In today's episode, Tyler recaps an exciting week of stock market action, from Q2 earnings to economic data and All-time Highs from the S&P 500 and NASDAQ. Looking ahead, Tyler sets the stage for what to watch from in next week's jam-packed market calendar. Whether you’re an investing pro or just getting started, you’ll get actionable insights on where the market’s headed, what to look out for, and why it’s still early in this historic rally.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Friday afternoon everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Great to be here with you to close out this fantastic week from our markets today. We got a good day of action today following a strong week from our markets. Going out on a high note here, you know, just off the highs of the day, but all time highs from the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ today. So if you’re a longtime listener here, you know how happy I am to be here with you today. The running joke is always that Kip gets the all time highs and I of course get the big down days.

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But hey, when you get 5 days of S&P 500 all time highs in a row every day this week, you know, I guess I was bound to get one of them then. So we’ll cover all of that action and more here in today’s podcast. We got another all time high in an area that might have been a little bit more overlooked. You see some people talking about this out there, but you know, it’s kind of in one ear out the other. But it’s a major theme for us here at the vra. If you’re a regular listener. Again, you might have guessed it already. And that is an all time high this week from Money Supply.

So let’s go ahead and take a look at our first chart here of the day. Well, we’ll hold off on this one for just a second because I do want to quickly recap what we just saw this week from Q2 earnings as well. And then we’ll start to take a look at today’s action and forward looking action as well. So we are in the heart of Q2 earnings right now. That was certainly the case this week. A big week, exciting week. And we’ve got another one coming next week as well is now 31 of the S P 500 have reported earnings so far. So see, we’re still got a big way to go.

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But so far we’ve talked about this here last week as well. The beats have been impressive above average level earnings beats so far from Q2 25. And remember at the beginning of Q2 was the Trump tariff mania, right. Liberation Day followed by the pause. You know, which someone reminded me today that Trump did say it was a fantastic buying opportunity and that day has marked the lows since. So remember what was happening. That’s April, right? The beginning of Q2. Everyone lowered their estimates for for earnings.

It began in Q1 and continued for Q2 so far, not looking like a very good call. Once again here from the analyst is 81% of the company’s reporting so far have beat on earnings per share. That’s a 4% upside surprise on average right now. That’s an impressive number. Earnings on average up over seven and a half percent versus last year. So.

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Not even just on the quarter year over year numbers. Remember who was president in Q2 of 2024. Sales beat 82% with 5.24 growth on average for Q versus Q2 of last year as well. So an impressive, impressive earning season so far. You know, we’ve seen some companies like Tesla that missed earlier this week, rallied back here today, up no, not all the G all did not get back all of his losses from yesterday. But when you have such a large number of the S and P beating on earnings, then the market’s really going to punish you for missing because everyone else is crushing it right now. Saw the same thing with intel yesterday to today. Intel I believe was down 8% on the day today.

Now let’s go ahead and take a look at what we can expect for next week. It’s going to be a fun one. Make sure you’re tuned in here with us. I’ll get a quick zoom in on this screen here if I can. How’s that for you? All right. You know, we’ll kick off the week with some important names, but maybe not some of the high flyers. Waste management, you’re always going to have waste pickup, removal, recycling. You know, that’s just a fact of life at this point.

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So that is a not a bad company, let’s say it that way. But again, we, especially in a bull market like this, we want to own the high beta names, right? Because the market is ripping and roaring. We want the the names that are going to go up even more than the market here in these scenarios. Now that is ultra aggressive. That does mean to the downside you’ll get more downside as well. But if you go into it knowing your risk parameters, you know, remove some of that emotion from it there because again, this is still the early innings. We’ve referred to this many times. You know, similar to the dot com era melt up where The NASDAQ rallied 575%.

If we were to compare that to the market we’re seeing today. It’s only 1996 right now, folks. This is the early innings. When we wrote the Big Bribe when it came out in 2022, we were looking for a bull market that would run to and through potentially 2030. And as Kip has talked about this week as well, we might end up being on the low side. And we had, I didn’t, I haven’t seen anybody with a, you know, a higher price target for 2030. That was a long ways off at the time, so not a whole lot of people had done that just yet. We might still have the price, highest price target out there and again, we might be on the low side.

