The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast

When Moon?

Rakaan Kayali

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When Moon?

In this episode, we will cover:

  • Intro
  • Market Overview: Stocks, Gold, & Crypto
  • Tesla's Volatility After Earnings
  • Bitcoin Miners Rebounding
  • US & Global Bitcoin Reserves Race
  • Bitcoin ETF Inflows & Technical Analysis
  • China’s Crypto Shift & Bullish Sentiment
  • Microsoft & Meta: Are They Overvalued?
  • Apple’s Starlink Integration & Market Impact
  • Dogecoin ETF & Crypto Market Trends
  • Investing Strategy: PIF Portfolio Insights
  • Final Thoughts & Q&A

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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.

Assalamu alaikum everyone. I hope you are doing well. A good day in the markets today. Today, by the way, is Thursday, January thirtieth. The indices were all in the green, as was the dollar index. up slightly the yield on the ten-year treasury was down slightly and the vix was down more than four percent tesla was extremely volatile which is uh to be expected after uh earnings uh so you have a lot of people that were in the stock just for a trade and they end up selling when the market opens and then the stock recovers when the opportunists come in I would say smart money comes in and we had basically an up and down day wherein Smart money was competing with the now money, with the traders that wanted to get basically in and out and were playing earnings. We'll see how this shapes up for the stock. But as I mentioned yesterday, I thought the earnings gave investors a lot to look forward to in twenty twenty five. NVIDIA is at one twenty five. They really have the strong rebound that many were expecting. I recall that we started the month with a high that was close to one fifty. Now we're at one twenty three as of the latest price. We did see a big recovery in Bitcoin miners today. So BitDeal was up six percent. It's up a smidge after hours. Iris Energy was up three percent and it's up more after hours. So it closed at ten twenty nine. It's now at ten eighty two after hours. Gold reached an all time high. And as now close to twenty eight hundred Bitcoin is at one hundred and five thousand. Doge is at thirty three cents and Solana is at two hundred and forty dollars. So here's another way to visualize the market winners and losers today. Microsoft was the big loser of today. The rest of the market was held up pretty nicely. You can see green is the dominant color here. with the semiconductors rebounding strongly after the deep seek scare that hit markets on Monday. In Bitcoin news, because we haven't really focused on Bitcoin in a while now, the Czech National Bank officially agrees to assess investing in additional asset classes. I reported on this channel when the Czech National Bank received the proposal and now it does appear that it's actually going to take a look and see whether or not it makes sense to allocate some of its reserves to Bitcoin. And the race is on, so to speak, between sovereign countries and states to establish a Bitcoin reserve. And these deep pockets are really signal a long-term bullish trajectory for this asset. A total of fourteen US states have already introduced the Bitcoin bill, proposing a strategic Bitcoin reserve for their states, and all indication is that there will be a national Bitcoin reserve under the Trump administration. Perhaps he hasn't explicitly said where you will establish a Bitcoin reserve in order to give the US government some time to buy Bitcoin before the announcement so that they can buy the asset at lower prices. It doesn't make sense to say, hey, we're going to establish a Bitcoin reserve, have traders investors run up the price and then try to buy the tokens now in terms of the bitcoin etf net daily inflows and outflows we have seen a tempering in volume so you can see the volume of inflows going down the volume of outflows is definitely less than the inflows but that too has been subsiding somewhat and It is it remains to be seen whether or not we're going to get a pickup here in ETF inflows. I personally think that a more sort of strategic catalyst such as a sovereign state adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet is needed to sort of reignite excitement around the asset or something with regards to interest rates. And perhaps, you know, more confidence on the inflation front will reignite the ETF inflows as we saw in various points in various periods in twenty twenty four. If we're looking at the technicals here for Bitcoin, it does appear very fairly valued if you look at something called the Pi cycle top indicator. And this basically looks at the moving average, the simple moving, the hundred and eleven day simple moving average and two times the three hundred fifty day moving average. And this has been a good. So the hundred eleven day moving average is In turquoise, the two-time, three-hundred-fifty-day moving average is in the hot pink. Typically, the pinkish line is where has been a decent indicator of a local top. And the turquoise line has been a good indicator of a local bottom. And right now, what we're seeing is that the turquoise line is around eighty eight