In a week devoid of meaningful Canadian data, the spotlight has swivelled south. Yesterday, bond markets spent most of their time stewing over a weaker-than-expected U.S. retail sales report. That, plus more Trump-Canada squabbling (this time over a bridge), brought out the bond buyers. Now all eyes shift to today’s potentially consequential U.S. employment report at 8:30 a.m. ET.

Some important new details emerged on Nova Scotia's new low-downpayment program.

Monday's bond markets remained subdued in the absence of any meaningful economic data or shocks. But we nonetheless picked up plenty of signals that could steer rates over the medium term.

In mortgage lending, news headlines are everywhere; usable, revenue-driving strategies are not.

In an industry drowning in information, the insights we do get are frequently inconsequential, untimely, or incomplete. And there's often no easy way to flesh them out.

All of that led MortgageLogic.news to rethink how mortgage professionals consume, share, and sanity-check information.

In the process, our goals were threefold — to save members:

• Time (manual filtering)
• Cognitive load
• Second-guessing

The tech does that by distilling complex stories into clear, usable intelligence. Then it lets you easily bounce ideas off the community or a trained bot for validation.

By coupling exclusive analysis with digital interpretation, community feedback and a powerful array of new sources, MLN 3.0 becomes a tool for staying three moves ahead of fast-moving competitors.

How to get on the beta

After months of hammering away in the background, the test version is finally live for everyone.

Here’s how to take it for a spin:

1. Click here (don't use the regular sign-in until you complete the steps below)
2. Log in with the same email you use on this site
3. Choose a password (required since MLN 3.0 runs on new databases)
4. Click the verification link in your email, and yes, check spam if it’s playing hard to get
5. Answer the setup questions
6. (Optional, but appreciated) Spot anything acting weird? Simply click "Send a Tip" to let us know

What’s actually new

For months, we’ve been busy behind the scenes, turning ideas into something usable. Here are some changes you'll spot right away:

• MLN 3.0 revolves around "sparks," which are streamlined news reports meant to spark ideas—ideas for strategies, client communications and business generation.
  
  Members can also create their own sparks, posting images, sharing their thoughts on video, or adding charts using our new graph builder. Member sparks then appear to all on MLN's new Community Feed.
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• An entirely new, fully customizable Mortgage Command Centre to monitor mortgage rate trends and economics (dashboard sharing coming soon).
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• News Lens™ lets you define what's important. It then slices through the headlines to pull out concrete ways you can turn news into business fuel.
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• Drop a spark, toss a comment, fire off a reply, or send in a tip—every move racks up karma, the local currency around here.
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• There's a brand new text-to-speech engine with voices that no longer sound like a fancy GPS.

• A redesigned News-Stream for customizable mortgage news monitoring from thousands of sources, with AI filtering out the garbage.

• A more straightforward, easier-to-view Rate Survey with province filtering (finally!).

• Instant search of news, economic data, rates and member comments.

• Live member Q&A.

• Anonymous news tips with guaranteed confidentiality, so you can share anything newsworthy without collateral damage.

• Bond yield alerts that flag 1.5+ standard deviation (i.e., meaningful) moves
• Downloadable receipts
• Saved news to read later
• Customizable notification settings to silence everything you don't care about

What to expect next

• The beta will run in parallel with our existing site for a while.
• Because it is a beta, you're likely to come across glitches occasionally.
• The AI might be a little wonky for a few weeks while it learns.

With any luck, our robo-coders will squash bugs before they make a scene.

So give it a try and tell us what worked—and what tested your patience.

And we welcome your unsolicited brilliance, so if you have feature ideas, please keep them coming!

"Canada lost jobs last month, and markets couldn’t have cared less," declared Scotiabank’s Derek Holt.

"Heartless? Not really, it’s a rational response to a dog’s breakfast of data and shaky underlying drivers," he said.

Here's what else economists were chewing on, coming into this week.

January’s Labour Force Survey served up one of those reports that can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

Employment shed almost 25,000 positions, virtually all of them part-time, and pretty much every one located in Ontario or inside a factory.

Yet the unemployment rate sank to 6.5%, not thanks to a hiring spree, but because nearly 120,000 people quietly vanished from the labour force. It was the largest non-pandemic decline since early 2022.

Wage growth decelerated further to about 3.3%, private-sector payrolls fell sharply, and manufacturing employment dropped to multi-year lows courtesy of the wrecking ball called tariffs.

Plenty of analysts blamed weather effects and statistical noise, but you can sum it up as job-market softness masked by collapsing labour supply.

Here's how the rate market may digest it.

Thursday's bond markets reacted loudly to a disappointing U.S. jobs triple whammy, while tech losses dragged equity markets–and yields–lower.

Mortgage rates aren’t hanging out at 1.99% anymore, but make no mistake, they're still priced aggressively.

The chart below lines up mortgage rates next to what the big banks are paying on their own 5-year senior debt.