 So I do actually work as an economist in my field and do a lot of financial work in systems. And I have kind of a hobby of just helping people with financial acumen and doing spreadsheets and some consulting. So we had a talk a few months ago. I think it was late January where I came in. And one of the concerns was to have a talk about teaching the community financial literacy. So financial literacy is not taught in schools. There's only 17 states in the United States that have some form of financial literacy taught in schools. And so it's really something that's a gap. Either people know it on their own or they don't learn it. So there's a talk that was done before. And it was done in January. It was about family and budget. And so after that, the next step is to talk about investing once you've got a savings plan. So that talk is available online. It's actually in the evite for on Facebook. If you look on the invite to this talk, to this event, you'll see there's a link for the original talk. It's on MCC East Bay's YouTube page. So I recommend going there. One of the things I didn't do is start with a Dua. So I wanted to start with a Dua. And in the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful, Most Merciful, Most Gracious. May Allah grant us enough provision to care for our families, to keep us free from being in the need of provision from others. May Allah allow us always to have enough provision to have time to work towards the pressure of Allah, to read his book and to remember his messenger, and to have enough time to help those in need who come to us for help. Amin. The other thing I wanted to share was a beautiful Dua of risk that I had learned. I also learned another Dua of risk. So the most beautiful form of risk is not money. Rather it is tranquility of a soul, healthiness of a body, purity of a heart, soundness of a thought, Dua from a mother, kindness from a father, presence of a brother, laughter of a son, caring of a friend, Dua from someone who loves you for the sake of Allah. May Allah grant us all these forms of risk. So let's get started. I know there's a folks who are watching online and inshallah we'll keep going. I'd like the session to be a little bit interactive but I do want to get through the hour. One of the goals is to try to get done before Isha and we can have a Q&A after Isha. Time to the agenda. So we'll talk a little bit about Islamic guidance. We'll talk about budget prerequisites and review, a little bit of a review for why things need to be done in a certain way and to kind of know how to plan and budget. A couple of baby steps that were left, referred to in the original talk. Then the most important part of the graph actually, the class today, is to talk about compounded growth. So growth, how you invest, if you invest in a fund or in a savings account, that it continuously grows and how it can build on its own momentum. So we want to make sure that that example is completely clear to folks today. It's the power of growth and the power of mathematics behind the growth. Then we'll talk about saving, investing and risk. Those are kind of prerequisites for knowing. Investment sectors and measuring performance. So everybody's probably heard of the Dow and the S&P 500, the standard and PORS 500. So one of the goals tonight is to try to demystify jargon. I don't want to use acronyms that people don't know. I want to explain acronyms so that you know what you're doing. And then a couple of sample stocks, a couple of sample utility investing sectors and mainly staying away from interest, staying away from RIDBA and how to invest in a halal way and how to do your research. So the prerequisite of this is if you had a friend who told you that he had $10,000 and he was at a car lot and he didn't know, he didn't have a, he didn't pass the driver's license test, didn't have a permit, didn't know what kind of car they wanted, didn't really know what horsepower or torque was, didn't know what miles per gallon was and they said they wanted to buy a car. What would you tell them? Get off the lot. Get off the lot. One of the things we want to do today is to actually teach you guys all those basics so that you're ready to buy a car, i.e. you're ready to buy a stock. So that's the goal of tonight. It's pretty basic. This is stock and investing one, Econ one, stock investing one. So if you have some, there might be some financial planners out here or people who have their own firms. I don't know, but I'm trying to keep it very basic. And I'd like the questions at that appropriate level. So let me know if I'm too complicated or too, too easy and I'll feel you guys as an audience as well. So that's the goal of tonight. And when people ask me about investing, I want to make sure that they understand some of the things they need to know before they invest. There's a lot that goes on to it. So let's go move on to the first slide. Okay, so the Quranic injunction, Allah tells us that those who engage in riba are actually making war with him. And he talks about four, four involvements with riba. Earning riba and collecting riba from people, okay? Paying riba. Witnessing, writing contracts for riba and witnessing contracts for riba. So these are four things that you can do with riba that Allah says that if you do that, you're making war with him. And this involvement in his riba is considered a Qabahir sin. And the category of Qabahir sins are lying, cheating, stealing, killing. So it's very serious. So we want to talk about folks. We want to talk to you today about how to do this in a way that we can avoid displeasure with Allah, okay? And I want everybody tonight, actually jumping to my last point, is to sit together. And if you're online, make niyah to do toba. Make niyah to do toba and stay away from riba. I know a family who was looking for a house, they were starting a family. And the husband and the wife made an intention of riba, of staying away from riba. They actually looked online for riba-free investments and riba-free banks. They only found one at the time. I'm talking about 20 years ago. They decided they had a limited budget and they went to a real estate agent, a bunch of real estate agents, and they wanted to live in a pretty expensive city. They went to real estate agents in the city and they said, this is our budget. We want to find a house. We're willing to find a fixer upper. Every real estate agent laughed at them. Said, no, we can't help you. One real estate agent said, okay, we'll see what we can do. This couple had made toba for riba. They didn't want to be involved in it at all. They found a house in their budget that was a fixer upper. Then they had to fix the house and they had $200,000 to fix the house. They found a construction company that wanted to be in the Bay Area that was out of state that was willing to build their house for a low price and their $200,000 budget. And they built their house and bought their house without riba out of nowhere this miracle happened. So, the reason why I'm telling you the story is that make the intention, make the intention to stay away from it, and Allah will provide. Gun fayah, gun, Allah can do anything. So, there's a couple of other things you can talk about. Saving and investing is actually a plan. It's a strategy. And we have the beautiful example of strategy, of saving in order to protect yourself from harm in Surah Yusuf. In Surah Yusuf and Ayah's 46 through 49, there's the dream. The Pharaoh has a dream. He says there's seven years of provision, then there's seven years of drought. And then if you do things properly, you can squeeze and you can eat and you can press oil after seven more years. So, Hazeth Yusuf is called from the prison that he's in. And he actually says to the Pharaoh, it means that you eat from what you need to and then you save everything else in the first seven years. Then you store it for the next seven years and you use it in rations. And then after that, he says if you do that correctly, you can find a strategy and a plan out. So, in Surah Yusuf, we have this example. And that's what we want to do investing. We have ups and downs. We have time for, we have our jobs if we don't have our jobs. So, we want to make sure that we're using the example of the Quran. And then in that, there's also, ayahs 54 to 56 where Hazeth Yusuf, who says to the Pharaoh, appoint me as a trusted guardian over this task. He takes the responsibility and says, I know what this means. I will take the responsibility to store. And he builds the storehouses and he preserves the food and the rations for 14 years and they come out of it. And then he meets with his family. So, Surah Yusuf goes on. So, that's about saving for a rainy day and being able to make it from times of provision through times of tribulation. The other thing I wanted to point out was another ayah that I saw in Surah Taqweer, the overthrowing, it's Surah 81, ayah four. The Quran says, it talks about the last day. And it says on the last day, full term she camels will be abandoned by their owners. So, when I heard this ayah in high school, I was studying business, I knew that the full term she camel is wealth that's about to double. You have a camel that's wealth and it's about to give you another camel. And so, when we talk about investing, that is an investment that provides a dividend, provides an income. It actually grows for you. And on that day, it's such a serious day that people fear a lot that they fear what's happening on that day. They abandon their wealth that is about to double. So, it's something interesting to me in talking about this ayah is that Allah knows how much we love wealth and how wealth increases and that's dear to us. So, I wanted to talk about investing and show you the ayahs in the Quran that I had