Apple's Stocks app launches automatically (unwanted) and consumes lots of application memory

On my M1 MacBook Pro, running Sequoia 15.1, the Apple Stocks app appears to be launching automatically upon Mac startup. Activity Monitor shows it running, even though I have not launched it. It is not included of my "launch at login" items. I received an "out of application memory" message which required me to "force quit" some applications... and the list included Stocks... even though I had not launched it. I have checked, and Stocks is not set to "notify" me of anything, so it should not be running. (I don't use it at all, though I launched it once when it appeared in Sequoia to see if it's similar to the iOS versions.)

Because Stocks is a "required by your Mac" app, users cannot delete it.

Please offer advice about how to stop this unwanted behavior to prevent its memory leak.