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The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow stretch of sea between Iran to the north and Oman to the south, linking the Persian Gulf to the open ocean. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil, and a large share of its liquefied natural gas, passes through it. There is no easy alternative route for most of that cargo.

That is why any threat to ships there makes traders nervous. Even without a closure, higher insurance costs and rerouted tankers push the price of oil up. Oil is an input to almost everything: petrol, flights, plastics, fertiliser and freight. When it rises, general inflation tends to rise too.

Inflation matters because central banks such as the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve respond to it by moving interest rates. Higher rates make borrowing dearer and usually weigh on bond prices and on shares, especially in growth sectors.

So a conflict thousands of kilometres away reaches a Toronto investor through fuel costs, mortgage rates and the value of an ETF portfolio.

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In February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which had been fighting Russian-backed forces in the east since 2014. Ukraine's Western backers have supplied weapons, money and training, and imposed sanctions on Russia.

Europe feels the war economically because Russia had been a major supplier of gas. Countries rebuilt their energy supplies, and higher costs fed into the inflation spike of 2022 to 2023.

The war also changed government spending. NATO members have pledged to spend more on defence, which squeezes budgets already stretched by ageing populations and high debt.

When you read about a ceasefire or talks, the markets usually watch three things: energy prices, defence-company shares, and the borrowing costs of European governments.

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Toronto's mayor leads a council of 25 ward councillors plus the mayor. The mayor chairs council meetings, proposes the annual budget and represents the city to other governments. Since 2022 Ontario has also given the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa "strong mayor" powers, which let them propose budgets and hire senior staff with fewer council votes.

Much of what you notice as a resident sits with the city: property tax, garbage collection, the TTC, road maintenance, parks, libraries, shelters and zoning. Big items such as health care and the main income tax sit with the province and the federal government.

You vote only in your own ward for a councillor, but everyone votes for the mayor. To vote, you need to be on the voters list, which you can check through the city's election website, and you will get a voter notification card. Advance voting is usually offered before election day.

Why it matters beyond politics: the city's choices on development, transit funding and property tax shape rents, commute times and house prices, which feed into the wider economy.

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Toronto has four major professional teams: the Maple Leafs (NHL ice hockey), Raptors (NBA basketball), Blue Jays (MLB baseball) and Argonauts (CFL Canadian football). Toronto FC plays in Major League Soccer.

Leafs and Raptors share Scotiabank Arena, and the Jays play at Rogers Centre.

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The UK has a parliamentary system. The leader of the party that can command a majority in the House of Commons becomes Prime Minister. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the finance minister, who sets taxes and the government's spending plans, usually announced in a Budget in the autumn.

The Bank of England is independent of the government. A nine-member Monetary Policy Committee sets Bank Rate, meeting eight times a year. Its job is to keep CPI inflation at 2%. If inflation is above the target, it holds rates high or raises them to cool spending. If it is below the target and the economy is weak, it cuts.

Bank Rate matters to ordinary people because mortgages, savings accounts and business loans follow it. It also influences gilt yields. Gilts are UK government bonds. When investors expect higher rates or worry about government borrowing, gilt yields rise and prices fall.

For a Canadian-based ETF investor the UK matters mainly through the pound against the Canadian dollar and through any UK shares inside a global fund.

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Windsor is a town in Berkshire on the River Thames, about 25 miles west of central London. It is best known for Windsor Castle, which has been a royal residence for almost 1,000 years and is described as the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world.

The castle sits above the town, and the Thames runs past Eton College on the opposite bank. Nearby are the Great Park and Savill Garden. The Royal Windsor Horse Show and Ascot Racecourse draw crowds in the summer.

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Bournemouth is a seaside town on England's south coast in Dorset, famous for about seven miles of sandy beach, a Victorian pier and cliffs cut by wooded gorges called chines. It grew as a Victorian resort and now supports tourism, finance and a large student population.

AFC Bournemouth are nicknamed the Cherries and play at the Vitality Stadium. The club climbed from the lower leagues and reached the Premier League in 2015, an unusually small club in a very rich league.

