The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast

The Market Got This Wrong

Rakaan Kayali

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The Market Got This Wrong

In this episode, we will cover:

  • Introduction and Market Pulse
  • Discussion on Bitdeer Stock Drop
  • Bitdeer’s Financial Highlights
  • Bitcoin Miners’ Profitability Explained
  • Strategic Outlook for Bitcoin Miners
  • Retail Sales and Economic Indicators
  • Fed’s Stance on Interest Rates
  • Q&A: Bitdeer vs. Iron and Market Sentiment
  • Islamic ETFs and Market Concentration
  • Closing Thoughts and Final Q&A

CONTACT US
salam@practicalislamicfinance.com

ABOUT OUR PODCAST
Our podcast is about helping people ethically build wealth. We cover a broad range of topics including stock and crypto investing, product reviews, and general financial well-being.

DISCLAIMER
Anything you hear in this video is an opinion. It is not personalized financial advice. Make sure you do your due diligence before making any investment decisions.

As-salamu alaykum everyone, I hope you are doing well. Today is Thursday, August 15th, and Bitcoin is at 59,700. Today I'm going to give you a quick pulse reading of the market, talk about a position that moved a lot today, and let you be on your way. I have a couple of deep dives that I owe the PIF membership. I'll be working on that inshallah for the rest of the day. So without further ado, let's get started. This is not financial advice, so be sure to do your own due diligence before making any investing decisions and leave a like if you enjoy these lives. Nice to see you Amir. As-salamu alaykum, get more halal alpha by becoming a member. If you think these lives are useful, then you should try a membership. So let me talk about Bitdeer. Bitdeer dropped today a lot. It's I think it's at maybe negative 15% right now, but it was actually down close to 20% at one point. And so Bitdeer is a miner, Bitcoin miner that I spoke about before on this channel, so I feel obligated to address. The reason why it dropped is because it's raising $150 million. Now this is no surprise that Bitcoin miners have to raise money constantly. We saw Quartz, we saw Marathon, both announced similar raisings in the last week. And so this is, plainly speaking, this is an overreaction by the market. There's nothing fundamentally concerning about raising money, the company's raising money. I think the market has just been very shaky and kind of nervous about Bitcoin and about Bitcoin miners. And so it overreacted. I think this is an opportunity for people who understand this company and what it's working on. And in fact, I am going to double down here and say that this is my favorite Bitcoin miner. I think it has the most going for it. I think it will do the best over the next near and medium term. And there's a number of reasons why I think that. I'll go into detail in the detailed report I share with PIF members later. But if I'm just giving you some highlights from their recent earnings reports, so they reported revenue of close to a hundred million, gross profit of 24 million, adjusted EBITDA of close to 25 million. And when you look at the year over year growth for this particular company, revenue is up 5%, gross 6%, gross profit is up more than 50%, adjusted EBITDA is up 33%. So I can understand if a company is raising money, diluting its shareholders, and it has a record of not using money wisely, that investors would react negatively to raising more money. But if a company has a history of producing $2 or $3 for every $1 that it raises for itself, so producing $2 or$3 in stockholder value for every $1 it raises, then raising money is quite positive. So raising money in and of itself is neither negative or positive. It really depends on who is raising the money and what they plan on doing with it and the returns that you expect from what the company plans on doing with the money that it raises. Now, Bitdeer has mentioned that it is investing in data centers and it is investing in its own proprietary rig and its own mining chip. And these have huge upsides to them. These businesses have huge upsides to them. And not only that, they promise to reduce the cost of mining Bitcoin. So it even helps their coin business. Now, the reason for this is that when the Bitcoin price rises, as is expected, guess what the company manufacturers of mining rigs do? They raise their prices because they can, simply because they can. And that eats into the profits of Bitcoin miners. Well, Bitdeer is getting around this by producing its own rigs so that when the price of Bitcoin increases, it takes that difference to itself and doesn't share it with anyone else. So this vertical integration that Bitdeer is working on, I think will prove to be