It’s officially that week in September when you leave the house in a jacket at 8 a.m. and end up sweating in a T-shirt by 2 p.m. Yay. Half the office has moved into their pumpkin spice era while the rest of us still cling to iced coffees and hunt sun patches through the windows like cats in heat (I don’t know cats very well). 

Speaking of cats, the fall equinox hit like a lion… or a lamb, whichever one is colder. But no matter what your turtleneck du jour looks like these days, we encourage you to get hygge-y with it, and cozy up to this week’s edition of The Margin newsletter.

– Eric Wainwright, Editor in Chief

The takeaway: Semiconductor and AI stocks drove the Nasdaq to a record high on Monday, while falling oil prices gave relief to the broader markets. But the midweek economic data threw a wrench in the rally. Rapid US business growth and low unemployment claims stoked inflation fears, sending the 10-year Treasury yield above 5.1% for the first time in 19 years, and sparking concerns over further Fed rate hikes. Add in oil jumping past US$100 per barrel again, and both Wall Street and the TSX surrendered their early gains to finish the week on shaky ground.

Did Meta finally release a product that people actually want? 

After four generations of Llama, the company’s underwhelming LLM, and the ‘pervert glasses’ debacle earlier this year, Meta hasn’t exactly been tapped into consumers’ deepest desires. (Maybe it’s been too busy trying to settle lawsuits.) But Muse, the company’s first ‘personal AI agent,’ seems to be right on the money. 

We mean that literally. Meta stock has surged nearly 25% since Muse launched in early September, and the product is being adopted even faster than ChatGPT in 2022. Muse can traverse the internet and complete digital tasks on your behalf, from filling out tedious online forms to haggling with unsuspecting Facebook Marketplace vendors. 

Muse is not the world’s first AI virtual assistant. Scrappy startups OpenClaw and Instinct beat it to the punch earlier this year. But OpenClaw is challenging to set up, and Instinct is an invite-only platform. And Muse – according to a slate of early adopters and appropriately skeptical tech journalists – works exceptionally well. 

The market seems convinced. Shopify stock jumped after the company announced a partnership with Meta. Meanwhile, stocks for many subscription services – which often retain customers by being easy to forget about and annoying to cancel – went down, now that Muse can quickly identify and terminate no-longer-free trials. Financial stocks also went down, perhaps because Muse will make it easier for customers to compare prices and switch between financial services providers.

Bottom Line: Meta ushering in a new era of AI was not on our bingo card. But Muse has proven itself helpful, user-friendly, and popular – for anyone willing to hand over even more of their data to Mark Zuckerberg, that is.

by Erin Nicole Davis

This is an excerpt of an article originally run in full on The Margin.

Noahthai Hem figures his Pokémon card collection will help fund his wedding some day. The 26-year-old Toronto-based bartender began collecting the cards as a hobby in his late teens out of love for Pokémon. Since then, he’s purchased cards for as much as $2,000. “I never would have done that if I didn’t think it would appreciate in value,” he says. His collection is currently worth around $30,000; he thinks it could be worth $40,000 in a couple of years.

For hobbyists like Hem, the jump from fun hobby to side hustle begins with a simple realization: I’m already doing this in my spare time, so why not make money from it? In the hustle economy, leisure's been reevaluated through the lens of productivity and asset appreciation. Sneakers and luxury watches are viewed as alternative asset classes, home bakers launch Instagram storefronts, and collectors track card values like day traders.

Instead of pursuing a hobby for the love of it, we’ve normalized the idea that passion projects should pay for themselves – or better yet, turn a profit. A normalized idea, however, isn’t always a good one. In some cases, it may defeat the whole point of a hobby in the first place.

Read more

Eric Wainwright, Editor in Chief: Earlier this summer, my wife and I celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary. We did so by not getting each other anything. Stay with me: nothing might just be the new something.

Nothing means, ‘I still love you enough that I don't need to hand over an old piece of tin to prove it.’ (Fun fact: tin is the traditional 10th-anniversary gift, which feels like an insult to everyone involved).

To be clear, I’m not saying milestones aren’t worth celebrating – of course they are. Rather, the best gift we could give was the recognition that we needed nothing more from one another than what we were already giving on a daily basis. Cheesy? Absolutely. But knowing that nothing was the biggest something was way better than capturing yet another useless unboxing video.

Don’t believe me? Imagine all the people in your life you’d feel good giving nothing to on a big day. Go ahead, count ’em up. I bet it’s a shorter list than you think.

Forget 10 years. Nothing is forever.

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), Amarah Hasham-Steele (staff writer), Shazia Khan (social media strategy manager), Anthony Milton (content lead), Martin Molpeceres (social video producer), Kat Angus (deputy editor), and Eric Wainwright (editor in chief).

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