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Finchampstead is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Wokingham, Berkshire, about two miles south of Wokingham town, five miles west of Bracknell and roughly 34 miles west of central London. It borders Hampshire to the south and is known as a wealthy, wooded commuter area.

Its hilltop church, St James, is largely Norman and sits within an older earthwork. A Roman road known as the Devil's Highway crosses the parish. The Ridges, a heathland and woodland area, and Wellingtonia Avenue, a line of giant redwoods planted in the 1860s, are local landmarks.

Local decisions are shared between Finchampstead Parish Council, which handles small local matters such as the neighbourhood plan, and Wokingham Borough Council, which handles planning applications, roads and schools. Housing proposals and traffic are the most common local stories, which is why many Wokingham Today articles about the village concern new homes and roadworks.

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A deficit is the gap between what a government spends and what it collects in a year. Debt is the running total of past deficits. The EU's rules ask members to keep deficits below 3% of GDP and debt below 60%, so France is well outside both.

France's president picks a prime minister, who runs the government and must have enough support in the National Assembly. To pass a budget without a vote, the government can use a constitutional provision known as Article 49.3. That lets it adopt the text unless a no-confidence motion succeeds, and a successful motion topples the government.

The OAT (Obligation assimilable du Trésor) is the French government bond. When investors worry about France's finances they demand a higher yield. Many people compare the OAT yield with Germany's Bund. A widening gap is a quick gauge of political stress.

For an investor, French politics matters because a budget crisis can hit French banks and shares, and the euro.

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Sablet is a hilltop village in the Vaucluse, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, below the jagged limestone ridge of the Dentelles de Montmirail. It is part of the Côtes du Rhône Villages appellation and is one of the villages allowed to put its own name on the label.

An appellation is a legally protected wine region. Rules fix which grapes may be grown and how, which is what makes a village name a guarantee of style. Reds here are mostly blends of Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre.

The village is known for its stone lanes, its winegrowers' cellars and a market. Vaison-la-Romaine is a short drive to the north.

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Vaison-la-Romaine is a small town on the river Ouvèze with two historic halves. The lower town holds some of the largest Roman excavations in France, at the Puymin and La Villasse quarters, with houses, mosaics, a theatre and a museum. Across the river, the medieval upper town (Haute-Ville) climbs to a ruined castle.

The two sides are joined by a single-arched Roman bridge. In September 1992 a catastrophic flood killed dozens of people and wrecked much of the lower town, but the Roman bridge held.

The town hosts a summer festival, Choralies, every third year, and weekly markets. It is a good base for walking in the Dentelles.

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Orange is a town in the Vaucluse with two of the best-preserved Roman monuments in Europe, both on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The Roman theatre has an intact stage wall about 37 metres high, which is rare because most ancient theatres lost theirs. It still hosts opera and concerts, notably the Chorégies d'Orange festival each summer.

The Arc de Triomphe of Orange stands on the old road to Lyon. It is a triple-arched monument from the early Roman Empire, carved with scenes of battles and spoils.

The town's name is older than the fruit. It comes from the Roman Arausio. The Principality of Orange later passed to the House of Nassau, which is how the Dutch royal family got the name "Orange".

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Avignon sits on the Rhône and was the seat of the Catholic popes from 1309 to 1377, when the papacy moved from Rome. The huge Gothic Palais des Papes is the legacy, and the old city's ramparts are largely intact. Both are UNESCO listed.

The Pont Saint-Bénézet, the bridge of the song "Sur le pont d'Avignon", was built in the 12th century. Repeated floods took out most of its arches, so it stops partway across the river.

Each July the city hosts the Festival d'Avignon, one of the biggest theatre festivals in the world, with a huge fringe called the Off.

Aïda is Verdi's opera set in ancient Egypt, premiered in Cairo in 1871. It tells of an enslaved Ethiopian princess who falls in love with an Egyptian commander. It is famous for the Triumphal March.

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A foldable phone has a flexible screen that bends at a hinge. The open phone behaves like a small tablet and the folded phone fits in a pocket. The trade-offs are price, visible creases, thickness and durability.

