The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast

A Perfect Setup 👌

August 22, 2024 • Rakaan Kayali

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A Perfect Setup 👌

In this episode we will cover:

  • Introduction & Bitcoin Update
  • Bullish vs. Bearish Signs for Bitcoin
  • PIF Membership & Halal Investing Course
  • August Performance of Bitcoin
  • Crypto Market Cap Trends
  • Fear, Greed, and RSI Overview
  • MVRVZ Score Analysis
  • Bitcoin Miner Revenue Post-Halving
  • Bitcoin Miners & High-Performance Computing
  • Altcoin Market Performance
  • Risks of Diversification in Altcoins
  • Kamala Harris, Gensler, and Market Impact
  • Post-Halving Bitcoin Highs
  • (6:43) Confidence in Bitcoin’s Future
  • BTC ETFs & Market Inflows
  • Bitcoin’s Resilience Amid Challenges
  • Bitcoin vs. Gold: A Comparison
  • Stock-to-Income Model for Bitcoin
  • Upcoming Monetary Easing & Bitcoin Impact
  • Entering the Second Part of the Bull Run
  • Inversion Thinking: Why Bitcoin Will Thrive
  • Q&A: Gold vs Bitcoin

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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're doing well. Today is August 22nd, Thursday, and Bitcoin is right above 60,000. We've been at this level for a month, it seems. But today I'm going to tell you about the good and the bad in the Bitcoin picture. And we'll look at the factors that are making people bearish versus those that could be seen as bullish signs. And I'll tell you where I stand on this topic. So without further ado, let's get started. Not financial advice. Be sure to do your own due diligence before making any investing decisions and leave a like. Let's get this video to a hundred likes. I'd really appreciate that. If you'd like to follow our trades, move for move and see what we're investing in and gain access to privileged insights, gain access to our course on Halal Investing, then become a PIF member. The course is for elite members. And as Michael Saylor recently said, you spend thousands, tens of thousands of hours of your life trying to earn money. It makes sense to spend a few hours trying to learn how to preserve it. And so that is inshallah something that we help with. So it's an investment worth making. All right. So where do we stand right now? So August was a month that is not unlike its historical performance. August was a month where Bitcoin bulls went from being jovial at the start to thinking about going back to the fiat mines and perhaps going back to the fast food industry in some cases. Needless to say, people's dreams have been rendered much more modest in this month based on the crypto action that we've seen. The crypto market cap is still flat. And in fact, if you look since March, it's been drifting downwards with more than half of the total crypto market cap. In terms of fear and greed, we continue to oscillate between brief periods of fear and very brief periods of greed. And for the most part, we are in the neutral territory. The same can be said for the relative strength index for Bitcoin, wherein we're seeing a strength index that is approaching oversold, but still in neutral territory. In terms of the MVRVZ score, which compares the market value with the price that people paid for their Bitcoin, we have retreated to between one and two after we had a score that was above three briefly this year. And this basically is telling us that people aren't really sitting on a lot of profit in their Bitcoin positions. The Bitcoin miner revenue has dropped as expected after the halving when their Bitcoin rewards drop and are halved, hence the name. And they haven't recovered because the price of Bitcoin hasn't done much of anything since the halving. So the Bitcoin miners are really getting squeezed from a cash flow perspective. We've seen some positive momentum for some Bitcoin miners, but these are really just bonuses that have come from the new play that Bitcoin miners now have access to related to high performance computing and AI training. But in terms of just the Bitcoin mining business, it's been pretty lousy since the halving. And the alts have basically done even more terribly than Bitcoin. If you look at the last month, basically the Ponzi schemes have done well. Everything else hasn't done well. And it's very slim pickings in the alt universe. And I know what you're saying. It's a good thing you're diversified in your alt portfolio. Actually, there's a lesson here, which is that diversification often gives people a false sense of security because they think they're diversified. They think they're in a lot of different plays, but in reality, they're all very correlated. So be very careful of the correlation between your assets when you're assessing the level of diversification that you have. And Kamala, the person who has a, let's say, 50% chance of becoming the next president, thinks that Gary Gensler may be a good pick for treasury secretary. Gary Gensler, for those who are unfamiliar, for many years was the main obstacle for BTC ETFs. And had he not been forced by a court order to approve them, he probably would never have. Kamala, even despite the rhetoric that is sometimes coming from the Democrat side, remains very hostile in her policies and the policies of our campaign to business and innovation and cryptocurrency specifically. I do think that her winning would be negative for the markets, but I don't think that she will win. I'd be surprised if she does, but I've seen crazier things happen. And despair is setting in, basically. So you can see Peter Brent mentions on X that basically this time around, the having has, the post-having high has taken the longest period ever. Post the first halving, it took only eight weeks in order to get to a new high. The second halving, it took 