The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast

A Powerful Pair: Tesla and Bitcoin

September 09, 2024 Rakaan Kayali

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A Powerful Pair: Tesla and Bitcoin
In this episode we will cover:

  • Introduction & Bitcoin Update 
  • Pair Trading & Elite Member Session 
  • Bitcoin Cycles & Market Trends 
  • Bull Run Phases
  • Tesla Robotaxi Event Preview 
  • Tesla's Wireless Charging Patent 
  • Robotaxi Profit Breakdown
  • Tesla vs. Competition 
  • Tesla's Competitive Advantage 
  • Full Self-Driving Progress 
  • ARK Invest & Tesla's Future Valuation 
  • Elite Member Session & Portfolio Access 
  • Q&A: Market Outlook 

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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're doing well. Today is Monday, September 9th, and the Bitcoin is trading at 56,700. And last time we spoke, it was at 52,000. So we've gone up quite a bit. We've gone up 4,000 in four days, basically more than 4,000, close to 5,000. So when I told you not to panic, I think I was justified in saying that. Now, that being said, we're not out of the woods yet. I think there is still some volatility left here in September. But as I mentioned on Friday, I think the worst is probably behind us. And time will tell if what I have said is true. Now, without further ado, let's get started today. I'm going to talk about two of my favorite positions and I'm going to be, I'm going to be talking about pair trading in this week's elite member session. So we'll talk about the mechanics of pair trading, how to set up a strong pair trade. And we'll do an example with Bitcoin and Tesla. So if you're interested in that, be sure to become a elite member. A link to do so is in the description of this video. So let's talk about Bitcoin first and where we are. So if you look at the last three cycles, this period, so you know, August, September has been a very volatile period. And we've had a repeat of this same story this time around now. But then if you look October and beyond, the trend is quite clear. So far we've been copying what we've did in the last three cycles, which gives us reason to believe that perhaps October moving forward will not be an exception to this and we will copy the last cycle, last cycle's upward movement, inshallah. And maybe even, as I mentioned, we may have front ran the weakness that was anticipated in the market in these and late August, beginning of September. And perhaps we have a stronger than expected end of September. Now, if we look at another FOMO inducing chart, we see that you can break up bull runs typically into part one and part two. It seems like we're due for part two of our bull run here. And part two, by the way, tends to be much stronger than part one. That is the anticipated returns in part two tend to be much stronger. And ending in euphoria, which is when you need to sell, be sure to be cognizant of that, of that fact. And if you are interested in Bitcoin, I think now is a better time to buy than two months from now, three months from now, Q1 of 2025. And even though I've said that, I'm sure many of you, actually, I hope the viewers will not do this, but many investors will be overcome by FOMO Q1 of 2025 Q2 and get in at exactly the wrong time. So just be sure that you're not one of those. And as it relates to Tesla, we have the big event coming up, October 10th, Tesla plans Robotex reveal at a California Warner Brothers studio. So likely what will happen is there's a fake town and they will use the fake town to demonstrate the abilities of their Robotex, so we'll get a live demo then. And then also when the, cause this event was actually postponed, when the event happens, we'll probably get a few other things revealed by Tesla during this event. So I think there's going to be some upward stock movement leading up to this event. It may turn out to be a buy the rumor, sell the news type situation, depending on how much we run up leading to the event, I may decide to take some profits and buy back after the event. We'll see though, so far, the stock has, has not given us reason to do that. Although there's still a month until the event. And so it may give us a reason to do exactly that. Obviously PIF members will be informed move by move, what we do in our portfolios. Now, speaking of a few other things, we did get a recent application for a patent on a wireless charging system, which is likely to be used for their Robotex fleet. So basically ideas, you park the car near on top of this and you basically don't have to plug in anything. So the Robotex will charge itself and be on its way. So you'll have a literal cash printing fleet with minimal human intervention required that is autonomous and producing cash. Now, how much cash you may ask? Let's look at the economics. And this is from Simply Wall Street. Uber charges two to $4 per mile in the U.S. Robotexes should be able to charge $1 per mile. Now, if a vehicle completes 50,000 miles a year, that's $50,000. Assuming the cost of charging, cleaning, maintenance, insurance is around half of that. So 50 cents a mile, that's $25,000 in profit. That's split