heard about or thought about investments. So, I wanted to go on and do that. So, let's see. I wanted to also review the basics of a very important budgetary graph. And this is called Masloss Erarchy of Needs. It's a triangle, it's a pyramid, and it shows you the priorities of how you need to think about providing and building the wealth in your life, okay? So, the bottom is critical, it's red, and it's the physiological needs. We need air, food, water, shelter, sleep, clothing, and reproduction. So, this is Masloss Erarchy of Needs. It's from 1941, it's actually covered in my original talk. And it talks about building the pyramid from the foundation up. The second need is safety, making sure you have personal security, making sure you have employment resources, health and property. So, what happens is that once you've secured your basic needs, you want to secure safety and security. So, we have to buy a house, we have to rent a house, we have to have insurance, we have to have a car, those are the basic needs. After that, we have love and belonging. So, friendship, intimacy, family, and a sense of connection. And then after that, once you've got those basic green, red, orange, and yellow covered, you have the ability to look for esteem and then self-actualization. So, until those basic needs are met, you shouldn't be looking for the other things. You've got to acquire the basic needs. And that's the way we need to think about it. So, when you look at folks who don't plan properly, they'll go out and lease an expensive car and they won't have enough money for their emergencies. They won't have enough money for medical emergencies. They won't have medical insurance. So, the idea here is to make sure that you have the red and the orange and the yellow covered before you go out and try to buy a car that makes you look good. So, those are the things that are important, all right? And I've seen stories where people will come in and they'll lease a new Audi, they'll have at least a new luxury car. But when you look at their finances, it's credit cards and their income is sufficient for their basic needs. And if something happens and the credit cards get cut off, then they won't be able to pay their rent. So, that's a situation, a trap where people are looking at not acquiring the pyramid the right way. This actually picture of this pyramid is on my phone. So, whenever I make a long term purchase, I think about this. Where is it? What am I doing, right? So, you have to own your car before and have your rent secured. And then a financial guru who's pretty famous, his name is Dave Ramsey. He's a Christian financial teacher. He's online, he has a syndicated radio show every week. You can find him on YouTube. He's actually a teacher who teaches all these basic things. He's very good to listen to. And he has financial basic steps that I covered in the next slide. And this is the seven step plan that we covered in the first talk about family and budgeting. The reason why I'm covering this again is so that we make sure that these basics are done before we get into saving and investing. So you'll see the baby steps are, number one, get $1,000 saved up in an emergency fund. You have to have oil change in your car. If you don't have cash to take care of those kinds of extra expenses, change the tires, maybe some medical expenses, you need that first $1,000. Once you have that $1,000, you start cutting up your credit cards, paying off all your debt, but cutting them up. Because that's what people use. They're using credit cards and paying interest to pay for incidentals. So if you have the $1,000, then you can actually start cutting up those credit cards. It's no point to do step two before you do step one. It's not going to work. So this is a plan for success. Step three is trying to save up three to six months of expenses and savings. People lose their jobs. They need to pay rent for several months. So three to six months is absolutely necessary. That's baby step three. So that's really the coverage of the first talk we had, which is budgeting and getting your house in order. Today, we're going to talk about step four. And you'll notice that in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it completely matches this pyramid. The pyramid is matched by Dave Ramsey Steps. Secure the first $1,000, which is the red, and then cut off the debt so that you're not bleeding money. And inshallah for us, we're trying to avoid Reba at all costs. And number three, get the orange secure, which is your safety net. And today, we're going to be talking about how to do step four. So step four, he says, invest in tax-favored accounts. Step five, fund for college. So when you've taken care of your own investments that they're going, then you start thinking about your children and keep getting your children out of debt, paying off your house. And then step seven is all the above. It's the blue and the green for Dave Ramsey. You've got to take care of step four, five, and six continuously for years and build wealth, inshallah. So this is a very important graph, which kind of indicates what's going on society today. I look at these graphs and try to understand what's really going on. So if you look at the black graph on the left side, you'll see that the black graph, as time goes on from 1975 to 2015, the black graph is dropping down lower and lower and lower. And the black graph shows that the average household savings rate. So in 1975, people were earning $100 and keeping $14 out of $100. Their savings rate was 14%. In 1975, people were doing pretty well. In 2017, that black point is at two. So I'm referring to the left axis here, the average family. The average family was saving $3 out of $100 if you're on the black graph. So if the average is $3, there's many, many people who are negative. Many, many people who are actually living month to month, they need to spend $105. They're bringing in $100. And they're going into debt for $5 every month. So that's a bad cycle. So the black graph is the have nots. And then the blue graph is the have. So in society, we have the haves and the have nots. The blue graph shows that as time goes on, people who are investing are building more and more wealth. So if you look at the end of in 1975, people had $450,000 of wealth, the average household income. The average household had $450,000 of net wealth. If you look on the other side where it's at the very bottom, that blue line is almost hitting $700,000. So people who are investing are building wealth. So if you're not on the blue line, you're on the black line. And if you're not on the blue line, your money is not working for you. So I wanted to stress that the folks who are on the blue line are investing. And they're investing in compound growth. And that's how this wealth is being built. And that's what we're going to try to teach you tonight. So the black line is also referred to as hand-to-mouth. A lot of people will say, this is the hand-to-mouth family. So they go, they earn, it comes in their hand, put it in their mouth, it's gone. There's nothing left over. So the next graph is something about strategy. This is what most people do. They get their paycheck. And if you look at the top, they get their paycheck. It goes into the check-in count. And whatever's left over goes into savings account. Then whatever's left over, they don't know because they don't budget. They don't have a plan. So that's, I don't know, question mark. And then whatever's left after that is, oh no, we don't have enough. So that's the typical behavior of many, many people. And I think I shared the statistic last time, that 40% of Americans who are very literate society don't actually have a budget. And 63% of Americans answered the question that they have some anxiety month to month over their monthly budget. They have some anxiety over budgeting. They're worried. 63% of Americans. So your actions are your strategy. So today, inshallah, we're going to get to a point where you guys have a plan and will teach you how to get to a plan, have a strategy. So a proper strategy is that you get a paycheck and tax deferred, before your taxes are taken out, it goes into your investment account, okay? Whatever's left over that goes into your savings account and you use that savings to buy vacations, big ticket items, couch, furniture, things like that. And then after that, your income goes into your checking account, you pay your expenses and you know exactly what those expenses are. So this is the plan that we want to have. We want to move from the typical behavior to the strategic behavior, right? So that's the goal of tonight. So again, in order to do this, we want to repent from it. And I actually have a quick story about a family. They lived in Houston and they had a house that was under $200,000. The wife was getting her education. Her husband was working, had a couple of kids. And so they decided to, when she was starting to work, they had a plan. She was gonna go to work and every part of her paycheck was going to be planned to pay off the house. Okay, so they had a plan to pay off the house. So every time she brought money in, they wrote a full 100% check of her income to pay off that house, right? And then on top of that, they had another strategy. They called their relatives and said, would you each give me $10,000? Cause they wanted to get out of Ribba quicker. They said, would you each give me $10,000? And some of the family members said, yes. And they asked, when do you need your $10,000? So one relative said in a year and one relative said in three months. And they took the extra 10 or 50 or $40,000 that they got from five relatives, put it in the bank, paid that part off. So they even got to a quicker point where they paid off their house and