I'm Joe. I live in Québec, I run a marketing business by day, and for a while now I've had a second job nobody pays me for: explaining stock market headlines to my friends.
Every week, in a WhatsApp group, I write short notes about the market. What happened. What a scary headline actually means. What an earnings report really said, once you get past the jargon. The group kept growing and the notes kept getting shared, so I decided to publish them properly. That's Markets North: this blog, and the videos that go with it.
What you'll get here
One weekly recap: what moved, why it moved, and what was just noise. Notes when the companies I follow report earnings. And plain-language explainers on how investing actually works from Canada, things like how a TFSA (CELI) or an RRSP (REER) treats US stocks, explained the way I'd explain them at a kitchen table.
The names I follow are mostly the ones building the AI era. The memory-chip makers: SK Hynix, Micron, Samsung. The chip names around them. Energy names like Bloom Energy. Big tech like Meta. That's my corner of the market, and I'll stay in it, because it's the corner I actually understand.
This is for the person who owns a few stocks, reads a headline like "memory oversupply fears hammer chip shares," and thinks (okay, but what does that actually mean for the company I own?) That translation, from headline to plain language, is the entire show.
The story: sentiment vs. business
Let me tell you the story that taught our whole group the most this year. It happened in October, and it's about SK Hynix, the Korean company that makes the memory chips inside AI servers.
In mid-October, a Chinese company called CXMT said it was making progress on a new memory chip design. That was the headline. And the market panicked. SK Hynix fell about nine percent in Korea in a day. The whole Korean market dropped more than six percent, and trading was briefly paused. In the US, the stock (SKHY) slid from around $170 down through the $150s, then the $140s. Well-known commentators said China's new supply would crush prices, that the memory cycle was "vicious" and the business was broken again.
Then the other side spoke. Bank of America called the selloff overdone. KB Securities in Korea said the same, and pointed out that profit forecasts for SK Hynix and Samsung were being raised, not cut. The market didn't believe them. For another week, SKHY slid further, to about $137.65.
So who was right? Nobody had to guess, because earnings were coming, and earnings settle arguments. On October 28, SK Hynix reported third-quarter results ahead of what analysts expected, and confirmed a shareholder-return package of roughly ₩100 trillion, including a special dividend funded by its investment gains. SKHY traded around $157.50 pre-market, up about 8.4%.
Sentiment said the business was broken. The business said otherwise. That difference, between the feeling and the facts, is what this site is about.
The rules I publish by
- No stock tips. Never a buy call, never a sell call, never a "top ten" list. I'm not a financial advisor, and nothing here is advice.
- Positions disclosed, every time: in the video, in the description, in the post. If I talk about a stock, I tell you whether I own it.
- Rumour and denial travel together. In the same piece, in the same paragraph. Never the rumour alone.
- Figures in US dollars unless I say otherwise.
- "I don't know" is a complete sentence. When the facts aren't in, I say so, and we wait for the report that settles it.
- Quiet week, no post. This is a hobby I'm sharing, not a content machine I have to feed.
What's next
The first regular piece is the weekly recap, plus the explainer every Canadian in the group asks me about: TFSA or RRSP, which account do you buy US stocks in, and what does the tax take look like either way? If that sounds useful, subscribe to the channel, bookmark the blog, and bring your questions. Especially the "dumb" ones. There are no dumb ones. Only headlines written to confuse you.