Why #bitcoin Miners Will Outperform Bitcoin

As-salamu alaykum everyone. A very interesting day today in the markets. We were able to hold the $70,000 price for Bitcoin. Actually, we dipped below it very briefly. This is probably exchanges wiping out derivatives traders. It's a pretty cutthroat business, really. So we did that dip, but then mostly recovered. Now we're sitting at around $71,000, $71,000 and change. However, what is frustrating to many is that the Bitcoin miners have yet to catch up with the Bitcoin price appreciation. So what the heck is going on here? Why aren't Bitcoin miners catching up with Bitcoin? Why do they continue to fall? Let's talk about this. Now, as always, this is not financial advice. Be sure to do your own due diligence before making any investing decisions. So as mentioned, Bitcoin miners today were solidly in the red, although not as bad as yesterday. And this has a lot of people scratching their heads and perhaps has a lot of people selling their Bitcoin mining positions. I think this is a mistake. We hold Bitcoin mining positions in our PIF growth portfolio, and we're probably going to hold a lot more with time. And I'll talk about that in a second. So Bitcoin having fear is overblown. I think this is the number one reason why Bitcoin miners continue to fall, even though Bitcoin is improving in price. The Bitcoin halving now is in 37 days, and this is where the reward for mining a block gets cut in half. And therefore, all else being equal, the revenue of Bitcoin miners is going to be cut in half. However, all else is not equal. The Bitcoin price is going up steadily and exceeding expectations. I think now 80 to 90 thousand is on the table for a price of Bitcoin before the halving. Keep in mind, in previous halvings, we didn't break all time highs before the halving. And yet now we have. And if you look at how Bitcoin miners have performed in previous halvings, this should give you a preview as to what one can expect after this halving. Now, another source of concern for people is Bitcoin's hash rate. This continues its steady march upwards. However, the hash rate is partially responsible for Bitcoin's price. I mean, the hash rate, yes, it indicates the difficulty of mining another Bitcoin, but it also is a measure of the security of the network. So the higher the hash rate, the more secure the network is. And therefore, by extension, the more valuable the Bitcoin token is. So there's two ways to read this Bitcoin hash rate. And yes, few miners have outperformed Bitcoin since the Bitcoin ETFs launched earlier in this year. You have CLSK, CleanSpark outperformed the price of Bitcoin, which is here in red. And you have, for example, Marathon and Riot underperformed it. This is true. But we're only talking about two and a half months. This is not enough to draw a conclusion. When you're in a bull run, you want to be in the levered place on the asset that is appreciating. And Bitcoin miners are levered place on Bitcoin. They're essentially call options on Bitcoin. And if you take a two month period, perhaps they underperform. But if you are of the opinion that we're in a bull market, then the levered place will perform better. They'll outperform the underlying asset. And obviously, in bear markets, they will underperform the underlying asset. Another source of criticism for Bitcoin miners is the fact that micro strategy is absolutely killing it right now. And the argument is that perhaps, you know, micro strategy is the better equity levered play on Bitcoin. Yes, I do think micro strategy is a decent play. Now, it's not in our portfolio and never has been because of its use of debt. And as Halal conscious investors, we stay away from companies that are heavily reliant on the use of debt. And certainly micro strategies business model is apparent that it's apparent that it is heavily reliant on using interest bearing debt to grow. So we stayed away from that and we focused instead on Bitcoin miners. But I do think that the potential appreciation for micro strategy is quite limited when you compare it to Bitcoin miners. Just, you know, if you take the the actual business and set that aside, just by looking at the market caps of these two equity plays. So for micro strategy, now you're talking about a market cap of close to 25 billion. Average Bitcoin miner is less than a billion in market capitalization, so much smaller entities. And yet they provide they their work actually gives the Bitcoin network its value. Bitcoin wouldn't have any value without miners. And Bitcoin is sitting at a market cap of now close to one and a half trillion. A micro strategy is sitting at a market cap of 25 billion. Bitcoin miners are sitting on average on a market cap that is less than one billion. And so it doesn't take that much mental gymnastics to figure out that the greater upside here and the Bitcoin play as far as leveraged Bitcoin plays go, the greater upside lies with the Bitcoin miners. And I'll actually point you to a number of positive indications or indicators for Bitcoin miners. The first being that the Bitcoin price has now entered a green zone where in historically, at least if history is to rhyme, where we're at these, you know, after breaking the previous all time high, we're at a point in history where the Bitcoin price is going to appreciate quite substantially. And most, you know, yesterday, if you saw yesterday's live, we saw the power law chart, that rainbow chart for Bitcoin's price. And we said the upper bound was closer to 300,000. So you have, you know, right now being at 70,000, we have a three or four X left here for Bitcoin in this cycle, if the power