Muslim Money Talk
Introducing the Muslim Money Talk Podcast, a place for all things Muslim and Money related.
Every week we'll be sitting down with Founders, leaders and industry experts from across multiple disciplines to discuss lessons learned, mistakes made and most importantly 'How they did it?'.
Brought to you by Kestrl: The Muslim Money App, software to help Muslims grow their wealth without compromise. Find out more here: https://kestrl.io/
Muslim Money Talk
Halal Stocks Expert: Ethical Vs Shariah Screening, Active Vs Passive, Fixing Donations & More! | Ep 49 - Rehan Ahmed
Meet Rehan Ahmed, founder of Halal Stocks, an Australian based FinTech on a mission to give investors an unfair advantage in the markets.
Ethan shares his journey from tech to the Muslim
Charity sector and how a shocking revelation led him to founding Halal Stocks. We discussed the evolution of halal investing, why you really can beat the markets, practices of the early Muslims and crucially: how to align Islamic and ethical investing.
Find out more about Halal Stocks and become a lifetime member here : https://t212.halalstocks.co/
This podcast is hosted by Areeb Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of Kestrl, the app that helps people to grow their wealth without compromise
Find out more about our app here: https://kestrl.io/
Show Notes:
00:00 - Trailer
02:48 - Growing up in Australia
05:10 - Quitting IBM to join Muslim Aid
10:05 - Realising how Charities pay salaries
17:17 – Lack of halal investment options in Australia
20:21 – Launching Halal Stocks in 2018
22:43 – Value investing vs. Growth investing
26:08 - Can you ever beat the market? Active vs Passive debate
32:32 - Are stocks still worth investing in?
34:25 – Halal Stocks’ offering: automated portfolios, not funds
36:07 – Sharia compliance vs. ethical investing: the BDS challenge
38:53 - Helping Muslims escape 40 hour work weeks
43:03 - Muslims building the first Market in Medina
46:18 - Can Muslims really make a difference in the markets?
48:23 – Why don’t Islamic Investing Standards include Ethical Screening?
51:16 – Dispelling the myth: most companies aren’t involved in unethical practices
53:06 – Getting Lifetime
Membership at Halal Stocks!
54:50 – Upcoming products: intelligent crypto, gold, and US market timing
58:01 – Final advice: follow the Prophet’s example through entrepreneurship
01:00:20 – Audience Q&A : the risk of entrepreneurship
Once you understand how every cent flows through an aid organization. For me, that realization of knowing exactly where my salary comes from was something that troubled me. Sorry, I don't understand Working for one of those organizations. Your salary comes from people's donations. How do we move an organization like this to one that can truly have 100% donation policy? Then I I read mufti taqi is money's. Everyone's read this book, the introduction to islamic finance. It's just the basic primer for everyone. We should all read it.
Speaker 2:And in that he had stock screening criteria for public companies and that I was like this can be halal okay, I didn't know, a stock's still worth it, whereas I feel like stocks have kind of lost the lost, the appeal that they had pre-COVID.
Speaker 1:So stocks have lost a little bit of that because of passive investing Acorns, like you mentioned, betterment, vanguard, blackrock, all of those they all end up selling you the same portfolio. What I find exciting about it is there's a sleeping giant, which is the the passive indexing robo advisor world. Yeah, that we can completely run past, wow, and they won't move. Why?
Speaker 2:I didn't say that I love one aoffy is probably one of the foremost sharia organizations in the world. Uh, they're setting the Sharia standards, based in Bahrain. Why haven't they included BDS or ethical?
Speaker 1:components. It hasn't been updated to the current political climate.
Speaker 2:In today's episode, I'm joined by Rehan Ahmed, the founder and the CEO of Halal Stocks, a platform that wants to give Muslims an unfair advantage when it comes to investing. We're going to be discussing what Islamic finance is like on the other side of the world, all the way from Australia, where our guest hails from today. We'll also be discussing the all-important topic of how ethical are Islamic financial products? Yes, they're Sharia, compliant by the letter of the law, but does that mean they're boycotting from certain companies and countries which are fundamentally misaligned with what we believe in? So, without further ado, I'm your host, arif Siddiqui, and this is Muslim Money Talk.
Speaker 2:Before we begin, we actually noticed only about 10% of you are subscribed to the podcast. So if you like what you're listening to and you want to hear more from us and see more things Muslim and money related, then please consider subscribing and, of course, leaving this episode a like and share it with your friends, leave us a comment or a review, because it really really does help us out and help more people to find us. Thank you. Now back to the show, because it really really does help us out and help more people to find us.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Now back to the show Rehan. Assalamu alaikum and welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Wa alaikum assalam, I'm honoured to be here at the Cashflow Studios in London? Perfect. Is this a bit surreal for you, as it is for me, because I don't know we've been speaking for so long. I feel like I've known you, but this is the first time we're meeting in person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is quite surreal actually, and even your brother that I know. I met for the first time just the other day A lot of people in the UK Alhamdulillah, first time physically meeting, but it's like meeting old friends and families.
Speaker 2:And for the listeners.
Speaker 1:you can probably deduce from your accent, but you're not from around here. No, I'm not. I live in Sydney, australia. Yeah, alhamdulillah, I've been there for over 30 years now, and then before that we were in the Middle East and I was born in Dubai, actually.
Speaker 2:You were born in Dubai. Yeah, okay, so you were born in Dubai. Then your parents moved to Sydney, to Saudi.
Speaker 1:To Saudi. Okay, so what did your? What?
Speaker 2:do your parents do um so my dad uh telecommunications engineer okay makes sense.
Speaker 1:Satellite communications, yeah, and that, and then um, yeah, and he was working for saudi telecom when I was in saudi, and then um, and then we migrated to to australia was that a bit of a culture shock, moving from, like, muslim majority countries to australia, sydney of all places? Yeah, absolutely, I didn't even speak the language I really were the first.
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean, you're taught english but you don't really speak it at home. So my first I remember, I still vividly remember my first day at school. I think it was second grade and uh, I went up and I didn't understand any of the work and that was a big problem for me because I was a bit of a nerd and so I was good at schoolwork. But walking into a classroom and not really knowing what the teacher was saying, and I remember crying, so I do. I do remember that.
Speaker 2:Well, they say, a bit of trauma makes you stronger. I agree.
