Happy Monday, Munchers! 🙏

Hope you folks had a lovely weekend. Life is great. 🤣

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 5 minutes and 18 seconds.

Yesterday, Tesla cars rolled out of the showrooms, OPEC sent oil prices flying, and UBS came around with the axe. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• The Nasdaq just had it’s best week in over 3 months. Looks like the party season is slowly trickling back in.

• OPEC’s surprise production cut added some more pressure to oil prices and got Wall Street thinking twice about inflation.

• Real estate in the West is on a rollercoaster ride down, but real estate in Eastern markets like Dubai, Singapore, and Mumbai is still spiraling sky-high.

Story Roundup

1 - Tesla pushes through with some electrifying sales. ⚡

For the last 3 months, Elon baba has been slowly and surely cutting prices of Tesla cars.

Owners are angry about all that “lost value” - but it’s working wonders for Tesla’s cash flow.

They just produced a record number of cars in Q1, and delivered a record number too.

441k new Teslas were assembled and 420k new Teslas were sold in the first 3 month of this year.

The market is saying one big thing - the desire to own a Tesla is still sky-high. But the only thing holding people back is their ability to pay for it.

Their share price has almost 2Xed since the start of the year, and news like this tells you why.

Electric. 🚗

2 - OPEC slashes oil supply up. 🛢️

If you thought that there was some relief in store at the gas pump, think again.

OPEC is the world’s largest oil cartel, and they just decided to slap on a production cut of 1 million barrels per day.

It’s basic economics.

When supply starts going down, prices start going up.

And that is precisely what happened across energy markets. All oil contracts were trading 6-7% higher, because OPEC has made their intentions clear.

They think that oil prices are a tad bit too low.

3 - UBS gets ready to chop up their payroll. ✂️

Our timeline is the only timeline where 1 + 1 = 40,000.

40,000 job cuts. 💀

After UBS merged with Credit Suisse, there were tons of “duplications”.

In other words, people doing the exact same jobs, but one at CS and one at UBS.

Now that both banks have married, the same work doesn’t need to be split up over 2 people. One guy can handle it all.

And that’s where the problem lies.

UBS is ready to cut up to 40k jobs - which is a crazy number, since the combined bank has about 125k staff.

That’s 35% of the company walking out of the front doors.

Mergers and acquisitions murders and acquisitions.

4 - Big banks try getting their rich clients in the metaverse. 🤦🏻

The headline says it all.

Over the weekend, UBS and Julius Baer tried talking to billionaire clients using VR headsets.

It was cool for the first few minutes, but then opened up a whole pool of problems.

A few clients had concerns with motion sickness and data security - since the platforms that we have are pretty prehistoric, and the environment looks like it’s been drawn by a 3-year old.

One client said that it looks like "Atari graphics".

You’ll have to fight me to get me to take meetings in Roblox. 💀

5 - India’s unemployment rate ticks up. 📈

The whole world is in trouble, but India’s economy has stayed strong.

For the longest time, Modi and co have been the only major economy that’s not in hot water.

But there may be some miniscule chinks in the armour that are going over people’s heads.

India’s unemployment rate ticked to a 3-month high of 7.8% - an early sign that there may be some cooling demand in Asia’s hottest economy.

Which brings us to the biggest risk to India’s growth story - a lack of jobs.

As population growth surges and millions of people become “of working age” every year, the number of jobs needs to expand to accommodate all of these new workers.

Once that cycle speeds up, life becomes HELL for the lower and middle income class because the guys at the top get to hoard wealth and pay people less, since there’s always someone else to take your place.

Breakout nation... 😅

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!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

- Aryaansh ⚡