 Hello, and welcome back to the trading floor, the Friday podcast where we wrap up all things global markets. But as you can see, I'm joined by Stephen. How's it going, Stephen? I'm pretty well. I'm pretty well. Thank you. Fresh off the back of my succession podcast. Have you watched the final episode yet? I have not, but I did listen to your podcast, and you did very, very well, I must say, not to give it away at the end of the latest series. So I feel like I've still got a surprise on the horizon here. So yeah, I thought you did an excellent job, though. And I was saying, in fact, to my wife, after I listened to it, I was like, look, to be fair, I mean, I used my focus at school, was playing sport, and let's face it, hanging out with my mates and having fun. There was an odd couple of teachers that perhaps because of their personality or charisma, you were engaged, but the content really bored me generally. So I was really disconnected from it. And I just thought, why don't they teach like what you did, which is take a popular culture's kind of theme of the moment that everyone's absorbed in, and then use that as a narrative to teach concepts, like surely young people will respond to that better. I mean, I would. I totally agree. Although, if I was to play four seasons of succession in lieu of teaching economics or business studies, I think I'd probably get fired for a number of reasons. But no, I totally take a point. Yeah, I mean, I think that would be awesome. So yeah, I thought that was a great episode. And if you haven't listened to it, just jump onto the channel if you go back the prior episodes. So we do one, if you haven't caught them yet, Stephen does a more banking related one on midweek. And then we do a more markets one on Friday. But with that, look, let's cover some of the major topics here to give you a quick primer. We've got the PGA tour has agreed to merge with Saudi backed rival live golf. And I've seen all kinds of tweets and Rory McElroy swear words doing the doing the rounds on Twitter. So quite keen to get a bit of a backstory on this, as well as talk about the merger in details, because I know that's your kind of area. And then perhaps talk about a villain or two, just to add some spice to the story. And then we'll kind of pivot over to one of the major market themes of the week, which was in the oil market, where Saudi energy minister delivered a Saudi lollipop, which when you read that headline, you're like, what is that? So we'll explain, but we'll go a little bit deeper and explain a little bit behind what is OPEC, what is their objectives, what is Saudi trying to achieve, any questions that might come off the back of that. And then if time bit of a quick fire round, we've obviously had the Vision Pro come out from Apple, Nvidia slightly coming off the boil, but what next? Maybe a little update there. And the Eurozone has obviously moved into a recession. So who's laughing now, Europe? Some UK Brexiteers might say. But yeah, kick us off then with this PGA tour live golf situation. What's the story here? What's the story? This is an absolutely brilliant story. One of the stories that you can't really write it. And I'm actually quite looking forward to the retrospective documentary on what happened behind clay stores, because this is a really good one. It's a story that is about monopolies, backroom deals, sports washing and staggering amounts of hypocrisy. So it's got it all. So let's start right at the beginning. And if anyone, you know, I don't assume that all of our listeners play golf or watch golf, so we can kind of give you a little bit of background. So there are two historically, there are two major golf leagues, golf tournaments in the world. The PGA tour, which is based in America, stands for the Professional Golfers Association. That word association is quite important. It's a not-for-profit entity managing these series of tournaments that take place across the year, across America. And there's also the European tour, which is called the DP World Tour now, which is kind of the same, but in Europe. Player-led, player-supported organizations that go around competing for big prize money, big television rights, relatively old school field to the tournament, quite stodgy, quite gulfy, maybe we could call it. And it's basically had, the PGA tour and the European tour basically had a monopoly, and we'll use maybe those words, that word in air quotes for now, a monopoly over golf, professional golf. You know, if you want to watch professional golf, you have two choices, European tour, PGA tour. If you want to play professional golf, you have two choices. So it's a pretty closed market until towards the end of 2021, early 2022, the Saudis got involved. So we all know a little bit about the backstory, the story of Saudi Arabia and their vision 2030 to diversify away from their reliance on oil. Just going to segue beautifully into the OPEC conversation. And a lot of their plans revolve around investing in cultural institutions that will bring value, both monetary and reputationly, to their country and stop them being so reliant on oil. So they have been pretty systematic in acquiring pretty significant sporting franchises. So for example, they've got a Formula One race in Saudi Arabia now, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, the