Speaker 2:Mashallah, you are clearly the case study, the case study for that. So I really want to get into all things Islamic finance, halal stocks, and we're coming hot off of the tale of Muslim Tech Fest, which was just this weekend. We're filming on Monday. Muslim Tech Fest was on Saturday, after a whole week of really cool events and you had a fantastic announcement that you made there which we're going to get into. But of really cool events, and you had a fantastic announcement that you made there which we're going to get into. But before we go into all that, I'm going to ask you a question. I usually ask all my guests Is this what you imagined you'd be doing when you were a child?
Speaker 1:No, not at all. Islamic finance or investing anything that was maybe not engineering was not what I thought I'd be doing. My dad, my grandfather, everyone was a line of engineers, and so that was kind of the path that I thought I'd follow To what led you to this then. So, fast forward. I did engineering. I did computer science engineering at university, so I followed the path, graduated, got a job at IBM.
Speaker 1:It was kind of the dream for me to work for a tech company like that, um, and then I spent over 10 years, 15 years in corporate and, uh, it just felt like I was wasting the best years of my life serving suboptimal interests, but just being so good at it. Right, and so, as a, as an engineer, as a technical consultant, um, we were designing cloud infrastructure before amazon and azure and all that came on the scene and, um, I just felt that surely, if allah gave me this one life, this can't be what it's for. You know, no matter how good you are and how fast you climb the ranks in the corporate world, you're, if anything, you're just enriching shareholders. That's one and two. I felt that you know the best years of my life the 20s, um early 30s, were were being spent um you know kind of round about doing halal things. It wasn't that I wasn't yeah, you weren't making.
Speaker 2:It's not like you were an investment banking or something, but you felt like you wanted to make more of a difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was just you got one life, yeah, yeah. So that led me to uh a break from corporate. So so I quit my job and a really well-paying salary. I had two little kids and I did it to join Musumeid Australia.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, take me through that right. So you were married, married, two kids Two kids, alhamdulillah and you were in your early 30s. Yes, what conversations did you have with your wife? Oh, yeah, when you were doing that, because we're no strangers to that. But I always said, dying is at the back of the room here today, and he was one of our a couple of episodes ago, my co-founder. He had two kids. At the time when we started this journey, I was debt-free, spouse-free, child-free at the time, so I never had that.
Speaker 2:I didn't have that. Um, I said I was gonna say baggage, but that makes it sound like a bad thing, but that get those gifts at the time. Um, how did you come to that decision? It was really hard, yeah yeah, a lot of istikharas.
Speaker 1:Um, I think it was more so. I had to do it because when would I? And time was running out. So for me it was more so that a friend and teacher of mine was at IBM, a senior architect, there as an enterprise architect, and he'd left IBM a couple of years before and became the CEO of Muslim Aid Australia.
Speaker 2:No way Okay.
Speaker 1:And for me I was just like whenever you're ready, I'm jumping. So he brought me on. We had to launch Muslim Aid's local charity and he needed someone to do the full digital stuff.
Speaker 2:So you were the CTO of it. I was the CTO, okay, wow. So what were you doing exactly? Just trying to do the end-to-end payments infrastructure for accepting payments and then donating away.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, because the CEO was also a qualified mufti and graduate of Azhar and, you know, enterprise architect, it was a very interesting leader. So we would study the sharia rules around sadaqah zakat, you know, riba, cleansing all of these rules that govern donations. And then my job was to codify them within the system, so from the website or the app taking donations all the way through to the CRM, the database, and then what finance and operations use to disperse into projects. And so it was my first foray into kind of I would say, islamic finance, but on the giving side. And so we had to. He wanted everything digitized. It was a full digital end-to-end stack, um, so we had to design, codify, kind of the islamic rules, right, to make sure that you can't accidentally spend the wrong bucket on a project, because that's for yeah, of course, if someone's giving zakat, you can't send that sadqa or interest purification.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay so it wasn't a manual process that we were implementing, it was it had to be the machine that did this, you know, cut up those buckets and made sure that they weren't violated so you were there for how many years?
Speaker 1:I wasn't there for very long. Um, so we delivered. I delivered that project in just over six months. Wow, yeah, alhamdulillah, and um uh, this is kind of where I had kind of the second crisis, right, the first crisis was obviously working for corporate america in australia but american companies and and then the second crisis happened when I had to decide whether I wanted to stay at muslim aid or not. Why did you want to move? Yes, indeedhanallah, yes indeed. So that wasn't the plan.
Speaker 1:But once you understand how every cent flows through an aid organization, right, muslim or not, it doesn't matter, it's industry standard. Someone who was raised in a certain way and who alhamdulillah, like we'd always try and give our zakat and you know sadaka, and always try and you know give, uh, because we had alhamdulillah. Um, you're now actually once you realize, and there's, you understand this, the people who run tech in a company have more access and power than the CEO, the CFO, everything else.
Speaker 2:You're saying that in a room. So people who don't know, we have a live studio audience today of a lot of my tech guys, so it's a little dangerous that you just said that they are. They have more power than the CEO in that they could turn everything off with a flick of a switch.
Speaker 1:Well, just that they have access to data because they enforce security boundaries inside an organization, what you have access to. The CEO usually has access to everything, but the tech guys are the ones that have to enforce the security boundary, which means they are super admin, and if they're super admin, they see everything end-to-end in a way that even sometimes the ceo doesn't yeah, absolutely yeah so. So for me, that realization of knowing exactly where my salary comes from was something that troubled me sorry, I don't understand.
Speaker 2:It's a muslim charitable organization.
Speaker 1:What was nothing wrong? They weren't doing anything. That's, you know, untoward yeah, a very honest, sincere organization. But if you're working for one of those organizations, your salary comes from people's donations yeah, and that made you uncomfortable that made me uncomfortable, because this is the first time in my life that I felt that I was receiving donations yeah, instead of being a net giver of donations, so that was a guilt.
Speaker 1:Now, I don't think that's how people should think when they're working at a humanitarian aid organization. No, but it was something that really haunted me and so that forced me to then as an engineer, you always solve problems. You don't just document them. You have to at least conceptually know how to solve a problem.
Speaker 2:You don't just throw stuff on the backlog to move stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, you throw it on the backlog only because you will get to solve it one day, you will get to it exactly. As opposed to just ignoring it. And so, for me, what was the problem that I identified was that how do we move an organization like this to one that can truly have 100 donation policy?
