In today's episode, Tyler kicks off the week with an action-packed VRA Podcast filled with all-time highs and market-moving headlines. He dives into the latest news in the AI and semiconductor race, and what it means for the future of the innovation revolution. He also recaps sector performance on the year, and why an unloved sector, Gold miners, continue to lead the way. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Monday afternoon everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a fantastic weekend out there and a great start to your week this week as well.

You know, when you start your week off with all time highs, it it’s really tough to have a bad start to your week and we got them in spades today from a number of areas. So we’ve got a lot to dive into here. Got an exciting podcast here today again. I mean when you got a day with this many all time highs, it’s tough not to have a good Monday here.

So quickly. We’ll break it down what we’re looking at here today as we got some big news overnight from the semiconductors and the AI race, which I’ll get to here in a second. That certainly helped with the all time highs today. We also had one of our favorites out there, Tesla, with a big teaser overnight. So we’ll speculate a little bit about that as well. You know, big potential, big announcement coming tomorrow and the stock reacted nicely today as well. But even outside of the tech space and some of our favorite names, some of our favorite sectors got all time highs a day as well, you might be able to guess what some of those are. As I already hinted, outside of the tech space, you know, really not going to get a whole lot of love from these areas from the financial mainstream media.

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And I’ll cover that a of lot a little bit more in detail towards the end of the podcast. And then of course, yeah, today now makes what, five or six days since the government shutdown began. You know, our good friend Wayne Allen Root has said on a show last week I heard him say this for the first time, but he said it for years now. You know, a new KISS acronym, you know, instead of Keep it simple stupid for the government, Keep it shut stupid. And could he, he couldn’t be more right there, especially if you’re a market watcher. If you’re heavily invested in this market, you do want the government to say stay shut down. So I’ll cover a few reasons for that as well here. So with all of that said again, great podcast here for you today, let’s go ahead and jump right in with with the semiconductor news and AI news that I mentioned earlier as OpenAI always in the headlines here.

You’re the makers of Chat GPT and of course they rolled out their, their short video platform over the weekend as well to a little bit of controversy in there. But hey, this is once again proving we are in the wild west of capitalism here. Because there was all types of, you know, what people are speculating will be infringements on copyright deals because they just. It really was a wild west scenario as people were creating these AI videos of all of their favorite shows. You know, but in their own way, whether it was south park or even kids shows like spongebob, they really all over the place with these videos here and users creating whatever they wanted with, with those characters. And just, you know, the few clips that I saw were pretty well done. So some impressive tech there once again from OpenAI. You know, maybe not necessarily our favorite AI platform out there, but hey, you know, to each their own.

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If y’all have a favorite AI platform that you prefer to use, you know, go ahead and leave it in the comments, email it to us. And you know, hey, while you’re there, go ahead and like and share this podcast to all of your friends out there. You know, we’ve beaten the markets here in 18 out of 21 years at the VRA. You know, all that’s to do with Kip. I joined him about seven to eight years ago. But why not share it with your friends here? Because it’s not a zero sum game here in the market. We want to help make everyone money out there. It’s one of our passions here at the VRA is serving retail investors.

You know, Wall street for so long has taken advantage and manipulated retail investors. And I talked about this briefly on Wayne’s show last week as well. This, that now the retail investor has more tools at their disposal than ever. And we want to help people to use those tools to beat Wall street, to beat the markets year in and year out. That’s our goal here every day. You know, one of Wayne’s guests last week was talking about 1971, when Nixon took us off the gold standard, and what a terrible day it was for the American citizens and, and what a great day it was for Wall Street. He went on to say, you know, if. If energy, essentially what we did, if money can be looked at as energy, which I think is actually a very good comparison there, when you take the dollar off of the gold standard, or any standard for that matter, essentially what you’re saying is now you have infinite energy to do with whatever you wish.

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And, you know, the money printer is not stopping anytime soon. We’re getting all time high after all time high in money supply. Which is why we’ve said for years, since the bare market lows of 2022, that you must own inflationary assets. That’s exactly what we teach people to do here. And just quickly, inflationary assets does mean stocks, whether that’s individual companies or your favorite ETFs. Then of course it means precious metals, gold, silver, physical gold and silver. And of course more stocks in there as well. The gold miners, uh, then again hard assets like real estate in this environment and of course the new kid on the block cryptocurrencies specifically.

