Plus: Nintendo’s Switch-eroo May 13, 2024 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 🏦 TD gets in trouble 😢 Renters feel rate hikes 🖥️ Clippy makes a comeback For a while, Microsoft seemed destined for irrelevance. Then this PC wunderkind got a bright idea. We explain below, in the Big Important Story. | Getty Images THE WEEK IN MARKETS An A-OK Earnings Season (So Far) We’re heading into the home stretch of Q1 earnings season — exciting! Strong performances have nudged the markets ever closer to all-time highs. The S&P, Nasdaq, and TSX all rose by about 1% last week. When all is said and done, analysts expect 10% Q1 earnings growth in the U.S. and about 6% in Canada. But drill down deeper and you’ll find one type of business in particular is paying the price for overly rosy expectations: tech-forward consumer companies. Uber, Airbnb, Disney, and Shopify all slumped after they said they expect demand to slow down a bit. Their numbers weren’t bad, per se. “Soft” is more like it. But analysts nonetheless got a bit spooked that high interest rates could finally cool consumer spending — which might trim the fat from consumer-tech profits as well. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Is TD entering a “lost decade”? Bloomberg asked that question after news broke that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating the bank for allegedly being used to launder US$653 million in fentanyl sales for Chinese gangs. TD may be fined up to US$2 billion, but its problems could extend beyond that. The inquiry has already resulted in the scuttling of one planned TD acquisition, and regulators may decide to limit the bank’s future growth in the U.S. During a company-wide meeting last week, CEO Bharat Masrani warned that “this is going to get tough before it gets better.” TD stock is down 12% YTD. High interest rates are hurting renters. Homeowners? Not so much. You’d think it would be the reverse, since renters don’t have mortgages to pay interest on. But, according to a new Bank of Canada report, homeowners are mostly coping with rate hikes because [1] they tend to own more stocks, which are up big, and [2] rising home prices means more equity, which homeowners can use to negotiate lower mortgage payments on their existing loans. Renters, in contrast, often get hit with higher prices as landlords try to cover their rising mortgage payments and then some. The longer rates stay high, though, the more homeowners could share in the hurt. INTERESTING Nintendo’s Switch-eroo is coming soon. Mario Bros. Inc. LLC announced last week that its long-delayed Switch 2 will arrive no later than April 2025. The Switch has been on the market for seven years, during which time it has sold more than 140 million units, which makes it the third-best-selling console ever. Nintendo is a platform-focused company, as opposed to a mobile- or cloud-focused one: last year, sales of the Switch and Switch games made up 94% of its US$12 billion revenue. So the stakes are high for the Switch 2. —Sarah Rieger FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🌋 Indonesia relocates 10,000 island residents due to an active volcano. “Can we get an active volcano?” asks New Jersey. Source 🍋 Panera discontinuing its caffeinated Charged Lemonade drink amid wrongful-death lawsuits. Still proudly serving Impaled on a Spike Iced Tea. Source 💉 Wegovy is now available in Canada, so make up some excuse to get out of your weekly Ozempic date. Source 💰 Study shows one in 16 Vancouverites is now a millionaire. Soon they might even be able to afford apartments. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🤝 Uber and Instacart join forces to fight their chief rival, DoorDash. Audiences will thrill over the exciting poke-bowl climax. Source 🚗 GM is discontinuing the Chevy Malibu. It will take its rightful place next to the Ford Taurus in Car Hell. Source 🍁 Oracle of Omaha considers becoming Oracle of Oshawa: Warren Buffett looking to invest in Canada. Source 🚢 Royal Caribbean hiring 10,000 new workers to meet surging cruise demand. Diarrhea mopping experience a plus. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY 1 COMPANY, 1 CHART How Microsoft Lost Its Way — Then Became Super Again This week, we’re going to tell the story of a single company. No, not Nvidia or Meta or Tesla, but Microsoft. Why? Well, it’s the most valuable company in the world (again), one of the most influential companies of the past couple of decades, and the only firm that’s stayed in the list of the ten-biggest companies over the past 20-plus years. But that alone is not the reason we’re talking about it. We are talking about Microsoft because it’s a company that’s taken one of the most interesting journeys in corporate history — a rise and fall and rise and fall and rise, rise, rise that, in a way, tells the story of technology in the 21st century, from PCs to mobile to the cloud to AI. And you almost have to understand tech to be an effective investor these days. Read on. 1986: Microsoft goes public at US$21 per share and with a US$519 million market valuation. CEO Bill Gates turns 31. 