Speaker 2:truly 100 donation policy. How would that work? Where would the operations, the operational expenditure, where would that come from?
Speaker 1:that was the question where how right? And so I'd solve the tech problems and we launched the new charity. We did all that, alhamdulillah, did it on the project and I left. I must have done more istikharas about that departure than any other decision I've made in my life, uh, because, uh, yeah, you asked me about what did my wife think? Yeah, about going. Yeah, she was.
Speaker 1:I was gonna basically almost half my salary to go and do this thing wow yeah, so that that's a sacrifice, right, and so you know, hamda, at the end of the day, she, she, stuck with it. But it wasn't an easy period to make the decision to go, of course, and then to make the decision to leave was even harder, because you kind of you know, you look like you don't know what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1:That's always the fear. So, but before leaving, I wrote a report and I left it and all the you know recommendations for different parts of the roadmap that we're going to develop into the future, and I'm not a type of person that likes to give criticism without a solution. Yeah, so either I want to give constructive feedback or none, and I did not have a solution to that problem when I left, and that was the only thing in my report. When I was leaving, I told them clearly. I said look, I know where my salary comes from and it makes me uncomfortable. It's not something they can change.
Speaker 2:What was their response when you said that, right, Were they just not like? Well, how do you think it worked? How do you think it was yeah?
Speaker 1:Because you said it haunted you. It did haunt me Because you have to understand that there are fatwas out there that allow a certain percentage of zakat funds to be used for those who work in the sector right, and so those are in place and I respect scholars with that view, but it wasn't the view of the scholars that I followed Right. So, part of my income. You know, I knew it was coming from Zakat, so it was the idea that someone has given so much In Zakat.
Speaker 2:I think it's going to the needy people and it's landing in your bank account and that sounded very yeah.
Speaker 1:I never consider myself the content, and so from that perspective that is how many, that's like industry standard for humanitarian aid organizations Some of it will be covered by you, if they can't cover it through other buckets. And because I was the one coding, flying those buckets, buckets, I knew exactly how much was coming from what, and so no one else in the organization knew that, other than ceo where did everyone else think the money was coming?
Speaker 1:so you know, when you, when you give a donation on these platforms and you say, like I'll give an extra, like five percent?
Speaker 2:oh, like a tip. Yeah, oh, so you just assume it all comes from there?
Speaker 1:yeah, but when you know how much is in that bucket? You know it's not coming from there. Can you say how much? No, it varies from organization organization right, so it just depends on how much people tip but, okay, um, it's nowhere near enough to typically to sustain the salaries of the staff.
Speaker 1:yeah, right, and that's the most expensive cost, okay, and so that discovery was a breaking point for me. I stayed for maybe a month or two after that trying to find a solution and at least have a roadmap, right? So it's not one thing that I'm going to solve this next month, but it's like, okay, well, what are we doing that puts us on a pathway that in 10 years time or 20 years time uh, we will.
Speaker 2:we all of our salaries will be covered from I mean from another funding source the only thing that comes to my mind in all this is the idea of the walk or the endowment, where some of that money is being invested so that the whole project can become self-sustaining through the revenue and the return from that investment itself.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That must have been kicking around in your mind, or through your research did you discover that it was yeah.
Speaker 1:But to turn that into something practical, especially in 2016 in Australia for a Muslim organization, there just weren't enough investment vehicles available that were Sharia compliant, that gave enough returns and that were liquid enough to be used for the purposes of a humanitarian aid organization 2016 Australia.
Speaker 2:Paint the picture for us. Wahid hadn't launched yet.
Speaker 1:There's no way. Their fund was not there. No, I didn't have a fund. I believe they did have a stock screening service back then.
Speaker 2:Oh really, yeah, Wahid did stock screening. Oh, no way Before a fund. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I pay them. So you pay them for a screening report.
Speaker 2:Okay, fine, so why did the stock screening? Hsbc is Islamic funds. Did you guys have access to?
Speaker 1:any of that, not in Australia.
Speaker 2:So there was just nothing.
Speaker 1:Nothing other than property. And how big is the Muslim population in Australia At the moment? It's about a million, we would say.
Speaker 2:Okay, so it's not insignificant. No, Okay. So a million people in Australia, nowhere to invest.
Speaker 1:So people were just saving for property. It's property, yeah, property was the only game in town and, uh, that's, I mean it can be lucrative. Um, there were some like islamic finance players funding property projects. That's been around for a long time. Um, but it's a big ticket, right. So you need a two hundred thousand000 deposit just to get started. It's highly illiquid, so to expose a charity to that kind of investment can be a little bit.
Speaker 1:I didn't feel comfortable picking illiquid asset classes for that. So then I went down this big rabbit hole trying to find passive investments. You know you can start a business. You can run a restaurant. You could do. I guess you could try and start a business. You can, you know, run a restaurant you could. You could do. Um, I guess you could try and start a real estate empire. But all of that would take resources away from the mission. Right, like they can't even you know afford to fund that. Now you're going to fund these things. So for me it was like it had to be passive. It went down like the amazon fba route and things like that. Right, um, drop shipping, all of these things, uh, to see, is there like passive business models that we can use to to start funding operations, um, so that let me down a whole bunch of asset classes eventually. That's why I leave right, because I don't have a solution I don't want to take so you've left, you've got nowhere to go to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no job, that's it that's it, I'm out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I quit without a job. Oh subhanallah, because it was the same same intention.
Speaker 2:It shows how strong. You felt about it right. Yeah, so you just like and then is this. It sounds like this is all the different ingredients for halal stocks. For me, right, so is that? Is that what happened? You went off the story and you formed halal stocks as this idea of a solution to the charity sector. Okay, I had no idea about that.
Speaker 1:Fine, that was my only customer that I was designing for, and so that's why, eventually, I got to the stock market. Initially I thought, well, it wasn't even an option, because I thought it wasn't halal. You, know, and then I read Mufti Taqi Isfani's. Everyone's read this book the Introduction to Islamic Finance, it's just the basic primer for everyone. We should all read it. And in that he had stock screening criteria for public companies and that I was like this can be halal. Okay, I didn't know.