between the vehicle owner and the network operator, Tesla. This is just a high margin cash producing machine, as I mentioned, that will benefit Tesla and will also benefit to the extent Tesla makes this available, fleet owners. So private investors that want to buy Robotexes or Tesla owners, that would be great Tesla owners and Tesla vehicle owners that can just add their cars to the fleet and earn some money. And if this happens, this may change Tesla vehicles from traditionally cars being liabilities and may change them from the classification of a liability to a cash producing asset. And therefore, if this were to happen, people could between one day and the next see their liability sitting in their driveway, transform into a cash producing asset with no effort on their part. And that will be a quite a good surprise for, or quite a good event for Tesla owners, I'm sure. Now there will be opportunity, there will be competition, but let's look at that competition. Let's see how serious this competition is. So if we look at Waymo, for example, so they mentioned that, and the, if you contrast the positive coverage of this in the news versus the negative coverage that Tesla gets, it's quite remarkable. Waymo is announced recently that Phoenix Sky Harbor is on track to be the first airport in the world to offer Waymo rider only autonomous vehicle service. So what does this mean? So it means in a very narrow route, geofenced, you can't go out of, you can ride in a Waymo and it will take you to the airport, guess what? Currently you can ride in a Tesla that has FSD and go anywhere. You can go to the Phoenix airport. You can go anywhere you want with very minimal intervention. And I can say this from firsthand experience, but not only that, so they say, trusted testers will be able to catch a ride 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like with what you can do with just any Tesla in Waymo's fully electric Jaguar, equipped with the fifth generation Waymo driver. By the way, Waymo uses LIDAR, doesn't use camera. LIDARs are very expensive and I'm not even sure it's economically viable for autonomous vehicles to be built with LIDAR. Certainly no one has done that profitably ever. They're solving for self-driving in a geofenced area that will only work in this geofenced area using a technology, which is doubtful that has the right economics to work in the first place. Because LIDAR is very expensive, especially when compared with cameras, which is what Tesla uses for its full self-driving. So things aren't looking that promising for Tesla's competition. And oh, by the way, just current trips are offered with an autonomous specialist in the driver's seat, an autonomous specialist, so like a driver. So I guess when I'm driving my Tesla or in my Tesla with FSD working, I'm an autonomous specialist. So yeah, currently it doesn't seem like there's any serious competition. I'm not discounting the possibility. Actually, it's very hard for any company to catch up with Tesla. So let's look at why this is the case. So we looked at the opportunity. Here's what Tesla has going in its favor. This is a few of the things that has going in its favor. So Tesla has now logged well over a billion miles of travel using various levels of autonomy. Competing platforms only recently crossed the 10 million mile mark. So 10 million versus over a billion. There's no catching up with that, especially when you consider that this lead is only growing because of Tesla's fleet that is in use right now. Tesla's Dojo is arguably the most powerful supercomputer in the world. So that's what it's using to train its full self-driving algorithm. The company has the capacity to manufacture over 2 million and growing vehicles a year. So additional data input points, specifically 2 million more, will be hitting the road every year and growing. And many of Tesla vehicles currently on the road can be upgraded to latest FSD version. So this means that Tesla has just a really huge moat. What's going to happen is other companies are just going to license FSD from Tesla. It makes no sense whatsoever for them to try and close that gap, unless they take a novel approach that's superior to Vision, which no one has proposed yet. But Tesla is currently using Vision and it seems like it's very close to the finish line. Suddenly we'll have more color on that statement on August 10th. I'm sorry, October 10th. Now there's a lot of analysts that like to discount this development. They like to say, oh, Elon Musk, he's been promising robotaxis for the longest time and it never happened, therefore it will never happen. I think this is very erroneous logic that is dangerous to adopt as an investor. Listen, Elon Musk has been bad at timing things, right? So this is a headline from 2019. He says, Elon Musk promises fleet of 1 million Tesla robotaxis in 2020. Yeah, that didn't happen. We're in 2024. We don't have one robotaxi yet. It's no denying that the timeline has been pushed back. However, think about what's happening here. What is the problem that Tesla is trying to solve? It is a very big problem, very complicated problem. It's trying to solve for general autonomy in