- Market Munch
- Posts
- Market Munch 🍎 | 18 April 2023
Market Munch 🍎 | 18 April 2023
Apple takes a trip to India, Silicon Valley slaps up Wall Street, and fintech starts heating up. 🔥
Aryaansh Rathore
April 17, 2023
Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏
As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 53 seconds.
Yesterday, Tim Cook got ready to go ham on India, Silicon Valley got on Wall Street’s turf, and fintech fundraising got rolling again. 🔥
Let’s dive in.
What’s hot, what’s not?
Market Commentary
Stocks are well and truly in the dead cat bounce, but the bear case remains super strong for now.
BlackRock decided to ditch a fair few of their 60/40 portfolio after high inflation and a ton of other headwinds gave their coffers a good beating.
Real estate across a lot of prime markets continues to be on a ripper.
Story Roundup
For decades now, the tech bros in Silicon Valley have been unable to crack the Indian smartphone market.
There are about 800 million smartphones in India. Less than 2% of those are iPhones.
A number that low is very odd, since Apple controls 25% of the global phone market.
But last quarter, Apple doubled it's India revenue.
This is not a coincidence - global smartphone makers have been in big trouble over hammered discretionary spending and most of the big boys have bled revenue across global markets.
But not India.
Apple is liking the resilience, and they’re building multiple megafactories to handle full-scale iPhone production.
Direct impact on the Indian market will be -
- Lots of new jobs
- Lots of new production spend
- Lots of confidence in India as a manufacturing hub
- An iPhone that's a little bit cheaper
Life’s good. 🤷🏻
America’s financial giants might have a structural shift on their hands.
Schwab, State Street, and M&T Bank saw a total of $60 billion of deposits flow out of their coffers in the last 3 months.
Customers are hunting for the best return on their money, and the big banks aren’t offering much.
The highest interest rates in the market aren’t even being paid by a bank.
A market-leading 4.15% interest for doing absolutely nothing is being paid out by Apple and Goldman’s digital bank.
The deposit flight is also being turbocharged by the SVB shockwaves, and the future is looking super cool. 💀
Imagine if American Express had a baby with a travel guide.
That’s exactly what Yonder is.
They’re a UK-based credit rewards startup that pays you to spend on experiences, and these folks have just scooped up $70 million in funding.
The interesting thing about this one is the timing. It’s super difficult to get funding for ANY startup, let alone one that works entirely on credit.
Investor lineup is star studded, with Cred’s Kunal Shah, GoCardless’s Matt Robinson, and football player Rio Ferdinand.
Sign of the times… 🤨
The Starship is a massive rocket.
It’s almost 150 meters tall and it has enough power to reach Mars.
Elon baba just postponed it’s launch because of a pressure issue, literally 10 minutes before launch.
The next test launch is gonna send this one flying 250 kilometers into the sky and has reusable parts that land by itself to be used for the next rocket launch.
To the moon. And beyond. 🤣
To everyone who thought China was finished, they’ve got something to tell you.
China’s Q1 GDP data came in, and they breezed by with a staggering 4.5% growth.
The biggest things driving this boom were a massive exports boom, a real estate market revival, and a ton more infrastructure investment.
Obviously, growth stalled so much that it would be unnatural to have a big bounce, but this bounce was bigger than expected.
As China opens up more and returns to normalcy, this number is just gonna get bigger. 🆙
Hope you enjoyed this issue of Market Munch. If you’ve got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email and I'll get a ping in my inbox. Thanks a ton for reading!
Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏
- Aryaansh ⚡