Today's episode is jam-packed with exciting topics as the market continues to hit all-time highs. The market seems to be waiting and watching for Nvidia's earnings tomorrow, and no one seems to be paying attention to the Fed speakers anymore. Tyler also dives into the latest SEC ruling on the Ethereum ETF and the political implications behind it.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there today. If you’re invested in this market right now, you certainly had another great day today. The all time highs here continued, so we’ve got an action packed podcast for today covering the markets. While the gains weren’t massive, we did finish at the highs of the day, which was good to see. And as I mentioned, all time highs as well.

We’re also going to cover the latest from what we’re expecting tomorrow in these Federal Reserve minutes that are coming out. We’ve had a number of Fed speakers this week, and the best news about that is no one’s paying attention to them anymore, which is good to see. And also a topic that has expanded a little bit more since Kip covered it yesterday is this new SEC ruling for the Ethereum ETF. Got some interesting details there that I’ll cover here. And of course we’ll cover the story that all eyes are on for, for tomorrow, which is Nvidia, the tech giants earnings reports coming in tomorrow after the close. So we’ll cover all of that and then some on today’s podcast here today. Let’s start here with the SEC ruling here. And I want to start here because this is kind of a fun one to talk about, too.

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And there is a take home point at the end of this as well. But so as you have, you tuned into Kipp’s podcast yesterday. You heard him talk about it. Essentially what it boils down to is the SEC made a bit of a surprise decision and approved these Ethereum ETF’s. So today going on right now is JPMorgan’s yearly investment conference. So maybe a little bit of a surprising source to some of you here. Not usually one that we’re tuned into, at least not watching it here. Keeping an eye out for the headlines from anything, though.

And this one got our attention. This is one of the interviews today during the conference was Emily Choi, who is the COO for Coinbase. And remember here that after the bitcoin ETF’s were launched, Coinbase is one of the f, not, I believe it is the largest. And I don’t think there’s a close second custodian for these ETF’s in holding their bitcoin that essentially these ETF’s are derived from. So they know more and have more insider information than probably anybody else out there, right? You would think so, at least. So there must have been a question in regards to this ETF. You don’t see the question in the Bloomberg snippet, snippet that I saw here. But she said that basically even a week ago.

So before this announcement was made, but just a couple of weeks ago, this announcement coming in the last couple of days, the sentiment from Coinbase at the time was that this would not be approved. So again, insiders here who do not think that this is going to be approved, she said all of that changed in about 48 hours. And she even said that is probably coming from the current administration because they’re sensing some panic here on their stance of crypto and what she’s likely referring to there. I had to go do a little bit of digging because I know that Trump has said, you know, he’s the pro crypto president, right. And that’s a big deal. The crypto community, you know, the Hodlers especially, this is a very adamant, outspoken group of people when they put their backing behind something. Yeah, it’s going to get some people’s attention. And specifically here, it’s gotten the Biden administration’s attention.

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So politico just came out with a piece eleven days ago saying that the White House basically was in scrambles trying to figure out how to remedy this here because they felt like crypto was Trump’s latest weapon against the Biden administration. That’s literally the headline article from Politico here as well. You know, I’m not a big politico reader, but on this topic, I do think it’s interesting. And again, all ties in here with the fact that we know, we’ve talked about it here often, that if you think the Federal Reserve is above goosing this market, sending this market higher into the November election in the hopes of helping their guy, if you think the Fed’s above that, it’s a little bit of a naive view. Not saying that it’s 100% what is happening, right. Although it looks a lot like it. And I would lean towards, yes, it absolutely is happening. But if you think that they’re above it, is the point here.

I think it’s a little bit of a naive view. This is a political animal. The Federal Reserve is supposed to be independent. There’s nothing federal about it, and the reserves are questionable at best. So what is so interesting here, though, again, is that so we know that the Fed isn’t above goosing the market. Now, we have proof here that the SEC is not above goosing certain markets in order to potentially help their guy get into office. I think about it again here. Ten days ago, piece comes out about how crypto has been a tool against Biden.

Surveys are showing as well that the crypto community feels like the Biden administration and specifically the SEC. They have felt that they have been unfairly targeted by this administration. This is 100%. A call was made to the SEC that said, we’ve got to turn this tide here. So again, I think that’s kind of a fun story here. And bitcoin and ethereum have been up big on the news, you know, again, coming out yesterday, really here, down a little bit from the highs of the day. But I’ll give you the exact quotes here with our crypto watch at the end of the podcast. Next up here, though, for big topics of the day, continues to be Nvidia earnings.