PIF, the sovereign wealth fund, bought Newcastle United last year. They own five of the Saudi Arabian soccer teams, which now have paid Ronaldo hundreds of millions and Bensama hundreds of millions to come and join. So they're going through this campaign of what some people call sports washing, distracting from human rights and focusing on sports. So they decided to get into golf about a year and a half ago by starting this rebel tour, the Live Tour, where they courted some of the world's biggest golfers, Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, etc., to move away from the PGA Tour, the kind of heartland of golf, and join them on this rebel tour, which was a bit flashier, a bit more fun, maybe they spray champagne at the end of the tournament. So it was all not quite golf. And it was massively acrimonious, a big dividing line for us, the sport of golf. A lot of the superstars went to join this league, got paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do it, and then the PGA started suing them for saying, look, you've broken your contract, you've gone and joined this rebel league, you can't pay play for the PGA Tour anymore, because you've given up your right to play, etc. The Live Tournament sued them back, saying, well, actually, you know, this person's a free agent, they should be able to play on multiple tours at the same time, lots of antitrust lawsuits were getting filed, Live saying that the PGA Tour was actually a monopoly, and they shouldn't be able to wield their monopoly power. All of this stuff was going on in the background, and it was basically a bit of a mess in the world of golf. Upstart League established quite kind of snooty professional golfers associated. Fast forward to Tuesday of this week, these two organizations have been at log ahead, they hate each other. The players on each tour hate each other. It's got really quite nasty words of words and things like that. But then on Tuesday, the shock was that these two tours announced a merger, a merger between two great enemies in this sport. It is absolutely, it took the whole sport, you know, it shocked the whole sport. It was a really, really, you know, shocking, shocking thing to do. So is this just, surely it's just money? It's like, how do you resolve differences, throw enough money at it, people accept it? Is that what's happened here, or is there something I'm missing? Yeah, there's definitely a big money element to it. I think both organizations realized that the litigation that they were throwing in each other was probably going to be damaging on both sides. The PGA Tour, very, very high levels of reputation, very, you know, a lot of history. But relative to the PIP, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, they don't have particularly deep pockets. So this is the Saudis saying, look, we've got unlimited money, basically. We can continue to throw unlimited money at live, this breakaway tour. But what we could also do, by the way, is we can team up with you guys. So the structure or the background is so fascinating. So the CEO of the PGA Tour, this guy, Jay Monahan, who we'll talk about a little bit later, he has been meeting with the Saudis and two other independent directors of the PGA Tour. In private, in Venice, they had a meeting in Venice. They had two meetings. It's amazing. They had two meetings on the golf course with the Saudis in London, as you. Meeting this guy, Yassir Al-Rumaian, who you might have heard of. He's the governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund. He's got the world's best CV. He's on the border, Uber, Saudi Aramco, SoftBank. He's the chairman of Newcastle. And he's now the chair of this new entity. But anyway, it took seven weeks of private discussions between four people, no one else knew, to announce this shock merger. And the thing was, the Professional Golfers Association, which is made up of thousands of professional golfers, the very elite ones being the likes of Rory McElroy, they basically found out on Twitter. They found out by text that the hated organization was going to be merging with them. And this has all happened behind closed doors. That's absolutely staggering. So can the players go on strike now then? And then if you have no players, you have no tool, regardless of what the banner is over the top of the tool. I mean, this is where it all gets quite interesting, quite relevant for understanding of antitrust and monopolies and things like that. They can go on strike, but they don't have an alternative. So this merger, just a little bit of a structure. So what's going to happen, this agreement in principle, the specifics having been fleshed out, what's going to happen is there's going to be a new entity, for-profit entity, sitting on top of the PGA Tour, the European Tour and the Lift Tour. They're all going to be operating underneath this new entity, where the Saudi Public Investment Fund are investing $3 billion, a minimum of $3 billion, and have exclusive rights to invest more. So it's basically going to be the Saudi holding company above these other three companies. Now, if I'm an individual, maybe if I'm Rory McElroy, I could go on strike, but what can I do? The only option I have to make money in the profession that I've got is in this environment. So if that's not a monopoly, I don't know what