vehicles, not geo-fenced autonomy, not, oh, hey, take me to the Phoenix airport from downtown Phoenix. It's not just trying to solve that problem, which Waymo is struggling to solve and needs an autonomous expert in the driver's seat to fix, it's trying to solve general autonomy in vehicles. That means the vehicle can drive itself anywhere on earth. It doesn't matter what the road system is like or what the rules and the driving rules in that particular location are. It can adapt using cameras, so photons and mechanical instructions out. That's what it's trying to solve for. But yeah, if it's late four or five years, I think that's understandable. The question an investor needs to ask is, do I think they will get there? And do I have enough of a time horizon to see that through? And if the answers are yes and yes, then I think this is a no brainer. And I think that there's clearly progress being made here. We're getting closer and closer to our robo-taxis being a reality. I think this much is clear. And hey, we're halal conscious investors. We're not dealing with options. We're not dealing with derivatives whose value goes poof when they expire. We own stock in the company. And while we have an investment horizon that is as long as it takes for our thesis to play out, this seems like a no brainer. Focus on the signal, ignore the noise. Yeah, the timeline has been pushed back. It's a tough problem to solve. It's not, we're not making chocolate bars here. We're solving full self-driving. And to give some color on what, how big of a deal this is for the company. So this is ARK Invest. They've been pretty good with predicting generally price movements for Tesla and developments in associated industries. So they have a breakdown of, so first off, they're predicting an 8.2 trillion enterprise value for the company without taking into account humanoid robots by 2029. And an 88% of that value, by the way, that's, this is a 10 X from where Tesla currently is, 88% of that enterprise value they predict is going to come from robo-taxis. Now, why is it that much of a contributor? Because what we said, it's a very high margin business. Now we're not selling cars anymore. We're selling a service that every additional dollar is basically going straight to the bottom line. EBITDA by business line in expected value is, in their sort of base case, is 440 billion EBITDA, and that's 86% of the total company EBITDA. It's a 63% of revenue, but because it has a more profitable profile, it's 86% of earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortization. So this is a huge deal for Tesla. The company, we're likely to see a lot of movement in the stock upwards around the event. And moving forward, as we get more, as we get more color around the robo-taxi service, the profitability of it, analysts are going to start building robo-taxi and its business into their models. We're going to see higher and higher price targets for the stock and the stock price should follow inshallah. If you'd like to join our elite member session, by the way, it's recorded. If you can't, if you can't attend, there will be a recording like all of our elite member sessions. Last time we went over protective puts. If you'd like to join this new one and get access to whatever new ones we make, then become an elite member. If you'd like to follow our portfolios, become a premium member. If you haven't already. With that being said, let's go to questions very quick. Salaamu Alaykum on a scale of bear to bullet scale, zero to 10. Where do you stand right now? Salaamu Alaykum. So for the rest of September, I think I'm neutral. I think it's, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised either way. I expect some volatility here. Longer term though, if I, if you asked me three to six months, I'm very bullish because I believe that the liquidity picture is clear and liquidity ultimately is what's going to, I have very strong conviction in the micro, in the individual assets that we hold. It's really a matter of macro when they play out. And I have a high degree of confidence in macro because of the liquidity picture, as I see it, and the fact that we are set for rising levels of global liquidity, which should raise asset prices. Of course. Thoughts on Hershey's stock. If you're a member, just put that in members picks. And that's where we talk about different positions or like potential stocks or assets that we may be interested in. Abdullah says, Salaamu Alaykum. Salaam. Always good to see you as well, Abdullah. Azgar Khan says, great analysis. Thank you Azgar. I'm glad you, I'm glad you were able to join us. Have some time horizon for reaching a hundred K. Did that change? Second question is about put options from Halal Haram perspective. Is selling allowed? So for these, let's take that to our discord, Abdullah, and we can talk about that in more detail, inshallah. For now, I would like to ask you guys a favor, which is to leave it. If you found this live useful and make sure to hit the notification bell, if you haven't already, so that you can catch our next live until next time. Make sure to take care of yourself. Assalamu Alaikum and peace be upon you all.