thousand. The pink line is around one hundred and forty two thousand. We're at one hundred and four thousand. So we're nestled in between the what the model predicts are the upper and lower bounds roughly. But there is more upside. We're about forty thousand away from the top and only ten thousand away from the bottom. So that should give you a good idea of where we are price wise for Bitcoin as it relates to. There's another Bitcoin. yeah so it does look like china is allowing ownership of bitcoin and crypto and so this will be very uh bullish for crypto in general obviously one of the one of the key differentiators for bitcoin And for crypto generally is that it is a global asset anywhere in the world. You can buy it. And so and there's a lot of purchasing power in China. So this should be really good for the token. In other news, final news that's kind of Bitcoin adjacent, Grayscale launches the Bitcoin miners ETF. And I noticed that in their top ten holdings, they didn't have Bitdeer, which is why I keep saying I do think that Bitdeer is undervalued compared to, because it is based in Singapore, compared to some of the other Bitcoin miners that are based in Western nations, basically. And, you know, one of the top ten holdings was iOS Energy. I do think that this ETF is kind of late. We're in, I think, the second half of the the bull period in this cycle. But Grayscale nevertheless did launch its miners ETF. So people want exposure to Bitcoin miners in their portfolios. They can do so through this ETF. Although knowing Grayscale, they're probably going to charge an arm and a leg for it. And also... I'm not really sure how much better that would be. It will be versus just holding Bitcoin itself and not incurring the management fee. So I'm not really a big fan of this product. There has been a game changer here with regards to, sorry, switching gears. There has been a game changer with regards to Apple adding Starlink to iPhones in iOS, so apple just opened iphone doors to starlink's satellite network giving users an alternative to their global star service for off-grid communication which no one really used now the key difference no more pointing your phone at the sky starlink works right from your pocket so I think this is actually a big feature enhancement for Apple phones. And perhaps that's part of the reason why it's up. Obviously, it's also up because of their earnings being strong. Very interesting that it appears and I'm not super technical, but it appears that this is the entire code, which you see on the screen right now. This is the entire code needed to produce the R one or the, uh, the deep seek, um, model hundreds. And this compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars that were spent by some of its competitors. So. Yeah, just goes to show, you know, it pays to be technical and to understand, you know, the details of the themes that you're investing in. All right. So with that, let's go to questions. Assalamualaikum. Hear me, dear. Cool. Nice to see you. an early Jumu'ah Mubarak for you, depending on your time zone. Salam, Rashad. Nice to see you. Salam, Hussam. Yeah, that's interesting. So, you know, global liquidity is always hard to It's hard to gauge. You ask different people, you get different answers. There isn't sort of one standard that people look at to gauge global liquidity. But it does seem like the general direction is upwards globally. And it does seem like the the forecast at least for the um I would say next two quarters is that that trend is to continue so that should be good for risk assets thoughts on the earnings report for uh microsoft and meta I I honestly think that microsoft is probably overvalued at this point I really wasn't impressed with what they had to say. It does seem like their understanding of AI is quite limited, and I do see that there will be sort of a fallout between Microsoft and OpenAI as it relates to meta. You know, I think that there's... I think that, you know, something has been revealed in the last week, and that is similar to how... Cisco did really well at the start of the internet age, but quickly smart money realized that the profit margins were to be made in the products that were built on top of the internet and not the sort of internet infrastructure providers themselves. Cisco stock ended up performing not as good compared to a lot of the software that was built on the internet infrastructure. And so similarly, I think Microsoft and Meta, their initial approach to AI was to build out a lot of infrastructure for themselves. you know, perhaps the winners of AI, at least from an investment perspective will be all these companies that build upon the infrastructure that is provided because their profit margins will be a lot bigger. And so both Microsoft and Meta from an investment perspective they don't seem like they're going in that direction and in the direction of really focusing on building, you know, what you can do with AI inference. Rather, they're looking at coming up with their own proprietary models and investing in that direction. So I wonder if that's going to turn out to be, you know, these companies will end up being sort of the Cisco's of the AI age and the other companies that are basically building