
The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast
The Practical Islamic Finance Podcast
Same Plan ⚡
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Same Plan ⚡
In this episode, we will cover:
- Intro & Market Overview
- Tesla’s Slowing Sales in Europe
- Bitcoin & Crypto Market Outlook
- AI Stocks: NVIDIA & Iris Energy Update
- Gold Surge & Economic Uncertainty
- Trump Media’s ETF Plans & Bitcoin Impact
- Q&A: Tesla Stock, Lucid Motors & Halal Investing
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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 had a wonderful day. Today is Thursday, February six and a mixed day in the market. Indices were pretty much flat. The S&P notched its third win in a row, but on a modest gain. So it was up twenty two points. The Nasdaq was up half a percentage point and the Russell was down point three three percent. The yield on the U.S. ten-year treasury was up point to seven percent. Now, I do believe that with the savings and the improvement in the U.S. balance sheet that DOGE will bring about, or at least has promised to bring, I think sentiment towards lending the US government will improve and therefore the yield demanded by the market on things like ten-year treasuries will fall. And that is good for risk assets. So when yields fall, typically risk assets tend to rise. Tesla is at three seventy four. We'll talk about its slowing sales in Europe in a second. We'll also talk about how the Bitcoin miners, specifically Iris Energy, doesn't seem to have changed its plan at all. And they specifically reference Deep Seek in their monthly update. BitDeal was flat today. NVIDIA is rebounding on the heels of earnings reports from hyperscalers that doubled down on their commitment to investing in AI infrastructure. And therefore, the projection for NVIDIA sales after having cratered following the DeepSeek revelation have perhaps improved now. I actually... I think that investors should approach NVIDIA with caution. It is unlikely that the projections that got it to its highs, so close to one fifty per share, it's unlikely that those projections for this year will pan out. So despite what has been said, I do think that there will be less demand for NVIDIA's chips. Now, gold continues to really do very well. It's at two thousand eight hundred and fifty five. And I do think that, you know, in addition to the everything bubble that I've spoken about many times on this channel, I do think that as uncertainty is increasing, political uncertainty and economic uncertainty, gold remains a safe haven for investors, and its price is acting as such, especially in an environment where the other traditional safe haven for investors, the U.S. dollar, is not as... as resilient as it once was in the minds of many investors, as the balance sheet of the United States has accumulated so much debt on it. But again, perhaps that this perception may change with the improvements that are being made in the fiscal picture in the United States. Crypto has yet to really recover from the liquidations that it experienced over the weekend. Bitcoin is at ninety six thousand. Doge is at twenty four cents and Solana is at one ninety one. Tomorrow we get the jobs report and I do believe that. It's tough to say what is good news in this situation because on the one hand, you have if the job report turns out to be very strong and the economy is strong, then you can basically kiss the probability of an interest rate cut goodbye. And that's not great for risk assets. but on the other hand it is telling you that the economy is strong and earnings should remain robust for the foreseeable future so there's a there's pros and cons to to either a a strong jobs report or a weaker one I do think that probably as it relates to crypto the name of the game is going to be liquidity I mean, the economic situation is not really what's going to determine prices in crypto. And therefore, the market may react positively to a slightly weaker than expected jobs report. Now, if it's very weak, then. the market may sell off. But if it's slightly weaker than estimates, then maybe optimism about an interest rate cut increases and therefore we get optimism about the liquidity picture. We're already seeing cuts in other places of the world. And so maybe optimism about cuts in the United States increases and that increases pushes crypto higher. So tomorrow is when the jobs report comes out. So tune in for that. With regards to Tesla, as we mentioned, the compare the comparables to last year are not too pretty with regards to unit sales in europe specifically so you can see in places like france and germany so in france the percentage change in units sold emphasis on units sold is in france it's down something like sixty three percent in germany it's down close to sixty percent in sweden it's down forty four norway thirty seven uk it's down seven point eight percent I do believe the reason for this is it's not that concerning I I I understand that I've I've said this on the channel before I thought byd would be a worthy competitor to tesla I do think the chinese models and cars that are flooding europe are more appropriate for european consumers than tesla cars are because number one they are cheaper and the purchasing power of the average european is falling and number two they are smaller and roads in europe are a lot smaller than they are in the united states so it's Chinese models, I think, are better suited for European roads than Tesla models are, which I believe were designed with primarily U.S. roads in mind. And also the price tag on Tesla models is a lot higher than Chinese models, which tend to be a lot cheaper. All this being said, I do believe that when full