Yields edged up on Tuesday amid expectations of a busy data week that crescendos with Canadian and U.S. jobs numbers on Friday.

Meanwhile, bond markets (so far) appear serenely indifferent to the U.S. capture of ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

In 2026, local credibility beats clever SEO tricks, says search marketing expert Shamil Shamilov from Toronto-based dNovo Group.

For mortgage brokers and lenders to show up in AI responses—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, etc.—it hinges on reputation engineering and source authority. That's a fancy way of saying you need to prove you aren’t a fraud to a machine that's much smarter than all of us.

What follows is part I of MLN's video interview with Shamilov. In it, he lays out how web search is mutating and where mortgage marketers should actually be spending their hours. If you're in a hurry, note the key takeaways below the video.

The bond market's seasonal hibernation is over. Time to strap in for an action-packed January, which means that volatility in fixed mortgage rates could pick up.

Here’s what to watch for...

For mortgage pros, these next 12 months may prove the most transformative—technology-wise—in our industry's history.

That's not hyperbole. It's an unavoidable truth. AI is advancing technology and development so fast that the 1996–1999 internet frenzy feels unambitious by comparison.

As a result, some of the most tedious gears in the lending machine will speed up this year, including mortgage research, app completion, doc processing, and approvals.

That last one is a true disruptor because one thing literally every mortgage shopper wants is immediate approval. In 2026, a small but growing group of lenders will give them precisely that.

Countless lenders are now racing to install or fine-tune AI underwriting systems. They know that by year-end, pieces of code will routinely decide borrowers' financial worthiness in the time it takes to blink—at least on the prime side.

In 2025, fixed mortgage rates dropped anywhere from 30 bps on the five-year fixed to 115 bps on the one-year fixed. And given how a key fixed-rate indicator closed out the year, one might say we were lucky to get that savings.

The Fed’s latest minutes, which Scotiabank says are "as stale as three-day-old turkey stuffing," were consistent with lower rates in 2026. And typically, the lower Fed funds go, the harder it is for the Bank of Canada to hike rates OTBE.

But the meeting summary also revealed significant uncertainty. Some Fed officials expressed a preference to keep the target range "unchanged for some time."

Bond market volumes are expected to be thin for the final three trading days of 2025. With little on tap until Wednesday's U.S. jobless claims, yields are guided more by things like portfolio rebalancing and geopolitical headlines.

Every quarter, Wowa.ca puts out some solid research called the Canadian Lenders Report (details).

We just saw its latest version and some interesting nuggets stood out. We're talking the kind that mortgage brokers can casually drop into the conversation when pitching their services.