Happy Monday, 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.

Over the weekend, Goldman Sachs started worrying about their not-so-friendly fintech bestie, Elon drew a collective worldwide facepalm, and big-ticket VCs flocked away from the metaverse. 🔥🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Chinese steel exports suddenly surged to a 7-year high. It’s most likely a sign that manufacturing activity is stronger overseas… and that demand at home is slowly wilting.

• PIMCO is placing big bets against a hard landing and their CEO is betting that things are not gonna go great.

• The UK is missing out on a lot of stuff… their stock markets aren’t rallying with the rest of the world. Their bond markets are starting to lag behind.

Story Roundup

1 - Goldman thinks twice about it’s friendship with Apple. 🤔

Goldman Sachs has spent the last 150 years serving the super-rich.

But 4 years back, they decided to try managing the little guy’s money - with a foray into consumer banking.

They teamed up with Apple to launch retail banking products to every iPhone user in the world under the umbrella of the Apple Card.

After spending $4 billion+, it looks like their marriage is getting strained.

- Key execs involved with the Apple Card decided to quit
- Lots of government pokey-nosing
- Multiple investigations on “gender bias” when approving credit limits

Goldman is looking to back out of this partnership now and sell their stake to American Express.

Even Apple is getting a divorce…

2 - Twitter pulls the dumbest monetisation tactic ever.
😭

Just when everyone got done with laughing at Reddit for the worst monetisation scheme ever…

Starting today, newly registered Twitter users cannot view more than 300 tweets a day.

If you’re an existing user, you get 600 tweets a day.

The kicker?

If you’ve paid for Twitter Blue though, you get 6,000 tweets a day.

The strategy seems pretty simple.

Do something silly with the product (to make lots of noise) and get people talking. Elon has done this before with the Tesla Cybertruck and it’s broken window.

And then sit back, waiting for the cash to roll in. 🤦

3 - AI switches seats with the metaverse. 🤖

This time 2 years back, half the world was convinced that we’d start living on the blockchain.

Cut to today, and none of those guys are in the picture anymore.

AI has more-or-less replaced Metaverse as the new hot investment darling.

Another interesting stat -
2 years back, metaverse was said 250+ times in companies’ earnings reports.

This year, it was only mentioned ~40 times.

Even Meta (the king of trend-hopping) decided that metaverse needs to be put on the backburner in favour of AI.

It’s a hard-knock life…

4 - India’s flagship index takes a trip back home. ✈️

After more than 20 years, India has brought home their offshore-traded Nifty index.

It’s always been in Singapore (hence the name SGX Nifty) but it’s coming back to India now.

It’ll be incorporated in GIFT City in Gujarat, which is basically BTEC Dubai.

India will assume a stronger role of a price-setter because 60+ domestic companies are itching to start trading.

Cash flow. 💸

5 - Tesla ships out cars like crazy. ⚡

Tesla has been on a ripper recently.

At the start of the year, they announced that they would try to increase volume by 50%.

This is unheard of for any company at trillion-dollar scale.

Yesterday, they managed to hit their target - a full half-year in advance.

Tesla delivered 466k cars and produced close to 480k.

Most of this was driven by Model 3s and Model Ys - the cheapest and the most expensive ones.

Even assuming a $50k average selling price (which is lowww), that’s $24 billion in topline this quarter.

Racing ahead…

Hope you enjoyed this issue of the Market Munch. If you've got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

Aryaansh