The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast
The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast
Fat Wars: LLY vs. HIMS
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Fat Wars: LLY vs. HIMS
In this episode we will cover:
- Introduction & Market Update
- Comparison of Weight Management Companies
- PIF Membership Benefits
- Housing Market Analysis
- Bitcoin MVRV Z-Score & Market Outlook
- Eli Lilly's Weight Loss Drug Strategy
- HIMS Market Reaction & Analysis
- Comparison of Eli Lilly and HIMS
- Discussion on Wealth & Financial Security
- Q&A Session & Final Thoughts
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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 Tuesday, August 27th and Bitcoin is at 61,700, Tesla is back at 210. Today we're going to go over a comparison between two companies that are in the fat burning business or weight management business as of late. So we'll compare them and see which one is a stronger buy. Full disclosure, I have money invested in both of them. Without further ado, let's get started. This is not financial advice. Be sure to do your own due diligence before making any investing decisions and leave a like if you enjoy these lives and benefit from them. That's of course their aim, inshallah that happens. So get more halal alpha by becoming a PIF member, if you're not already. On Friday, inshallah, we'll have another elite member session. So we'll go over some ways to protect your profits, which I think will pay off dividends for those who attend, inshallah. So if you're not a member yet, do become a member. All right, so we got some housing prices, housing prices data today. Prices were up around north of 5% nationwide. If you compare this with their levels in June, 2023, obviously different markets had different results. So New York saw the highest annual gain among the top 20 cities with prices increasing 9% in June, followed by San Diego and Las Vegas with annual increases of 8.7 and 8.5% respectively. Portland, Oregon was the worst of the housing markets and the United States, at least when we're talking about major cities, only saw an annual increase of less than 1%. Now the question that was posed to me recently is what do I think is going to happen to housing prices? And I do think that there's an argument to be made that a pullback is in the cards here. If you look at the home price inflation adjusted, home prices inflation adjusted, you can see that we've been on quite a run as of late. And I think there's an argument to be made that this run is just unsustainable. We saw a similar run in 2006 and we know how that ended with a dramatic drop. When you compare with the affordability, so if you take the US home value divided by income and we look at that ratio, we really haven't seen ratios as high as where we are right now since 2006. And as I mentioned, we saw what happened there. We saw a big plunge in housing prices after that peak was reached. And in the 1950s and what happened there was basically there was static in housing prices. So they really didn't do much of anything for the next 10 years. So incomes arose during that period, but housing prices stayed basically stagnant and that's what brought this ratio down. So this could end in one of two or three ways. So either housing prices come back down if we think that this ratio is going to hold, that is it's going to revert back to it's something closer to the average. So either housing prices are going to come down or they'll stay stagnant for a long period of time and incomes will rise. And so this ratio will go down or there's just going to be a really big increase in inflation and on an inflation adjusted basis and housing prices will remain relatively stable. And we'll see on an inflation adjusted basis that housing prices go back to something more normal. Yeah. Based on this at I think there's an argument here that one of these three scenarios is what's going to happen. Based on this, I probably wouldn't be a buyer here of if I'm looking, if I'm considering buying a house and especially considering, I do think one of the reasons why housing prices have been as high as they have been is because a lot of people are locked into very low interest rate mortgages and they're not getting out of that situation in a high interest environment. So there's been inventory has been hard to come by for houses because no one is selling because they can't get a similarly cheap mortgage. When interest rates do go down, we may see the inventories increase because there's a lot of people who have been holding off on moving because they can't find appropriate financing cheap enough for financing may decide that, Hey, now there are some options available for financing that are not too expensive. So maybe these people are motivated to put their houses for sale that increases inventory and reduces prices. So there are so many other factors that could impact the housing prices. So it's very tough to actually forecast, but food for thought at least. All right, now let's move to Bitcoin. So Bitcoin seems to be at an equilibrium. If we look at the MVRVZ score, now this compares the market value to the realized value. Typically when we have reached equilibrium in a Bitcoin regime, I'm sorry, in a bullish regime, this has been a positive sign because it has typically been followed by a upward trend. And it's typically signified the, the end of the downward trends. So the, a local minimum, if you will think that we are in a generally bullish regime. And I do think that is the case because of liquidity levels and they're being on schedule to increase globally. Then I think when you look at the MVRVZ score and that we're at equilibrium levels, this is a good sign for you. All right. So now let's talk about Eli Lilly. And they big headline out of Eli Lilly today was that they were selling ZEP bound vials at 50% discount to meet the weight loss drug demand. You can actually buy vials from their direct consumer online site, Lilly Direct at either $3.99 or $5.49 a month, depending on the dosage. And this is compared to if you wanted their, if you wanted Ozempic, it's cost like 2000 a month. So this is a big decrease, make it a lot more affordable for more people, increase the customer base for them. So on the heels of that announcement, Lilly stock did get a bit of a bump in an environment where most other equities were falling. And this I think is the right move for Lilly specifically. There has been a shortage in the, for Novo Nordisk, its main competitor. There has been a shortage in the compound for the drug. In Lilly's case, they don't have a similar shortage. Actually their bottleneck was with the actual pens that are used to administer the drug. And that's what was causing the manufacturing bottleneck for them. So they decided, okay, let's just sell the vials. And then the patient will have to actually load the