Our favorite continues to be Bitcoin, which I’ll get to here in a little bit, but hit another all time high here today. So you know, again like share comment all of the above on your favorite platform here. We love hearing from you and you know, if you’ve got any requests for you know, stocks to look at, markets to look at, screen shares that you want to see, got some great screen shares coming up for you here as well in today’s podcast. So anything you want to see, send it over our way and we’ll be sure to take a look at it and and you know, just maybe you might see it here on the podcast as well. So back to the big news overnight and over the weekend, OpenAI and chip designer AMD announcing a massive partnership. Another one here for Open AI. You know that there multiple that we’ve seen in less than a month here, another one I’ll touch on here in a second but this one is for the purpose purchase of 6 gigawatt worth of computing power using AMD’s Instinct series AI GPUs. Now this rollout won’t even start until the second half of next year, the second half of 2026.

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But that didn’t stop AMD from rallying, you know, over 30% in pre market trading and finishing up on the day 23.71%. Take a look at that chart there and you know a big one here and I’ll touch on this more in a second. Didn’t even get to all time highs yet today that we look at as very bullish as new highs beget new highs. So when you’ve got some of the largest chip makers out there getting right back up to that point again, new all time highs are not a bearish occurrence. Once you get to blue sky territory and no one has a loss in the company, that’s when the party really begins for a company like AMD here. So great day for amd. Another part of this deal that I found interesting was that OpenAI will also receive warrants to purchase up to 160 million shares of AMD potentially a 10 stake in the company of exercise here, you know, and throughout the day to day, whether it was in financial, mainstream media, articles or on tv, you know, this was a lot of talk of this is a direct challenge to Nvidia to this is, you know, competition for Nvidia. What could this mean for Nvidia? All of it, right? But for Nvidia, no press is bad press.

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And generally, generally speaking, right. As you likely know, we here at the VRA are big fans of Nvidia. We’ve been long since mid April of this year after the April lows. So first I would say this is not bearish for Nvidia in any way. No matter how you want to spin this, no matter how the mainstream is trying to spin this. So back to the OpenAI deals. Remember Nvidia just signed a massive deal with OpenAI as well, not even a month ago. It was signed on September 22 to be exact and it’s much, much larger than this AMD deal is.

So Nvidia might have finished slightly lower on the day today. Let me just double check where it finished at. Down just over 1%, you know, still just below its all time highs. But Nvidia’s yield compared to open AI or compared to AMD’s. As I just said, AMD’s deal doesn’t begin until the second half of 2026 and it’s for 6 gigawatts of computing power. Well, Nvidia’s deal was much larger in terms of compute scale. One it begins IM began immediately and represents at least 10 gigawatts, at least 10 gigawatts of computing power and millions of Nvidia GPUs. So at this point, you know, we don’t even look at this as a Nvidia AMD story.

This is an innovation revolution story here. There’s certainly more room for competition. You know, this is not a zero sum game for this. And when you look at this chart of Nvidia or AMD again this market cap is slightly lower usually from stock charts. That’s less than one tenth the size of Nvidia. Nvidia’s market cap is over 4 and a half trillion compared to 330 billion now still a massive company here in AMD. But point being there’s plenty of room in this space for, for more competition. And again that just makes it makes us more bullish here.

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You know, really we see this as early innings of the innovation revolution meets roaring 2020s meets Trump economic miracle 2.0. Any other administration you know, specifically if Kamala had gotten it, do you think these kinds of deals would be announced? With chip production coming over here to the US a lot of these facilities really ramping up their delivery times for when these will be built. And those deals seem to be taking place every day here now. So at the end of the day, again this just makes us more bullish on semiconductors, on the AI race as a whole. A kind of rising tide lifts all boats. Right? Think about what this will do for companies who are the actual chip producers because Nvidia and AMD are or chip designers, they have to go outside sources to make these things. You’ve got companies like Taiwan Semi who’s also working on plants here in the US flying under the radar compared to these companies. Then you know, another one, asml who doesn’t make these chips directly, but whose equipment is directly used in the manufacturing of both AMD and Nvidia chips.

So now we’re talking about millions and millions of more chips being made. Again, nothing but bullish for this space. So you know there will be many winners going forward. That’s how we view this. We like owning leadership here. So that means owning the biggest company out there, which is Nvidia. Again, the largest public company, not just for the semis, but in the world with an over four and a half trillion dollar valuation. We’re not far off folks from seeing a $10 trillion valuation on companies.