is. I'm fascinated to see what's going to happen with the Department of Justice and antitrust legislation and things like that. You mentioned the number of $3 billion there, and I couldn't help in my head go, okay, so Saudi Aramco clocked a $161 billion profit. This isn't revenue, it's a profit. $3 billion sounds like an absolute steal to penetrate quite a cultural, iconic American kind of body or institute, if you like. What do politicians get involved into this and start putting their nose in? Because the Saudis have got a bit of crown jewel there, surely, from penetrating the US in a different type of way. Yeah, well again, it's a really, really interesting question. You're absolutely right that the money, the $3 billion is spare change for the Saudis at the moment. Just to give you another outrageous statistic, Tiger Woods, the most famous golfer of all time, he didn't join Liv back when the rebel tour was starting last year, but he did get offered $800 million to join. You turn it down. So now he's, you know, not quite got offered $500 million, and they're both, you know, they must be fuming that they took the moral high ground by not joining this other tour, and now they're all merged together. This is America. Can they not sue, what was it, Moynihan? They've been misled, right? They're misinformed to make that appropriate decision at that time. Yeah, this is going to be a legal blood bath. There are so many grounds to so many different stakeholders to sue, and you're absolutely right. You know, this isn't just, you know, the Saudis buying an individual team within a structured domicile in a particular country. You know, imagine the Saudis trying to buy the Premier League. That, you know, that would not, well, you know, never say never, but I don't think that would happen. I think that would get blocked. And you would expect there to be some significant pushback on a political stage to say, this is not something that can keep, that can happen. This is one of our cultural institutions, and we will not sell it. But let's see, as you said, you know, as you said, money talks. And, you know, the US is the home of money talking. So there's going to be updates and updates to come on this, but it's pretty live and it's pretty raw news. Yeah. It's funny you should say that. And that does lead us nicely into the OPEC side because of the Saudi link. But not only that, you know, before I even dive into what's going on with OPEC and Saudi, you know, whenever oil prices, which typically, let's say they're trading at 70 bucks a barrel at the moment, that tends to be a kind of, if we look at the last decade, an average price, let's say, given the peaks and troughs that we have. But it's interesting where you have a historical sectarian division of the Islamic faith that's personified in Saudi Arabia and Iran, let's say. However, if the price of oil trades, as it has done in recent history, down sub $30, the two countries then get along and make decisions together. It's funny how in the end, money really does make the world go around when the pressure points are on, despite your stances and however strong they might be, your, I guess, the human, as humans in the end, we have these existential threats to our well-being, our ability to live. And then we have to make decisions at that point. But I'm not saying the PGA live golf situation is quite on that level. But it's not quite existential. But you make a very good point. And I think this murder is representative very clearly of the power of money over the nice warm feeling of sentiment and culture and things like that. But I guess the other thing that it says, and maybe we can kind of segue now into the OPEC story, is the power of oil. We like to think about a net zero future and lots of solar panels and wind farms and things like that. But oil is still pretty all important when it comes to the global economy. And one section of that is this organisation called OPEC. So shall we cover that for a bit? Like you said, not everyone plays golf. Not everyone knows who OPEC is. So let me start from the bottom and we'll move from there. So give a good foundation. So the organisation of petroleum exporting countries. Now you'll hear about this a lot. And I think if you're to give this context, if you're a student and you're looking to work in a global markets division, whether it's a role in sales or trading or research, this is fundamentally, as Steven, you were kind of saying, pretty critical because the overall decisions that the central bank makes that dictates the direction of economy will impact consumption, which then means that supply needs to move. And it starts to explain then the ramifications how all of this is kind of correlated connected and OPEC are very integral to this. So the long story short being an economy is growing, higher productivity, more demand for these oil products. And then the opposite could be right now, we're kind of heading to recession, demand starts to reduce and therefore supply starts to tighten. So that kind of is the picture. But OPEC, so I took this from the OPEC website because it's interesting the way they phrase it, of course, as of what their organisation is and what their intentions are. And then we can talk about what actually they do in reality, which is a little bit different and how they're