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Crazy to think about. All right, so what to watch for next week again? So some big ones on Tuesday before the open, sofi after the close, got Visa, Spotify will be a good one as well. On Tuesday evening I will be on War Zone with Wayne Allen Root. So we’d love to have you there with us. You can find it’s the main link at the top on Gateway Pundit after the close. So I’ll get the exact time here for you as well. But if you aren’t already tuning into Wayne’s new show, War Zone, I highly recommend it. He’s had some fantastic guests on so far.

You know, his new hit show, Wayne just puts them out one, one after another. So thank you Wayne. Looking forward to being on your show as well and congratulations on the new show. All right, so after Tuesday, you know, Wednesday after the close, which will also be the FOMC day. I’ll get to that here, more in a minute as well. We’ve got Meta, Microsoft, Robin Hood. These are some big ones. Robin Hood has been a high flyer as of recently.

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Yeah, just off of its all time highs right now. And then we’ll continue it into Thursday as well. We’ll stick with this. Oh, Qualcomm, excuse me there after the close on Wednesday as well. That’s going to be a big one. Two big chip names. You got arm. And then after the close we’ve got Apple on Thursday which has, you know, been struggling.

And then on Friday I will actually be on Charles Schwab Network as well to recap the some of these earnings in the afternoon on Friday. So hope you can join us or excuse me in the morning on Friday. So hope you can join me there for that as well. Looking forward to it. Thank you as always for having me on there as well. I believe Diane King hall will be the anchor for that show. So thank you, Diana. Looking forward to that one as well.

Yeah. So then after the close, Coinbase as well, also with the movement in Bitcoin and you know, the announcements from Stable Coins, which I’m not going to get into here on today’s podcast as much. But if you’d like to learn some more about that, this is a topic I cover here often and has had a lot of recent development. So if you’d like me to do a full podcast on that one, let me know. Kind of considering doing a whole one just diving, taking a deep dive into that topic. Reddit after the close then on Friday some energy names. Those will be interesting to watch here as well as oil has ticked down really stuck in know the mid-60s range, has had some brief breaks above it on some, you know, all kinds geopolitical fears out there. That doesn’t mean that energy companies can’t do phenomenally in this environment.

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Deregulation. Drill baby, drill. Let’s get rid of some of these useless costs for these companies, right, that don’t go these, these costs mandated by the government essentially that don’t go in to drilling for oil and gas. Needless regulation done by our bureaucratic class. You know, you bring those down then you’re talking about bringing down break even prices for these companies as well. Which of course would mean lower oil prices here. If you can bring down companies break even prices, that’s probably an even bigger, you know, if you can do that then oil prices have to come down. That’s the biggest, you know, oil prices going up is usually a symptom of the bigger problem that well one, it could be just too much demand.

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But in this case scenario, in this environment, we know we’ve got the supply we need to get after it here. All right, so also to watch for next week, not just earnings, we’ve got a busy economic week coming up as well. Q2 GDP coming in on Wednesday. Then Friday is the beginning of a new month, will be August 1st. So we’ll get jobs data ahead of the open as well. Then of course as I mentioned earlier on Wednesday we can’t forget that we’ll get the latest FOMC meeting and we’ll hear from the money printing Rockstar himself how Jay Powell, the money printing Rockstar himself had a bit of a rough week for Jay Powell this week. We’ll see what ends up happening with his position there. You know, we’ve just got what, seven, eight more months to go really just it’s a waiting game at this point until we can get this guy out.

Let’s see what happens though. You know, just quickly here, I will say this. I didn’t watch the whole deal of Trump going to the new Federal Reserve building. You know, saw all the clips Jay Powell making some faces, but then also, you know, getting handed the note of that he is over on the cloth the cost overruns here. And man, just time and time again we see this with Trump where somebody, when they’re in their own element. So for Jay Powell, for example, when he’s in front of a microphone for an FOMC meeting, he just is big, confident guy, you know, filling up the room, everybody’s there to see him and that’s who he wants to be.

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It may not necessarily be who he is though. I think yesterday kind of prove that.

Remember just last year when Trump was elected, the next FOMC meeting they asked him about if Trump would remove him from office and he sat there and confidently, no stutter, no arms, not permitted under the law. Repeated it, not permitted under the law. And then look at who we saw yesterday with Trump. It’s a completely different human being. And again, we’ve seen this time and time again from critics of Trump. When they get in front of him, they fall apart. Whether it’s a business owner, head of the Federal Reserve, you know, remember Trudeau back when he was still the Prime Minister and I blinking on the name of the current newly elected Prime Minister of Canada, you know, on the campaign trail, we’re not going to back down to Trump. And then he got in the Oval Office and I want to congratulate you, sir, on a great, you know, first few days here in office and just completely bent the knee to him.