syringe themselves and administer it that way. But we'll sell the vials at 50% discount. And so I think that this is the right move. I think it makes a lot of sense. It puts Lilly at an advantage compared to competition. Now HIMSS, which is another investment that we have, is still cheaper. So if you can get the GLP-1 injections at $199 a month, but it did take a beating in the market today. I think last I looked at it, let me check it right now actually. So HIMSS is down close to 7% just today on this news, but HIMSS is still cheaper in terms of their GLP-1 injections, but cheaper by less. So people have more options. That being said, I think the market overreacted. If we do a comparison between Lilly and HIMSS, you can see the revenue growth year over year for Eli Lilly. Now, obviously Eli Lilly is a much bigger company than HIMSS. You're talking about Eli Lilly's flirting with a trillion dollar valuation, whereas HIMSS is still a sub 5 billion. I think it's close to 3 billion right now. So if you look at revenue growth year over year for Eli Lilly, it was at 31% versus HIMSS at 50%. Forward revenue growth expected at around 26%, 53% for HIMSS. So HIMSS has the advantage there. Again, I understand it's a lower base, but still percentages are what they are. If you look at the profitability, if you look at gross profit margin for Lilly and HIMSS, they're very similar. So north of 80%, which is fantastic. Yes, the net income margin for Lilly is higher. You would expect that when compared to HIMSS because they have economies of scale. HIMSS is still very much in its growth phase. Eli Lilly is a much more mature company. If you look at the sales, so enterprise value to sales on a forward-looking basis for Lilly, it's at 19%. Whereas for HIMSS, it's at 2.35%, even though HIMSS has a higher expected growth rate. So yes, I understand that the net income margin for Lilly is higher, but I think HIMSS will get there as it gains more economies of scale as it grows its operations. So comparing them, I think HIMSS has more upside than Lilly does, especially at these valuations. And I think that HIMSS is presenting a unique opportunity to investors with the volatility that it has, because it is shorted at close to 10% of floats. When a stock is heavily shorted, it tends to move up. It tends to overshoot on the way up and it overshoots on the way down as well. And today I think it's overshooting on the way down. I don't think HIMSS is necessarily a GLP-1 play. I think in the near term it may be, but what it has proven with offering GLP-1 and ramping that up to almost a hundred million dollars annualized revenue is what it's proving is that it can onboard a new opportunity, offer a new drug, ramp it up quickly. And it has the infrastructure in it, the vertical integration in it to do effectively. And so there are so many other opportunities that are going to come up to do something similar to what it did with GLP-1. That's the real play. If you understand the HIMSS business model, it's not GLP-1. That's very narrow thinking. The real play is the personalized, convenient accessibility to drugs that HIMSS is providing at a very competitive price. Comparing the two, I like both companies. As I mentioned, I thought Eli Lilly's move today was the right one. It's making the right moves. I think with Lilly, you'll have a more stable investment with less returns, but HIMSS, you're going to have a more volatile investment, but with a greater return. So that's my comparison of the two. I saw the recent survey actually asking Americans what they considered wealthy. And this number differed based on where they were located. So in San Francisco, for example, they consider someone with at least $4.4 million to be wealthy. San Diego, Los Angeles, that was close to$3.4 million. Dallas, close to $2.2 million. So it really differs. However, I realize that these numbers may seem intimidating to many. They're good to aspire to if you have the right intentions with what you want to do with your wealth, but I don't think necessarily that these are having this amount of wealth is necessarily going to change your day-to-day enjoyment of your life. The most important thing is to not have any debt, pay off any debt that you have, and live within your means. And once you do that, I think you've solved the money problem. And I go back to what the prophet, peace be upon him, said with regards to being wealthy, in terms of at least the material terms. The prophet, peace be upon him, says, and the translation of that is, whoever among you wakes up secure in his property, healthy in his body, and has his food for the day, it is as if the whole world has been given to him or gathered for him. And so that's really, I think, if you have these things, you should consider yourself to be very wealthy. There's nothing more to have, really. That being said, I do think that Muslims should be strong, and strength is often wealth is a form of strength. And if you have the right intentions with why you want to accumulate wealth, to be strong, to do something good with it, then that's all good. But you should not consider yourself wealthy if you don't have the numbers that we mentioned. All right. Become a PIF member if you haven't already. Leave a like if you haven't already. Let's go to questions. Rashad, salam. Let's not talk politics, but Harris is planning to give first-time buyers some cash. Would that nourish the housing market? Yeah. Sorry to say this, but everything Harris has proposed so far has been asinine. It's just silly. Price controls are silly. Taxes on unrealized gains are insane.$25,000 for a first-time home buyer is just going to inflate the price for first-time buyers. And I don't think it's going to have the intended effect. I think instead of giving first-time homebuyers$25,000, how about just reducing their taxes and keeping their money with them instead of increasing taxes? So instead of doing this inefficient proposal, how about just keeping people's money with them and getting off their back? I think that's a better solution. Zoya, salam. Thanks for your video. This makes sense for why you have each pick in their portfolio. Thanks. I appreciate that, Zohair. Isfan says, salam alaikum. I really appreciate these updates, even if I'm not able to make the live sessions. I'm glad you made it today. Always good to see you, my good friend Isfan. Jazakallah khair for all that you do for our community. What a great... Thanks so much. I really appreciate that. That brightens my day whenever I read comments like that. Rashid says, salam alaikum. Is it a good time to grab some shares of Hems? Yeah, I think it is. And perhaps I will. And I'll let PIF members know that I did, if I do. If you'd like to follow my trades, move for moved, and do become a PIF member, as I mentioned. And until next time, make sure to take care of yourself. Assalamualaikum and peace be upon you all.