Happy Monday, Munchers! 🙏

Hope you enjoyed your weekend partying. 🤩

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, Insta’s co-founders splashed cash on a news app, Adani’s losses accelerated, and Shein got ready to rocket. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Not much noise from companies over the weekend. Guess all the Wall Street hotshots are busy sipping their iced coffees and enjoying the start of summer.

• FTX’s billionaire mastermind Sam Bankman got into some more hot stuff. Courts reckon that he was trying to influence politics with his donations. The crypto industry is in TEARS. 😂

• Bond markets have been on a ripper this year. They’ve been up 4% (their best start to a year) until last week. That global rally seems to have fizzled out as investors bet that rates might get cut soon.

Story Roundup

1 - Instagram’s co-founders splash their millions on an AI startup. 📱

Everyone wants a piece of the AI pie.

From the 12 year olds on your LinkedIn field to billionaire tech entrepreneurs, you’ve got everything under the sun.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram - and they’re now building a news app.

These dudes want to create a TikTok for text, where you’re given personalized news recommendations that you can scroll through.

It’ll learn from the stuff you like and dislike to give you short, bite-sized pieces of content.

Something like this is super cool - but the biggest problem is over who controls the content you see.

If you get fed a narrative that polarizes you (which Big Tech is not against), then we have an issue on our hands.

It’s a game of power! 💪🏽

2 - Adani baba’s market losses speed past the $150bn mark. 💸

Today marks the one-month anniversary of the Hindenburg report targeting Adani baba’s flagship companies.

But I doubt that this freshly married couple will be cutting any cakes soon.

Total market losses in Adani companies have just crossed the $150 billion mark and Adani’s own net worth has shrunk by $79bn.

Dollar-denominated bonds issued by Adani businesses have also sharply sold off, and it isn’t hard to figure out why.

Cash needs to be preserved, debt needs to be repaid, and slack needs to be teased out of their supply chains.

Burn, baby, burn. 🔥

3 - Shein takes to the skies… and leaves a lot of dirt behind. ✈️

Chinese fast fashion companies are minting millions but absolutely hammering the environment while doing it.

Shein is the biggest and baddest shark in this pond, and they’re asking for big money from investors.

They made $23bn in revenue last year, and they think that 2025 will be the year that they cross $60bn.

Shein has become the shopping destination of choice for Gen Z customers in the West - but this poses a problem in itself.

A younger market is more “flirtatious”, which means that customers who repeat orders are low.

High repeat rates are crucial in any online-first business, so Shein needs to sort that out.

Oh, and they also need to fix their -
- ill fitting clothes
- employee abuse complaints
- sweatshop working conditions
- bad customer service

It’s a pretty long road to walk. 🚶🏽

4 - TCS wants to turn AI into a coworker. 🤝

IT giants are recognizing that GPT punches above it’s weight.

And India’s largest IT firm reckons that they could be great buddies with AI.

Tata Consultancy Services is a $150bn behemoth, and they wanna start integrating GPT into their workflow.

In some pilot tests, GPT has been able to generate all the code needed to solve a problem, without leaving any room for errors.

Tata and Co. will be training AI for very specific use cases and super precise verticals.

One step ahead. 🤩

5 - China says that their golden banker is “co-operating”. 🤔

Renaissance Bank was literally responsible for some of the digital renaissance in China.

They brokered some of China’s biggest tech deals and raked in billions toward local companies.

And one week back, their founder went missing.

Yesterday, his company was informed that he’s “co-operating” with the government in a probe.

Power corrupts people, and this is Jack Ma version 2.0. 🤷🏽

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!

You might also wanna follow up on Twitter, Insta, or LinkedIn.

Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

- Aryaansh ⚡