products on top of AI will end up appreciating a lot more. Do you think Bitcoin will reach two hundred thousand this year? What are your thoughts on twenty twenty six? Yeah, so I do think that my price target for Bitcoin is two hundred thousand this year. Obviously, you know, the A confirmation of the US Bitcoin reserve will be very bullish for it. And if we see other sovereign states adding Bitcoin to their balance sheet, then that will be great as well. I do think that Bitcoin will follow the four year cycle, but not the four year Bitcoin cycle, the four year liquidity cycle, which happens to correspond with the four year Bitcoin cycle. Solana to BTC, I was thinking of converting two thirds of my BTC to Solana. If you'd like to see my crypto portfolio, you can become a PIF member. I'm not really that bullish on Solana. A lot of commenters are a lot more bullish than I am. I just look at it from a cashflow perspective and it doesn't really cover the costs to run the network. And I think all of the apps that are built on top of it are going to eat into the cash that's generated from the network itself. So I hear a lot of very bullish price targets for Solana. I don't really share that view. Dogecoin hasn't been moving much. That's true. It's very hard to tell if a move is coming soon. that being said you know looking at the chart in previous time like if you look at last year the move came february march I believe uh for dogecoin so you gotta love that uh that image if you look at uh yeah last year the real uh breakthrough in the price of doge came at the end of february so you know who knows what happens if you look uh longer than that um Oh, I was going to show you guys, um, , so in , it was, it was around that time where, uh, we got a breakout in Doge coins price as well. So who knows if history repeats hit the like button if you like this life. Yes. Thanks for reminding me become a PIF member link to do so is in the description. What else do you guys want to talk about? What could be a catalyst? Well, I think the ETF for Dogecoin was sort of completely missed by the market, but I think it's actually a big deal. So maybe approval of the ETF is what the market wants to see. Because I do think a lot of people, especially people who hold Bitcoin in their brokerages, are going to look at Bitcoin's market cap. It's above two trillion and say, hey, I'm not sure if this is going to double. We need another two trillion in market cap. But with Dogecoin, which has the same code as Bitcoin, Dogecoin is at a much smaller market cap. Maybe there's more upside there. Sam is considering subscription. How often do any changes happen in the PIF growth portfolio? We try to make one or two trades per week. We're not a day trading. I think day trading is kind of silly. We try to make one or two trades per week, and we try to focus on fundamentals as opposed to technicals. Although we do take technicals into consideration, it's not the guiding force for our decisions. Won't the Bitcoin National Reserve be bad news for altcoins? People will rush to buy Bitcoin. So typically there is seasons in crypto, oftentimes when Bitcoin is popular. Altcoins suffer. And then people have that same reasoning that I just mentioned. And they say, hey, Bitcoin is already up. Let's look at other smaller cap coins. Maybe there's more upside there. And so money flows down the market cap list. So that's typically how it works. I think Rocket Labs has a lot of military engagements. So it's kind of why I stayed away. And so the question from Abdullah is if so many crypto got ETFs, wouldn't they cancel each other? Obviously, the more ETFs there are in crypto, the less impact each individual ETF will have. That being said, we're still talking about. The number of different cryptos that have ETFs can be counted. I mean, there's basically two, Ethereum and Bitcoin, compared with the number of cryptos out there, more than ten thousand. And now with a pumped-out fund, there's just an infinite number of cryptos. Whereas cryptos in the wild have to compete with all other cryptos in people's brokerage accounts, there's only a very few number of cryptos that they have to compete with. Hossam, we invest when we see an opportunity, really. It's based on what the market gives us. This week we added two new names, but that's not typical. But sometimes we'll add two or three names in a week. Sometimes a month will go by and we won't add a new name. I don't think there's any sort of bearing on the halal question whether a stock is a penny stock or not. terms of whether it's halal or not so penny stock just refers to the size of it and there are some other things that go along with it but fundamentally now we're talking about the size of the company and the price that it's trading at and therefore that doesn't really have any bearing on sharia compliance well it says best decision subscribing to pif well thank you so much khalid that's That earns you a spot on our screen there. So jazakallah khair for sharing that. Thank you all. Yeah, no problem, Hossam, anytime. And leave a like if you like this live. Become a PIF member if you aren't already. Until next time, make sure to take care of yourself. Assalamu alaikum and peace be upon you all.