Speaker 1:And so when that happened, I was like that's an asset class I can actually try. When that happened, I was like that's an asset class I can actually try and, being from a computer science engineering background, it's a fully digitized asset class. It's the most data-rich asset class in the world. It has the longest history and so, from a data perspective, so it was just a dream asset class for an engineer. And so that's when I started my study. This would have been in the starting with the stock market 2018, so it took me two years of looking at other stuff, um, and in 2018 I start, uh, looking at what is being published with regards to stock market strategies by the greats you know okay start with ben graham, you start with um obviously warren buffett, and I started with the value school there anyway, and the rest is just a lot of education and um upskilling myself but now I see where you kind of started was very similar.
Speaker 2:2018, 2019 is when when kestrel kind of came about, when dying, and I met and I remember talking to you, I think like the year after you'd started, and we had started, um, and just thinking these guys are doing something really really cool, um, but I understand the appeal right. So stocks and shares, liquid, low entry barrier, a lot of data available. Plus, you now have the screening criteria in your hand. So what was the first iteration of halal stocks?
Speaker 1:so the first iteration of halal stocks was a newsletter oh, okay yeah, so it was a stock picking newsletter, right, but it was the machine that picked the stocks. Based on what? So I studied, um, I fell in love with a certain madhab within the investing world, and that is quantitative value investing.
Speaker 2:Ah, okay.
Speaker 1:And what it does is it quantifies the rules of thumb of the value school, and then you codify them, and then you backtest them and then you discover okay, if we were to cut up the universe of stocks in this particular way and rank it, the stuff at the top would outperform the market, the stuff at the bottom would underperform the market.
Speaker 2:So, in terms of the different schools of thought, do you want to give a quick definition to the listeners of value investing? Value investing do you want to give a quick definition to the listeners of value investing?
Speaker 1:Value investing. Yeah, so value investing is often juxtaposed to what's called growth investing, and so you can kind of break up the world of investing in those two ways. There's many other methodologies. There's trend following right. There's obviously technicals based investing, which you can either be a trend follower or a mean reversion style investor. Value investing is one of the schools where your primary study is of the underlying asset itself. Okay, so what's the underlying asset? It's the company. You're going to look at the books of the company. You're going to look at their revenue. You're going to look at their balance sheet.
Speaker 2:Which sounds so obvious, maybe to some people who are looking at this. You're investing into a company.
Speaker 2:We should know how the company is making money and how it's run, whereas in what's happening in stock markets and funds is they become highly speculative and people are just looking at the growth side of it. How much does it increase year on year? Then we just throw money on that, whereas the value side I've always felt is more inherently Islamic, because you actually care about what the money's being used to do and perhaps the impact maybe on the real economy For sure, I definitely gravitated towards that side.
Speaker 1:It's also a little bit more risk averse as a strategy, because you're always trying to buy assets that look underpriced, whereas in the growth school it's less about today's valuation and it's more about tomorrow's evaluation yeah right, and so you're like, yeah, it might be overpriced.
Speaker 1:so the growth school is looking at a company that has a certain valuation and it might be like 10 times bigger than what it should be today, based on today's fundamentals, but the trajectory is that it should become 100x. So therefore it's fine for me to enter, whereas in the value school, you're looking at today's profits and earnings and sales and you're looking at that and you're saying, oh, for whatever reason, the stock market is mispricing this, it's missing something about the underlying asset and it's pricing something else in that's about the future.
Speaker 2:So that's where your tagline giving people an unfair advantage comes from, that people have missed it. We found it. Check this out, we found it by looking at the quantitative elements of this, of this, correct. Okay, so you started as a newsletter, but I think when we started talking, you'd already evolved. Yes, to an actual platform.
Speaker 1:We had an app like a web app at that point in time. So I launched, so in the middle of covid. Uh, I I, by the time covid comes around 2018, 2019, is gone. I've done enough research to know that, um, I, can we have quantitative models that can generate market beating returns, and that's not an impossibility. I think there's a lot of um propaganda out there by those who support passive investing, like the john bogles of the world. Uh, it's in their best interest for you to be a passive investor, and um, and so yeah, because this mantra evolved of you can't beat the market.
Speaker 2:You can't beat the market, the market always wins. Uh, statistically, active trading has never surpassed passive in the long run.
Speaker 1:It's not true, right, but that is the conventional wisdom, is it not true?
Speaker 1:No, in the very long term. In the very long term, there are always examples of those who've beaten the market, such as Like Warren Buffett, yeah, or, if you have the Medallion fund, jim simons, um, joel greenblatt, who, who I took a lot of the philosophy from. He ran gotham capital and, like, compared that in the 90s at 30 per cent per annum, so and and so joel greenblatt is one of those quantitative value guys. He just has rules of thumb and that's how he invests, and so if you read the, I'd probably recommend this for everyone. If you read the little book that still beats the market, he's got his magic formula in there. I've back-tested that. It doesn't really work anymore because it gets published. But what's more useful is the philosophy and the manhaj. So if you understand that that's possible and why it works, then you can develop. With sufficient study, you can develop your own algorithms that would do exactly the same thing.
Speaker 2:The philosophy being the underlying value.
Speaker 1:Correct that you can systematically right, not discretionarily. So systematically means your entire investment process is documented line by line, that it can be implemented by a machine. The S&P 500 is a systematic investment process. That's all it is and it's actually people call it's actually people call it passive. It's not passive. The. In my definition, passive investing would be like when you equal weight yeah entire universe, right?
Speaker 1:so you just go and buy the footsie hundred equal weight. You buy the s&p 500 equal weight, right? That would be passive. But the s&p 500 and most of of these newer indexes are market cap weighted. That's why in the top 10, like 30% of the index is in the FAANG stocks, for example, or the MAG7. And so that is an index that actively overweights companies and actively underweights others.
Speaker 1:So in that instance, you'd call that active, I'd call it active, systematic, whereas passive is someone who's just blindly following whatever an indices are saying, they're just buying the whole market.
Speaker 2:Sure, as opposed to someone who defines the market like S&P.
Speaker 1:Yes, S&P 500.
Speaker 2:And they're defining that based on the actual market cap or the size of said companies.
Speaker 1:They're weighting companies versus each other. Yeah, and if you're doing that, I consider that an active process.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think, because they're not following trends or speculation, or but I don't know right Because Tesla, perfect example. Okay, their valuation varies based on a tweet, so wouldn't you say that they're kind of passively going along with that?
Speaker 1:because it's not entirely values based it's not values at all, so you can be systematic and be growth. So the S&P 500 is a trend following system that actively weights companies whose market cap goes up and underweights companies whose market cap goes down.