referred to. So their job is to coordinate, unify the petroleum policies of its member countries and ensure the stabilisation of oil markets. So you rightly said oil is integral to pretty much everything. The new Apple Pro vision, these machines that make these hardware components, they need manufacturing facilities which require power. And not at least at this point, those manufacturing plants powered by solar and clean energy, its fossil fuels. So that requiring then the oil component. So they ensure a stabilisation of oil markets to ensure and secure an efficient economic and regular supply of petroleum to a couple of major people, consumers. So that us when we're fitting our cars up stuff like that when we need it, we've got it. And it's a reasonable and controlled price. So very much unlike what we have had through the energy crisis, obviously in recent years, which is these cues and so on, they want to offset that by having ability to move supply, to move price, then a steady income to producers. So in order that they continue to reinvest and keep things efficient so that the consumer demand can be met and so on and so forth. And then a fair, they term it a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry, which I thought was quite funny when I read it. Fair return. What was that number? 160 billion? 161 billion, which was a record breaking year, of course, financial year just gone, obviously, because of the Russian Ukraine crisis. But what does that all translate to? And often how they're referred to when you read media is the cartel. Yeah. And from what I understand, cartels are illegal in most industries. So why is this one allowed? Well, if you're an American politician and you're trying to pursue a piece of legitimate legislation called NOPEC, which does exist, they would say this is a cartel for exactly the reason you described. They have a inappropriate control and that can then they have no oversight so they can make decisions as they see fit, which as we've just described really is the catalyst for so much that controls what happens on planet Earth, essentially. So is that right that someone like Saudi Arabia, who are the kind of de facto kingpin of that group, given the volume that they produce, should they have that power? So yeah, it's a cartel, but as ever, cartels are being attacked by regulators and so forth. Let's talk percentages or talk numbers. How much of the world's oil supply roughly does NOPEC control? Are there any other big players that are not involved in NOPEC? Obviously the US, but yeah, what's going on there? Yeah, yeah. So that kind of starts to then lean into a bit of the backstory. So for many, many years and we go to universities and counter students all the time and I always ask them this question. I say who produces the most crude oil in the world? And inevitably, I'll give them like a multiple choice and I will put in there Saudi Arabia, I'll put Russia, USA, Iran or Iraq or someone like that. All big producers. Every university I've been to, from Oxford to Harvard to Nottingham Trent to Southampton, they always say Saudi Arabia, which is a slightly separate point where you can't make assumptions with these markets. You've got to know these facts to determine what's important and what's not. But the point being is they're kind of right. Saudi were, I mean, OPEC was founded in 1960. There were five countries. They were all predominantly really Middle Eastern Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. They are really the foundational members and by definition, they're the largest within the group. The other fifth member was Venezuela, but they're very small. There's definitely a balance of power there. So to give you a bit of context on size, someone like Saudi traditionally would be producing something like 10 million barrels per day. So I always think of it, if you think of an oil drum in your mind's eye, 10 million of those puppies get made every day from Saudi Arabia. But if you think about someone like equatorial Guinea, who's like the 13th member that rounds off OPEC, they produced about 250,000. So really, there are no consequence to the global output in that scale or in the decision making process. So you can imagine a 13 country round table, Saudi, guess who's sat next to Saudi? Well, there's Mr. Iraq and Mr. Iran, and they're making really the decisions on behalf of everyone else. But that's quite problematic because you're starting to get a little bit of a fractured group where particularly African nations, which many perceive in time have the greatest upside growth potential, they will then start to have more influence and control countries like Nigeria, for example, we're one of the biggest. And does that start to then water down someone like Saudi's ability to have even control on their own group? Rightly, like you said, so OPEC really account for the majority of global world oil supply. However, the tide has changed because through change, this was actually coming the back end of the Obama administration, there was a law change in America which meant that the US could then produce and sell oil abroad, as well as for their own internal consumption. So that means then if I'm a phomex on mobile, Chevron, I can go gangbusters, right, let's just produce as much as possible, because not only can I service America, I