then she wrote checks to the relatives based on their calendar and their schedule. Each of their relatives, they gave them $10,000, got their $10,000 back. Whatever was left over, they paid it off. That was the plan for the check of the wife. And then after that, she could quit work if she wanted to. She ended up staying at work, but it was completely luxury, their house was paid off. So I wanted to tell you, this is a strategic plan. It was somebody that, I hold as an example that I wanted to share with you guys. Okay, so now I have a little bit of a pop quiz, okay? So Susan and Bill get married. They're both 25 years old. Bill wants to go to med school. So he enrolls in med school and he goes to med school for 10 years. So he's 35 when he gets out of med school. While he's going to med school, Susan is working and investing, right? She works and invests. So she puts $5,000 a month into investment account for 10 years. And then when Bill starts working, she stays home and has kids. And then Bill starts investing $5,000 a month. So that's the scenario, okay? So who thinks that after when they both reach 60, who thinks that Susan has more money in her investment account than Bill? So Bill invests from 35 to 65 and Susan invests from 25 to 35, just 10 years. She doesn't touch it. And then Bill invests first. So who thinks that Susan has more money than Bill? Same amount, exactly the same amount. $5,000 a year, okay? So both are investing $5,000 a year. Susan does it for first 10 years and then Bill does it from 35 to 65. Who thinks Susan has more money? Who thinks Bill has more money? Okay? And who thinks their money is fairly equal? Okay, so let me show the graphic. Compounded, compounded. So the investment is staying in. They're continuously investing it and the income of it is staying in. So the idea here is the example is to give you guys the power of growth, okay? So Susan is the gray line. So let me demonstrate. So Susan is investing from this point to this point and then she's this gray line. She ends up at $602,000. She doesn't invest anymore at the age of 35. Bill starts at 35 and he invests all the way to the age of 65. He ends up with $540,000. So the idea here, it seems counterintuitive but even though she didn't invest after the age of 35, she got started early. So early is better than late and continuous and that's the power of this example. Now Chris, who's the blue line, he starts at 25 and he continuously goes all the way to 65. He ends up with $1.142 million in that account. That's $5,000 a year. That's not much. That's $416 per month. It's not a lot to be a millionaire for that investment time. And the idea here is that the growth rate is 7% and the investment is $5,000 a year and it's constantly reinvested. So the power of compound growth is very, very powerful. It's very, very powerful, okay? And so we want people to get started and get started early. This is just the graphic about the two are doing exactly the same thing. One just gets started 10 years earlier. No, we'll talk about that later. So we're gonna talk about it. It's just a mathematical example. So both of them start, they both start at this, they both start the company at the same time. One person starts investing in their 401K. You know, we all have 401Ks, a lot of us do. They invest in their 401K. One person waits till they're 35 and they get to 200,000. The other person, just by starting 10 years earlier, they get to double the amount. So 10 years early gets you to double the amount. Question? Yeah. Yes, yes. So we're gonna talk about that. The question was that if this is an example for 401K, there is a possibility that this value will drop. So this is average growth over the whole life, right? But we'll show you the market. Some of the risks. We're gonna get into some of those things. I just wanted to, this is all sort of prerequisite to get you guys to understand some of the power of investing. Go ahead. With the, yeah, we'll do Q&A after. And the mortgage, it's kind of different because you're paying the interest and talking against you. But the bank is benefiting from you like this. The bank is making the money like this off of you. It's a double-edged sword. If you invest, you make the money. If you don't invest and you pay interest, you're losing the money at this rate in a faster and faster rate. So we're gonna get into, next we're gonna get into just a simple graph that shows the earlier you invest, this is how much you need to invest to get to a million dollars at the age of 65. So if you start earlier, you only need to do $361 a month with the steady growth model, just mathematics. If you start later, you have to start investing, at the age of 40, you have to start investing $1,400 a month to get there. So the later you start, the target of a million dollars is harder to get to, right? So savings, savings is just a quick note on savings. Savings is very liquid. You have access to your money. It doesn't go down and you pay very few fees on it. So most checking counts and savings counts are savings, okay? I'm just stating that as a definition before we get into investing. Investing, when you invest, you have a greater chance of losing your money than when you save. The money you invest in securities, mutual funds and other similar investments typically is not federally insured. So savings is insured. So FDIC, everybody's heard, most banks have FDIC, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, VACCIT. So savings are insured and investments are not insured, okay? So that's the number one thing you need to know about investment. And then the other thing is investment allows you to grow your money, but it also allows you to lose your money. So you have risk and you have reward. But that's the second most important thing, right? The last thing I wanted to tell you about investment, so that's the left box. The right box tells you there's so many complicated products. People get bogged down to jargon when you're listening to the financial news on the radio, whatever. There's only very few types of investments. There's stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate or commodities, gold, silver, things like that. There's sophisticated commodities like banks will buy barrels of oil, they'll speculate on a lot of things, but those are pretty much the categories of investments. And when we say staying away from interest, we're gonna stay away from bonds. Bonds guarantee you a rate of interest. You don't do any work for your money. You don't put any thought into your money and interest is haram because of that. There's no effort and it's hoarding money and building money and we want to completely stay away from bonds. So for us, today we're talking about stocks. We're talking about the value of a stock. What is a stock? How does it grow? How do you evaluate it? And how do you choose what you wanna do? And then again, there's real estate, so it's tangible. And there's commodities and gold. And then going back to Dave Ramsey's Baby Steps, most of us, when we get paid, we get paid in cash. If we have a house, we have home equity, so you wanna pay that off as fast as possible. That's the way you build wealth. Building cash and building home equity. The next thing you wanna do is you wanna take advantage of your 401k stock options. And the next one you wanna do is, if you have some money on the side and you're doing a good job savings, you wanna do some investments. So most people wanna try to do at least one, two, and three, and possibly four and five, right? The rich, rich people, the number four, some companies number five, some companies offer a pension. If you have a company that offers a pension and you're thinking of leaving it, make sure you really know what you're giving up. A lot of people will go and leave one job for another job and they'll think the income's higher. If they're giving up a pension, they're giving up hundreds of thousands of dollars. A pension is very, very valuable, right? And then real estate holdings, if you have the ability to buy more real estate, that's another way, and then commodities, gold, and silver, and then you have the Rothschilds and the King of Saudi Arabia who buy art, and yachts. Those are the things they invest in. So these are the kinds of things that you can do as an investment. How are we doing on time? Oh, 25 minutes, okay. I need to get to the end of this. I need to get to the investment part, okay? So this is the difference between stocks and bonds. How do you evaluate what you're going to buy? When you, we're gonna stay away from bonds and when we buy into a company, we're buying a stock. You should act and think like you're a partner in the company. What is the company doing? And you wanna make sure that you look at a couple of things. The most important thing is SWOT. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, okay? Uber has a threat. It's called Lyft, right? You wanna know if you're investing in Uber, what is Lyft going to do? If you're investing in Apple, what is Samsung going to do? What are the strengths of the Apple and are they gonna come out with a watch and do you think people are gonna buy that watch or are they just gonna buy the next iPhone? That's their strength. That's where they go to, okay? So you got strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You should definitely look at those things as you think about a stock, okay? The next thing you're gonna look at is management. Okay, Steve Jobs passed away. Who is Tim Cook? Does he know what he's doing? Okay, that's the Apple CEO, right? So you need to look at the management. Quickly going down the list, you wanna look at their competition, you wanna look at their profit loss. If you can, you wanna look at the value of the company versus the stock you're buying. So is Apple worth $212 a share right now? I do not know. But you should know. Don't just buy it because someone else will come later and you're hoping that you buy it at 212 and someone will buy it at 230. Don't, that's what most people do. Oh, I'll just buy it. I think someone else is gonna buy it at 230 so I'll buy it at 212. Is it worth 212? Because if the market corrects itself, it will be worth 185 and you will lose 30% of your investment. So these are very, very important things. You get caught up in stock market, sort of like a casino, just keep playing and somebody else will come along and you'll take their money. That's not how you should invest. And then the last thing is you should look at tax laws and regulation and acts of law. That's very, very boring stuff but a lot of companies will have disclosures and they'll have things called matters of risk and matters of concern, meaning this law is going to change. So in the airline industry, laws and regulations are very, very crucial to their profits. Their profit margins are thin. So if you're gonna buy an airline stock, you need to know. If you're going to buy a telecommunication stock, you need to know. Uber and Lyft have a lot of regulation going on right now. I don't know what's gonna happen but a lot of countries and cities are getting a little bit tired of this Uber and just Lyft going all over the place, causing congestion and all the stuff they're doing. So that's very important when you look at stock. Risk, all investments involved taking on risk and it's important that you go into the investment in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds with a full understanding that you could lose all of your money in one investment. Okay, so that's my disclaimer for tonight. I'm not giving stock advice, I'm not giving investment advice but this is very, very important. Do you have a quick question? You have to read their financial statements. So every company is audited, there's an annual shareholder report and it requires research. You can go on Wikipedia, you can look up the company, that each company on Wikipedia and Google has a page, click on it, and then it should take you to their financial disclosures. So this is sophisticated stuff. But what I'm trying to stress here is that you need to do the research, your money is on the line and your wealth is on the line, right? Real quick, let me jump back. Okay, one of the things I wanted to show you also is it says notes on risk, see the notation at the top, sec.gov. So Securities Exchange Commission is the regulatory body for all investments in America. And sec.gov has a PDF that all of this comes from. I didn't write all this stuff. I just made copies of it. I'm trying to notate where you can go and do your research. A lot of my next few slides are actually pictures of websites that you can know that the website's there and just click on it and start looking around doing your research. So we're gonna get there. Real quick question. The 10Q, the 10K, matters of risk, matters of concern, that's a very important one. Yeah, they have to disclose it. If they don't disclose it, they'll be fined, levied against the company. And I actually write those for my company. It's very, very sophisticated. So even when they're written, they're very sort of cloaked. They're not just gonna say, hey, we're scared of this going on. They're gonna say it in a very financially cloaked way. Brothers and sisters, let's hold our questions of Patricia, because there's a lot of people on Livestream will go around to like Patricia. And everybody can hear you. Thank you for the reminder. Okay, so we're jumping into investment now. So this is a very, very important graph. This is not the pickup line that your stockbroker's gonna tell you. They're not gonna call you and say, what's your appetite for risk? Because they're trying to sell you stock. They are making money on you invested. So every time you invest, they make a percentage of the stocks, a percentage on the stocks that you buy. So this is the stock risk reward matrix. Sometimes it's a nine box matrix. In this case, it's a 12 box matrix. And it shows you that the more, the farther you go out on this axis, the more reward you want, the more risk you're taking, right? And these are the high risk sectors, right? And so when you look at something like utilities or real estate, they tend to be stable. They tend to be down here in these quadrants. You don't make a lot of money, right? It's not quick money, but it's also not a lot of risk. And then when you get into the NASDAQ funds, the funds that are technology companies that can either make millions of dollars or run out of funding and shut down. That's the dot-coms that come up, come and go, come and go. There were 3,000, I think I mentioned this before, there were three, in a couple of years span between 2011, 2014, there were 3,000 venture capital investments in companies. 39 of them made it. So if you're gonna play ball in that red box, you have to put a lot of money out there to make a little bit of money, right? And venture capitalists want 100 times their return. So when they invest in a company, they want 10 times their return quickly, then they want 100 times, because they're trying to hit it big. So this is a very important graph. So you wanna think about what you want, how you want to play before you start to play. So remember my example, you're on a car lot, you have to know what kind of car you wanna buy. It's very different, the stocks are just like cars. There's so many different products out there. Okay, so we talked about savings, investment. Now we're gonna jump to investment sectors. So you have to know your risk, and you have to know what kind of investment sector you wanna play. Look at that graph on the left. On the far left. That is a spaghetti graph, okay? It shows the volatility of every one of these sectors within a one year timeframe. And the starting point is a year ago. So they all start at the same point and they show you whether that sector went up or whether the sector went down. So some of these sectors here, consumer staples, information technology, healthcare, they averaged and did pretty well. They're in the green, right? The other ones are in the red. So if you pick utilities, you're kind of on the borderline, you pick consumer discretionary real estate. Real estate didn't do too well last year, in the last calendar year of time. So you've gotta know which sector you want to invest in, right? But do you believe in healthcare? Maybe you're a nurse, maybe you're a physician's assistant and you know what's going on. If you're comfortable in that sector, play in that sector. Make your, put your investment in that sector. That's what I meant, I didn't mean play in the sector. And then these are the, every day if you click on this page, CNN Money, I've cited the website. Click on CNN Money, you go down, you see sector performance, every day changes. Every day it's tracked. So decide what sectors. Maybe airlines aren't here, but tends to be that communications, health services, consumer non-durables, these move up and down all the time. Technology services actually went from, while I was putting together PowerPoint, this went from number one to number eight. It just jumps up and down every day, okay? So you've gotta know what your risk appetite is and what you believe in and what you know about. Okay, so now we're gonna start investing. So we can pick a single stock. You can buy a single stock. Most companies, if you have a 401K, they will give you the choice of buying the stock of your company. So if you work for Twitter, you probably get Twitter stock with your paycheck and you can elect how much Twitter stock to do. Or in your 401K, they'll give you a choice for Twitter stock or growth stock and bonds. You'll have a menu of options. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what these different options look like. So this is, so I wanted to give a note here about the Dow Jones. So the Dow Jones and the Standard and Poor's 500 are two thermometers for the economy. That's all they are. They're made up numbers. So Apple, Coca-Cola, Visa, Master Charge, these are the top 30 companies in the world that are part of the Dow Jones industrial average. It was just invented back in the 30s or 40s. It's 30 companies. They put the price of the stock in there and every day they come up with a point number. And everybody looks at, if you listen to the radio, you'd be like, oh, the Dow is up 500 pints a day. The Dow is down 500 points a day. Oh, things are doing good. Trump talked about tariff with China and this thing moves up and down and up and down. And the Dow Jones moves like a roller coaster. You can see from 1997, the purple line is the Dow Jones and that's how it's tracked. So if you put $10,000 into the account in 2000, you'll have something like $60,000 at the very top. So it's gone up six times and that's just the Dow, right? So did those companies become six times more productive? Probably not. It's the price of the stock. Like I said, Apple, you buy Apple at 212. Doesn't mean anything. And someone comes along and wants to buy it at 230. Doesn't mean anything. They just feel like it's worth more. That's just a price. It's become a commodity. So what's happened is that stock trading is like commodity trading. People are just sort of gambling on the casino hoping to make a new buck. So you've got to invest what you believe in. So most companies will give you their stock. So I work for PG&E, Pacific Gas Sector Company. I'm offered their stock or I'm offered a bunch of different funds. I'm offered 23 different funds. And one of the funds is the Dow Jones fund and the Standard and Poor's fund. So it's just a ruler. And it's a composite. They