As-salamu alaykum everyone, I hope you are doing well. Today is Monday, September 30th and we did get a pullback today in the price of Bitcoin currently at $63,663. So we pulled back from the $65,000 and $66,000 that we reached as of late. Nothing to worry about. I think that the pullback we got is to be expected considering how much we have run up as of late. One of the, and I'll talk about this a bit more in this live, one of the things that is surprising, is noteworthy is the Chinese stock market, which has been ripping higher as of late. In the last week, the Shanghai index is up 21%. Monthly, it's up 18%. But year over year, it's lagging a lot when compared to the S&P, for example, which is up 33% in the last year versus the Shanghai index, which is up 7.7%. I think that the near-term steps that the Chinese government has been taking to ease the monetary conditions in that country are indicative of two things. Number one, the Chinese economy is hurting and they're actually suffering from deflation, believe it or not. We've been talking about inflation all the time here in the US, but in China, they're suffering from deflation and it needs to, the Chinese government needs to stimulate the economy however it can. It's doing that through additional debt. It's kicking the can down the road, so to speak. Eventually, they will run out of road, but for now, it seems like this is working. The intention of the Chinese government is to inflate asset prices. Hopefully, that gets people to start spending more. I think that's the overall thinking here, the high-level thinking here. What is clear, at least, is that the path of monetary easing, as I've been mentioning on this channel for a while now, is basically the track that we're on. You're going to see it not just in the US, but you're going to see it globally. Again, here, longer term, this can't continue forever. We can't continue to, as a human species, we can't continue to operate on this much debt, but for now, it's working and the party goes on, so to speak. One of the results of this, the monetary easing that is happening globally, is that asset prices are going to inflate. If you look at the global liquidity cycle, this is, by the way, from cross-border capital, it doesn't actually reveal how it comes up with these numbers for liquidity, so it's proprietary. I think the inputs that it is using to gauge global liquidity are quite important, but it does seem consistent with what we're hearing from central banks and from other measures of liquidity. I'll show you another one, which are pointing towards global liquidity increasing and us being closer to the bottom of the global liquidity cycle than the top. This is the main thesis for macro being stimulative and bullish for asset prices in the near to medium term. This is why pullbacks like today, I don't think are a cause for concern, necessarily. Additionally, if you look at the monthly global central bank policy rate cuts, we have not had as many cuts as we have had in September since March of 2020. So you have to go back all the way to March 2020, which was right before a massive bull run in asset prices to get to a point where monetary easing was as aggressive as it is or it has been in September, and it's to continue this way for the foreseeable future. Again, good for asset prices. If we're talking about the economy, we're talking about sustainability, not so good, but this is the world we live in today. If we look at other measures of global liquidity, because I don't like to look at just one measure because maybe that measure is wrong, especially when the measure is using inputs that are not disclosed as is the case with cross-border capital. So when you look at other measures, other economists and what they're saying, they're all saying the same thing with regards to global liquidity, and that is that it is going up. There's unprecedented monetary destruction and risky asset expansion. So the attribute of preserving your purchasing power is being destroyed in most currencies, but the prices of assets is going up. Speaking of destroying the purchasing power and assets going up, if you look at the income housing gap in the United States, it has essentially never been as high as it is right now. And that is when you compare the income of the average American with the price of a house, houses have never been as expensive. So if you go back to 1985 and you look at the medium sales price for a house in the United States, that's around$78,000, and income was around $22,000. So the difference is 3.5 times, whereas today that difference is closer to six times, wherein the medium household income is $74,000, and the medium sales price for a house is $433,000. So the American dream is becoming just not attainable anymore. House ownership was a big part, a key pillar of the American dream, and that's simply not feasible anymore, not with these prices. Personally, I have to say for myself, at least, I'm hoping we get a pullback in housing prices. It's very hard for me to even consider purchasing a house given the run-up that we've seen in housing prices as of late. And so the investor in me tells me this is probably not really a good time to be buying a house. Obviously not financial advice, but make of that what you will. Now, if we go back to the China situation and what we're seeing there and some of the impact that it's having. So the monetary easing in China is aggressive and it is expected to continue. And