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And once that first company crosses that threshold, many will follow from there. Like next topic here, one of our favorite names probably the, what we have said is the name to own for the innovation revolution, Tesla over the weekend. Well first let me just take a step back there. You know, so many people miss the broader part of this story in Tesla. You know, a lot of people until just recently and still to this day really view Tesla is just a car company. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. And that’s why they have such a premium compared to other car companies out there. Was Tesla’s valuation day just shy or right at one and a half trillion? Just over one and a half trillion.

I mean they’re make, they’re working on making their own chips as well to be going into their products. But of course outside of cars you have robotics, with Optimus you have the AI which really for real world use, case on AI, there’s no one out there who competes with what Tesla is doing right now. They have millions and millions of hours of data to pour through from the road, from actual drivers on the road every Single Tesla out there is a data collection machine that is going to be invaluable to trading at training FSD, which version 14 just launched here. So, so many reasons to own this stock. But back to the speculation here, you know, tease a new product launch for tomorrow here, you know, speculation is that it could be, you know, the new roadster which will be really the fastest vehicle on the road, zero to 60. You know, there’s all kinds of stuff out there though. Could it be for the Cyber Cab, is that finally going to roll out hopefully here in Austin, Texas or some speculation about much more outside the box kind of stuff. Drone tech has been whispered about, other vehicle models, upgrades to these models.

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Kip has talked about that. A lot is here as well. And I mean even on the Tesla battery side of things, that’s another one that I didn’t mention earlier. Kip talked about this on a podcast last week. When you have nuclear ramping up or even if you’re a fan of solar, right, which I do think is not there yet as far as viable technology goes because you don’t have the storage capacity for it. So Tesla batteries become even more essential if they win the race there. I mean all of these things that we just mentioned, from batteries to Optimus to FSD and of course different vehicle models each of these, what could those companies be valued at if they were spin offs the AI aspect of it? I mean some of Those fetch a 2 to 3 trillion dollars valuation in just a few years on their own. So we think Tesla is definitely in the running for the first $10 trillion company out there.

Now of course, execution means everything here, but Elon, you know, when he, when the, the chips are stacked against him, you don’t want to bet against Elon Musk. So again, so many exciting reasons to own this stock here, really. We’ll, we’ll stay tuned. We’ll, we’ll comment on it more here tomorrow as well. So off to our markets on the day again, multiple all time highs here from the small caps. We got an all time high in the NASDAQ closing high in the S&P 500. And just before I get to that, I do want to share this here as well. You know, the fear and greed index finally creeping back up into greed mode after, you know, weeks, weeks on end, closing in this neutral, neutral, neutral phase here.

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Now we have seen a slight increase in bulls from the AAII survey, but nothing like you would say is irrational exuberance, right? Nothing like that at all. And we’ve got a new One here for you today, the Schwab Stacks index. Move this down a little further. This is a new one here for us. We’ll start to monitor it a little bit more here. You know, doesn’t go back that far compared to some of the other indicators. But look at this. I mean, that was 2020.

Obvious. Big system, big bullish readings there. So just a quick, you know, definition of what this one is based off of Schwab Zone website, a higher stack score, which is this indicator right here, indicates that Schwab clients. So not the whole market. Right. Our net buyers of equities, if it’s low, it may be more bearish, signaling net selling from their clients. And again, potential bearishness. Look how low we are compared to where we were in the 2020-2021 time frame.

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You know, we talk about this here a lot. You don’t see big tops in a bull market until everyone out there is bullish. When you start getting sock tips from your, your cab driver, from your Uber driver, you know, at a restaurant, getting stock tips just from people you don’t even know. During this time frame, from 2020 and into 2021, man, we were getting calls and texts every day talking about, you know, what stocks do you want to own here? What do you think about this new IPO? What do you think about NFTs, right? Just a few years ago in 2021, in 2020, NFTs of literal digital rocks were going for millions of dollars. At the time, everyone was saying, you know, this is going to go on forever. That’s the sign of a market top. And this tells us right here, you’re just nowhere near those levels. Which means that pullbacks will remain buying opportunities here.

Absolutely. So, folks, it’s fun, fun to be here in the market. We’ll continue to look at every DIP as a buying opportunity. And you know, on the other side of that, a lot of people say buy the dip, sell the rip. Well, we’re not day traders here. You know, we’re opportunity traders. And you know, we use the VRA investing system to time our ETF trades. And with those profits, we dollar cost average into our VRA10 baggers.