call it a composite fund. It's just like you could buy one donut or you could buy a box of dozen donuts in variety. It's a big box of variety of stocks put together and they show you what it does. It's a standard. So like a ruler and a meter. So this is the Dow Jones. And most 401ks will give you this option. They will give you the Dow Jones growth index option. They will give you that. And you can see that this is a little more aggressive. You see the blue line, the highs are a little higher and the lows are a little lower. It's dipping up and it's dipping down a little bit more than the Dow. And the reason is these Vanguard guys are trying to build their reputation of having a more aggressively managed fund and make more money than the Dow. They're trying to do better than the Dow. They're trying to beat the market but come up with a fund that's just like the market. So now if you wanna buy this, the question is how do I stay away from Riba? If I'm in this, what do I do? So if you click on the page, you'll see that the chart has overview, interactive performance, and the most important ones are at the bottom, at the other side, holdings and costs and fees. So if I click on holdings, you'll see here that this stock at that day, it shows you what it's made up of. So the Vanguard fund is showing you what's inside our fund. And it shows you that it's 100% stocks and no bonds right now. That might change in a few days if they decide to panic and buy some bonds. But right now when you buy it, you should look at this fund and decide whether you want to protect yourself and stay away from interest. This is a good one, right? So you see that the type, it holds cash, has 98% stocks and 1.1% foreign stocks, no bonds. But then if you look at the right side, you've got a little bit of something of a problem here. So it's mimicking the Dow, so it's doing Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, Alphabet, Visa, so it's got Visa in here and it's got Mastercard in here. It also has Home Depot, it has Coca-Cola, it has other things in there, right? That's what they're trying to do. So most of these large, large funds will have some banking in there. They will have banking, it's very difficult to avoid that. The only way to avoid banking and interest in a fund is to actually pick your own stocks and make your own fund. I'll show you how to do that, okay? So this is the thing to do and to teach you guys how to do the research to, inshallah, get going. But this is, a lot of us are limited by what we're allowed to do. Our 401k will only give us, like I said, 23 options, 10 of them are bond, so I'm down to 13 options. One of them's PG&E, so I'm down to 12. So I've got 12 options. I've got to do the best that I can and then do the oba for the rest because if I don't invest a little bit, I'm gonna not have any fund. So I tried to do the best I can. All right, so the next slide, we're trying to get through nine more minutes, so there's a few slides, I wanna get two. Okay, so this is my expertise, right? I'm not pitching my company stock. And actually, if you listen to me, you'll run away from the stock. So in 2009, this stock, 2009, the market crashed. If you look at the red dots that I circled 2009, there's two black dots over here on the very side. I think the ladies, you can see it. If you had $10,000 invested in the market crashed, PG&E was at $9,845. It didn't really go down. It's very, very stable against the market crash. Okay, but the market, the Dow, the S&P, this is against the standard and poor 500, the best 500 companies. Those companies, their $10,000 investment went down to $5,800. You lost 42% of your money by doing nothing. Just sitting there, market crashed, you had a recession. So this stock is anti, it's not volatile like the market. So in times of making money, you don't make a lot of money. PG&E stock doesn't shoot up to the sky. But in times of crashes, it doesn't fall to the ground. So it's not like a roller coaster, it's more stable. So then the other thing that happens with PG&E is that if you decide to invest in only one stock, which I don't recommend, and you're in PG&E stock, you get to 2017 in October and it's doing really, really well, your $10,000 is about 24K and then there's the Napa Fires. The Napa Fires happened in October of 2017. There were 20 fires and the people of Napa decided that they were on a two PG&E for the fires, the fault of the fires. So our stock price went from $70 to $38 and your $24,000 investment went down to $16,000. It's all big loss. So when you invest in only one company, you're susceptible to their risk, you're susceptible to their scandal and you're susceptible to their faults. So you don't want to invest in one company either, right? So this is just a demonstration that you need to learn the next keyword. We learn compound interest, we learn fund. Now we want to learn about diversification. So a fund is diversified. It's like that box of donuts, it's a random selection. So if you want to be in a sector, you want to be in the airline sector, you don't want to just buy continental airlines. You want to buy continental, Delta, United, Virgin Air. You want to buy a bunch of them so that you're safe from one company doing something really bad. If you're in the airline sector and there's an airline crash, they're all coming back. So you've got to be diversified. And also don't be in one sector. So this is just a demonstration. So PG&E is 75% less volatile than the market. We actually have a rating. We know that rating. So if the market goes down, we tend to sort of have a shock absorber. We don't go down as much, we don't go up as much. We have a rating of volatility. So the next one is what I kind of recommend you do is if you want utilities and you like utilities, you believe in utilities, then buy a utility fund. So you can go and get away from the Dow, get away from the S&P and choose the sector you want but have it diversified in the fund. So this is the FUGAX. This is the Fidelity Utility Growth Fund. So again, didn't say bonds, it's about growth. So you're staying away from interest. And this you can see that if you get to 2017, PG&E crashed, but the purple fund still did pretty well. So it's a blend of a lot of utilities, right? So you want to stay away from one stock in one fund. In one sector. So if I prefer utilities, I want to do the utility growth fund. If I want to stay for them from the Dow, I want to stay away from that and pick the utility fund. So that's just one sector. So I showed you the Dow, the S&P, I showed you a utility stock, I showed you a utility fund and I'll show you another one more before we go to Isha. Isha Allah. The next one I wanted to show you and you do the same research. You can click on it, you can see what the holdings are. You can see that there's some companies that are investing in renewable energy, some companies that are utilities, and it's pretty good. I'll show you its performance. Okay, and this one I wanted to show you which is the other way of investing, which is real estate. So there's a fund that you can buy. You don't have to buy a property. A lot of people tell me, I don't have enough money to buy a house and income property. You don't have to have money to buy a house. You could put your 401K if you have the choice and buy a utility fund. I mean, a real estate investment fund. So if you read about it, it'll say to scrappily what it is. The investment seeks a high level of current income. Capital appreciation is a secondary objective. So this fund is actually investing in real estate that gives income. And while the price isn't shooting up, look at this performance. It's actually not very good. You know, it's not doing well. But what you're not understanding on this blue line is while the price isn't going up and down, every month it's giving you a few dollars, every year it's giving you a few dollars. So if you have 50 shares, you're gonna get another five. You're gonna get another four. Every year you're gonna get a few shares of income, okay? So it's not rated as a good fund in terms of its growth, but it's rated as a good fund in terms of its income. And that income leads into that compounding graph. So the more income you get, it's kind of recycled and keeps going, right? So this, you can see here that if you don't want this fund, if you want to stay away from ribba again, you can go to the holdings and decide, you know what? I really like public storage. I know that Americans are really, they like to buy stuff, too much stuff, and then they don't have enough room in their house, so they go and put it in the public storage unit. Once they put it in the public storage unit, do you ever hear of anybody getting rid of their stuff? No, it's a solid investment. I'm just hypothetical. So you can go here and you can decide that I'm just gonna buy these three funds here. I'm not gonna buy the whole fund. I'm just gonna buy the ones that are there. So all the research is there on the internet. You can go and look at it. And so this is what I wanted to demonstrate tonight. This is what I wanted to show you guys and give you an overview for us, how to approach this, how to approach it in a halal way, inshallah, that protect our families, protects us from receiving interest inadvertently, doing our best that we can do in order to invest wisely, and then the baraka and the provision is from Allah. But you're doing your part. You're doing your part with the best intentions. And may Allah protect our families and allow us to earn His pleasure in doing the best that we can to do that. Let's see how I wanted to write on time. How am I doing here? Two minutes, okay, all right? So again, it's a very, very, like I said, stocks should be thought of as an investment in a company. If I came to