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Tomorrow after the close, all eyes will be on that report. You might even be tired of hearing us talk about it here, but this is a big event here. Remember, this report really does have the ability to kind of swing the market one way or another. This phase of the AI innovation revolution, bull market kind of began with Q one earnings from Nvidia last year. Right about this time last year. Yes. The bear market lows were October 2022. This really kicked us into high gear, though, you know, here seven months later or so.

Let me get a sip of water real quick. So again, bear market lows October 2022. But Nvidia’s Q one earnings were really kind of an inflection point in the early months of this new bull market. But it did begin for Nvidia before that, as their last five quarters have had tremendous earnings. You’ll see just how tremendous here in second. But this makes Nvidia the fastest growing large company in the world. Check it out. Like I said, last five quarters, if they hit guidance tomorrow, not exceed expectations, if they hit their goals for themselves tomorrow, that would be $24 billion in revenue in a single quarter, and it would mark a quadrupling of their revenue in just the last five quarters.

At that same time, their net income margins have doubled here as well. So you see why this has been such an impressive company and why so many people, rightfully so, pay attention to it here. And right now. Nvidia hanging around all time highs. It’s kind of hard seeing a way that right now that this company disappoints, that day will come. You know, a hundred, you know, all good things come to an end. But based off of their head start in the AI space and the development and chip space and the demand for their products. This should be another good quarter, but we’ll see.

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And remember, it’s not the news that matters, it’s the market’s reaction to that news. So that’s really what we’ll be watching tomorrow. If Nvidia happened to come in strong and the market’s lower, that would kind of confirm our view of taking some profits ahead of this event. We’ll be continuing to talk about that here. If you want to learn some more, come and join us. We got a 14 day free trial. If you’re not already a member here at the VRA, you can sign up@vrainsider.com. so come and join us.

We’d love to have you here with us as we really are just kicking off this bull market here as well. We’re just in year two of this bull market that we have called here since the October 2022 lows. And always a good reminder, bull markets on average run between four and six years. We think it’s going to be a longer bull market. Our call remains at Dow Jones 100,000 by 2030. You might have seen Eddie Ardini. If you’re a close market watcher, he’s calling for 60,000 by 2030, which, I mean, who’s going to be mad about that? We think the gains are going to be far, far better and we want returns in our portfolio that reflect that as well. All right, next up here.

Well, got lost in my notes here. Let’s go ahead and. Yeah, yeah, okay. Sorry, Nvidia. Earnings tomorrow. We’re reporting on that here. Quick fed recap here as well. This is really interesting for us as well, because there’s been so much talk about the Federal Reserve over the last couple of years.

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Right. They’re always making headlines. And now what is seeming to happen is that people are tuning out from this inflation, we’ve said it here after these last inflation reports, inflation is now once again in our rearview mirror, again. Doesn’t mean it’s going to be a straight line down, right. We’re not going straight to deflation and prices likely aren’t ever going back to what they were pre this period of time, pre coronavirus insanity. We’ll likely never see those prices again. But what we want to do here at the VRA is find ways to make money off of that information. But again, the good news is if the Fed, it doesn’t have as much sway in the market, it makes everybody’s life a little bit more enjoyable.

We’ve had a whole lot of Fed speakers over the last two sessions yesterday and into today, we got the release of the Fed minutes tomorrow. But if you’re watching what the market is telling us again, all time highs, but specifically what the ten year yield is telling us is that rates have peaked. Yields were down again ahead of those minutes coming out tomorrow, down half a percent on the day to a 4.41. And the speakers today all but confirmed this as well. They tried to jawbone the market lower, talking about higher for longer, talking about, oh well, maybe there will still be a rate hike. Not really, though. They didn’t really say that anymore. That that kind of rhetoric has really left the room here.

Even Fed President Waller said inflation is not accelerating. A rate hike isn’t necessary. So that’s kind of one of the key to take home points here. But it’s a circus over there. We’ve got other the Cleveland Fed President Loretta Messer said we can hold rates or we can even raise them right. Then she went on to say, if inflation against expectations stalls out or reverses again, you know, they can jawbone all they want. I think yields lower on the day to day is the market calling out the Fed’s bluff here. And we’re, like we’ve said, we’re fine with the higher for longer theme.