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If you have any questions about what that looks like, if you’re not a member already, come and join us. We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on@vra letter.com for, for free for two weeks. You get access to everything the VRA has to offer. That’s our daily updates, that’s our VRA portfolio. That’s our special reports in there as well, which we’re working on some new ones as we head in to Q4 of this year now, which we are now in and just wrapped up an incredible Q3 where we beat the market once again. On track now to make 19 out of 22 years that we’ve beaten the market. Just so I don’t get these numbers wrong, I’ll pull them up here for you one time. Where we’re at for the VRA portfolio as the end of Q3 has wrapped up, you know, the Nasdaq was our best performing major index on the year.

And I think if you talk to a lot of Wall street analysts in the March to April time frame around tariff mania, if you told them that the Nasdaq would be wrapping up Q3 with double digit gains, you would have been laughed out of the room. That’s exactly what we were saying at the time, especially when Trump made the pivot and we started buying stocks shortly after that. But now through Q3, the NASDAQ up 17.3%, the VRA portfolio up 41.8%. And we’re not done yet. Right. A lot of money managers might take the rest of the year off after this, but as I said at the beginning of this podcast, that’s not who we’re here for. We’re here for the everyday retail investors, for our new clients as well. We want to help you crush Mr.

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Market. That’s who we’re here for day in and day out is the everyday investor out there. And so again, come and join us. We want to work with you here at the vra. All right, back to the market action here on the day today. We were actually led earlier in the session by small caps, which did hit an all time high today. We want to see more outperformance from the small caps. And a quick reminder here that when the Fed cuts rates after the first rate cut over the next six months, small caps tend to outperform large caps by roughly 5 to 7%.

So that’s what we want to see here. Russell 2000 again was leading earlier in the day today finished up 4/10 of 1%.2486 Next up here, the Nasdaq hitting an all time high today, up 7/10 of 1% at 22,941. I’ll quickly show this chart here. And the main point is that after pullbacks like this that we saw there, again, this is an example of buy the dip. This was not a particularly large pullback right Two and a half percent. Yet it had enough power to keep investors bearish. And now we’re really not at extreme overbought on steroids anymore, especially not on money flow. Right.

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This is an opportunity here. Yes, we’re back to all time highs, but that’s an example of what buy the dip looks like and what we really like to see. I’ll go back to small caps here, which again, all time high there. Look at this, not overbought on steroids at all here. Still a buying opportunity in our view for this group. And again, it’s tough to buy stocks when they’re at all time highs. But there’s rarely a better time if you’re not in the market than all time highs. Again, all time highs are not a bearish call currents for the market.

All right, to wrap up here for our major indexes, the s and P500 an all time closing high, just shy of its all time intraday high. Let me just double check that one, make sure nothing funny happened there at the close. Yeah, just below the all time high from Friday at the peak today, you know, 50 cents a dollar away from it or point away from it. And then the Dow Jones did finish lower on the day to day down just over 1/10 of 1% at 46,694. You know, again, I’ll say this, I’ve said it a few times now, but based on VRA system readings, you know, we’re still in a buy the dip mode here with room to run for really all of our major indexes before we hit that extreme. Our most extreme overbought distinction, which we call extreme overbought on steroids. And here’s another factor here when you’re looking at that. Okay, stocks above the 50 day moving average and above the 200 day moving average.

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Just 61.4% of stocks in the S P are above the 50 day 67.4 are above the 200 day moving average. You know, if you never looked at this indicator, that might sound like a decent amount. We’re nowhere near overstretched by any means until these readings get into the 80s, really mid-80s will remain long and strong. And then we start to see those again. Extreme greed on the fear and greed AAI bulls outweighing bears in the 50 to 60% range for bulls for weeks and potentially months on end when markets start going up like this. You know, again, there’s nothing more bullish than a market that gets overbought and stays at overbought levels. And briefly here I’LL recap what I said earlier about the government shutdown. As Wayne Root said, kiss keep it shut.

Stupid has us very bullish here. In five of the last six shutdowns the markets moved higher. We’re now on pace for six out of seven here. The last and most recent shutdown was in Trump’s first term where the S&P 500 returned over 10% during the 35 day shutdown from 2018 and I believe that was into 2019 as well. But it didn’t stop there as over the next 12 months the S P returned over 24%. So again, very bullish here for the markets and we can’t forget we just wrapped up Q3. So Q3 earnings are just on the horizon here. Those will kick off next week with the big banks towards the end of next week and then after that we’ll start to kick into high gear.

