Plus, America’s potash problem July 28, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 🛰️ Satellite SMS 🌽 Corn cash 🚪 Meme-stock mania The Opendoor bonanza is giving us GameStop flashbacks. | Sony Pictures THE WEEK IN MARKETS The return of meme-stock mania filled the headlines last week — see below for our Q&A with the guy who whipped up the Opendoor frenzy — as day traders sent a random department-store chain (Kohl’s) soaring 40% and gobbled up American Eagle stock because of some weird parasocial investing relationship with Sydney Sweeney. But it was last week’s promising start to earnings season and U.S. trade pacts with Japan and Europe, not meme stocks, that drove the markets to more all-time highs. It's early yet — only about a third of the companies on the S&P 500 have reported their numbers so far — but of that group, 80% have beaten expectations, including Google and Coca-Cola. If that's the final number for Q2, it'll be the highest since 2023. Over on the TSX, meanwhile, the early winners include Loblaws and an unheralded juggernaut we'll take a closer look at down below. Bottom line: the global economy is showing its resilience. Despite all the geopolitical turmoil and tariff whiplash, companies keep finding ways to turn nickels into dimes, and for serious traders, that’s the real headline. THE CHART OF THE WEEK WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Farewell to the “sorry, I had no cell service” excuse. Rogers has launched a free trial of its new satellite-to-text service, which provides messaging coverage in dead zones anywhere south of the territories, provided you have a recent phone and a clear view of the sky — a service that sure would’ve come in handy for this writer when she ran into a bear in the backcountry. Anyone in Canada, regardless of mobile provider, can try the service for free; it’ll cost $15/month after that. Curiously, Rogers has been notably quiet about its corporate partner in this venture: Elon Musk and SpaceX, whose Starlink satellites are already used by more than half a million Canadians. It’s the one part of his business empire, in fact, that’s thriving right now. Did we just give U.S. tech giants a double handout? Canada’s new digital services tax (DST) was intended to tax U.S. tech giants on the money they make from Canadians (and bring in more than $1 billion in annual revenue). In response, those tech giants — Amazon, Apple, et cetera — hiked fees to pass along the costs. But now that Prime Minister Mark Carney has scrapped the DST, surely those U.S. tech giants will scrap their fee hikes and refund users … right? Well, Google dropped its fee, but the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) says those other companies aren’t responding to questions about it. Meanwhile, one Nova Scotia small-business owner told the IJF she’s been charged thousands by Amazon for a tax that now doesn’t exist. INTERESTING Canadian potash prices are crushing U.S. corn farmers. The ratio comparing the cost of fertilizer to the price of corn is the most askew it’s ever been. Why does this kernel of a data point matter so much? Because it’s a tidy synopsis of the busted Canada-U.S. trade relationship right now: Canada has the world’s largest reserves of potash, or “pink gold,” and the U.S. is far and away our biggest customer, accounting for about 80% of imports. Farmers are also a powerful political lobby in the U.S., and despite largely voting for Trump, those farmers have endured an entire year without turning a profit on corn. Earnings week in two words: hot garbage. Most of the headlines last week came from the likes of GM and Coca-Cola, but one company’s report caught our eye for having one of Canada’s largest market caps despite very little name recognition: Toronto-based Waste Connections. What is it? If you guessed a dating app for single trash collectors, nice try, but no, it’s a subsidiary of one of North America’s largest garbage-collection conglomerates. WC crushed analysts’ expectations last month by reporting $290 million in earnings, in part by targeting areas without any competitors — a useful reminder that the shrewdest investments aren’t always the sexiest. —Sarah Rieger FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🚘 Mercedes-Benz is incorporating Microsoft Teams to make your car a “third workspace.” Slack hard at work to bring Huddles to your toilet. Source 🤖 Sam Altman warns about AI voice fraud in banking. Repeat: Scarlett Johansson will never ask you for your PIN. Source 😊 Nine new emojis are coming, including “landslide” and “trombone.” Very helpful if you’re running late to jazz practice. Source 🛂 Canadian passport ranked eighth most powerful in the world. It scored high on visa-free travel but really clinched it in the swimsuit competition. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 😷 New study finds that the pandemic made our brains smaller. But it really sculpted our sourdough muscles. Source 🍫 Hershey announces plans to raise prices by double digits. Apply now if you want to Klarna some Reese’s. Source 🔌 The Tesla Diner is now open in Hollywood. Try the chili if you want to switch to Commode Mode. Source 🚓 Some Vancouver parking cops to start wearing body cameras. Will provide tons of footage for new spinoff, Under Arrest: Expired Meter. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY MANIA The Man Behind the Meme Stock Ever heard of a middling real-estate platform for U.S. home flippers called Opendoor Technologies? We sure hadn’t until its sub-US$1 share price jumped 208% in a week, thanks in part to the relentless tweeting of Canadian hedge funder Eric Jackson. This isn’t his first retail-investor rodeo, however. Among quite a few blown calls, he’s had one notable success: back in 2022, Jackson predicted Carvana’s 1,000% trough-to-peak recovery. And now he’s calling Opendoor a future “100-bagger” (his way of saying it’ll grow 100x) despite its dismal balance sheet. Investors piled in, and at one point, $OPEN accounted for roughly 10% of all daily U.S. stock trades. We wondered how it felt to be at the center of all this action, so we reached out to Jackson to ask. You tweeted about $OPEN, and the price soared soon after. How did that feel? That was weird for sure. This never entered my calculus of looking at the stock. I wasn’t thinking, “How do I create the next big GameStop?” or something like that. Is Opendoor a meme stock? I think all meme stocks are stupid businesses that I would never want to own. I didn’t even know Krispy Kreme was a stock until I heard it was the new meme stock a few days ago. And then, if you go back to 2021, I thought GameStop was a dumb business. I still do. I don’t think $OPEN is a meme stock. The company hasn’t made money in 11 years and holds about US$2B in debt. What did you see in it? Unless you find something really cheap, there’s no hope of it 100xing. My cheat sheet is to find a company that everyone thinks will go bankrupt. Maybe it’s got a lot of debt, but it is a national platform of some kind. The people who use it like the service, profitability is improving, and you have to see where it’s going to flip from losing money to making money. You have to bet early that six months from now, the world is going to look very differently at this kind of company. Now’s the time to invest, when there’s max pessimism. Whether or not you intended to, you started a frenzy. Do you feel a sense of responsibility to the people buying this stock? For sure. Some people have said, “Oh, I made all this great money for my family. Thank you so much, Eric.” Obviously, that feels great. But somebody else tweeted me like, “I put all my savings, $25,000, into Opendoor! I'm with you on this ride!” And, you know, that doesn't feel great. That feels daunting, because it doesn’t sound smart to me. And because I very well could be wrong about Opendoor. Now that you see the power you have to move markets, is there any temptation to do it again? The markets are pretty smart, pretty big, and pretty liquid. You can't get full of yourself. But I am more conscious of not tweeting absentmindedly. I'll probably be more guarded, but I don't plan on stopping sharing my thoughts and ideas. What's the worst-case scenario here? Opendoor crashes. People laugh at me and say what an idiot I am. My hedge fund closes. I lose my house, I lose my family. Those are high stakes. I’ve got a ways to go, you know. I'm not sitting on the beach here. I'm in my little office, grinding away. Interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear the full thing, check out this Wednesday’s TLDR podcast. OTHER VERY GOOD READS 📰 If You Think Canada Has Press Freedom, Share This on IG Meta’s news ban is cutting us off from crucial information. | The Walrus 🏦 When Canada Pressured Our Central Bank Trump’s attack on Powell echoes 1950s Canada. | Financial Times 🥌 Broomgate: A Curling Scandal World Curling just tightened its rules. Listen to the wild story explaining why. | CBC Podcasts THE WISDOM OF SOCIAL Congrats to the James family on LeBron’s AI slop baby! THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? 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