Speaker 2:Oh okay, I see what you're saying. They're not value school at all, but it's actively doing whatever it's doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay, got it yeah so the S&P 500 is not a value index. It's the opposite. It actually overweights growth, gotcha Right. So it's a trend following index. So all that to say that this kind of passive versus active dichotomy, um, I think is a bit of a misnomer okay um, and you're saying it's like a ploy to get people to just put their money in the next one in an index fund run by these large organizations like vanguard and fidelity and exactly yeah, yeah, 100 it's, it's.
Speaker 1:It's also laziness on the fund manager's part. They don't have to do much well they don't.
Speaker 2:You just collect the money, put it in the, collect the check there's two ways to grow a wealth management company.
Speaker 1:One is by, you know, growing your capital, so being good at investing. That's one way. It's actually quite hard and the the easier way is just to hire more sales people, and so if you, if you just acquire more customers and more AUM amounts under management, there's two ways to grow AUM either you have great performance or you just have great salespeople without having to compromise, whether it's on their belief or user experience or price.
Speaker 2:I founded Kestrel because of how fed up I was at how poor Islamic financial services were in this country. Often people didn't use them because of how bad the user experience or customer service and, indeed, how high in price they were. So Kestrel was the answer to that. If you download the Kestrel app today, it can help you by creating a budgeting plan. Plug in whatever bank account you have and it will create an auto budget just for you. You can then tell us what goals you're saving for and we'll save towards them automatically into pots and then, crucially, link you towards Sharia compliant investment and savings products as well. So download Kestrel today and try it out for yourself.
Speaker 2:Now back to the podcast today and try it out for yourself. Now back to the podcast. A stock's still worth it for people listening. There are people listening here who are saying well, you know, my gold portfolio is doing really well, or crypto is really taking off recently, or property, depending on where you are right in the world, whereas I feel like stocks have kind of lost the appeal that they had pre-COVID right when you had all these robo-advisors, the nutmegs and the acorns and all these people moving up. But why do you love this asset class so so much?
Speaker 1:So stocks have lost a little bit of that because of passive investing Acorns, like you mentioned, betterment, vanguard, blackrock, all of those they all end up selling you the same portfolio, it's the same portfolio, it has the same company Just packaged differently, sold differently, just different sales people selling it to you, and so there's no differentiation between like.
Speaker 1:If you look at the list of top 10 robo-advisors in the world, their portfolios all perform pretty much within 1% or 2% of each other every single year, so they're all selling the same product. So what's happened is, I think there's opportunity for players like us who are active and we're actually doing this and we're a minority for some reason to actually come at it and give fresh solutions.
Speaker 1:And what I find Sorry, no, no no, sorry, what you find is what I find exciting about it is there's a sleeping giant which is the passive, indexing robo-advisor world that we can completely run past and they won't move. Wahid.
Speaker 2:I didn't say that I love Wahid.
Speaker 1:So I think that's what's happened. There's, like this complacency that's become apparent because you need to grow an aum business yeah the. The easiest way to do that is hire more sales people and spend more on marketing. Yeah, the hard way to do that is generate better performance.
Speaker 2:So tell me about what you guys are doing today, because you're more than just giving people the education and the tools to go out and do that yourselves. You've actually created your own fund, which I believe is available via like trading 212 today. You can actually buy and sell that right now you can.
Speaker 1:It's not a fund, so I can't use that terminology, um, but it is a. What are automated portfolios?
Speaker 2:automated portfolios yes andated portfolios.
Speaker 1:Fine, yes, and so the user experiences, like a fund, because they don't have to do all the hard work in choosing what to invest in when. And so there's two parts to the value proposition. One is making sure that things are Sharia compliant. So you know, we're certified from Amman Advisors. I've been studying, alhamduldulillah, under Mufti Faraz Adam For about five years now Good friend of the show, great friend of the show, and I love his Love, his work, mashallah. So continue to study Under him, and he's our Sharia Advisor. He's been with Our journey since 2019.
Speaker 2:Okay, so same as us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, nice, alhamdulillah. So in the product development side, especially on the Sharia side, codifying Sharia rules, he's been there with us, alhamdulillah, and so Sharia, and then this BDS thing, that's become really important, that's what I wanted to ask you about, because the biggest complaint levied against Sharia-compliant stocks and shares is okay.
Speaker 2:so you're telling me Apple is Sharia-compliant but they're making use of labor camps in China or more topically, right now? Oh, okay, so this fast food chain is Sharia compliant, but technically they're also supporting this terrible organization in the Middle East which is doing all kinds of things right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the the industry, because of that phenomenon that we mentioned about passive investing um, passive invest investing is married to an index and the creators of those indices are not us, it's not the muslims that are creating those indices, it's smp, it's msci, right right, it's BlackRock, and so they will happily create Sharia compliant indices they have. Sharia boards and everything, because Gulf money needs to flow somewhere. There's a lot of wealth in the Muslim world. They're happy to serve us, but would, I think, blackrock's going to release a BDS compliant index?
Speaker 2:No way yeah.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't think Vanguard would ever do that either. I don't think Standard Poor's would ever do that either, right, so there's, we know where allegiances lie. And so for us, because we're active stock pickers and I write the index, right? So what I said about systematic investing can you write a better set of rules than the S&P 500 that performs better? That was the question I asked myself. I said why can't I write a better set of rules? And so that's what our research was. And so we created our own indices, which then pick the stocks, which then make our portfolios, which is where we get our performance from.
Speaker 2:So what has your performance been like since you've been live?
Speaker 1:Since we went live. So June 2020 was when we went live. We started tracking our portfolios. Alhamdulillah, we've been doing it 60 months in a row, updated every month. Average return is 16% 16%, yeah, alhamdulillah.
Speaker 2:So for comparison, a typical S&P has returned. What in the same period?
Speaker 1:A typical robo-advisor would have returned about 10. 10. Right, 10, 11. I mean, it's been a good period.
Speaker 2:I think that's quite high typically. Yes, that's above average. Usually I was expecting more, like 7 to 6%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah typically, yes, that's usually more like seven, seven, eight percent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so long over, if you look over the last 20 years, 25 years um you know, a robo advisor portfolio would have, um you know, given you that eight percent but just so people don't understand, 16 is very high for a stocks and shares fund marshal, so not a fund.