self-driving grows out, then this calculus may change a lot for consumers regardless of their location. and not excluding Europe, obviously. So that will be a major selling point for the cars of the future. That is the full self-driving capability. And this may even out the competition, as well as the introduction of new models by Tesla. So Tesla hatchback is expected to come out in twenty twenty five, a smaller car, a cheaper car. And so that might be more competitive with Chinese models. Again, this is a model that is expected to come out in the first half of twenty twenty five. in good news related to tesla they're hiring engineers for tesla bot assembly and production in a very aggressive manner so they are pretty gung-ho about getting uh Optimus robots off of the assembly line this year. And so this is very good. I believe that this will eventually be their largest business, these humanoid robots that it produces. And the demand for them will be basically as many as they can produce. They'll have a very solid profit margin and There's going to be a lot of players, but there's going to be one or two companies at the top. And I believe Tesla is well positioned to be the top name in this field, which should add eventually trillions of dollars to this company's market cap. Trump Media and Technology Group, which counts Trump as its majority owner, on Thursday said it had filed to register trademarks for new vehicles under its financial tech brand. Each of the exchange-traded funds and separately managed accounts will sound familiar to anyone familiar with the president's promises. So Trump Media, which, again, the biggest owner, majority owner, is Trump himself, plans to offer a Made in America ETF, a U.S. Energy Independence ETF, and Bitcoin Plus. So I think it's safe to say that companies that fit into these ETFs, and this is an obvious conflict of interest, I can't believe this is legal, but I do believe that companies that fit into these ETFs will probably have a favorable disposition vis-a-vis the current administration. And so, you know, Bitcoin stands to benefit from Trump himself being an owner of an ETF that holds Bitcoin. And so probably regulation, there's additional catalytic rules regulation that is headed towards Bitcoin specifically and crypto generally. Now let's talk about IOS Energy's monthly update, January, twenty twenty five. So the plan hasn't changed for this company. They are using the same language that they've used in previous updates, and they are focusing on the same things. So the DeepSeek revelation has not really changed their main selling point, at least in management's mind, and that is their access to power and the infrastructure to support data centers needed for AI. So in their highlights for the months, five hundred and ten megawatts of data center capacity, fifty three million in revenue. For this month, thirteen million in electricity costs, they say hardware profit of forty million, which is, you know, they're sort of implying this is the gross profit for them. And that's around seventy five percent. But I really don't like looking at this because there's a big depreciation expense that these Bitcoin miners incur. And so hardware profit is not really anything to go by when you're trying to figure out how much cash is this company producing because it requires continued upgrades of their Bitcoin miners, continued raising of additional cash to expand their hash rate to keep up with the ever-expanding hash rate of the Bitcoin network. So it's not that easy. It's not like, okay, we're going to mine Bitcoin for X and just pay, you know, in electricity and then the rest is profit. That's not the case. They have thirty one exahash installed, so their growth has been quite dramatic in recent months. And so with regards to their growth specifically, so they have thirty one exahash installed. Their average was twenty nine in terms of operations because they have to take out some miners, install new ones. They're constantly upgrading. This is name of the game name of the game with regards to bitcoin miners in december they had or that was their average operating hash rate and november was so you can see how aggressively it's been growing uh bitcoin mind is at five twenty one basically basically the same as the bitcoin mind in december Revenue per Bitcoin notched up a bit, ninety nine thousand in January, ninety eight thousand in December, eighty six thousand in November. Obviously, this is a function of Bitcoin's price, nothing they have control over. Electricity costs went up a bit as well to twenty four thousand in January versus twenty two thousand in December. And the hardware profit, as we mentioned, seventy five percent, whereas it was seventy seven percent in December, seventy four percent in November. They're basically paying spot prices for electricity. So there's going to be a few variations in percentage points from month to month on what they're paying for the electricity that they use. And management commentary I thought was interesting. So they said in January, our Bitcoin mining business continued to deliver strong hardware profits. Again, I don't like talking about hardware profits. They don't mean much. We also announced a new at-the-market facility that provides flexibility to fund accretive investments. That's to the tune of one billion dollars. They can go to the market, basically access the market ATM with a balance of one billion dollars. not a bad place to be in, but it will cause dilution and it really requires management to actually fund that creative investments as they are saying in order to create more shareholder equity than is diluted the business and investments across the business and continue to