can now sell this stuff elsewhere. Now throw in then the transition of government to Donald Trump and kind of deregulating the market doesn't really care about the environment. Let's just give exploration licensing, let's make America great again. And America soon displaced Saudi Arabia as the number one dominating global oil crude supplier. And then the other third party in all of this, much to the headache of Saudi Arabia, of course, in recent years is Russia. And the Russia is kind of like a neat setup where Russia really dominate the flow of oil to Europe through the natural passage of geographically where it sits, whereas America can service that side of the Atlantic. So for the Middle East, they've been under pressure on many different fronts. Okay, that makes total sense. That was really, really interesting background. I remember a few years ago, maybe during the pandemic where price of oil was negative, I think. I don't know if I'm getting that wrong. And then maybe this time last year, it was at $125 a barrel. Okay, so that's quite a big swing. Now you mentioned earlier on that it's just above $70 a barrel. What influences these prices and how is it effective? What's happened this week? Yeah, so I'd say the price activity you've described there from going from $125 to $70. So why did we go to $125? There was an unexpected, and I say this from an unexpected, from a timing point of view, I think the Russia and incursion into Ukraine was going to happen just given the growth of NATO and the encroachment from the West to East on the border of Russia. So I think most people, and Russia has exhibited this type of behavior before to shore up its geographic borders, its transportation, kind of routes, its passage of crude. It's very important to their economy, obviously selling this stuff. So it was the timing that was unforeseen and obviously it came at the worst possible moment for global markets because we just had COVID. And so as you said, prices got decimated. OPEC took absolutely dramatic action to slice production to stabilize and push prices back up. And then to compound the issue, you started to see then this invasion, which then put disruptions on supply and we topped out at $125, that kind of area. We're now down at $70. So we're now on the back end of this and just kind of digest those numbers for a moment. If you're Saudi Arabia, your price is halved. So as we've just said, you've come off the back of this record-breaking, state-backed Saudi Aramco mammoth year of profits, but the price is just halved. So your profits are going to halve essentially. Now, why does this happen? Well, we're in a period now of growth is slowing and to keep this super straightforward, growth is slowing because we've had a pretty unprecedented period of the speed of which inflation has risen due to COVID. And as I said, compounded by the energy crisis, so interest rates have gone up, but at a very sharp rate. And as a consequence, the tightening of those conditions starts to then weigh on growth. And given the cost of living crisis that compounds this, you start to see then people's confidence starts to fall, their ability to spend. And we start to see job cuts when, as we've seen in lots of different sectors. So all of this means that demand fades. And it's not like you're just in the Saudi Aramco facility turning dials and all of a sudden the oil prices just start moving. It's not quite as responsive or quick as that. So the economy is slowing, prices have drifted lower and lower and lower. And what OPEC have tried to do is try to intervene essentially. And the backdrop of this is we've had some Chinese data this week from a trade perspective. Now, even if you don't trade Chinese products, you look at China in the through the lens of it being the world's second large economy, it is by far the biggest consumer of multiple different commodity products. And if they slow the demand impact that that can have on these commodity products is quite severe. And the problem with that is that Chinese exports fell for the first time in three months in May. And so it's kind of giving more weight to the economist view that the post COVID reopening of China has not been quite as powerful or sustained as many might have hoped. And then you throw in Europe this week and the eurozone is now in the technical recession. So yeah, oil is moving lower and they've got to do something about it. Is the long story short? Yeah, what I love about this story is just how closely it maps into studying economics at school or at university. It's very much the power of supply and demand and macroeconomic factors and we've got growth rates and inflation and interest rates and things like that. But one thing that we don't talk about in our economics textbooks is lollipops. So tell me, tell me what a lollipop is in this context and what's happened this week? Yeah, so yeah, to build out a little bit of the numbers, because these are good to know, because you asked about the kind of amounts of global supply. So OPEC plus has in place already, because this isn't like a complete surprise. They've already been seeing the price move lower and lower over the past 12 months. So they have in place cuts of 3.66 million barrels per day and that amounts in terms of global demand to about 3.6%. Including the 2 million barrels