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And that’s why it’s all from Jay Powell yesterday, you know, beating his chest when he’s in front of his microphone. But when you take the creature out of their element, you know, they’ve got to adapt. And he just kind of shrunk.

I think that’s who Jay Powell more likely really is when you, especially when you talk about wanting the Fed to be independent. This is one of the least independent feds we’ve ever had. Jay Powell will bend to the will of Democrats time and time again will bend to the will of governments out of control spending. He encouraged them to spend during COVID encouraged the Biden administration to spend after that and then completely whiffed on inflation. So, you know, again, we’re in a waiting game at this point until this guy’s out of office. But back to the, the all time highs here with the Fed meeting coming up. And again from the money printing rockstar himself, he can talk all he wants about, you know, keeping yields down because of inflation. Then why are the money printers back On Jay Powell, right? That is an all time high, roughly 20 months in a row here of increases.

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And this was the largest monthly increase since July of 2022 as well, an increase of four and a half percent. 20 for the month of June, just in time for the FOMC meeting. Now this is a chart real quickly here because this only goes back for M2 to the 60s. So we’ll go ahead and look. What is the dollar done since that time period? How about that? Just about the same time period. Let’s just even go from 1960. Wow, wow. Lost 90% of its value since 1950.

But we have data older than that. The dollar is older than that. Let’s go back to the creation of the Federal Reserve. This should be, you know, shown in front of Jay Powell at every single press conference that he’s done. What are you doing to fix this problem? Jay Powell? Why is our dollar worthless compared to our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents?

You see it in the price of everything. Price of gold, price of bitcoin, price of real estate. And it’s absolutely insane. And wage growth has not kept up with this by any stretch of the means. Let me go ahead and pull this one up here so you can see even better, right? That’s where we are as of 2013. So it’s not even as of today. It’s even worse now.

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It’s hard to believe that again from the creation of the Federal Reserve, getting off the gold standard just year after year after year, our currency is more and more debased. And so that’s why we’ve talked so much here about owning inflationary assets. It’s why we wrote the Big Bribe, right? Because most people want to be able to save in their dollars. Most people who work a job, the productive people in the society should be able to to put their money into a bank and expect it to be safe, not current, always losing its value year after year. It’s not even possible, you know, to store money under the mattress anymore.

It would be worthless in 10 years time. The purchasing power of $100,000 since 2003, you know, in today’s dollars, if you would have just put $100,000 into a money market account and I’m just going off, off the cuff here. Kip recapped these numbers with me recently for a campaign we’re working on for you here. So stay tuned. It’s going to be a good one. That since 2003, when we first recommended gold, the VRA first recommended gold, the dollar versus the dollar. If you would have invested $100,000 in a 3% money market account, it would be worth in today’s dollars, roughly have the purchasing power of $67,000 dollars. Unbelievable.

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While gold, on the other hand, $100,000 in gold from 2003 at, you know, roughly $3,300 an ounce today, you’re looking at, I mean, that’s outperformance. It’s outperformed the S&P 500 in that time frame.

But again, The S&P 500 is an alternative as well. You want to own inflationary assets. Right. Cash is trash unless it’s an opportunity thing where you’ve got to have it, but it’s going to continue to devalue at a minimum of 2% the Fed’s goal every single year. So you’ve got to own stocks, you’ve got to own real estate, you’ve got to own physical gold and silver, and you’ve got to own cryptocurrencies as well. We love what we do here. If you can’t tell, we get pretty worked up about it as well. We want to help you not only keep up with inflation, but become wealthy and in the process.

So if you aren’t here with us already, come and join us. We’ve got a free trial going on right now@vraletter.com. you’ll find our podcast there, transcript, all of our free items as well. You, we’ve got some charting services in there, all kinds of great stuff. So come take a look there. If you don’t want to join us, you know, bookmark that website. Keep coming back with us here and we’ll keep talking about what matters most for retail investors and every day here at the market close. All right, so last point here, as I mentioned, we’ve got the Fed meeting coming up next week.