explore alternative funding options recent announcements regarding stargate highlight the strategic value of iron's a two thousand three hundred and ten megawatt grid connected power portfolio. That's very important because it's grid connected. The infrastructure is there. If you want to start from scratch, it's going to take you years to, it's not just a matter of money. There's also approvals, securing land, securing connection to the power grid. This takes a lot of time. And so for hyperscalers that want to move fast, this portfolio is very valuable. with an increase in observed demand for our cloud and co-location services since the start of the year and following deep seek release. So they wanted to throw that in there, that following deep seek release, we're still seeing demand for cloud and co-location services since the start of the year. So nothing has changed, at least for them. We look forward to addressing the market and sharing additional details in our financial performance et cetera. All right. So Nothing here important. So, seven hundred and fifty megawatts is the Childers project. Again, their location in Texas is very important because the Stargate investments, what we know about them so far is one of the top candidates for the first investments is in Texas, which puts Iris Energy in a good spot. Now, one point four gigawatt Sweetwater project. um multi-gigawatt development pipeline you can see here the percentage energized is in green foundations are here in gray so they're working on it I mean their main two sites are here in texas seven hundred fifty megawatts and shoulders fourteen hundred and sweetwater in canada they have a much smaller uh much smaller sites. Then you can see here the planned data center growth. So we are here, H-one, first half of twenty twenty five planning on. So in terms of where we're planning, we're planning on getting to eight hundred and ten megawatts, both operating and constructing, and then second half of twenty twenty five to nine hundred and ten and then the first half of twenty twenty six to twenty three hundred. With a good chunk of that being energization, so. There should be a lot of growth here in the. in the data center portfolio for iris energy and assuming the demand for these data centers remains as is and this is what we are getting in terms of signal from the hyperscalers up until now I mean we have I mean it could be that it's just a matter of you know not wanting to admit that they perhaps overestimated the amount of investment required. But at the same time, there are some companies like Google that are actually increasing the amount of their investment. I don't think that would happen unless they thought there was an advantage to doing so. So overall, I think a decent update and we will continue to keep you posted on IRS energy. Salamat Dawa. Salamat Gaming with Fahad. Salamat Dr. Boss. So do we expect continued choppiness in the markets and crypto until Trump policies and deregulation takes effect in next few months? I really think that there's a lot of questions with regards to the liquidity picture moving forward. And that's really what's going to determine where the market goes from here. When will the next rate cut come? I think that there's probably going to be some positive surprises that support the market. And I do think that there will be more and more signs that the economy perhaps needs a pick me up. And now the most well-known tried and true pick me up is to make money easier to access and therefore a rate cut. And, and that I think will be, a good catalyst for the market and perhaps the next leg up here in the bull phase of the cycle. Salaam, Brother Hussams. Dawa Quest says, all in Dodge then. Yeah, it's... Depending on how you see it, it's trading at a discount, especially compared to where it was in the last few months. I do think that there's a lot of, it makes a lot of sense. Tokenization of different assets makes a lot of sense of making more liquid, create a market for otherwise liquid assets. But there needs to be, I think, regulation on this. I'm generally pro deregulation, but I recognize that some regulation is useful for protecting consumers. And I just don't want us to swing back to the other extreme where nothing gets regulated and then we have things like FTX pop up. Thoughts on Lucid? I see them on the road nowadays. Yeah, me too. I do see them every now and then, but it's a good car, but terrible economics. The company is just burning cash. It doesn't make sense. As an investor, it doesn't make sense. Do I like silver? Well, I like gold more. Amin says, Rakan really likes Lucid. Yeah, I mean, I think that company is going to zero. So, Renegade, Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh. Dee says, Assalamualaikum, I'm retired, need help in figuring out how to manage my Vanguard moving to Halal Investments. Can you advise on this and also provide tax advice? If not, any recommendations? Well, if you'd like a consultation, Dee, we do have, you can sign up for a consultation. Link for that is in the description. Is Tesla good at, well, I think you meant a two-seventy-two. We're not at one-seventy-two. Is Tesla good buy at one-seventy-two? Well, I will say this about Tesla. Sorry, at three seventy two, but it is in our buy zone. So make of that what you will. So I do think dollar cost averaging in Tesla at this point. Again, not financial advice, but I do think that if you see the vision as I do, then it makes sense. I guess. If you enjoyed this like, do leave a like. If you enjoyed this like, do leave a like and become a PIF member if you haven't already. Until next time, make sure to take care of yourself. As-salamu alaykum and peace be upon you all.