a key differentiator when the Bitbull market resumes. And this will reflect itself in the profits for this company. So nothing to worry about with regards to Bitdeer. This is at least my assessment. The coin miners, if one is wondering, okay, when are they going to go on the run? Why are we even invested in them? Bitcoin is promising to return a very healthy return. As I mentioned yesterday, if you go by any of the popular models that have had historical efficacy, if you look at what the models are predicting, Bitcoin on its own is going to do extremely well. So why even bother with Bitcoin miners? Well, there's a very narrow window of time when Bitcoin miners do extremely well. And that is represented from a coinometrics, by the way. And in this time when Bitcoin miners do extremely well and actually outperform Bitcoin by a lot is when Bitcoin goes on a run. So if you look at this chart, the x-axis is telling you, the horizontal axis is telling you Bitcoin return over previous 30 days. So when the Bitcoin return is over 50% in a 30-day period, then the average Bitcoin miner return over the next 30 days tends to be above 200%. You can see somewhere above 300%. So just looking at sort of the center of that circle that is drawn on the graph, you can see that there is a period, a specific period of outperformance for Bitcoin miners. And that's why we're in this particular trade. Now this is with regards to most every Bitcoin miner, I would say this is a trade, you know, you get in and you try and flip it at the right time. It's suggesting that if Bitcoin goes on a run, let's say it does 50% in a 30-day period, the next 30 days is probably a good time to take your profits from your Bitcoin miners, convert them to Bitcoin. That's at least what I will do with a major position that we have in a Bitcoin miner. Now with Bitdeer, I'm not so sure I'm going to do that because the more and more I understand this company and I understand its management and listen to them, the more bullish I am becoming on this company. I really like them. So we'll see if I end up doing that with Bitdeer. Definitely though, I think taking profits with Bitcoin miners, whether or not you sell out entirely or not, is a good strategy if you'd like to follow our trades to become a PIF member. And before I forget, tomorrow inshallah, this is something that I've been wanting to do for a while. Tomorrow inshallah for the elite members, PIF elite members, we'll be doing a live deep dive into a company using the methods that we mentioned in our course and evaluating a very popular stock. And I will share more details with elite members today inshallah. And it will be recorded, so for those who can't attend the live session, the lesson or the live evaluation will be recorded. All right, so retail sales came out today. This was the third piece of really important news, really important data to come out this week. So we had PPI on Tuesday. The big takeaway there was that producer prices were coming down, but margins were coming down for producers as well. This may translate into lower earnings in the future. CPI was also down. We're still at around 2.9% in terms of yearly annualized inflation. Fed's target, the magic number is 2%. We're still a ways away from that, but we're headed in the right direction. Today, advanced retail sales came out with a plus one for July and 0.3% was expected. So that's good. Still, it signals that there's still strength in the U.S. consumer base. So the markets reacted positively to that. The S&P last I looked, let's see here what the markets are doing. S&P is up just shy of one and a half percentage points. So the markets liked that. So it seems like we got good news on both fronts with regards to inflation, with regards to the economy, good news on both fronts. And now we're at a point where good news is good news. And so weekly initial claims for unemployment also, we got some good news there. So if you actually look at the seasonal number for weekly unemployment, it's actually lower than where we were the same time of year last year. So it's important to compare numbers on a seasonally adjusted basis. And here you can see 2024 is the dark blue. So you can see that we're lower in terms of weekly initial claims for unemployment than we were in 2023, above 2019 and 2018. But still, the point being, this is not an outlier number that we necessarily need to be concerned about. So far, everything is pointing towards a soft recession. So maybe we do have a recession, but it's not going to be that deep and severe. And the Fed is signaling cuts. So today, the St. Louis Fed president said that the US labor market is no longer overheated. Labor markets no longer pose a clear upside risk to inflation. Recent data has bolstered confidence