24 weeks. The third halving, it took 25 weeks. And now we're at 23 weeks and we still haven't seen a high. So what gives? Why aren't we seeing a high? Will we not be seeing a high? I think the trend is that it's taking longer after halving. But also one should mention that we did reach a new high prior to the halving, which is unprecedented. So the pattern may be thrown off a bit by the Bitcoin ETFs, wherein we saw an earlier high. Now, this particular commenter is questioning whether or not we will see a new high. And I'm here to say that I am confident that we will. This Bitcoin cycle is far from over. And I'll point to a number of things that give me this confidence. Number one, we have the BTC ETFs, which continue to have net inflows on a somewhat regular basis. You can see the green far outnumbers the red days. So net inflows, the days in which we have net inflows far outnumber the ones that we have outflows. We've recently notched our sixth day in a row of BTC inflows. And in fact, since the inception of these BTC ETFs, they've had net inflows that actually exceeded the number of Bitcoins that were mined in total in the same period. So we just look at this week, for example, number of BTC bought by US ETFs, 670 versus 450 mined. If you look since the 10th of January, number of BTC mined 150,000 and number of BTC bought by US ETFs close to 300,000. So close to twice as many Bitcoin. And eventually, this is going to this is going to bear fruit in the form of price appreciation for this asset. It has to. That's just a mathematical certainty, inshallah, of course. And Bitcoin's resilience during this time, even though one might be somewhat frustrated with the lack of movement and kind of choppiness and consolidation that we've had to endure for the last weeks, Bitcoin's resilience still is something to behold. If you look at everything that it has had to deal with, if you look at the German government selling 50,000 C's Bitcoin, the US government selling 10,000, Mt. Gox distributing 95,000 Bitcoin, Celsius, Gemini earn and trading also making distributions, the market absorbed all of that and we're still over 60,000. So if anything, I think Bitcoin has proven itself to be a very mature asset that is behaving more and more, I think, like a reserve asset as its volatility decreases. And as we're seeing with the gold appreciating reaching new highs, Bitcoin is going to be that on steroids and eventually it will replace gold. It just has had to deal with some exogenous issues, but it will weather those and be on track. And if we look at the stock to income model for Bitcoin, it shows that the projected price as of the 20th of August was 66,500. The actual price was around 59,000 on that day. So we're close, but we're still undervalued. If you look a month from now, the same model is suggesting a projected price of 78,000. So there's a lot here to be, and we are not far from where we are projected to be. And there's no reason why we shouldn't catch up with our schedule, especially considering that more money is coming. So if you look at from here until the end of the year, we're currently at 525 to 550 basis points. There's a 43% chance that we lose 100 basis points from now till the end of the year, and a 17% chance that we lose even more than that. So there's monetary easing that is coming. And when liquidity rises, it raises all boats, especially risk on assets that Bitcoin has tended to be correlated with. And so this is from the ex-user, I'm going to butcher the name, Aurelian Ohio. He makes the following observation that if we were to basically segment each boron to two parts, between them there is often some choppiness. But we've concluded the first part of the boron, but there is a second boron, a second part of this boron that tends to be even more dramatic in its moves. And we're due to enter into this second part of the boron. So I think that even if there is slight variations between different halving cycles, I think generally speaking, we're on schedule. We're slightly lagging the projected for the stock to income price, but we're still in the ballpark. There's nothing that would cause me to change my thesis on this. And if we use inversion thinking and we ask ourselves, what would it take for Bitcoin not to do well? The answer to that is the government would have to behave responsibly and not overspend and not give in to the temptation to essentially buy votes by introducing more liquidity into the market. And that's not something that the government is going to do. We are going to continue to print more and more money, rack up more and more debt. And as we do so, there's really only one direction for a scarce and now trusted asset like Bitcoin to go. And that is up. So the counter argument for Bitcoin and saying that coin is at its peak or it's not going to go higher, the counter argument would require us to get a hold on printing money basically. And I don't see that happening anytime soon. So with that being said, take some questions very quickly. What is your take on gold? I think it's a good reserve asset, but Bitcoin will replace it and outperform it. Rashad says exit the market in August. We'll see. Rashad will have to take it case by case. But yes, this August, last year's August were pretty terrible. But we've we made it through them. And I think we're doing pretty well. Iftikhar Abed says, please few words on gold, if it will keep going up or down. I think generally it will continue to go up. But the issue, the question relates to the magnitude of how much it will go up. I think that, as I mentioned, Bitcoin will outperform. If you enjoyed this live, do leave a like. Until next time, make sure to take care of yourself. Become a member if you haven't already. As-salamu alaykum and peace be upon you all.