you and said, give me your money, you're gonna ask me a bunch of questions. Don't just throw your money in stock. And what happens now is that the markets are treated like commodities. So what's happening with these big six banks, investment houses, they are running AI, artificial intelligence. Look at this headline here. Like it's something good, right? The first ever managed fund by a robot is here. So far it's beating the market. So they're trying to tell you that this friendly little robot, you know, it's doing pretty well. He's beating the market. He's not beating the market. This is a rigged game. He's not beating the market. He's beating you. And he will beat you every time. This robot is working 24 hours a day. It's trading in China and Japan right now. And it's front running trades. So you know when you do a Google search and you get like 4.5 billion hits in like a fourth of a second? That's your normal computer. These computers are 20 times faster than that. They're computers. They make on a $10 billion fund, which is average. They make $50 million in a half an hour. Just taking money from somebody else. Buying high, buying low selling, jumping up the price, selling high and getting out. Every day you're seeing this if you watch the market. So this is not a friendly robot. The Time Magazine is deceiving you with these articles. This is not a good thing. So we have to invest from the long term. We have to know what sectors we're in. And we have to protect ourselves and be in solid places so that the companies have standard and solid foundations in what we're doing and believe in that, right? So that's, and also tries to get the income. Don't try to play this price game with this guy. You can't beat him in chess. You're not gonna beat him on the global economic settlements market. If you can't beat him in chess on your computer. There's no way, no way. These are the biggest, most richest people, the smartest people in the world. We do hedging at PG&E, a last note. The hedging statement is mathematically 37 pages. It's impossible for me to read every day. That's how sophisticated this is. Okay, so inshallah, that's the note for the talk. Get started early. There are many investment specialists at work in our community. One of the things I wanna say is if you go and meet a stock broker, make sure they have the heart of a teacher and not the heart of a salesman. Don't let them tell you what to do with your money. Ask them to teach you what you can do, what you should invest in, what's good, and what's the future outlook. If they can't answer the questions in this bottom bullet here, the bold bullet, they need to tell you the benefits, the pitfalls, and the potential scenarios of all your choices. And then there's some bullets down here for the best different online investments. Anyway, inshallah, thank you for your attendance. Inshallah, may Allah protect our provision, our families, and allow us to gain His pleasure. So we're gonna, Bismillah, we're gonna restart, and we're gonna do two questions from the sister side, and then we'll ping-pong back to the brother side, and then we'll keep on going back and forth, inshallah. So I'm gonna just hand the mic over, and look like, I'm just gonna hand the mic over to your sister, and then you can be the moderator. Zakhlehir. Asan, I come to Zakhlehir for this talk. I had one clarification question, and then an additional question. The clarification is when we're talking about real estate investment trust, you said something along the lines of, if you wanna avoid RIBA, you can invest in individual, investment holdings or real estate holdings. I didn't know that there was actually any RIBA involved in real estate investment trust, and if you could speak to that. Is it open, is it open? I just wanted to make it clear that most investment in real estate is done through loans. So those companies are financing all their properties that they're buying through loans. Right, so raise the volume. Okay, so I wanted to make it clear, jumping to the Aberdeen Fund, and again, I wanted to introduce you guys to Vanguard, Fidelity, Aberdeen. These are all companies that have products. So this is the real estate fund, Aberdeen, and the holdings there, most of the companies are buying public storage when they finance a new facility. They're buying it through financing through loans and banks. Everybody's financing, working cash, every company's doing that. But on your side, your transaction, you're looking for income, right? So you have to do the best you can for that. So I'm saying that if you're, my point was if you're not comfortable with some of the financing options that are there, you can go to the specific company and just select the companies that you want. But you'd have to open up your own Ameritrade account, and this is why I showed the last one. So if you look at the last bullets on the bottom, these are the companies that you can go online and build your own 401K and your own fund from. So if you wanna buy public storage and you wanna buy an airline stock and you wanna diversify, you would go there and pick your own individual stocks. You don't have to buy from Aberdeen, you don't have to buy their mix of funds. So this online brokerage TD Ameritrade, they allow you to actually pick stocks that you want to pick individually. So you do your research here and you decide, well, I think I went back too far. You decide that you want two or the three of those and not all of them. So you don't buy the Aberdeen fund, you can just go and select the stocks you want and put them in your TD Ameritrade account. That's how you would do it, to try to do it yourself. Does that answer your question? It does just suck love for her. I hadn't considered looking at their expense sheet to kind of see how much they were paying in interest, for instance, as an indication of how halal an investment could be. You can see their debt ratio. So there's an equity debt ratio with a lot of companies and there's usually, some companies and some industries have a higher equity ratio and you can stay away from, if you do your part, you can stay away from more leverage companies, more debt companies that carry more debt. Does anybody else wanna? So like a quick question. So my school district offers a 403B, but it's a huge list of different ones and I have no idea which one to choose. So yeah, you will get a selection of funds. So bonds are bonds, we're there on. And then if you eliminate those, you'll probably have, I'm guessing a selection of usually somewhere 40 or below funds. And then they'll usually have a couple of key words in them and if you go back to this, the reason why I showed you the names is if you go back to Vanguard, you'll see that usually they have a name and then they have growth index. So growth index means it's focused on the growth of stocks and it's index money, it moves up and down with their price. And then the other one is utility. This is a utility, I think this is utility mutual funds. Utility mutual funds, so this is a utility index. So you use those terms, if you look at your funds at your 403B, you'll have a selection. And in that they'll say high cap, meaning large companies, high, what's cap? Market cap, it's how much the stock, the company's overall stocks are worth. So there's high, medium, and low. Then you'll have those for index funds and then you'll also have something that says international bond funds and you'll eliminate those. And then it'll also say international currency funds and you probably don't wanna mess with international currency exchanges. So you wanna focus on the growth and index funds if you're a 401 3B. If you have questions, you can then set up an appointment. I do some financial counseling one-on-one here and one year and I'm gonna set up my appointments. So once a month I come in for a couple hours and I meet with folks. So I'm not giving investment advice, again. But I try to help folks out, try to decipher what to do and help them make more and more decisions. Okay, thank you so much. Just don't forget. My brothers? Yes. So in the same line, most companies, they have debt, right? So, but as a stock investor into that company, does that contributing to Riva? The company is, the company is involved in interest. They're charging interest, they're gaining interest, all their funds, everything, all their accounts are gaining interest every day. Working cash is gaining interest every day. There's nothing you can do to avoid that. If you invest in a company, you will have to look at their bank statement and you'll see that they have debt. So along the same line, actually most of the company also invest their money in stocks and buy back, right, plans. And sometimes they invest really, even technology companies, they invest their money, right, which is more of an interest gain. So can you shed some light whether this will be a halal investment if you buy a stock from those companies, even technology companies? Even technology? Well, you have to look at their holding. So some companies will invest heavily in Visa and MasterCard. That's where they put their money. Some companies will invest in gambling and casinos. So you have to do your own part. I can't tell you what to do. I can't make a patois. But you have to do the research that you can. I know for 25 years I've worked in utilities. Our debt equity ratio is 45 to 55%. And our cash, working cash, is usually just invested in money market. Our checking accounts just gain interest from the banks that hold them. Our bank is Melon Bank in New York. That's all we do. We're not going out putting our working cash and making it work for us by buying casino stocks and buying liquor stocks. That's not what we're trying to do. So I feel pretty confident about telling you about