Hello world! Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Anthony Milton, and I like sunsets and long walks on the beach. I’m also The Margin’s newest writer and editor, your man in the markets, your boy on Bay Street, your… dude on the derivatives? (I’ll keep working on it.) In past lives, I’ve worked as a consultant in the climate and energy space, a bureaucrat in New Zealand, and, most recently, an editor at Toronto Life, where I covered the city’s culture scene and reported on financial intrigue.

I subscribe to the principle that, despite society’s obsession with abstract numbers and corporate brand names, the world is fundamentally made of people doing stuff. The privilege of being a reporter is that, for me, each of them is only a phone call away, no matter how lofty their job titles may be. It’s my job to bring the heady world of the markets directly down to earth, and I couldn’t be more excited to do so. Let’s do some cool stuff with some cool people.

– Anthony Milton, Content Lead

The takeaway: Everything was down this week, but the real question is: why? Chip stocks everywhere, especially on the Nasdaq, just kept sinking, even after Taiwan Semiconductor (TPE:2330) beat earnings and raised its 2026 guidance, indicating that good news isn’t necessarily boosting AI stocks anymore (more below). Warren Buffett describing the market as "increasingly driven by speculative trading” certainly didn’t help matters. The TSX, meanwhile, barely budged at all – for once, Canada's shortage of public AI companies is working in investors’ favour.

Wall Street’s confidence in AI might be starting to crack. This week, several key players in the AI boom saw their stocks fall: iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX), a bellwether for the chip trade, fell 4.6%, slumps in key players like Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU), Sandisk (NASDAQ:SNDK), and Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) sent the Nasdaq sliding, and declines on the S&P500 were only saved by non-AI companies reporting healthy earnings.

Dips in the AI market aren’t a new thing (we also saw similar volatility in June), but what is changing is the narrative. Just three weeks ago, analysts were explaining away those swings as interest rate jitters and fallout from the US-Iran war. This week, though, headlines are all about doubts around AI itself.

The stories we tell ourselves matter. The AI boom itself was one narrative: that super-intelligent robots will replace human workers en masse, creating enormous gains in efficiency while doing things never thought possible. The markets put a very, very high dollar value on that story.

Now, however, a different narrative is taking root: that those promises were overblown. As we noted last week, the Magnificent Seven have lost the confidence of some investors for their huge investments (and debt) into AI, instead moving money toward the chipmakers, hence the semiconductor boom. But this new narrative is making its way into that space, too.

Meanwhile, public opposition to AI adoption is growing. In South Korea this week, a union representing 40,000 auto workers at Hyundai (KRX:005380) staged a partial strike over AI-powered humanoid robots designed for the factory floor. If they succeed, that could set a tough precedent for manufacturers like BMW (ETR:BMW), Mitsubishi (TYO:8058), and Toyota (TYO:7203), all of which are building their own robots. Meanwhile, some AI executives have received threats on their lives as anger grows toward their technology – and their demands.

What this means…

by Anthony Milton

The World Cup final is this weekend, and although Canada's part in the tournament is over, the legal blind spot this story is about won’t expire when the winners are crowned. Montreal hosts the UCI Road World Championships in September, and that and every Canadian event that follows will face the same risks.

This is an excerpt of a story originally run on The Margin.

Two weeks before the World Cup kicked off in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, French soccer player Elye Wahi was arrested in Marseille, where he plays in France’s domestic league. French police specializing in corruption offenses had noticed something strange about the striker’s last game against FC Metz: sports bettors had put unusually high sums on the chance Wahi would receive a yellow card in that game, and sure enough, he got one after tackling an opposing player.

The police never charged Wahi with any crime, letting him go after an interview, and just three weeks later he was in Toronto, playing against Germany for Ivory Coast in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But had that suspicious game occurred on Canadian soil, authorities here would have had even less recourse – unlike France and most other developed countries, Canadian police have little authority to arrest someone on match-fixing suspicions alone.

“Canada is extremely vulnerable to competition manipulation,” says Jeremy Luke, CEO of Sport Integrity Canada, the country’s main sports ethics organization. “I see it as being as big a threat as doping.”

Canada, as it turns out, has an enormous blind spot when it comes to competition manipulation, and with FIFA already come and gone and the World Cup heading into the quarterfinal stage, the deadline’s passed to figure it out. This World Cup could be the most bet upon tournament in history, with the total amount projected to exceed US$50 billion, and all that money is attracting shady characters. The UN warned that organized crime is looking to get in on that action, potentially corrupting players and officials to throw points, matches, and referee calls so that pre-planned bets can be guaranteed to hit.

That means competition manipulation and sports betting are linked at the hip, but unfortunately, our laws haven’t caught up. When Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021, it failed to follow up with proper legislation against match fixing. That’s left us with a FIFA-sized blind spot. It’s not legal for an athlete to throw a game (technically, one can be charged with conspiracy and fraud) but those laws are mighty difficult to enforce.

Read more

Anthony Milton, Content Lead: It’s getting harder to square Canada's fortunes as an oil and gas producer with the fresh hell every summer brings. Just last week, Premiers Danielle Smith and Doug Ford made headlines over a new Alberta-to-Ontario pipeline; before that, Mark Carney had promised Alberta a new line to the coast. On paper, that's great for the economy. But at what cost?

Here in Toronto, I spent last Tuesday night sweltering in the 37℃ heat (48℃ with humidity) watching alien math-rockers Angine de Poitrine jam out. I woke up Wednesday to a sky gone sepia from wildfires burning up north, and by evening I had donned an N95 mask to avoid breathing the toxic air outside – air thick with suspended ash from the wildfires, along with an ever-increasing amount of world-heating carbon dioxide. That same day, the Bank of Canada released a surprisingly positive economic update with growth numbers driven in part by increased oil exports, off to be burned somewhere else on this ever-warming planet.

I’m reminded of Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s 2021 essay in The Atlantic, “The Gods Were Right,” which imagines a world where every fossil fuel-burning car, airplane, furnace, and power plant is rendered transparent, revealing the millions of tiny fires burning all around us every day. Is that what it'll take to set humanity straight on climate change? Or do we wait until the fires are in front of us, creeping down our streets, as they already are in the north? 

Musing on mythology, Magnason concluded that the Greek gods were right to punish Prometheus for giving fire to humankind. Looking at the blood-red sky outside my window, I’m beginning to agree.

From The Margin group chat:

If you liked this newsletter, hated this newsletter, or are totally indifferent to it, hit the reply button and tell us why! We’re so lonely.

This week’s contributors: Tyler Haw (audience engagement), Jenna Zaitchik (senior creative designer), Shazia Khan (social media strategy manager), Anthony Milton (content lead), Kat Angus (deputy editor), and Eric Wainwright (editor in chief).

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