An AI assistant (a large language model) is software trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language. It does not look things up unless connected to search, and it can make mistakes, so important facts need checking.

Both trends depend on better chips. Chip makers and the data centres that run AI are among the biggest drivers of stock markets, which is why technology weights matter in your ETFs.

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A quarterly earnings call is where a listed company reports its revenue and profit for the last three months, and executives answer analysts' questions. The share price often moves sharply on the news, so investors watch for how results compare with expectations.

For Tesla, the key figures are vehicle deliveries, the gross margin on each car, energy-storage sales and spending on new projects. The company also talks up its autonomous driving and robotaxi plans, which is much of the reason for its valuation.

The Roadster is a long-promised sports car. The Semi is an electric lorry meant to move freight cheaply.

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Elon Musk runs or owns several companies: Tesla (cars and energy), SpaceX (rockets and the Starlink satellite internet service), X (the social network, previously Twitter) and xAI.

SpaceX builds the Falcon rockets that fly cargo and astronauts to orbit, and is developing Starship, a much larger reusable rocket. Starlink sells internet from thousands of satellites.

xAI was founded to build AI systems and released the Grok chatbot. Merging it into SpaceX ties AI development to the cash and computing resources of a large, privately held company.

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Marques Brownlee goes by MKBHD and runs one of the biggest technology review channels on YouTube, with around 21 million subscribers. He is known for clean, calm video and straight verdicts on phones, laptops, cars and gadgets.

If you are new to his reviews, watch for the ones that cover the "daily driver" experience, where he lives with a product for weeks. He also hosts podcasts and interviews executives.

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The Joe Rogan Experience is a long-form interview podcast, often running two to three hours, covering comedy, science, health, politics and fighting. Rogan is also a stand-up comedian and a UFC commentator.

It is one of the most-listened-to podcasts in the world, so the guests he books and the claims they make often get picked up by news outlets.

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Jimmy Carr is a British stand-up comedian known for rapid-fire one-liners and a deadpan delivery, often with very dark humour. His shows are for adults.

He is also a familiar face on British TV, hosting 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and appearing on panel shows. His stand-up specials are on streaming services.

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Ross Edgley is a British endurance athlete. In 2018 he became the first person to swim around Great Britain, which took 157 days and about 1,800 miles. He is also known for dragging a heavy log or tyre across long distances as training, and for his strength work.

His channel and books describe how he builds a body that can handle extreme volume. Swimming in cold water for hours is hard because the body loses heat and the salt damages skin.

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Brian Cox is a British particle physicist and a professor at the University of Manchester, and he is best known as the presenter of popular science programmes. He explains very large ideas, such as how the universe began and how stars work, in plain language.

Emergence is a live show rather than a TV series: he walks an audience through how complex things, from galaxies to living cells and minds, can arise from simple rules. No physics is needed to enjoy it.

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SpaceX builds and launches rockets for NASA, the military and companies. Its Falcon 9 rockets reuse their boosters, which has made launches far cheaper and far more frequent.

Starship is its giant next-generation rocket, designed to be fully reusable and to carry people and cargo to the Moon and Mars. Each test flight teaches the engineers what to fix next, which is why SpaceX launches early and often.

Starlink is the satellite internet network, with thousands of satellites in low orbit. 'V3' is the next, larger generation of those satellites.

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NASA is the US space agency. It runs the International Space Station, sends robotic probes across the solar system and operates telescopes such as James Webb.

Artemis is its programme to return people to the Moon. Artemis II was the first crewed flight around the Moon in that programme, so the data it brought back is the first fresh look from people near the Moon in decades.

A fast radio burst is a flash of radio waves from deep space lasting a fraction of a second. Brown dwarfs are objects too big to be planets and too small to be true stars.

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Rotten Tomatoes collects reviews from professional critics and turns them into a percentage called the Tomatometer. A film marked 'Certified Fresh' is both well reviewed and reviewed by plenty of critics.

A high score does not mean 'popular'. Small films often score 100% from a handful of reviews, so check how many critics there are before you trust a number.

