
The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast
The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast
Calm before The Storm
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Calm before The Storm
In this episode, we will cover:
- Intro & Market Recap
- Stock Market Rally: Dow, Nasdaq, & S&P Performance
- Tesla’s Growth & Full Self-Driving Moat
- Bitcoin Reserve: What It Means for Crypto
- Google’s AI Investments & Market Reaction
- Bitcoin’s MVRV Z-Score: Bullish Indicator?
- Will Dealerships Disappear? Tesla’s Advantage
- Final Thoughts & PIF Membership Benefits
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 Tuesday, February fourth, and we did have a green day in the market. Basically across the board, Dow Jones, Nasdaq, S&P and Russell were up with the index that was the most up being the Russell up one point three eight percent. Companies that we follow like Tesla were up, Nvidia was up. Bitdeer was down. Iris Energy was basically flat, but moved a bit upwards post-closing. And M-Phase Energy was up substantially or is up substantially after reporting earnings. It has pulled back a little from the initial jump that it got, but we'll look at M-Phase in detail, inshallah, tomorrow for PIF members. If you enjoy this live, do leave a like and subscribe to become a PIF member. Link to do so is in the description. Uh, gold is at an all time high, uh, and, uh, Silver did well today as well. And oil is recovering a bit, just point five, six percent today. Bitcoin is at ninety seven thousand. Doge at twenty five cents and Solana is at two oh four. So today we're going to talk about, obviously, some of the major news items for today. Salaam Arshad, nice to see you. And we're also going to look at the MVRV Z-score for Bitcoin and what it may be telling us about the upcoming period in crypto. So in terms of economic news today, we got job openings and they did decline in December. We got seven point six million. The expected was eight million. We also saw, I guess, in response, a increase in the probability for a rate cut in March, but a modest increase, but an increase nonetheless. In the details of perhaps the job picture, here's an anecdote. So General Motors is cutting fifty percent of cruise staff after ending robo taxi business. Now, I fully expect Waymo to be another company that follows suit. There's absolutely no reason for Waymo to be in business. General Motors is laying off roughly half its employees who remain at its discontinued cruise robotaxi business. The plans come two months after GM said it would no longer fund cruise after spending more than ten billion on the robot taxi unit since acquiring it in two thousand sixteen. So that's ten billion down the drain. Basically, GM cited the increasingly competitive robot taxi market, which, by the way, there is no taxi market as of yet, but it's increasingly competitive for GM. despite its non-existence, capital allocation priorities and the considerable time and resources necessary to grow the business are reasons for its decision. Like I said, there's really only one game in town, and that is Tesla in terms of robo taxi Waymo. The geofence solution doesn't really make any sense. It's not a generalized solution, and it is quite inferior to a generalized solution, which Tesla has now. I have to say, after Deep Seek's revelation and the lead that we thought AI companies in the United States had over everyone else, that lead being exposed as essentially non-existent, and very easily can be caught up to. It has occurred to me that, you know, could the same be done with Tesla's Robotaxi business? That is, is the full self-driving software something that, you know, some Chinese startup is going to come up with their own version for, you know, in a few months time. So that is, you know, on the list of risks I see for Tesla share price. I understand that a lot of Tesla share price in many investors mind hinges on the robot taxi business. That being said, I do see that there is somewhat of a difference here with regards to Tesla software versus open AI. And that is Tesla software is only the value that Tesla gets from it. is not just in the software, but the fact that it has physical cars that are on the road that have the components to make that software useful in terms of full self-driving. So, That's something that can't come out of the blue. So even if someone were to say, okay, I have this software that enables full self-driving, you still have to have a fleet of cars that are on the road that can actually interpret and run this software and actually know have the hardware necessary the cameras necessary and everything else necessary to make this software useful and so in that respect I see the moat that tesla has around its full self-driving business anticipated full self-driving business to be much deeper and wider than the mode that a purely software business can have like open AI. So the risks of a similar surprise I think are less acute in the case of Tesla. But it is something that I think about. I'm always thinking about these things. All right. Even though we did get the softer than expected jobs report, the fact remains that seventy seven percent of S&P companies have beaten their earnings estimates basically to date for their Q four, their fourth quarter, which is equal to the five year average. And it's actually above the ten year average. So the economy remains in in good shape. And I actually think it is showing some signs of improvement. And therefore, I think that equities do have that tailwind of growing earnings. And I actually think the multiples are not that out of whack. There isn't irrational exuberance for most of the markets. Now, in terms of companies that did not beat earnings, Alphabet is reporting earnings as we speak, and they are down after hours. But I did want to report on Alphabet because it did mention something very important, which is that they are going to be investing seventy five billion or making seventy five billion in capital expenditures in twenty twenty five. The estimate was fifty seven billion. So They are not rolling back their capital expenditures, which I assume the majority of these capital expenditures will be in AI and AI infrastructure. So they aren't rolling back their capital expenditures, which was one of the worries that the market had after the DeepSeek LLM came out about a week ago. And, you know, the NASDAQ pulled back as much as it did. So that is good news. It should be good news for AI infrastructure plays that are out there. It should be