Speaker 1:It's not a fund. We do it and we cheat because we have gold in there. You have gold there as well.
Speaker 2:I don't think that's cheating, right. Otherwise, the typical portfolio has oh, it's got everything.
Speaker 1:So cool, yeah, bonds, whatever you, whatever you call it, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that you wanted to solve, which was for charities. You're very much making that for everyone yeah okay, so there's a lot of questions I want to ask. Firstly, did you ever solve the charity?
Speaker 1:problem. So we in. We got our first charity client in 2023. I'm assuming no, it wasn't Muslim aid okay um, see, the bigger the charity is, the the longer it takes for the board to accept things like that. So House of Sadaqah, which is run by a good friend of mine, you know, we started their charitable endowment fund, alhamdulillah, using our strategy, and I guess timing was good because in the first year they made 30%. Wow.
Speaker 1:Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. Yeah, so you know that's there, so that's the mission, but we know how slow that sector moves. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And in the meantime. So when I was in the accelerator with Peter Gould, why did we start in 2020? I was in the middle of a startup accelerator that Peter Gould ran in COVID, and as part of that accelerator, we launched that initial newsletter service, and so he told me you should open this up to everyone. I know you're passionate about the charity space, but there's so many more people you can help, and so I did two things. I decided okay, let's open it up to regular folk, because I'm one of those people as well who wants a roadmap to escape the rat race.
Speaker 1:And Umair joined me on that mission my co-founder straight away when he heard what I was doing, because we all know that the Sahaba didn't work 40-hour work weeks, and that's not really the lifestyle of the Prophet. How did they work? So they would. If they were laborers and not many of them were Then they would go and work as much as they needed to, they would take what they need and then they would go back home. You know, as a great example, ali radiallahu anhu Used to draw water, for when he used to draw water for this Jewish man in Medina, and he would pay him a date for drawing that, and when he would have enough dates, he would just take his dates and go home. And the man still needed more water drawn and he said I'll pay you double. And he was like I have enough, it's enough for my family. So that was there as laborers. The other side of the coin was it was that they were businessmen they were financing trade missions to syria, abyssinia, absolutely all over the place the prophet is trained.
Speaker 1:All prophets were trained in in in the occupation of being shepherds yes yes, so we know this and the process. When he was young he had that training. A lot of great you know is done through that process.
Speaker 1:But the prophet also had a second profession in his life and that was that he was a merchant and trader yes from his youngest days he was groomed, in a way, you would say, from his uncles, to be a businessman, and so he used to go on business trips as a young child and observe them how they would trade and then eventually would become, you know, an incredibly accomplished trader. Of course. And so you see that it's not an accident that Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, puts the Prophet in the commercial capital of Arabia, mecca, mecca. Mecca is where all the money was made. It was the business capital.
Speaker 2:Because it was effectively like religious tourism, yes, which it is today as well, but back then.
Speaker 1:It was the marketplace, because the religion and the idols and all of those things were economically empowering to the Makkahs, which is why the Quraysh were so afraid as well when Islam came to, because they thought their livelihoods were going to be challenged. Exactly, the whole economic system was going to be thrown in the air for one god, instead of all the tribes coming All of these.
Speaker 2:You could bring whichever god or whichever idol you want and do that. The reason I said Medina is that I always come back to that story of when the Muslims first arrived in medina, the first thing that the prophet muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam asked to be established was a masjid and the second thing was a marketplace.
Speaker 2:But there's more to that story which I heard from you. Actually I can't remember where I heard it or when you said it, but you said actually it took some time for that marketplace to be established, right, because they were looking for the right criteria. What was it they were looking for?
Speaker 1:subhanallah. So there were different marketplaces in medina after the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam established the first masjid, um, and some were like um, fixing prices, others were like charging taxes, others were only open to some people and not others, right, and so there was all of this, uh, corruption in the marketplace that he saw. And so then he went, established his own, you know and so, and that marketplace, uh, was a free market. There was no taxes, um, and anyone could come and trade as long as they followed the rules, and so it was the first regulated market in that sense in Islam that he established.
Speaker 1:Why did he do that, you know, we have to really think about, like, what was his economic genius that he was trying to implement in a new city? Because he'd learned the power of commerce in Makkah. He was, you know, extremely trusted with regards to business. He was also, like, if we go back to what his training was, he was a capital allocator. So how does he meet his, you know, soon-to-be wife, khadija Radila Wanha? It's through business. She notices that this guy is a very, very accomplished Businessman. Allah Businessman.
Speaker 1:Fund manager Really? Because, yeah, you know what? What that relationship is between khadija radhi allah and prophet is that of an investor and a fund manager so she would provide him with the capital.
Speaker 2:He would decide where it would be just best distributed. Who was going to go and return the most correct from their missions, from their caravans?
Speaker 2:yeah, and he would go and do it himself that's such a cool alignment because you're talking about how, when the Muslims arrived, they actually looked at the other markets already in place, realized, okay, these aren't good enough, we need to make our own. And that's basically the story of so many Islamic fintechs today, what you guys are doing at Alar Stocks, what we're doing on the banking side now, and so many others.
Speaker 1:Yeah, indeed, we need to free the markets, but also the markets need to incentivize those who are doing good and punish those who are not, and the marketplace is the perfect place to do that. That's what price discovery does is supply and demand. If left free to flow, as I said, said invisible hand guides the price, and so that's something.
Speaker 2:if you have a truly free market, then people's needs are fulfilled the fastest but today, with the marketplaces and the S&P and the indices, blackrock, vanguard, all these guys, there's the implication that the bad are not being punished and the good are not being rewarded. Money is flying to certain institutions who are doing all kinds of things, from funding wars in the Middle East, pollution, fast fashion, the degradation of this planet and the people of it. Do you really think we can make a dent Absolutely? Why Do you really think we can make a dent Absolutely?
Speaker 1:Why? Because you know the words for good is ma'ruf, that which is known and what is kind of ugly and should be shunned. Is munkar right and munkar is something that's strange, it's something that you're not used to seeing. That's why it's strange to say it's munkar right and munkar is something that's strange. It's something that you're not used to seeing.
