning, etc. Then in the 1970s, IBM surpassed GM after it debuted its mainframe computers. Then Microsoft and Apple came along, and, well, you know the rest. This process is called creative destruction. Last week, the Canadian economist Peter Howitt won an Economics Nobel for his research showing how it fuels economic growth. Growth is good. But creative destruction can also make buying and holding the biggest stocks a dangerous strategy, as Bloomberg Opinion columnist John Authers recently argued. The upshot Here’s our second big point: buying into narratives, like big tech keeps on winning!, can be dangerous, because it can disguise seismic shifts underway in the economy. For instance, Tesla and Nvidia both get labelled “big tech,” but they make very different things — EVs and AI chips, respectively — and they stand to have very different effects on the economy and very different earnings potential. That’s why all this creative destruction/who’s-on-top stuff matters to investors: if a company falls from grace, that usually means it has underperformed expectations. And if its stock tumbles as a result, that can leave a company with less ability to finance R&D or capital expenditures to make great new profitable products. We can’t tell you which firms will win the coming decade in markets. But history is clear that at least some of today’s tech giants, sooner or later, will go the way of GM. It’s almost inevitable. Which is why for long-term investors, it’s important to diversify and hold stable, profitable companies. Beyond that, all we can say with certainty is to expect change and more change and then even more change on top of that. Be ready, and really know what you’re investing in. —Brennan Doherty OTHER VERY GOOD READS 🍽️ The Company Ruining Restaurants Why a bunch of restaurants are all starting to taste the same. | More Perfect Union 👖 It Was Gen Z’s Favourite, Until It Wasn’t Inside the SSENSE fiasco. | The Walrus 💰 Canadians Say They Need $1.7M to Retire We calculated how to get there. | Wealthsimple Magazine THE WISDOM OF SOCIAL THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (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 (lifecycle marketing 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 Amazon, Broadcom, Google, JPMorgan, and Microsoft. 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. 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