good news for Bitcoin miners that are doubling as plays on AI infrastructure. Should be good news for NVIDIA and companies like it. Now, with regards to Bitcoin, we did get a pretty solid indication from the crypto czar David Sachs. regarding the Bitcoin Reserve, which is that the Bitcoin Reserve you mentioned is one of the first things that they are going to be looking into. So I honestly think it's a done deal, the Bitcoin Reserve. Now, how it actually ties into the sovereign wealth fund that the US is going to have, it's unclear to me. It seems they are separate entities, but in reality, they could be just one. I mean, you could just add Bitcoin to the sovereign wealth fund. and and that's a reserve right there but they do seem to be the current administration seems to be thinking about them as separate things for whatever reason but I do expect Bitcoin to be in both places, to be in the strategic reserve and also in the sovereign wealth fund for the United States. And that's good for Bitcoin. That's good for crypto generally. Now, speaking of Bitcoin, if we go to our favorite measure for Bitcoin and whether it's oversold or undersold, let's look at the NVRVZ score. This measures basically the amount of profit that's in the market at any one time. Anything below zero is something that is undervalued. That is, it indicates an undervalued Bitcoin price. And it has typically coincided with local bottoms. So you can see the orange line and you can see the local bottoms are typically in this green area. And that is below zero for the MVRVZ score. And then you have anything above seven basically is overvalued and that's that red bar here. And you can see that when the orange line actually gets to this red bar, this has typically coincided with local tops. Where are we right now? Well, we're right at close to three, basically on the MVRVZ score. And if you look at February of twenty twenty five, you compare it to twenty twenty one compared to twenty seventeen. And I showed you guys a similar chart yesterday. This dip that we have recently experienced mimics similar dips that we experienced in the previous February's of the year following the halving. And it was followed by this big upswing in price. Now, history doesn't necessarily have to repeat itself, but it often does rhyme. And so it does look, the charts at least, from a historical perspective, do look quite promising if history is going to repeat itself. So as this commenter is mentioning, Mr. Crypto, this may be the worst time to actually give up on Bitcoin and perhaps other altcoins as well. With that being said, let's go to questions very quickly. Nice to see you, Bilal Zidane. Ali, nice to see you. Thanks for clicking on the like. Will iron run before earnings? It's tough to say. But I mean, there's a confluence of factors that are affecting the price of iron, like any other stock. Obviously, you have the at the market dilution. And but you also have and you had, you know, last week, the revelation about deep seek and, you know, perhaps the infrastructure that iron has built out, especially in Texas, is not as valuable as iron. As we once thought, but that story seems to be rolling back now and people are going back to their initial thesis on the need for power and need for infrastructure that IOS Energy has a lot of. So there's different narratives that are impacting the price. I do think that if we look at something like Bitcoin and obviously the price of Bitcoin miners is going to be influenced heavily by the price of Bitcoin, even if there is a lag between the two. If we look at the price of Bitcoin, I do think there is another leg up here. And perhaps it's more dramatic than what we've experienced previously. And that should affect the prices of Bitcoin miners in a positive way. So whether that happens before or after earnings or on earnings day, it's tough for me to say. But generally speaking, I think that there's another leg up here. most auto parts come from china I guess there will be a workforce reduction at the dealers too says rashad I actually will reveal to you one of the main selling points for me for buying a tesla was the fact that I didn't have to go to a dealership every time I walk into a dealership I feel like you know I'm yeah a sheep being led to slaughter or something because they kind of swarm you. The salesmen swarm you and they throw at you a bunch of stuff that you know a lot of it you're not going to need. And it's very tough to discern you know, truth from fiction and what's overpriced versus what's fairly priced. And so I just didn't want to deal with the dealership experience. And that's why I went with Tesla. That was one of the reasons why I went with Tesla. So I actually believe that, you know, the dealership position as, you know, as a point of sale for cars will start to go away with time. Thanks, Ali. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Dr. MVG. Really appreciate it. Squared Circle. Any plans on buying more Doge? Perhaps. We'll see. Yep. As Rashad mentioned, PFI alerts are shared on the private Discord channel. Subscribe. Thank you, Rashad. Abdullah says... Tesla is one of those stocks that will make a potential millionaire need four hundred shares at least. I agree with that. I actually think three hundred shares will get you there. I was wondering, do you have any other stocks placed similar to MPIF or maybe a future pick? So as Rashad mentioned, you can look at I actually like some stocks that we bought last week, PIF members will know, that have run up and I'm kind of kicking myself. I wish I bought more heavily, but yeah, alhamdulillah, anyway. I don't need a stock name as I'm just wondering. Yeah, I do think that, you know, a lot of our names in the emerging growth portfolio will beat on a percentage basis, the gains of Tesla in the near term. But in terms of sort of a longer term, set it and forget it name, Tesla's at the top of the list there. Do you see iron hitting the hundred and twenty dollar mark? No, but I don't. If I did see it hitting the hundred and twenty dollar mark, I would definitely buy a lot more than I have right now. That. Yeah, everyone hang in there. Inshallah, things are going to turn around. I remain very bullish. I don't think that this cycle is over yet. Still another leg, as I mentioned. Certainly, if you look at historical precedent, that's what it suggests as well. So with that being said, do leave a like if you enjoy these daily updates. Until next time, make sure to take care of yourself. Assalamualaikum and peace be upon you all.