1995: Microsoft enters its first era of dominance with the release of Windows 95, which defines the layout of nearly all future PC interfaces. In a brilliant stroke, Microsoft bundles the innovative web portal MSN into Windows 95. In a memo to executives months earlier, Gates calls the web “the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981,” and MSN helps Microsoft capitalize on it. For the first time, Microsoft becomes one of the world’s top ten most valuable companies. 1999–2001: Then comes a turning point: as Y2K approaches, Microsoft is the player in PCs. In 1999, its shares surge by 68% and its market valuation hits US$613 billion, briefly making it the world’s most valuable company. (Apple is worth less than US$10 billion.) But Gates is weary from a decade-long antitrust fight with U.S. regulators, so, in 2000, he steps down as CEO, and Steve Ballmer, the company’s 30th employee, takes over. The trouble is that Ballmer is no Gateslike visionary. Worse, Microsoft shares fall by 64% from their peak when the dot-com bubble pops. 2007: Under Ballmer, employees become overly concerned about performance reviews and lose ambition, leading to Microsoft’s “lost decade.” When Apple announces the iPhone in early 2007, Ballmer scoffs, saying people will never pay $500 for a keyboardless phone. But the iPhone soon generates more revenue for Apple than Microsoft makes from all its products. Microsoft responds by launching the Kin, a youth-oriented smartphone. But it doesn’t support downloadable apps and lacks a calendar, corrective spelling, and an online chat feature. It’s discontinued after 48 days; the Windows Phone 7 doesn’t fare much better. Microsoft also fails at e-books, search, and mp3 players. 2008: Microsoft needs a big gamble to pay off as the era of shrink-wrapped software winds down. Gates, though no longer CEO, encourages a team to build a consumer cloud platform to compete with Amazon Web Services. Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, Azure, is announced in October. Investors don’t pay it much attention, but launching Azure will prove to be a (rare) far-sighted move during Microsoft’s lost-in-the-wilderness era. 2010: Apple, worth US$222 billion, surpasses Microsoft to become the most valuable tech company. Only ExxonMobil is more valuable. 2014: Tech companies stop growing when they stop making cutting-edge products. And the Microsoft board, displeased that the company has done nothing truly cutting edge in years, pressures Ballmer to step aside. Satya Nadella, a 22-year company veteran and the head of the cloud-computing division — one of Microsoft’s few bright spots — is named CEO, and he shifts the company’s focus from Windows products to Azure. 2019: Microsoft’s bet on Azure finally begins to pay off as more customers start paying for cloud storage and apps. Microsoft’s annual revenue grows by 14%, to US$125.8 billion, and its shares climb by 55%. Bloomberg calls the turnaround “the Miracle of Microsoft.” Capitalizing on the momentum, Nadella sees a major tech shift coming and takes a big bet: Microsoft invests $1 billion, followed by another $10 billion, into machine-learning developer OpenAI. Internal emails later reveal that Microsoft executives are “very worried” that Google is scaling up its AI efforts and that Microsoft is “multiple years behind.” 2022–2023: The world realizes that Microsoft picked a winner in OpenAI when, in late ’22, it releases ChatGPT, a freakishly good chatbot. Microsoft quickly expands its partnership with OpenAI and, in doing so, pulls ahead of Google and Meta in the race to develop AI. Microsoft integrates OpenAI technology into Azure, which proves to be an effective platform for distributing its AI products. In March 2023, it launches Copilot, a subscription-based “Everyday AI Companion,” for the 365 suite (Powerpoint, Word, etc). —Claire Porter Robbins OTHER VERY GOOD READS 🍼 The Hidden Pregnancy Experiment* Can you become a parent without your phone knowing? | The New Yorker 🏭 The Mississauga Factory Using a Known Carcinogen We included the wrong link to this story in our last issue — apologies! | The Narwhal 🧮 Jim Simons, the Numbers King* Simons, a pioneer of quantitative trading, died on Friday at age 86. | The New Yorker *Article is paywalled, which, yeah, is kind of annoying. But we think good journalism is worth paying for. THE WISDOM OF X The ad for the new iPad was, uh, pretty aggressive… 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), Clare Douglas (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (senior lifecycle specialist), Matthew Karasz (markets editor) Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), Kat Angus (managing editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Microsoft and Amazon. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Replies to this email address are not monitored. Have questions? Visit our Help Centre or submit a request to our Client Support team. VIEW IN BROWSER PRIVACY POLICY UNSUBSCRIBE Mortgage brokerage services are offered by Pine Canada Financial Corporation (“Pine”). If you use Pine’s services, Wealthsimple Mortgage Services Inc. 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