when you have an environment like that, what happens is the focus of investors changes from profitability to growth. And so investors start to focus on what stocks are growing the fastest and profitability becomes a secondary concern. And this is why we see companies like NIO do as well as they have been as of late. NIO is the stock I'd like to focus on in this slide because it has been a really big mover as of late. If you look at the last five days, it is up close to 20%. If you look at the last month, it's up 70% almost. And so what's going on here? You have the macro environment, which is becoming a lot more stimulatory in China, but you also have some good news as it relates to NIO and you have some encouraging financials as it relates to NIO. There recently, I think yesterday, there was an announcement that NIO was going to receive an additional close to $2 billion investment from its major shareholders. Not going to read that article for you. That's really the gist of the content, what you need to know. For those who are unfamiliar, NIO is an electric vehicle manufacturer based in China. And I think that their cars are competitive even with Tesla, especially now before full self-driving is as commonplace as I think it will be in the future. Their claim to fame really is that yes, they have decent cars and they're competitively priced as well, even compared to Tesla and BYD. They're premium cars, but their claim to fame is this battery swap network that they have. And essentially the idea behind it is that, hey, instead of parking your car, parking your electric vehicle, charging it and waiting for it to get charged, what they do at their stations is they just swap your battery out for another battery that's already charged. The problem with this approach, a lot of people like this approach. So their approach takes about three minutes, four minutes to swap the battery. So from start to finish. So it's basically as fast as filling your tank up with a gas, if not faster. Now, the problem with this approach is that first of all, you have to have standard, if you want non NIO cars to use NIO stations, you have to have a standardized battery pack and standardized engineering across different brands in order for this automatic battery swap or automated battery swap to take place. It's also the case that you have to have batteries that are charged, that are waiting and exceed the number of expected cars that need swapping at most times, because if you want to accommodate the swapping demand at the peak, you have to have those batteries in place available, charged so that you're able to swap and satisfy demand for swaps. And for the rest of the time, when the demand is not at peak levels, there's just a bunch of batteries sitting around and not being benefited from. And if you want to move them from one location to the other, you have to actually haul them in a truck from one location to the other. And so expanding this network is extremely expensive. And I think it's when you're looking at this approach versus improving battery technology in a way that allows charging times to come down. I think that approach is probably what's going to win out. It's probably going to be the case that battery technology improves such that the longer charging times, by the way, I went on a road trip not too long ago to charge my Tesla battery. I think it was 50 percentage points. It took between 10 and 15 minutes. It wasn't too bad. It was at a rest station. There was things to do if you wanted to grab a bite or something, you could do that. So it wasn't really burdensome. That seems to me like, okay, there's room for improvement. Yes, you can improve battery technology and decrease charging times for those batteries. But I think it's way simpler, more scalable than this battery swap approach. Even though right now, the NIO advocates will point to this as a point of differentiation. I don't really see it as that much of a plus for the company. I think that eventually they're going to fall in line with the rest of the EV companies that are basically building out charging stations and use those charging stations. And by the way, the only time you need to do battery swaps is if you're on a road trip. And other than that, you're totally fine just charging your car at your home. And that's what people do most of the time. I don't know if this investment is really worth it that NIO is doing. And I don't know if it's going to pay off for the company in the future. That's my take on that. Now, let's look at the financials. I should also mention that there's little about the full self-driving capabilities in NIO. Although I do see them when I listen to their management, they are very aware of the fact that the future is self-driving and they seem to be very interested in investing in research and development. So those are good. But up until now, there's nothing that we know of related to full self-driving and NIO cars. So that's a very big thing, I think. But perhaps there's a lot that hasn't been revealed. We will find out more in the future, I'm sure. Now let's look at the numbers for this company. So I talked a bit qualitatively. Quantitatively, their deliveries are increasing. As I mentioned, it's a competitive car. It's a good car and it's competitively priced. It's not like Lucid, which is just a ridiculous company with a ridiculous product. If you look at deliveries here, so Q3 2020 was $55,000, Q4 $50,000, Q1 2024 $30,000, Q2 