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That will be on Wednesday after the close. Now, here’s the probabilities for the meeting. All but certain that the Fed will once again be staying put here, despite Trump’s comments of wanting 300 basis points worth of cuts. And Mr. President, we agree with you. Too late. Powell is absolutely due here for his fourth, fifth, who knows, six major policy mistake. I would say so since his tenure as Federal Reserve chair.

So, you know, just a month ago, it was a 25 chance. You can’t see that there. My face is in the way. 25 chance, almost of a cut that obviously dropped very quickly because as J. Pal loves to say lately, uncertainty. You know, we think he’s going to be just as wrong about uncertainty as he was transitory. So we have to look out to September next to see where the next rate cut will be possibly. How nice is that, though? That’s a month and a half away.

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Month and a half of no meetings from the Federal Reserve. Now if only we could stop them from giving any press conferences or any interviews, that would be, that’d be fantastic. All right, so September is still looking like now the first cut. Let’s see where we were, you know, just a little while ago, a month ago about where we are now. You know, still a chance here that they’ll stay put once again. The odds right now are remain at, I think the Fed’s dot plot is for two rate cuts in 2025. They’ve got four meetings left. Let’s see what they do with them.

So be here for, for us Wednesday after the close. I’ll be here with you to recap that as well. All right, let’s get to the fun stuff here. The Fed is not always that exciting, right? The creature from Jekyll island as G E Griffin coined the term the the banking cartel themselves. That’s why we report on it here because their influence and power is so serious to most people. A lot of what they say goes right over their head because they do speak a different language, which is purely for gatekeeping reasons. We have words for everything they do already. But they’ve got to make it their own lingo so that when you hear about it on the news, it just sounds like buzzwords to you, right? We have better terms, way simpler terms for this.

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They love to make things overly complicated and make you think that their job is complex. Complex or there’s a big difference. Complicated is, you know, all these steps for to get it from point A to point B and you know, zigzagging around complex would be finding the most efficient line from point A to point B and spending the time thinking about it. So again, their job complicated, not complex. All right, so again to the exciting stuff here today. Again with money to M2 Money Supply at all time highs. Kip taught me this lesson long ago as his mentors taught him, when M2 is on the rise, you must be long stocks. And here we go.

All time highs here once again, again from the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ. But what might be most surprising before we get into those all time highs might be the sentiment. Because if you just hit five days in a row of all time highs, like I said from the S&P 500. You’d be expecting people to have a party, right? That is not what we’re seeing from this market because so many people still have so much cash on the sidelines. So not everybody’s celebrating yet. And especially hedge fund managers, you’re behind the curve. They’re losing to retail bad right now. So take a look at this AAII investor sentiment survey.

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Now, we have had a few weeks in a row here of more bulls than bears. Now we haven’t seen a whole lot of that so far this year. It’s been a whole lot more bears than bulls for the most part of this year. But three weeks or four weeks ago, we got back into positive territory and it’s only moved lower from there. Despite the fact the S and P, all time multiple, multiple, multiple all time highs. Nasdaq again, multiple all time highs. And as we say here, often new highs beget new highs. And we talked about this one here as well.

I won’t go back to this chart, but if you look at history’s most recent example of V shaped recoveries, once you get back to all time highs, that’s when the party’s just beginning. I believe in 2020, from all time highs to the peak, which was about 18 months or so, maybe 24 months, we ended up another 40% higher from there with some great buying opportunities along the way. So again, if you have any FOMO here, you feel like you aren’t exposed enough to this market, just remember this is the equivalent of the dot com era, possibly on steroids. It’s only 1996, so we’re in, you know, inning one, inning two, you know, maybe bottom of the first, top of the second, around that area. So you know, stay patient. Look, look for your opportunities. Spot your favorite companies and get in them. Monthly dollar cost average.

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Big believers in monthly dollar cost averaging here. All right, so again, back to this. Wow. How about that though? Three weeks, four weeks in a row of declines. So three weeks in a row of declines in bulls despite more all time highs. Now, we didn’t see bears increase, right? But people are just uncertain. They’re like Jay Powell, they just don’t know what to do with their money. Right now that is just not the sign of that you’re anywhere near a market top.

You know, it’s not until the bullish sentiment gets into the 60s, 70s for weeks on end. Look at how the Bears did that mean that’s they were wrong, wrong, Right. A little bit in this time period. Right. But look how wrong they remained for a month.

