The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast

Easy Money

Rakaan Kayali

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Easy Money
In this episode we will cover:

  • Introduction and Market Overview
  • Bitcoin Price and Mixed Markets
  • Fed's Upcoming Decision and Market Expectations
  • Changing Odds on Rate Cuts
  • Inflation Insights from True Inflation Data
  • Possible Market Reactions to Fed's Decision
  • Why 25 Basis Points Might Be Likely
  • Tesla's Sensitivity to Interest Rates
  • Tesla’s Growing Battery Business
  • Tesla's Recent Production Milestones
  • Optimism for Tesla’s Stock
  • AI Infrastructure: New Opportunities
  • Iris Energy’s AI Expansion
  • Oracle’s AI-Driven Growth
  • Collaboration Among Industry Leaders
  • AI Earnings Potential

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 Monday, September 16th, and Bitcoin is at $57,700. The markets today were mixed. We had the Dow reach a new all-time high. NASDAQ was down, which is not that surprising considering the strong week that we had last week. And yeah, everyone in the market is waiting for the Fed's decision. Is it going to be 25? Is it going to be 50? We had probabilities shift on us a lot over the weekend, where at one point we had a 50-50 probability. So we can see that with the Fed CME watch. So we had 50% probability for 25, 54, 50 on September 13th. Today, the probability looks to have moved in favor of a 50% base point cut. Now with 61% probability of a 50 base point cut, this is surprising. It did seem last week that we were settled on 25 base points after the last major piece of economic data came out. But over the weekend, the market changed its mind. Now we're looking at a more probable, at least according to the market, more probable 50 base point cut. Now one of the culprits for that, so we have true inflation, which takes into account the reportings of different data contributors. It's a decentralized way of getting a picture of inflation. It's not an official number, but I think it is useful to look at. If you look at the year-on-year change, at least as per true inflation, we're looking at 1%. Especially recently, it does seem like inflation has fallen off of a cliff. Now if the 50 base point cut comes in, and we'll know more about this from the Fed chair's statements, I personally think they're probably going to go with the 25 base point cut. I could be wrong. Just because a 50 base point cut would suggest that there is a sense of urgency that the Fed has, and perhaps that's not the impression that they want to give. But in the case of a 50 base point cut, the market's reaction could be positive, it could be negative. The positive reaction would come if the Fed chair were to say, listen, we did 50 because we could. The inflation rate is coming down very quickly, and we think that 50 base point cut is appropriate. On the other hand, if they say, oh, the economy seems to be slowing down, and we need to, in a very dramatic way, and we need to make sure that we save ourselves from a recession, I don't think he's going to say something like that. But something that could be interpreted like that, and summarized like that, then the market may have a negative reaction to that. All that being said, I do think a 25 base point cut is more likely, just because the data, the official data, seem to suggest that's the proper course of action, but we'll see on Wednesday. Now, in this environment, what I am interested in is how can I make money for myself and the people who follow my moves and the people who watch me. And in this environment, it's very clear that there are certain players that do very well. One of those players is Tesla. Tesla has an inverse relationship. Their stock price has had an inverse relationship with the level of interest rates. We've seen the revenue for this company increasing pretty steadily for the last many years, certainly since it hit its last or most recent all-time high of $400 per share. And yet, the stock price has fallen. And yet the stock price has fallen since then, and only recently has recovered on anticipation that interest rates will go down. Now, the reason for Tesla in particular being ultra-sensitive to interest rates is because, well, number one, their main business is selling cars as of today, and their cars become more expensive the higher interest rates there are. And also, the people tend to put off buying a car altogether until interest rates come down. At least they're more likely to make a new purchase when interest rates are lower. On the other hand, an additional factor that you have is that Tesla is really a forward-looking investment. We're looking at cash flows in the future as opposed to the ones that it already generates. And therefore, you have to discount those future cash flows by the prevailing interest rate. And when the interest rate is higher, the value of those future cash flows in today's terms is lower. For those reasons, Tesla is very sensitive. Tesla's stock price is very sensitive to interest rates. And so, I really think that Tesla is going to do extremely well in the upcoming period. It's going to be easy money, inshallah, for investors. And not only that, not only the interest rate catalyst and the robo-taxi unveiling catalyst, but also something that Wall Street isn't really paying much attention to is the