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Yields below the 5% rate and even a little bit higher should not be too restrictive for this market. We saw it during the 1995 to 2000 dot melt up that rates were far above, on average where they are right now. And one last point here as well. I’ll point out the CME’s Fedwatch tool is still showing a probability of a rate cut in September, and the probability continues to creep higher now at a 51.8% probability for the Fed to cut rates in September. Now, I don’t put a whole lot of stock that’s just a probability index, right? But it will be interesting to see where that probability goes tomorrow after these Fed minutes are released. Likely nothing new of consequence coming out of it, which I think the market would look at as a dovish sign. And after these Fed comments as well. One last point.

Evercore. Evercore, isi, you’ve heard us reference them a lot. They expect a September rate cut as well, which is funny to hear, because going into the year everyone said the Fed has to cut rates early because they can’t do it right before a presidential election. We’ve said here that that’s not going to derail this very political Federal Reserve if it can help their guy out, right? So it’ll be really interesting to see if that does end up being the case. Alright, next up here, let’s take a look at our market action on the day to day. We’ll cover here quickly. As I mentioned earlier, two all time highs today. We were led by the S and P 500.

And I’ll point out we finished at or near the highs of the day just about across the board here as well. So while they weren’t massive gains, that’s exactly what you want to see from the market. So not quite an all time intraday high from the S and P, but an all time close closing high up a quarter of a percent to 5321. Next up here, the Nasdaq. Also an all time high today. Nasdaq 100 all time high today as well, up just over two tenths of 1% to 16,832. The Dow Jones was higher on the day, still just below $40,000, but was up 0.17% to 39,872. And lastly here, small caps did finish lower on the day, but just fractionally down two tenths of 1% to 2098.

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And for IWM, the small cap ETF still hanging out in the range of 52 week highs there. And again, I’ll point out what we’ve been talking about here for the last couple weeks as well, is that we are at short term overbought levels on the VRA investing system. Now, is that a massive sell signal? I’ll say here no, that’s when we reach extreme overbought on steroids. But this is about the time when, well, really, it’s the time where you want to already be positioned. This isn’t the time to be putting on new positions, not the time to really be monthly dollar cost averaging into the overbought names doesn’t mean you can’t look for a rotational aspect here. It’s one of the things that we do here at the VR era. But as far as putting on new positions, that time was a month ago when we were saying this correction is looking like it’s starting to end. Now we just want to continue to ride the wave higher.

If we can or if we need to trade some positions, we will, but we’ll continue to alert you to those changes here as well. Next up, looking at our internals on the day. Another factor that has us interested here, especially leading up to Nvidia’s earnings earnings tomorrow, is that these internals weren’t fantastic today. Even on a day with all time highs, we saw more declining stocks than advancing stocks for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Now, I’ll point out no big two to one beats, three to one beats or anything negative by just a few hundred issues, but still not what you want to see. But no big red flags. 52 week highs, lows were our bright spot. Managed still to come in positive there, a little bit lighter than recently, but still getting some good numbers.

And lastly here, volume. Similar story, negative for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq, but no big, like I said, no big two to one beats or anything like that. Next up, looking at our sectors on the day to day, we finished with seven out of our eleven s and p 500 sectors higher on the day to day. One that we’ve been talking about a lot here is, is utilities. Utilities led the way today. You know, as a defensive name, sure. So you kind of notch that, take from that what you will, that it is a defensive name. But it’s also been a signal for us that yields are going to head lower.

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Utilities are the biggest borrowers in the nation. So as the forward looking mechanism that the stock market is, what do utilities hitting 52 week highs tell you? It tells you that looking forward, the market is expecting lower rates for these companies and likely higher energy prices as well. After that, we had consumer staples and then financials, which is also right in the range of a 52 week high. Just below it there. Consumer staples is in the same boat. A lot of these sectors are right at 52 week highs or all time highs. And we did get an all time high today from the tech sector. The semis have not been able to quite take out their all time highs from early March.

Another thing that will be interesting to watch tomorrow after the close with Nvidia’s earnings. Alright, our laggards on the day to day energy, followed by industrials and then real estate. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Little bit of red on the screen here. Gold lower still above $2,400 an ounce, down half a percent to $2,425 an ounce. Silver, down two tenths of six tenths of 1% to $32.20 an ounce. Copper, now up on the day just under half a percent to $5.10 an ounce. Hanging out there around its 52 week high.

And lastly here, oil down 1.36% at $78.22 a barrel. Finally here for today, Bitcoin, which I covered a lot of earlier. But as far as price action goes, interesting day here today topped out early this morning at 71,872. That’s its highest level in what, about two months or so? Just below the 52 week high at 73,000, but it since pulled back still higher on the day, up three tenths of 1% at 69,662. 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@vraletter.com click the podcast link at the top and we’d love to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in.

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Until next time, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.