that inflation will return to target in absent news shocks. Risk of inflation rising has declined while risks to unemployment are increasing. The time may be nearing when an adjustment to policy may be appropriate. And he went on to say that he's not talking about necessarily an easy monetary policy, but one that is less restrictive than what we have right now. So based on his comments, and we still have some time before September 18th when the Fed meets, but based on his comments, I think if you press them, he would say he's leaning towards a 25 base point cut. So the economy seems to be holding up pretty decently. Inflation seems to be cooling down. So things are, I think there's a lot to suggest that the markets will rebound. I don't know when they will rebound. You know, does it happen next week or next month or next two months? I don't really know. But I do think that they will rebound and in our positions, Inshallah, we'll do very well. I'd like to follow those positions to become a PIF member. Taking questions very quickly. Assalamu alaikum, Zuhair. Nice to see you. Assalamu alaikum, Chocolate. Ma. Khadnan. Nice to see you, Tahir. Oh, nice to see you, Tahir. It's been a while. I'm originally from Syria. I love your content. Never miss a video. Thanks, Tahir. I really appreciate it. I love your content as well. So yeah, check out Tahir's channel if you haven't. Do you think BitTear will outperform Iron in price per share from $15 all-time high for Iron? Yeah, I do think BitTear. Now, both of them, I think will perform well. But I'm more bullish on BitTear. I just think that the moves that they're making are quite clever and they separate themselves from other Bitcoin miners in what they're doing. Abdullah says, awesome news for elite members. Yeah, Inshallah. I like to think of my work as sprints. And in this sprint, I'm going to be working on revamping our course, Inshallah, adding new material and just improving on it. So yeah, I'm glad you like that, Abdullah. Sheikha says, Enphase Energy, any good news for it? So their recent earnings report wasn't too hot. I checked their exposure to interest and contribution of interest. It still doesn't pass our comfort requirements. So it's still uncomfortable for me right now. Perez says, Assalamu Alaikum. What are your thoughts on the estimated price of Bitcoin hitting $100K this year and $1M by 2030? Well, I think $100K this year is likely, actually. I think it's a greater than 50% probability that it hits $100K this year. Now $1M by 2030, it's very hard to predict. Honestly, if you're looking, I think the max you can predict, it makes any sense to put any effort into forecasting the price of an asset is maybe two or three years because things are moving so quickly that it almost doesn't make sense to try to think beyond that because as I mentioned, everything is moving so quickly. So what's unique about this particular time that we live in, in terms of investing, is how quickly you can make money if you're able to spot a trend and how quickly you can lose it as well. That's really what is unique. So if you have an insight into a particular technology or trend that is just getting started, you can make a lot of money with that. And my advice would be, if you have an insight that you're really confident in and the valuation is very cheap, like it's a no-brainer, then you should go in heavy. That's really how you outperform. But at least that's how I think about it. All right, let's go to questions. I don't think bullrun is coming before the US elections. What do you think? It's tough to say. I really can't predict these near-term things. It's tough to say. But oftentimes, sentiment in the market is flipped on a specific event. And so near-term, it's hard to say. But I do think that liquidity is rising. All indications point to that. And therefore, I think the logical conclusion for that is that asset prices will be rising as well. Will we get a summary of your Turkey experience? Yes, inshallah. Long live Bilad Hisham. Indeed, long live Bilad Hisham. Thoughts on Islamic ETFs? If you don't like volatility of individual stocks? I have reviewed Islamic ETFs before, so check them out on my channel. Some of the holdings that they have, I agree with. Some of them, I don't from a comfort level. But I will say this. If you're in the wealth-building phase, I think there's a lot of alpha or above-average returns to be had in concentration. That being said, if you can reach your goals without concentration, then you might as well go for an ETF. Do you think Bitdeer will go down further? Honestly, no. Gun to my head, as they say. I don't think it will go substantially lower. But near-term is very hard to predict. I honestly think it overshot today. It wasn't that bad of