per day agreed last year and the voluntary cuts. So Saudi already has done this in April. We're only at the beginning of June. We'll come back to this, but this does not bode well for Saudi Arabia. They've already tried the strategy. Oil prices went up for the period of a few days and then fell and have consistently fallen to the point they've needed to have action taken once again. So a couple of things that have happened from this decision this week, actually happened on Sunday. All of those cuts I just mentioned, which are in place, they were valid to the end of this year. So strategically as OPEC, you've got a couple of options here. The first one is we just extend the duration of the cuts that were existing or in place at the moment. So in effect then you're taking out more barrels of all out of the market over a longer period of time. So that's the first thing. The April one obviously failed. So for Saudi, they've gone for what they call like a sweetener, which is a sweetener being we will opt ourselves. And the reason they do this is because they produce infinitely more than all the other OPEC members, they're the only one with spare capacity to do so. They're also slightly padded by this record breaking year of profits as well. So they've gone for an extra one million cut in July for one month. And that's important as well, because as we'll kind of touch on later, the next logical option that they've got if prices keep falling is, well, this isn't for one month, this is till the end of the year. But then you're subtracting out what six million barrels of oil, if you start doing the maths, it's a lot of missed opportunity to sell and revenue there, which they won't want to go down. It's really interesting because they're trying to control price by setting supply. And a million barrels of oil is a nice a day is a nice, as they said, a nice lollipop, a nice sweetener. But it's not significant enough to guarantee that the price is propped up. So they've been they've been using money every day, right? Yeah, so this is the sweet spot. And this is what they don't know. So that the reads between the lines here from a market's perspective is that Saudi Arabia, the way it's perceived by oil traders is they're trying to eliminate, they're trying to control speculators in the market, because they're trying to drive the price down. It's almost like a classic strategy that we've seen over many, many years. I did the same, I must say, don't tell anyone, but when oil got down to like 30, 40, not that long ago, what do I do? I jump on my stock pension fund and I start just loading up on energy companies. Because the idea being that the price can't remain that low, and you alluded to it earlier, and it's this vision 2030, right? It's this necessity through the now new competition. So going back to the cartel analogy, let's say I used to be the biggest drug dealer in New York in 1980s. Then all of a sudden, what I'm the American Italian American in New York running the gangster mafia, then the Russians move in, then the Ukrainians move in, then the Chinese move in with their all new drugs and all new supply. All of a sudden, what have I got to do? I've got to diversify. I've got to diversify my income flow, but I've got to finance my mafioso organization at the same time, which is expanding into these new areas which require capital. This is then when we talk about fiscal budgets in a more professional non-drug sense and a fiscal budget for Saudi, the key figure that they need to hit in order to finance. I mean, we're talking about diversifying an economy. So aside from dropping $3 billion to buy PJ and live golf combination, they're trying to develop public service sectors, health, education, infrastructure, recreation, tourism, all of this. And all of this requires as well a pretty monumental marketing budget to facilitate this the way they're perceived internationally. So it's $80 is the key line in the sand that they must hit in order to finance. A government is literally spending tax, and you've basically got to balance the book. And for Saudi Arabia at the moment, we said oil is trading 71. All the time it's below 80. They are effectively out of the money. They're spending more than they're bringing in. They've just had a record breaking year, which obviously helps juice the coffers a little bit. But the idea being here and the risk now is that, as we've seen, prices initially jumped to 75 in reaction to this announcement. They stayed at 75. For guess how long? One second. It printed 75 at the market reopen of the futures market for one second, and it has only gone down, basically. It briefly dropped below 70. So this is the market telling OPEC this is not a satisfactory move. And we're going to call your bluff. And that's not a good sign for Saudi Arabia having already failed in this exercise in April. So just kind of bringing this into land, if the cartel is not the only show in town, as we've discussed. And there are fishers emerging within the cartel between various countries. I mean, is OPEC even relevant anymore? Has it got a future? Yeah, a lot of people would already say no. I mean, even though it still exists in practice, they gather. Probably not. And actually, this is probably only going to get worse in terms of the harmony of the relationship even within OPEC. Because