- Market Munch
- Posts
- Market Munch 🍎 | 19 April 2023
Market Munch 🍎 | 19 April 2023
Goldman hits the brakes, Apple showers in cash, and Elon starts his AI dream. 🔥
Aryaansh Rathore
April 18, 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 58 seconds.
Yesterday, Goldman hot hammered by a market slowdown, Apple came out swinging with savings, and Elon got to work on his own AI. 🔥
Let’s dive in.
What’s hot, what’s not?
Market Commentary
Mixed earnings reports put a massive grey cloud over Wall Street. Stock remained subdued in general.
Investors are still eyeing rates and trying to stay ahead of the Fed. JPow and co set the stage in our world. 🤷🏻
Improving European growth and slowing American firepower is putting a little pressure on the US Dollar. But Uncle Sam ain’t going nowhere…
Story Roundup
Serving the little guy and making big bucks in markets has been Goldman’s plan of late.
But things have backfired pretty badly on both fronts.
Q1 earnings came in yesterday and profits were down 18%, which shouldn’t be the case, since banks make more money when rates are hiked.
Their consumer banking unit has been the subject of a lot of criticism and a source of a lot of losses. The entire division has been chopped up and closed down, with employees either fired or put to work elsewhere.
The trading arm (which makes tons of money from volatile markets) shied away from expectations because of a disappointing performance from the fixed income groups.
What’s the smart money doing? 🙈
These are some interest rates that you can get on your savings.
Wells Fargo - 0.15%
Chase Bank - 0.01%
Bank of America - 0.01%
Apple - 4.15%
Apple is a tech company, but they’re offering over 12X the returns of their closest competitor.
All with no fees, no minimum balance, and no minimum deposits.
Apple has spent the last couple of decades learning all sorts of stuff about their users.
And they wanna get a nice slice of the US consumer spending pie.
Tech companies are turning into banks. 🤔
yo dont let apple see this or they’ll actually make it a product
Elon is worried about the future of AI, and he thinks that we might be extinct soon at the rate this stuff is evolving.
So he wants to get to creating “TruthGPT” - an AI that understands the state of the universe.
His reasoning makes a little bit of sense: Humans are a pretty interesting part of the universe, so that makes AI “less” likely to take us all out.
Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all been blamed for not taking safety seriously and letting their models run rampant.
We’re literally living in a dystopia. 💀
Johnson & Johnson is in some super hot water.
Over 65k people claimed that their talc powder causes cancer and JnJ had to pay a $7 billion fine for this.
It’s a massive one-off charge and would be the biggest product liability lawsuit in history.
Consumerism… 🤷🏻
China’s EV scene is the hottest in the entire industry.
And some of the high-flyers are getting ready to venture out.
Zeekr is a Chinese luxury EV company and they’re making major strides.
They’ve already sold almost 100k units since their 2021 launch (faster than Tesla btw) and compete directly with Elon baba and BYD in a cutthroat EV market.
All those business learnings and all that agility is gonna pay off when they move to Europe.
Zeekr is gonna go to Sweden and the Netherlands in Q3 - where EV adoption is through the roof.
Electric…
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 ⚡