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So make sure you’re subscribed for the VRA Investing Podcast will always recap biggest earnings here every day at the market close. Next up, looking at our internals on the day, I’ll quickly kind of start to wrap up here. You know not pretty good numbers here from our internals. The S&P 500 did finish negative advanced decline on the day today but we came in positive on the NASDAQ 52E highs lows blew it out of the water. A combined roughly 709 stocks hitting 52 week highs 2 to just 119 stocks hitting 52E lows and volume also coming in positive for the NYSE and even better on the NASDAQ as you might expect but roughly 70% upside volume for the NASDAQ today. Next up here are sectors. We finished with 7 out of our 11 sectors higher on the day with 3 all time highs here we had utilities we which is one I’ve talked about here a lot. When you see utilities hitting an all time high is the biggest borrowers in the nation.

That tells you that yields will be heading lower. Remember the stock market is a forward looking mechanism after that. We also had tech hitting an all time high on the day today. What was. Oh and the industrials hitting an all time high today as well. Our laggards were real estate, consumer staples and healthcare. Finally here for today our VRA Commodity Watch. Let me get a quick refresh of these screens here.

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I always like to do this live while on the podcast to make sure there aren’t any updates towards the end, especially for gold today as we hit an all time high of $3993. Now it’s really 3994 because it was 0.95 on, on there. So 5 cents away from that level and just, you know, less than $6 away. Right. At $6 away an ounce from our year end price target at the beginning of the year at $4,000 an ounce. You know, I saw Ed Yardeni had a piece out over the weekend where they raised their price target roughly April of this year to $4,000 an ounce because he must have been reading the VRA letter there because that has been our call from the beginning of the year. Going into this year, we said that there were no, there was no bigger bull on gold going into this year than the vra, which means, of course, that we were even more bullish on the miners. Now, have you tuned into some financial mainstream media today, which, you know, we really like to leave it on in the background more for interviews than any one network individual independently.

Although I will say the Charles Schwab network does incredible work. The fantastic guests on there, the anchors are very unbiased. They ask good questions as well. And there probably is no better network out there right now, purely from a financial point of view. But even on those networks, you know, you talk about gold, maybe they mentioned the miners, but that’s really about it. You know, they just talk about, oh, you know, gold, central bank buying, currency, debasement, you know, all of the main stories you hear all the time. Not the topics that we talk about here at the vra. You know, I always love the quote, and this certainly applies the financial mainstream media, but just mainstream media as a whole.

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Right? If you don’t watch the news, you’re uninformed. If you do watch the news, you’re misinformed. How true is that? Especially as we’ve seen really over the last 10 years now. But as gold approaches $4,000 an ounce, again, all you hear about is gold, which is great. But the gold miners rarely get much love at all. And even then, it’s not the junior miners they’re talking about. It’s mostly the big players out there. So we love the junior miners here.

We’ve got a few of them in the portfolio that we like a lot. Again, come check those out here for free for 14 days@vraletter.com but how did the gold miners not get any love? You’ve got the semis, which we are super bullish on here. And just what we got today, you want to see tech leading the way and semis leading tech. Well, the same is true for gold. You want to see the gold miners leading the precious metal. And it’s exactly what we’ve seen this year is GDX has outperformed just about every other ETF out there from the beginning of the year to now up over 135% in 2025. Incredible returns to not hear very much about in the mainstream media again, how they focus on the wrong stories there. So it’s a great reason to come and join us here.

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Next up here. Oh, GDX did hit an all time high on the day today, by the way. Next up here, silver hitting another 52 week high here now less than a dollar away from it. Dollar an ounce away from its all time high now at $48.40 at the highs at a 4861 an ounce. Copper holding above $5 a pound after Friday’s gains at $54 a pound in oils, you know, saying above $60 a barrel here at up 1.4% on the day to $61.73 a barrel. And finally here, another exciting one we talk about here often. Bitcoin, excuse me, hitting an all time high today, getting above 20 or excuse me, 100, excuse me, $126,000 of Bitcoin at the highest today, 126, 183 of Bitcoin today now up still 1.8% on the day at 124,953. This is a group here, specifically bitcoin.

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There’s really no greater supply and demand story and there’s no better time of the year to own Bitcoin as Q4 returns over the last 10 years in Bitcoin have average 57 and a half percent returns. You know, that would get us, you know, right to our year end price target which going into the year was $200,000 a bitcoin. So let’s see if we can get here. Regardless, we remain extremely bullish on bitcoin over the long term, folks. That is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up@vra letter.com, click the podcast link at the top. You’ll see our transcripts and comments there as well.

So again, thank you for being here with us. We hope that you’ll like, share and subscribe to our daily VRA Investing podcast. And as always, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.