that. Again, I'm not pushing my company stock, but different industries have different things that they do. That's a very conservative industry. We're heavily regulated and we're not allowed to play with the money to try to make more money. We're trying to provide a service of electricity and gas in a very safe way. We also do some hedging, but the hedging is not betting. It's just trying to build a base of gas electricity so that we don't have rate shocks when there's hurricanes and things like that. So I can tell you from my experience that that's what's happening in the utility industry. You can go in a company, there's a Lazarus fund and it invests in windmills and solar farms. So if that's something that you feel is pretty safe and that's where their project development costs are, that's where the capital is, that's pretty good. You're avoiding a company that's playing with alcohol, casino and gambling and things who are gaining a lot of interest, leveraging things like that. Another example would be like real estate. Are they paying interest for their properties but not engaging in putting their money in all these other stocks? So tech stocks actually buy a lot of companies. So Google, Microsoft, Apple are buying tons of small companies. They have so much cash, they have to keep buying companies. So are they buying companies like that? Are they diversifying into alcohol and gambling and things like that that you don't want to be involved in? So that's all I can say. Otherwise, I mean, zero is very impossible. So there are some companies that are trying to, they're trying to do it the halal way and come up with a way of saying this is the most halal, the least interest in the least problematic things that are in their accounts is possible. But those companies, I don't know the name of the companies. There's some different ventures out there that are doing that. Another, can I answer that question? I had a question. So, what does Islam say about investing in cryptocurrency and also buying cryptocurrency? No comment. I'm not giving any patois or I'm just giving analysis of stocks. So I'm not gonna comment on that. I think that the sisters, I'll come back. Peace be upon you. Peace be upon you too. So given the fact that we live here in the barrier where house prices are very expensive, so if one was to wait until we save enough money to buy 800,000 or $1 million home, it might take us until we retire. So we'll be renting and paying for someone else. So then we kind of force if we wanna live here to take a loan and pay interest. So is this considered as rebound? Paying interest on a mortgage is a river. Okay, you guys are cool. There is an alternative. I've seen a presentation from Guidance Financial and there's also Universal, UIF and Amin Housing. Those three names I will say because I do know that they're, I know that people who are really specialist in Halal contracts and evaluating the way the contracts are written actually have approved these three institutions and they have a Sharia compliant lending program which is based on co-ownership. So you and the bank, you put down a down payment of 30%. The bank puts down 70%. You co-own the property just like your father would own 70%. And then you buy back the shares based on a formula which is not based on interest. So it's called the co-ownership declining balance buy back program. I know that's a mouthful. Co-ownership declining balance buy back program. So there's a couple of things. University, Guidance, Amin. Like I give you. University, Guidance, Amin. UGI, UGI. University, Financial is one. Guidance. Oh, it's a separate company. Yeah, Guidance. Guidance, Financial is another. You just have to Google Sharia, Notipa, Guidance, Financial or University, UIF. University, something UIF. And then the last one is Amin, Housing, Cooperative. Okay. Exactly. So those are the three that I would recommend for staying away from mortgages. Sorry, and I would actually advise against Amin Housing having got out of them, but that's another story. My other question to, oh, sorry. This other question in terms of, you know, is there a way of like cleansing, like potentially a percentage of the income that comes in, you know, that you can estimate from Riba and then giving that away to be, you know, to take precautions against having that, you know, way on you, right? When you're investing that may be like, you know, once a year at some point in time assessing what's the percentage of investment in a particular, you know, mutual fund from in, you know, in banking or credit card industry and then what percentage of, you know, gains have you had and then giving that away as a way to. I don't know the ruling on that. You can talk to Imam Tahir who's affiliated with the mosque or Sheikh Rami, if you have a specific question. You know, those numbers are very, like knowing how much of what stocks you've bought and how much of that could be problematic income and then figuring out what to do with that problematic income to give it away so that it's not on your, you know, on your record with Allah, that's not what I can tell you. But I can tell you that if you want that kind of guidance, you should probably set up a meeting with Imam Tahir and stuff and figure out a plan for your zakat and Sadat on top of your zakat so that you can get that income out of your wealth. Hi, I have a quick question for some of the website and you're gonna buy a stock like Yahoo Finance. There are like quite a few value like price per earning, earning per stock, you know, it's like so many information. So do you know, you know, which, which value are more important and you're gonna check, you know, the stock and you know, if you wanna buy it, if you wanna invest on that, you know, is there any like four or five parameter that you check that and you get the idea, you know, how a company is doing? Yeah, so the most important number is the price earnings ratio, P-E ratio, it's price over earnings and then their dividend payout. So every company has a policy, a stated policy and a history of what their earnings and profits are and then based on those earnings and profits, how much shares they give to their employees and bonus plans and how much money they return to the shareholders in terms of dividend income. So you wanna look for, again, growth is, is you buy a $50 per stock and you're hoping it's gonna be $70, right? And the income is that that company's $50 stock gives you a $2 dividend every year. So if you buy a hundred shares, you're gonna get $200, $2,000, you know, in dividend income every year, you get that reinvested and compounded. So price earnings ratio and dividend payout are very important and then risks, you know, a lot of people don't like regulation and they don't like taxation. Those things determine the future of companies very, very dramatically. And so those are things that in the industry they try to look at. So you've got a couple of those things. Each, if you go to Fidelity, they'll do a research on each company. Like when I tell you to click on, let's say Yahoo, you can go on Yahoo and actually look at their stats and their balance sheet and you can see the Wall Street writeup by different Wall Street. So Fidelity will have a writeup on Yahoo and it will say, this stock is a buy, hold, or sell for the next quarter, for the next year. So they're giving you investing advice and then you can read that and decide if you believe it or not, if you think it's reasonable. So every stock has a buy, buy, buy, you can look at every stock and say, is it a buy, sell, or hold and then read its risks and they'll actually write up for you. So one of my cousins works for Fidelity and he's a manager in the utility and airline sector. And every day his job is to make sure he's doing the writeups for all the utility companies, utility funds, and airline companies and funds. That's his job. So you can go and read the Wall Street writeups at those companies and that's a good way to go. And once you start reading them, you'll get better at sort of understanding what they're saying and why they're saying it. They should tell you why it's a buy. They'll tell you why it's a sell and just decide that. But if you invest, you should be investing and then reviewing every quarter. If you're going to actively manage your investments, you should be reviewing them every quarter. You don't want to look at them daily up and down. That will just give you a heart attack. So, Shah. Is there another question? Yeah, Islaman, come right here. Welcome, Islaman. So there's been a little bit of talk about market correction and I think you mentioned that earlier. So I just have a two-part question. So number one, what is a market correction? And number two, in your opinion, which cap, large cap, small cap, will be the safest bet when it comes to market correction if it happens? Again, this is assuming, this is your personal opinion and that was my question. So things can't go up forever. You see that graph there? There's actually a line, a red line that you might not have noticed. That's called the 50-day D.A.M. The 50-day average price, D.A.M. So it's taking the volatility out and it's taking an average of the last 50 days price. Every day, it takes the last 50 days. So that red line is trending. You see how it goes up and down? The red line stays the same. But now look at it go into the top. Can things just go up forever where the average, every day's price is going up and the average stays going up forever? A lot of people will tell you in the financial news that we're in some kind of a bubble. So meaning things are overly inflated. And so we have to determine, individually, you have to determine who you're gonna listen to and what you believe. So right now, the Dow Jones has been dropping