2024 $57,000. Now, if you compare quarter to quarter, which is the better comparison because the auto sales tend to be very seasonal, you can see deliveries in Q2 2023 were $23,520. Deliveries in 2024 were $57,000. So just annualizing these numbers and what Tesla is expected to deliver, Tesla is expected to deliver basically around 2 million cars this year. And so roughly 10 times as much as NIO, just to give you some scale here. Now, in terms of vehicle sales, if we look at the revenue upline for the company in 2024, that's the most recently reported quarter, it was just above $2 billion. And that represents an increase of 118% from the second quarter of 2023 and 87% from first quarter. But again, comparing to first quarter doesn't really make sense because the auto business is very seasonal. Q2 2023 I think is a better comparison. Now, this is very important. And so vehicle margin was 12.2% in the second quarter of 2024 compared to 6.2% in the second quarter of 2023. That's a very big improvement. So they definitely have that going in the right direction, which are margins. That being said, even though margins are improving, they're not great. So 12.2% as a top line margin is not great. And in fact, they have vehicle margin, but then they have gross margin. So gross margin, I think is, you can ignore vehicle margin. Gross margin is the top line margin, basically. That's 9.7%, less than 10%. So this is a hard way to make money still, even though they've improved substantially. It was 9.7% gross margin in the second quarter of 2024 compared to 1% in the second quarter of 2023 and 4.9% in the first quarter of 2024. So that's definitely headed in the right direction. You can see loss from operations. They're going down. Net loss is going down. Cash and cash equivalents is 5.7 billion. Now this company has a market cap of 12.5 billion. So cash and cash equivalents are around 50% of the market cap. That's good as well. That being said, the company is not without debt needs to be taken into account. So here's another way of looking at this. So you can see margins, vehicle margin, or let's look at gross margin going from 1 to 4.9 to 9.7. So there's definitely improvement there. Here's the research and commentary. So in the second quarter of 2024, 442 million, representing a decrease of 3.8 from the second quarter of 2023 and an increase from the first quarter of 2024, excluding share-based compensation expenses, research and development expenses were 397.5 million, representing a decrease of 1.9 and an increase of 8.7 from the first quarter of 2024. Research and development expenses remained relatively stable compared with the second quarter of 2023. This is something that's very key here. This is a company that is losing money and it's not expected to. So we were talking about gross margins improvement, but the net income is still very much in the negative. And in fact, I think it lost close to 5 billion. Let's look at this, make sure I'm not saying anything wrong. So EBITDA in June, 2024 was negative 4.36 billion. The company needs a lot of cash to continue. Now this is in Chinese currency, negative 4.3 on a 17.45 billion in revenue. So what are we talking here? Close to 20-25% in terms of a negative margin on their EBITDA. That's tough. They still have a long way to go to reach profitability. And in fact, profitability is not expected until 2027. But again, because of the conditions, the macro conditions in China, investors got really hyped up about this company because growth is now being prioritized over income. It did get some positive news and current shareholders actually increasing their investment in the company, which communicates confidence that these current shareholders have in the company doubling down. And also when you look at the numbers, they are headed in the right direction. There's still a ways to go, but if you look at gross margins, they're headed in the right direction. Deliveries are headed in the right direction. The car is a competitive car. And so all of this coming together at this time have caused the price to increase as it has to the tune, as we saw 70% in the last month. Now, is this something that I would consider investing in? No, not really. And the reason why is because I like to invest in the best of breed in a company, in a theme. And certainly I think electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles, autonomous and electric vehicles are the future. And it's in the right space, but I don't think it's the best of breed. I think Tesla is. I think if you look at their research and development expenses, for example, they cannot hold a candle to Tesla in terms of their spending. And you saw research and development expenses basically flat, and that's because they have a lot of use for their cash in other places. And I think Tesla with its research and development and with the different lines of business that it has and with the aggressive growth policy that they have are just the safer bet. And especially as it relates to full self-driving, Tesla is in the lead. And it's not really clear to me where NIO is in that race at all. The thing that occurred to me is maybe I'm overestimating how hard it is for these companies to catch up with full self-driving that Tesla is developing. And that may be the case, but I have no evidence to suggest that this is the case, because none of these companies are coming out with anything even remotely close to the level of autonomy that