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The Bank of Canada sets its overnight policy rate, the rate that banks charge each other, and uses it to steer inflation toward 2%. Commercial banks set their prime rate from it, which drives variable mortgages and lines of credit.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures how much a typical basket of goods and services costs, compared with a year earlier. When inflation is above target, the bank is less likely to cut rates.

The S&P/TSX Composite is the main Canadian share index. It is heavy in banks, energy and mining, so it rises and falls with commodity prices and financial-sector earnings, and is less weighted to technology than US indexes.

The Canadian dollar also matters. When oil rises it often strengthens, which changes the value of any US or international assets you hold.

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The Federal Reserve is the US central bank. Its policy committee sets a target range for the federal funds rate, and that rate anchors borrowing costs worldwide because the US dollar is the world's main reserve currency.

When the Fed raises rates, newly issued bonds pay more, so existing bonds with lower rates fall in price. High rates also make future profits worth less today, which hurts fast-growing technology shares most.

Because the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are such large parts of global equity funds, a change in US policy can move your ETF even if you hold no US-specific fund.

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Both countries have high debt and slow growth. In a high-debt country, rising interest rates make the interest bill larger every year, which leaves less for services or tax cuts.

France does not set its own rates. As a euro member it follows the European Central Bank, so it cannot cut rates to help itself and must instead cut spending or raise taxes.

The UK has its own currency, so the pound can fall when investors worry. That raises import prices and inflation, another reason the Bank of England is cautious.

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GDP (gross domestic product) is the total value of goods and services produced. Growth of 4.3% is strong for a large developed economy but slow for China, which depends on growth to employ millions of people.

China is the world's largest manufacturer and a major buyer of oil, iron ore and copper. When its growth slows, commodity prices and Canadian resource shares often weaken.

Chinese shares are in most global and emerging-market ETFs but at a modest weight. They are subject to political risk, since regulators can change rules suddenly.

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A Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) lets investments grow and be withdrawn tax-free. You contribute from money that has already been taxed. Withdrawn room comes back the following year.

A Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) gives you a tax deduction when you contribute, and growth is untaxed until you withdraw, when it counts as income. It tends to suit people whose tax rate now is higher than it will be in retirement.

The First Home Savings Account (FHSA) combines both: a deduction going in and tax-free withdrawals if used for a first home. It only suits people who qualify as first-time buyers.

Contribution limits change each year and unused room carries forward, so check the Canada Revenue Agency for yours. A non-registered account has no limit but is taxed on dividends, interest and gains. This is general information, so confirm your position with a tax professional.

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An ETF (exchange-traded fund) is a basket of investments that trades on the stock exchange like a single share. An index ETF simply copies a market index, such as the S&P 500, without anyone picking stocks.

The management expense ratio (MER) is the yearly fee taken from the fund, shown as a percentage. All-in-one ETFs usually charge roughly 0.2% to 0.25%. Fees compound against you, so a 1% fund costs thousands more over decades than a 0.2% fund.

Asset allocation is the split between stocks (higher growth, bigger swings) and bonds (steadier, lower return). All-in-one funds come in conservative, balanced, growth and all-equity versions. A person at 45 typically has about 20 years before drawing on retirement money, but how much risk suits you depends on your goals and temperament.

Rebalancing means selling a bit of what has grown and buying what lagged, to return to the target split. An all-in-one does this inside the fund.

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Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions. If rates rise, newly issued bonds pay more, so older bonds fall in price, and longer-dated bonds fall further. A bond ETF can therefore lose value while rates rise, even though the bonds will pay back at maturity.

When a Canadian holds US or international shares, returns depend on the share price and on the exchange rate. If the US dollar falls against the Canadian dollar, a US fund can lose value in Canadian terms. A hedged fund removes most of that effect for a small cost, while an unhedged fund leaves it in.

Foreign governments often withhold tax on dividends paid to non-residents, typically 15% for US dividends under the tax treaty. How much you pay depends on the account (an RRSP is treated more favourably for US-listed funds than a TFSA) and whether the fund is listed in Canada or the US, so it is worth reading the fund's documents.

None of this is a recommendation, and the right answer depends on your situation. A fee-only financial planner can check your specifics.