from 26.9 a couple of weeks ago to 25,000. So it's lost 2,000 points or about 7% of the market. So some people are really, really worried that this is a, you know, is it a small earthquake or is it just the beginning of a very big landslide? And where's the market going to go? So you have to make that determination. You have to read the different sectors. One of the reasons why I chose the utility sector, which is here, is to show you that graph, this one right here. In 2000, I wanted to make sure that this graph showed you 2009. Our company is rated as a negative 74% volatility with the market. Meaning if the market goes up one, drops one point, we will only drop 20 points. We're a little bit safer. And the different sectors I wanted to show you, you know, in our investment sectors is there's stocks, there's real estate, and there's different industrials and commodities. So my answer to your question is, you need to be on this graph as well, right? You need to go back to the 12 matrix box right here. And any financial advisor will tell you that 50% of yours should be in the lower four boxes. Medium to low. And then 30% of your investments should be in the medium. And 10% you play with. So you know, you're trying to play with 10% to really hit a home run. So you should have, you know, utility stocks, real estate stocks. One of the stocks that does really well in recession times is consumer durables. So people stop buying, you know, stop buying Tesla stock and they start buying rice, bread, meat. They stop going out to dinner and they start buying stateless. So Nabisco, those kinds of stocks tend to do well. And I put those sectors in this, where's the sector graph? That's the next one right here. So all these different sectors are what you believe. So my question to you, you can ask me a question, I'll ask you a question back. Which sectors do you think are the safest in the time of recession? I gave you an answer. Consumer consumables. They don't do that well now but they might be doing pretty well later. And investor confidence is also big. If everybody freaks out, wants to take their money out of the market, it will collapse. You have to keep your money in there. So it depends on how much confidence you think that people have with the outlook of the future. And politics plays a lot of point in that. And you know, we have a lot of disagreement on politics right now. What's happening with China? So I can't answer all those questions. You have to make those individual decisions yourself and see what you feel. I will give you a shocking stat though that right now the markets are trading that two and a half times the revenue of all the companies in them. Okay, so if the companies are making a trillion dollars in a year, that's the gross value of what the companies are making. The market is right now trading at $2.5 trillion. So it's two and a half times multiple of what the revenue of the company is in it. That's not good fundamental economics but you can still make money. So that's the thing, that's where the casino and commodity part of it comes in. It's very, to me that's, if you look at the books, that's alarming. If I said give me a million dollars, I wanna make, I only make $100,000 of revenue a year, but I want two and a half million dollars from you as an investment. You're probably not gonna invest in my company. Right? But that's the way the markets are trading, right? Did I answer your question? Whose question was that? I have a question, I don't know about you. And I don't know how what the time is you wanna, for your life. Okay. Thank you for the information, very helpful. So going back to the topic of what's permissible and what is Sharia compliant, I was wondering if there is a list of Sharia compliant stocks and the same for a list of Sharia compliant investments. I don't know if you have that information handy or if it's available somewhere that can be pointed out too so we can do more research. Going back to your statement of looking in investment funds, right? But go down to the sectors, go down to the company specifically, do your homework because no company is gonna be without interest. Let's face it, right? It's a primary source of income, primary business that we need to look at, and then do your homework. But I was wondering if there is something out there already today that you can find us too. So there was a startup that I know of that was trying to rate stocks by their halalness rating. So they were looking at doing all this research and making sure that the stocks were interest and if the minimal amount of interest, no casino, no gambling, no pornography, those kinds of things. So there was a startup that was doing that. They couldn't get the accounts international so they didn't do well. But actually I was having a conversation with someone today who told me that there's a company that just raised $40 million because they have that financial model and they were able to have international accounts. I will find out the name of that company and I will actually post it on the event update. So I'll hope to get that in a week, okay? So there's a lot of Muslims who want that model. It's just, can someone do that model and get funded? There is a company out there. I can't remember what it's called. Brother, that's me again. So for an IRA account or a 401K, do we have a way to sell everything and just leave it as cash? Just because we don't want everything to be wiped out but we just leave it as cash? So some of them have that option. So they will let you sell your, so 401K is based on 401K, which is a law. It's a legislation and you have to, if you put your money in a 401K account, you cannot withdraw it until you're 59 and a half and then you have to pay taxes on it as income but you get to avoid the taxes while you put it in there. Some of those funds have the ability to park your fund, sell your fund and put it in cash. Some of them don't. They actually recommend you do it in bonds. That's what the investment community thinks like, why would you want to put it in cash? That's crazy. You're gonna put it in cash and not put it in a bond? So they deal an interest and they think it's crazy to have something that's just cash. So a lot of them don't give that option, but some do and it just depends. I cannot remember if my company allows me to do that. I can't remember. So yeah, I was asking that because I had IRA account with speedality that I just roll over but I didn't know that I could leave it there as a cash so I place it and now I'm losing then they told me, oh, you could have left it as cash. And for those who don't know the acronym, IRA is individual retirement account and it's also, there's a law and there's a class of funds that allows you to avoid taxes and put it in there. So you rolled over your IRA to another account but you could have left it in cash. Yeah, and that would have been a, well, timing the market. You could still do that. Oh, there's a question. What about investing in commodities? I mean, it's a way to avoid rip up, commodity markets. You can invest in commodities but they move up and down like that spaghetti graph and you are not in control of what's going on. So rice, heating oil, gold, silver, all those things you can invest in. And you have to make a decision. So just on gold and silver, you can buy an electronically traded fund which is based on the gold and silver price or you can buy physical gold and silver. Like have $1,000 of silver coins, have $10,000 of gold by jewelry but then you have to pay zakat on it. So yeah, that's one way to diversify really well. I mean, there are people that will tell you that you should have some gold, some silver, some mutual funds and some food stored in your house. That's really well diversified. If you're really worried, does that answer your question? So I was gonna get back to that sister's suggestion of living money as cash in IRA account. Then it won't be investing, right? You wanna take advantage of the investing, the time value of money. So obviously putting in a fund or a stock would be investing. But her suggestion was this graph here in 2009, if you would have parked it in cash for about two years rather than ride the blue line, you would have been way better off and then you put the cash back on the blue line or the purple line. Yeah, but that's... So you take it out of the stock, keep it in cash, hold it while the market goes down. But again, you're timing it. You're saying, I believe that I'm gonna do it. So then you lose out on what the brother is saying, which is, if you put in cash in the IRA and stocks are still growing, then you've basically given up the chance for that to grow. Yeah. Okay. Right, yeah. Yeah, so you're a month too late. So I was gonna add, there's other options for IRA, which is self-director IRAs, which gives you a lot more flexibility on different types of investment you can do as well, if somebody chooses to. And there's a lot of good brothers in the Muslim community that are certified financial analysts. They have companies, you can get their cards from MCC and go meet with them and they'll do the whole financial planning for you. They'll do IRA, there's college funds, there's 401K funds. And they'll tell you the tax. I personally have a hard time with taxation policy. It's not my favorite thing to read. So they are really up on the tax laws. That's what their expertise is far beyond mine. I know one brother, his company's name is Total Wealth Management. He, I attended his presentation. So he has ideas about Halal investing. So somebody might check him out. I personally do not invest with him as a disclaimer. Any other questions? I think that's a wrap up. Okay, well, thank you all for your attendance. Inshallah, this is helpful, hopefully helpful. Yes.