if you think about the objectives of these different countries, it's almost like looking at the Eurozone and what decision did the ECB have to control someone like Greece or Ireland or Portugal, but then use the exact same policy to control someone like Germany. It's just someone's got to lose here. And so in the it's almost magnified in a situation where you have countries like Libya, Nigeria, very subject to civil wars and things of that nature. And so they are going to want to serve their best interest and their own needs. And more often than not, that is that is counter to what the wishes of Saudi, whose power is already diminishing. And so, you know, this move by Saudi, I think with the Gulf connection is just one of lots of different things we have and will continue to see as they try to, I guess, try to reframe the international investment view about that as a place and a center for business, for tourism and all these different factors. But yeah, I mean, I had a little bit on numbers just to throw some some cash at this as well. There is some money they're potentially losing out on. So the actual number that they're cutting Saudi is from 10 to nine. I mean, that's the way it's kind of referred to in most media outlets. But I think the numbers are a little bit more nuanced and just perfect round figures. So one analyst I was looking at, he was saying Saudi are producing at the moment around just shy of 10 and a half million. And it's trading at 71. So if you actually break that down, they're making about seven. I mean, this is this is a pretty incredible number anyway. They're making about 750 million bucks a day per day. So if they were to cut then even less than a million down into around the 9.8 around that region, which I guess the analyst is looking at it in what's more reachable, more sooner, they would need the price of all currently trading at 71 to go up to 75 and a half to generate the same level of revenue that they've lost by not producing the same amount of oil. They need then in fact, basically that oil left to go to $81 a barrel, that would then create them 50 million, 50, 50 million more per day. Now, if they can get all up to 81, which is a dollar over their fiscal break even, they're basically banking one and a half billion extra a month. The problem is the market's telling you, you're going to have to do a heck of a lot more than cut a million if you want to get that price up because at the moment the global macroeconomic situation is deteriorating. Things are actually probably on the demand side of the equation going to get worse. So they're going to have to make subsequent reactions on the supply side. That's really interesting. The fact that it will be wonderful if you could control both supply and demand in a particular market, but if you can only control part of supply in a particular market and demand goes south, then you're probably on the losing end of a pretty significant trade. Yes. So not to open Pandora's box, but who does have money? So if I'm Saudi, I'm like, well, how do I get this money? And what if I could just pump oil and the Western world is in demise? Well, there's one party that's always there willing to pick up the tab. For everyone, if it's an Italian banking crisis, we'll pick up the tab. If there's a Russian war on Ukraine, we'll buy your oil. There's always Mr. China sat on the sidelines ready. And why do you think that recently in geopolitical gatherings, you've seen Xi and Putin and the Saudi Prince, MBS, all shaking hands altogether. And all of this put strains, of course, on the relationships that Saudi has with the US. So this is when the geopolitical stuff starts to come into this. I mean, that's a lot more long play, but it's definitely integral to understanding then the relationships and also the scenarios that might play out in the long run. I'm going to close that Pandora's box because we could talk about that for hours. But I just want to maybe I just want to finish up. Usually we have peers on this podcast and I listen to this podcast every week and I hear peers as opinions and a lot of different things. I don't hear yours and I know that, you know, people listen when you talk. So I'm going to do a little bit of a bit of a quick fire round to get your thoughts on a few of the things that have happened over the last few weeks. They're too controlling, Steven. They're too out of line of consensus that people get nervous when I give my opinion. Exactly. This is not investment advice. So try to answer these as quickly as you can. All right. So firstly, I'm going to talk about Apple. So do you think, quick fire round, do you think that the Apple Vision Pro goggles will, in the medium term, in the next 12 months, increase or decrease Apple Share price? I think Apple Share price will go up and I think they'll have absolutely nothing to do with the Vision Pro. Nice. Wow. Very quickly. I thought that was, I thought it was an absolute marketing triumph, product flop. That's my summary. Does anyone want to wear them? Of course not. I mean, you have to, you have to wear basically like a mobile phone size battery device strapped to your thigh with a, with a wire going into your headset, which only lasts two hours. The cost more than what people were expecting. It has no, it is nothing other than a prototype device that I'm