Speaker 1:That's why it's strange to see as munkar and what's maroof is what's normal, and people gravitate towards goodness, and so, yes, there are casinos and tobacco companies and so on that seem lucrative, but they are never the biggest companies in the world. Banks even banks aren't the biggest companies in the world. Banks even banks aren't the biggest companies in the world. Why? Because even the people who are profiting from vice don't want it for their own children. It has its own limit to growth because it's destructive, and so people naturally incline towards goodness, and so that's where I get my hope from is that if you provide them those solutions, which is what we're trying to do, we screen on, obviously, the Sharia criteria. We know the BDS criteria is very important, and as soon as October 2023 happened, we started implementing that. I think we were the first to do so.
Speaker 1:We know ESG is also important and we have to be custodians, and so we update our screening criteria to make sure that we're aligned with what we think the values are of the ummah at the grassroots level. But that unites us with so many other communities.
Speaker 2:So why haven't the Sharia standards caught up to this right now? The Aofis and SMPs? Well, maybe the reason SMPs might be because of what we talked about before, but Aofi is probably one of the foremost Sharia organizations in the world. They're setting the Sharia standards, based in Bahrain.
Speaker 2:Why haven't they included BDS or ethical components? Because for people who don't know the typical things that mean a stock is Sharia compliant, is the source of funds being away from obviously non-Sharia compliant things like gambling and alcohol, but also looking at the amount of interest which they might have on their cap table and debts that they've taken. But it doesn't necessarily say, oh, you know, it's a weapons manufacturer, right. So why haven't they taken a look at that ethical element or BDS element yet?
Speaker 1:I think in spirit it's there. In spirit, actually, it is within the standards, but the way that it's been implemented by the practitioners has been, it hasn't been updated to. You know the current political climate. Iof is not a political organization, nor are the standards. So you're not going to boycott countries within a standard.
Speaker 1:But what you want to know is when defining what is permissible income that is open to interpretation, that is open to interpretation. And so for me, I think, yes, the standards do need a reinterpretation to apply in the modern context, but do they need to be rewritten for some kind of political, like incorporating political moves in that? I don't think so, actually. So my view on the standards is that the implementation of them has not caught up to the time and place that we're in. So when we implement the IFE standards and guidelines, when I look at impermissible income, if I think that that's income coming from a government or a state that's doing human rights violations and invoking a genocide right, that's impermissible and come to me, and I don't think any scholar would sit there and say no, no, that's permissible to fund that. No scholar would say that. But what's happening is that that rigid implementation of that done by practitioners hasn't updated't updated itself the time place that we're in right now for certain companies doing different things.
Speaker 2:So, for example, if a fast food company decides they're going to give free meals to an occupying power right, or you know would that count? I guess it's about tearinging. You know, like someone once said to me, that if you want to try and boycott all of these companies, there'll be nothing left in the market, because they're all involved in some way. I don't believe so okay, I don't.
Speaker 1:actually, you will find that in looking at the companies that are on the bds list, uh, there's like there's more than 6 000 companies on the us exchanges and if you you were just to filter out the BDS ones, that's in the hundreds. So the vast majority by number are companies that don't violate BDS guidelines. Actually, most people are good no one's like pro-genocide but it's just the biggest ones that have to cut deals and try and please the right people that are under the influence.
Speaker 2:so it appears like because they're the loudest and the ones we we probably see on our high streets. The starbucks, the mcdonald's of the world the most successful, yeah but not they're successful.
Speaker 1:That's why the the market cap right if you look at the companies that have the biggest market cap, when you're looking at google and mic and Apple and those companies.
Speaker 1:Of course, they've got dealings with Israel, but that's because that's a function of them being big as well, whereas we don't invest in the top 10 or even the top 20 of the index, because we're trying to identify mispricings, and mispricings happen mostly, um, where people aren't looking as usually in the middle. So, uh, we, we're investing more so in the you know, the 10 to 100 billion dollar company, as opposed to the 500 to 3 trillion fine, okay, so that's in the middle is really where you see most likely something's going to be overvalued.
Speaker 1:Undervalued or overvalued Sure sure, yes, correct. So that's where we do our hunting, but what I'm trying to say is actually that it feels like everyone's aligned to the other side. It's not true. The vast majority of companies are not.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's really heartening to hear. That is really heartening to hear. That is really heartening to hear. So what's next for you guys at Halal Sorts, because you had some really exciting announcements that you made on the stage just before we came up, yes, so please tell us and I think you have a very special offer for people if they get on Quake right, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So we've got a limited time, what we call the founding membership. Because membership? Because we, we came to the UK to launch our product. You know the broker integration is through trading two and two, first and foremost, and we know that that's, you know, mostly a European focused platform, very easy to use, and I wanted to, you know, give the early adopters something special.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And so what that is is it's a fixed cost. It's £249. It gets you lifetime membership to our portfolios with no fees, into the future, right? So that's one. You get, you know, a really cool founding membership card as well that opens up a rewards program so you can also be rewarded for referring people. So that's a limited time offer. It's here now while stocks last, as they say. Alhamdulillah, we almost sold out of MTF, alhamdulillah.
Speaker 2:Amazing okay, yeah, so there's a few more left, but if people go to the website, the lifetime offer is still available we'll put the website in the description so people can head there and, inshallah, it will still be open by the time this episode drops. Yes, okay, fantastic. What is next for you guys? What do you want to do? Because I saw some really cool stuff. I don't know how much of it you want to say here. We can talk about it.
Speaker 1:I think it's important to move the industry forward. I have the model portfolios that we've got right now and that we've been testing for five years. In the market there's more than one, and so what we started with is what I call kind of an all-weather kind of portfolio. It's a portfolio that has got reasonable universal appeal kind of portfolio. It's a portfolio that is like, got reasonable universal appeal. But then we've got I've been working on Bitcoin strategies since 2021. And so that would be the next cab off the rank, which is what I call intelligent Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:So, knowing being better at timing things like Bitcoin, because it's a very volatile asset class. Yeah, um, we've got intelligent gold coming right. So if you want to invest in gold but you don't want the as much volatility, yes, that's, that's intelligent gold, and we have a market timer for the us economy. Um, which leads the sap 500 okay.
Speaker 2:So when you say intelligent gold, intelligent crypto, you're trying to move away from all the speculative activity. You're saying you can kind of time when things are going to be less speculative. Exactly Okay, by looking at past trends.
Speaker 1:Correct Can you do that with crypto, you can do it with crypto. Well, you can do it with Bitcoin, that's for sure. Okay.
Speaker 2:And so it has now enough data for us to understand when risk is high and when risk is low and you're looking at everything from what's going on with the presidential elections in the US to, I don't know, a war somewhere else.