Tesla has currently on its cars, which is improving all the time. Over the weekend, I got an update on my car, the smart summon. And so now if I want to summon the car, if I'm coming out from a store, I want to summon the car to the front of the store, I can do that by using my phone. And there's all these features coming out all the time. And I'm just not clear on where these companies stand with regards to all of these autonomous features that continue to improve in Tesla vehicles. And then obviously when you take into account power generation and storage and you take into account other lines of business that Tesla has going for it, it just seems like the better reward to risk ratio in the space. So that's why I have held off on investing in NIO. If I had to guess, I think probably there's a higher than 50% chance that there's an additional, given the macro environment, there's an additional 30% appreciation left in the stock and perhaps even more just because of the macro environment that China is in. But it's not the type of asymmetrical bet that I like to make. With that being said, there is something that I want to say here, and that's related to politics. I don't like to talk about politics because I know it's a contentious subject and I like to be good vibes only. But I do want to mention this because I think what I have seen in relation to the events in Middle East is very little reflection on what happened. And I just want to mention this verse from the Quran, and I think it explains exactly what happened. Allah says, and whoever kills a believer intentionally, their reward will be hell, where they will stay indefinitely. Allah will be displeased with them, condemn them, and will prepare for them a punishment. And so there are no exceptions to this. So if you kill a believer intentionally, but then later you're killed by a Zionist, there's no exception here to that. When you have the displeasure of Allah, then the universe tends to conspire against you. And life comes at you fast, as the saying goes. And one day you may be given speeches, and after seven days what you built over 50 years could be wiped out. And all of a sudden you're being fished out of a hole. Your lifeless body is being fished out of a hole after only seven days earlier or a month earlier, thinking that you were far away from that. So I think that this is the, I think that the right conclusion here is to make sure that we don't speed read through the Qur'an, and rather try to understand it, and be sure that we're not displeasing Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in our actions. So with that being said, I will take questions. By the way, if you enjoyed this live, make sure to leave a like, and hit the notification bell when we go live next. With that, let me take questions. Rashad says, Salam Arkan, do you anticipate big moves after talk today? I don't really think so. I think Powell, his aim is to, will be to not make headlines in his talk. That's what I think. Elias says, Salam Alaikum, I have a question. The majority of people in my country use Binance for peer-to-peer with no other option. Is it permissible for me to use it despite their past actions against Palestinians? I can't tell you what's permissible or not, but what I can say is that I'm uncomfortable dealing with them, and so I don't. And I've been uncomfortable dealing with them for a long time, even before their recent actions. Salam Arkan, thank you for the great content. Thank you, I appreciate that. Thank you, you've been with us for years, that's awesome. Rashad says, do you think the port strike will affect the market? Oh, the Yemeni port strike? It doesn't seem to have had that much of an impact. Although you could say perhaps part of the reason for the pullback today was escalating tensions in the Middle East, but I don't see it having that much of an impact. How do you see IonQ stock, as I think quantum computing boom will come inshallah. So, quantum computing is something that I'm interested in looking at more, but I haven't really had the time to delve into it and understand it. So, I've just made a note of it, Aqib, so I appreciate you mentioning it, so I'll take a look inshallah. Thank you for discussing NEO, it's my pleasure. Any alternative to interactive brokers for Europeans, or is this the best? I've heard about Trading212, so if Trading212 is available, check it out. I haven't tried it myself, but I heard good things. Salam Arkan brother, can you check out ACMR please? It is an American semiconductor company with 90% revenue in China with crazy growth. Okay, I'll check it out too. I appreciate you mentioning that, Faisal. And Rashad says the upcoming US port strike. Oh, I don't know too much about it, so I'll read more about it. But I think these things, I would not trade around them. I think the main thing here, the main thing that I would trade around is liquidity levels globally. I think that the path of monetary easing that we're on is a very high probability path. We've already started it, and it's very high probability that we continue on it. And along the way, it's not going to be a straight line up. There's going to be a bunch of news events that cause the ticker to look like it always does, which is a zigzag. But I think the general direction is up, inshallah. So with that being said, leave a like if you haven't already. And until next time, make sure that you take care of yourself. Assalamualaikum and peace be upon you all.