sure will be a game changer by finger in the air 2030. You heard it here first. See the second question. Do you think Nvidia will be able to cross a trillion dollars, which obviously has done, and importantly, stay there. It's come off quite a bit. 100%. Yes. Because your question had no duration on it. So will they cross a trillion? Absolutely. Will they re-cross a trillion, I guess, in the next six months, if we were to be a little bit more specific? I think that they will probably sit around the current valuation that they're at at this point in time. I think you've had the kind of gold rush if you like into AI. I think the, I think the dust will settle a little bit. What I'm particularly keen to hear next is kind of look at, look at Nvidia in two ways from my perspective. So not going into financial statements and things like that, but looking at it from a hardware perspective, I just want to know how much of the boom that's happened through things like Microsoft and big tech names, how much have they already exercised their orders, and therefore the biggest players of kind of the market's fairly saturated, because when you're buying these like $10,000 a clip chips for your supercomputers, I certainly don't have one underneath my table here. So I'd like to think about that in terms of what's left of the market to capture with the current products that they have, and also what are the timings in their R&D of the next development, and then what does that unlock as future revenue over time. So I'd like to look at it from that perspective. And the second perspective I'd like to look at Nvidia for a price point of view is we haven't had anything mentioned yet about legislation. I don't think it's a case of legislation takes like a lifetime to come into play. That's not going to impede the progress of the share price. However, I want to hear as we go into the election cycle, which isn't really that far away now over the next 24 months, and it will really start to ramp up in the next 12, how much do they talk about this stuff? How much is this market going to be, is there a vested political interest to look at this market and potentially regulate it as to what degree? Because I think that will have a subsequently impact on the ability for the bubble factor that's priced into AI at the moment. Definitely AI is the future, but I think it's captured the premium in the context of recent weeks and months. That's really interesting. And maybe last question as we draw this into a close, and this is one that we, actually the students on our summer analyst program have asked this week a couple of times, I think, that relates to the eurozone going into recessions. Why is the euro going up even though the eurozone has just announced the technical recession? What is going on there very quickly? It's a good question because the student, I said to the student, where did you read that headline? And they said the daily telegraph. And I said, well, you can take that daily telegraph and you can throw it in the bin. Everything that's on the daily telegraph is yesterday, if not last week or months information. As far as markets are forward-looking, so long story short, the eurozone has moved into a recession in the first quarter. It's basically grown. It shrunk 0.1%. However, we've known this. It's been telegraphed for a long time. Markets have already discounted that factor at the moment. The question here is then, at the moment, the ECB is still signalling the idea that they're going to hike because even though top-line inflation has basically halved since its peak in October 2022, core inflation is still pretty much at its peak. And that's not budging particularly. It's just sat there. And so the ECB have to hike, essentially. They are pretty slow out of the traps to start with. So they're playing a bit of catch-up. So yes, it's all priced in. It's not new news. The ECB have given no comment as to change the perspective of how markets are leaning, which is they're going to hike rates again. So euro up and not down, essentially. That's really helpful. Thank you so much. I think I'm going to take away Nvidia. It's going over a trillion. Absolutely. And the Apple goggles, they're going to be a thing by 2030 and by the euro. Yeah, I'll give you one departing stat line. So I had a look at some research and it was talking about how many iPhone users there are. So there's over a billion. There's a lot. And the estimates are at best case that by 2027 AR VR is expected to surpass 100. So when you talk about people get so excited because of this mass adoption argument, but even with the brightest minds running the most in-depth figures, you're only penetrating a fraction of the market. So for it to be a revolutionary game changer, it will, but not yet. I'm not getting my checkbook out. They're cool though. You're not going to deny it, but yeah. Cool. All right. Well, thank you, Stephen, for jumping in. I know it's not your usual slot, but I appreciate you doing a double tap this week. And definitely check out the Succession episode. 100% encourage you to, you know, witness like a 20 minute one, but it's super interesting because it's very relatable, of course. So when you're on your walk this weekend in the sunshine, maybe one for that situation. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Sam.