Speaker 1:It surfaces through different. So if we're talking about just crypto, like every asset class has a different input to determine whether it's high risk, low risk. If you're talking about Bitcoin, then yes, there's a lot of social risk. That's built into that.
Speaker 1:Then you're looking at trends, you're looking at tweets, you're looking at that kind of data, you're also looking at price movement, and so it's a real blend of risk statistics. That, then, very cool. You can figure out how to do. The reason why I want to do that is because one no one's doing it, um, and so so many people losing money in crypto. Um, you know, so many people. Instead of just being buy and hold because buy and hold, you know, huddle has been kind of the mantra there are smarter ways to get exposure to these assets and then turn to cash when you need to so if you become a lifetime user today, you can get access to all of these things when they come.
Speaker 1:That and then global expansion. So the UK is inshallah. The reason we're here is because we do want to establish a base in the UK. I think it's a very important market. I think there's a lot ofallah. The reason we're here is because we do want to establish a base in the UK.
Speaker 2:I think it's a very important market. I think there's a lot of synergies between what we're doing, what you and I are doing, so we should definitely have a chat. I don't know if you saw our demo I think people will have seen it by the time this episode goes out but we want to allow people to invest into Bitcoin, in particular, into gold, through their typical digital banking app. This one just happens to be Sharia compliant and BDS compliant as well. Amazing. We should definitely talk offline. Let's do that.
Speaker 2:Cool. Was there anything else you wanted to share with the audience, or any final advice to budding fintech entrepreneurs, many of whom listen to?
Speaker 1:this. Subhanallah, entrepreneurs in general right, you're a rare breed in the world, you know, you're the, you know one percent of the one percent. And in the muslim world you're even rarer, right, because everyone aspires to be a doctor and a lawyer and so on. Nothing wrong with that. But we need more risk takers, right, and we need more people from that. Our parents generation, the generation before them, couldn't take the risks because they had to establish the foundation, and now we're at a point where we have an amana. If you can take a risk or if you can take some time off, mashallah, you did right. You chose a time and a season in your life where, like it was right for you to, to become a startup founder.
Speaker 1:For me it came a little bit later, right when my kids were oldest. My, you know, my boys are like 20 and 16, what yeah?
Speaker 3:okay, you don't seem old enough to have kids so now I'm not changing nappies I can actually, you know, work on my startup okay.
Speaker 1:And so if you're, if you find yourself in my, my message to everyone out there is you know, do, even if it's a side hustle, even if it's a side project, take up entrepreneurship. Why? Because that is what Allah chose for the Prophet Before he became a prophet. And so, if you want to follow the sunnah of the Prophet, then that is, you know, one of the ways that you can reach the highest levels, right? So there's a hadith Of the Prophet that says the honest and trustworthy merchant Right, who's the entrepreneur, will be raised amongst the prophets and the Siddiqin Right and the martyrs. So there is no rank that you can't reach through entrepreneurship. Wow, you know. So we need more people to be following that path. Incredible Inshallah.
Speaker 2:What an amazing way to end this, Rehan. Thank you so much for your time. As-salamu alaykum Wa alaykum, as-salamu alaykum, all right, big round of applause. Cdl Williams. Very Assalamualaikum, waalaikumsalam. Alright, big round of applause To the audience. Very good, do you guys have any questions for Rehan Whilst? We have him Any questions for what you heard about today? Go on, don't be shy, guys.
Speaker 1:You can ask me yeah, bismillah.
Speaker 3:What's the risk for you to start so so I mean late in your life Entrepreneurship, yeah. So the question was what was the risk that you were taking going on so?
Speaker 2:late. So I mean late in your life, entrepreneurship, yeah. So the question was what was the risk that you were taking going on so late? I guess it's the familial risk, the salary risk.
Speaker 1:How did?
Speaker 2:you deal with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, later in life, after you have, like I have an Islamic mortgage, yeah, right.
Speaker 2:What in Australia yeah?
Speaker 1:Through who? So? Amana? There's a few players. Where are they? The Jazz Amana do them. There's a few players that do Islamic mortgages. I was just through Amana At a time when, because they're benchmarked to whatever the cost of capital rate is right.
Speaker 1:So it's benchmarked to the interest rates. At a time when rates are high, right, that's actually like a material risk for me. So if you're asking what's the risk for me, last year I was employed full time, I had a great salary and then I jumped full time into Halal stocks about six months ago. So financial risk is extremely high for me. You know, I could lose the roof over my head, right, if I can't pay the bills. Yeah, so it's not. But I have time.
Speaker 1:So you have to look at where you can give. So what is it that is your unfair advantage at that point in time? Mine, right now, my co-founder's got young kids, right, and I know that the time that I have he doesn't have, and so if you're in that season I can give time, and so for me it was like just double down and and do what you need to do, right, um, some people maybe they find themselves with capital and they want to risk that. I also did have capital at risk. So because I um, I took a redundancy from my corporate job after seven, eight years, I could take the risk. I could burn $100,000.
Speaker 3:So that is where you're balancing risk. It's a calculated risk.
Speaker 1:You have to know when, and there's times in your life when you take a risk that is completely uncalculated, like when I left Musumein, not because it's a bad organization, not because my heart wasn't there, wow Right. But you know, I didn't know where my next paycheck Would come from. But as long as you're doing it For Allah's sake, like Allah has never let me down and I know, mashallah, the fact that everyone is sitting here Right now you know Allah has never let you down, you know. So when are we going to learn to treat allah the way he deserves to be treated?
Speaker 1:well you know when, when, when are you going to actually say, yeah, allah, I actually trust you, and you don't have to prove it to me anymore does that answer your question?
Speaker 2:well, so for context, one side hustle is he's a dj, so I'm not sure that right, nice, I'm sure they're like madness sheets that you remix hello beats any other questions before we wrap up?
Speaker 2:no, okay, perfect. All right, rohan for the second time. Assalamu alaikum. Thank you for listening to the muslim money talk podcast if you like what you heard. Right, rohan for the second time. Assalamu alaikum Wa alaikum assalam. Thank you for listening to the Muslim Money Talk podcast. If you like what you heard, then please subscribe to Muslim Money Talk. Wherever you might have been listening to this, give us a like and share it with someone who you think might be interested. It really really helps us out. Thank you, assalamu alaikum, and see you next time.