law is to hold. Now, it may be less than three to four X, maybe it's, you know, two to three, but that's the range. And the price of Bitcoin, if you compare it to, let's say, a year ago, the price of Bitcoin was sub 30,000. So the price of Bitcoin has already doubled. And you can already, more than doubled. And you can already see that Bitcoin miners that were perhaps prepping for the halving based on their revenue being cut in half when Bitcoin was 30,000, are now quite delighted to see that it actually has already doubled before the halving. So there, even if their revenue expectations were based on, you know, a 30,000 price for Bitcoin, or a 40,000 price for Bitcoin, it's looking very likely that the appreciation in the price of Bitcoin will have more than compensated for the halving. And we're just at this time of the halving, we haven't gone into the months after the halving when most of the appreciation happens. Now, if we look at the miners performance, now, even though the miners performance since the beginning of the year has been disappointing for many, if you look at the miners performance last year, they far outweighed or they far outpaced the performance of MicroStrategy. Yes, recently MicroStrategy has done better. But last year, certainly the Bitcoin miners have done better, you know, close to 6x-ing. The best performing miners did close to 6x. So they outperformed Bitcoin and they outperformed the other major equity levered play on Bitcoin, which is MicroStrategy. And if you look at the previous halving, so if we looked at 2020, and May of 2020 is when the previous halving happened. For Marathon, for example, if you look at this bottom row, you can see, you know, in March, the performance of the stock, it was down close to 50%. And then in April, it was flat. And then May, the month of the halving, it was up 55%. And then June 30, July 123%, August 22%. So at least historically speaking, Marathon being a Bitcoin miner performed poorly in the months leading up to the halving, but then extremely well in the month of the halving and for a few months after. And the same is true with Riot, which was around during the last halving. So in February, it was down 15%. This is the bottom row again. In March, it was down more than 25%. April, it was up 45%. May, it was up 76%. Again, this is the month of the halving. June, July, August, all had positive returns. Nice to see you. So yesterday, I showed you guys this chart that showed, okay, what generation A6 have what break even prices for Bitcoin that is at what price does it still make sense to mine Bitcoin. And we basically saw that, you know, for the latest generation miners, the S21s, the shutoff price was $46,000. Again, we're north of $70,000. So we're deep in the green. And this is post halving numbers. For S19s, it's closer to $60,000. For S, this is for the XP and the S19K Pro. For the S19Js, it's closer to $70,000,$80,000 at the highest price of electricity that is. So most of the Bitcoin miners are actually S19Js and above right now. That's what they're using. So I think most Bitcoin miners are going to do just fine after the halving. And for the ones that are using S21s, I think they're going to be deep in the profit. And when you look at the Bitcoin miner revenue, you know, this is at the end of the day, this is the bottom line for any company. And that is, you know, how much money is it making? And this number continues to go up as one would expect with the price of Bitcoin and it going up. So, you know, when we're buying, when we're investing, we're buying the business. We're not buying the stock because oftentimes the stock will deviate from the business, but it will catch up with the business. So we're buying the business here and the business is telling us that the numbers are going up, the revenue is going up and eventually the stock is going to follow. Now, I don't think I have a high degree of confidence that that will be the case. Yes, there are some pre-halving jitters and we've seen this historically, but I don't think that this time around is fundamentally going to be different in a bad way for Bitcoin miners. If you look at the fees that they're collecting, a number of transactions on the Bitcoin network, the price of Bitcoin, which is their main source of revenue, that Bitcoin that they mine and they sell, the HODL levels of these different Bitcoin miners, how much Bitcoin they're actually holding. All of this points to, I think, a prosperous few months for these Bitcoin mining stocks post-halving. So the conclusion here is, not to panic, not to get frustrated. And really, these are times where one, now this is not financial advice, I can only tell you what I'm doing and planning on doing. These are times where one can increase their exposure to these Bitcoin mining stocks. I've actually taken profits from Bitcoin mining positions and I've held back on buying the dip in our PIF growth portfolio for a while now. But I think we're approaching the time where buying the dips is starting to make more and more sense, especially as the deviation between the performance of Bitcoin, which is basically the underlying asset for these Bitcoin mining stocks, the deviation between the performance of Bitcoin and the performance of Bitcoin mining stocks is growing. So this is a good time to, I think, buy more Bitcoin mining stocks. Obviously, not financial advice. Be sure to do your own due diligence. And As-salamu alaykum to everyone in the chat. I hope your Ramadan is going well. And wa alaykum Rashad, nice to see you. And until next time, make sure to take care of yourself. As-salamu alaykum and peace be upon you all.