Tesla battery business and the ramp-up that is happening there. And by the way, for those who are unfamiliar, Tesla's battery business is the most profitable line of business that it has today. It won't be the most profitable once robo-taxis come out. But today, the battery production business is the most profitable, highest margin business it has growing. In just 101 days, Tesla has produced 50 million 4680 batteries for a lifetime total of 100 million. So, in the last 100 days only, it produced as many batteries as it produced in its lifetime. So, if you take an average of that number, what it produced, and you just average it over the last 101 days, that comes out to around half a million. That's these blue bars here. Now, if you were to assume a linear growth in their production, that's these green bars here. So, you could say that, oh, maybe they're approaching something on the order of 800,000 batteries per day. However, even elementary knowledge of how production capacity works tells us that, in fact, increases in production capacity tends to not be linear. So, it's more likely that this increase is more exponential. And therefore, the most batteries were produced in the most recent period. And we're going to follow something like the red S-curve here. And so, when we get a battery update from Tesla, this could be very bullish for the stock, wherein they report a daily output in terms of battery production that really exceeds analysts' expectations in a big way. And as I said, this is going to move the needle a lot for the stock just because it is the most profitable line of business that they have. Another easy way of making money in the environment that we are in is through providing infrastructure for AI services. And I was very pleased to hear that Iron was leaning into this opportunity. Today, they announced that they're increasing their NVIDIA GPUs. They've purchased more NVIDIA GPUs after having a stagnant number for a while. They're purchasing more than they even have right now, 1,080 additional NVIDIA GPUs. They're NVIDIA's most recent. And they expect AI cloud services revenue to make up 10% of earnings by the end of this year. So, this is in addition to the 30x a hash that we're expecting for Iron, in addition to the close to 50x a hash for Bitcoin mining that we're expecting for Iris Energy, the company is expecting 10% of earnings this year to come from AI cloud services. And this is really great. As an investor, I love to see it. It makes a lot of sense. I've been predicting it for a long time that, hey, it's going to be leaning into this easier way of making money. And the unit economics bear this out. So, if you look at AI cloud services, this is what they're expecting. So, AI cloud services estimated to contribute 10% to run rate earnings from Iron's 510 megawatt data center portfolio by the end of 2024, a proportion expected to continue to grow through 2025. So, it's going to, inshallah, become more and more prominent part of their business, which makes them less and less of a trade and more and more of a longer term investment. So, if you look at the gross margin here and you compare top line revenue with just the cost of that revenue, so basically electricity costs, you're looking at a margin here of 95% gross margin. Whereas with Bitcoin mining, the margin, assuming a$60,000 price for Bitcoin, the margins are in the 60 percentage points. I really think that this leaning into AI cloud services is an easy way to make money for Iris Energy and that should translate, inshallah, into great things for investors. I really think we've picked the best two Bitcoin miners to put our money in, inshallah. And this preview, inshallah, of what is to come for us is what is happening with Oracle. Oracle has been on a tear as of late since they reported their earnings. They're up more than 11% in the last five days. Today, they're up more than 6%. That's a big number for a company that's close to half a trillion in market cap. And why? Even more than the earnings that they reported where they had a beat on top and bottom lines, but their expected revenue for next year exceeded expectations in a big way. And that's really a function of them leaning into the AI infrastructure opportunity. The CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison, was mentioning that he and Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, they were in Nobu and in Malibu, I believe. And basically, the meeting was Larry Ellison and Elon Musk begging Jensen to take their money because they wanted basically all of the GPUs that he could possibly provide. And this is a really good business to be in. Right now, the AI opportunity, the only company that has actually made money from this AI opportunity is NVIDIA. Everyone else is banking on future revenues and setting themselves up for the future. But eventually, I think the earnings are going to go further down the supply chain and more and more companies will benefit. So with that, I can't take questions today. I do have to run. I apologize for that. But I appreciate everyone who attended. If you did enjoy this live and market update, then do leave. I really appreciate that. Let's make sure we get all our lives to at least 100 likes. I really would appreciate that. Thank you all and have a great rest of your day. As-salamu alaykum and peace be upon you all.