a news. If you look at their raising $150 million, it's not a bad piece of news if you have confidence in management. So I think the market overreacted. And the market is looking for Bitcoin miners to huddle Bitcoin. And I don't see why I would pay Bitdeer's management to hold Bitcoin for me. I can hold it myself. What would cause me to hold Bitdeer is if I thought they were working on something that may leverage their exposure to Bitcoin's price. So I think the market is focused on their own thing. Just subscribe to PIF Premium. And don't know where to start, any specific idea. So Abdullah, join the Discord and I will reach out to you myself or someone on the team will reach out to you and make sure that you fully understand how to get started, inshallah. Is PLL uncomfortable? With PIF? No, PLL is not uncomfortable. If something turns uncomfortable and you're at a great loss? Well, if something turns uncomfortable, as I always say, I just sell. Sorry, if there's no reason for me to think that the thing that I'm holding that is uncomfortable is going to outperform all other assets and therefore I have to hold on to it. So when something becomes uncomfortable for me, I just sell. Brother Ken, this might be unrelated, but I found a recent opinion on leasing cars have changed compared to your older opinion on an older video. Maybe I'm wrong. Can you clarify? Where did you find my opinion on leasing cars has changed? It hasn't changed. At least by definition is just a long-term rental. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong about a long-term rental. Is gold trading halal? Well, are you trading gold for gold? In which case, you know, so obviously there's a different. So in the case of things that are used as currency or can be used as currency when you're trading, you need to make sure there are different types. If you're trading gold for cash, that's totally fine, but the transaction has to be instant. You can't have a time delay. Otherwise this could be a loophole for an interest bearing loan. Brother, please don't get angry. I just want to learn your opinion. Okay. Until I don't have a habit of getting angry. I don't think I do at least, you know, not on lives. I don't. My question is regarding CFD. They say it is gamble, but you can hold the trade as long as you want and all gambling have an expiration date. And the people who told you that try to avoid getting advice from them. Actually, I realized that maybe it sounds aggressive. Maybe that's why you're saying don't get angry, but no CFDs are not gambling is not about having an expiration date. Gambling has fixed PNL, but CFD has variable PNL. I don't know who's telling you this, but that's not what gambling is. You can watch my writings or read my writings and watch my videos on gambling. Now they say your sessions always follow a yield curve, flipping and seeping never missed once right now it is in the inversion phase. What do you think? I think right now, as I mentioned, the most important thing is are the liquidity levels as it relates to asset prices. And right now liquidity is rising and that liquidity I have to believe will make its way to real assets. I can't really think that I can't really see investors holding on cash, especially if rates are falling and the Fed is buying back their treasury, they're buying back assets and putting them on the balance sheet, sucking from the basically opportunity for people to actually buy them. So I think that, you know, money is going to flow towards stocks and another real assets. I'm going to Turkey next week. Do you have any tips on your experience of living there? Tips for Turkey? Well, they really like it when you say something in Turkish. So if you, you know, memorize a phrase in Turkish that may get you a preferential treatment. Also, if you have a kid, if you have like a toddler, they really like kids. And so they're, you know, you can see a Turk with, you know, a frown on their face as soon as they see a kid and they'll start smiling at them. So take a kid with you. You can find a lot of them in parks and airports. So there's a lot of them hanging around. Thanks a lot, brother. That's my, it's my pleasure. Fantastic material as always. The general opinion between scholars is to pay one to two and a half percent Zakat on stocks, both as a trader or long-term investing. Would you agree? Well, I did a deep dive into that particular question. You can check out my video on Zakat on stocks on my YouTube channel. Leave a like if you enjoyed this live. Until next time, make sure to take care of yourself, become a PIF member if you haven't already. And if you become an elite member, you can join us tomorrow for our live deep dive. Until next time, take care of yourself. And peace be upon you all.