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And came back in June as well. Those were massive gains that they missed out on. Fear and greed index, similar deal here as well. You know, again, five days of all time highs in a row, you would expect it to be at extreme greed. We’re just not there. And again, until we’re at extreme greed in the 90s, really, you know, for multiple weeks in a row, those are the signs we’ll be looking for to say, hey, let’s, let’s take some profits here and get ready for a great buying opportunity. One more chart here. I saw this one from Charles Payne today as we get into our market action here because I do say it so often, Kip says it so often, New highs beget new highs.

And here’s the proof for you, right? How frequent are market corrections following all time highs? Well, one year later, after an all time high, 9% of the time, the market even has a pullback of, of, of 10% three years out, 2%, five years out, the market’s higher 100% of the time. Wow.

 

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When you zoom out on a chart of the stock market and specifically here in the US which is only every single pullback has been followed by an all time high since the US Stock market was originated. That’s what all time highs mean. You know, until that pattern changes, we’re going to remain long and strong. Well, of course we’ll take profits here and there, but man, it’s, it’s just way more fun to be a bull and celebrating the health of our economy and celebrating the wins of these companies. All right, so quickly here, we’ll wrap up the week for you so you can get off and have a great Friday. S&P 500. Well, let’s get to our leader. Dow Jones led the way today up just about half a percent to 44,901.

You know, trying to get back to all time highs. Not far away from it at that level. Let’s see how far away we are here quickly. We’ve got just a couple hundred points, about 200 points away from an all time high. Another move like today, really. All right, next up here, small caps up 4/10 of 1% on the day to 2261. The S&P 500. There we go.

All time high for the fifth day in a row up 410 of 1%. 6388. Next up, the NASDAQ up a quarter of 1%. Also hitting an all time high at 2118 semis. Had a good day today as well. You know Nvidia Hidden Intraday all time high. We also saw Broadcom hitting an all time high today. So I won’t dive too much into the semis.

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We got such a big earnings week next week coming up, but right in the range there as well. So good day. Just what we want to see, tech leading the market and semis leading tech. All right, next up here, let’s take a look at our market internals on the day. These haven’t been as stellar as you might expect for all time highs, but we did finish positive here just about 90 minutes before the close and the advanced decline line was still negative on the Nasdaq. But that means we got a good broadening smart money hour today even if we didn’t finish at the highs of the day for the Nasdaq. But we did have more advancing than declining on the nyse and just barely coming back positive on the Nasdaq as well. 52E highs lows coming in positive for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq.

And lastly here, volume solidly positive on the NYSE over 2 to 1 positive though on the Nasdaq. Those small cap names in there, those penny stocks really help those volume numbers. But again we won’t try to rationalize the data too much. That’s good stuff. That’s, you know, liquidity, fuel to the fire. All right, our sectors on the day today, our leaders were some value names here today as we had the Dow Jones leading. But you know, these have been some high flyers under the surface as well. You know, companies like Caterpillar hitting all time highs, John Deere right at all time highs.

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Home builders having, you know, a nice rally back from their lows as well, which many people wouldn’t expect in this kind of a housing market right now. But as we talk about here often as well, you’ve got over one third of homeowners own their home outright. It makes that really hard to have a full mutual know bare market and housing in that environment. So materials led the way and then followed by industrials which actually hit an all time high here as well. After that consumer discretionary financials hitting an all time high. We had two laggards today, energy followed by communication services. All right, let’s wrap here that for the day with our VRA commodity watch. A little bit of red on the screen here but one very bullish factor as well.

So I’ll get to that here in just about 10 seconds. Gold down 1% on the day at $3,338 an ounce but just what you want to see from this group, especially on a day like today, is the miners leading. We talk about this here often. It was just like we want to see semis leading tech. You want to see the miners leading gold as well. That’s, that’s the biggest one. That’s really kind of where it originates from in that regard. The semis kind of stole that from it.

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But to have gold down over 1% on the day, guess where the gold miners were up 1 on nearly 1.2% right in range of their, you know what, 14 year highs, highest level since 2011. Know that’s true for silver. Let me, I don’t want to give you bad data there. That is correct. Since 2012, 2011. All right, next up here, silver also down on the day by 2.3%. $38.32 an ounce. Copper essentially flat on the day.

You know, what a run it’s been on here as well. You know, similar to silver, silver’s had a great run as well. And you know, historically still very undervalued in the silver to gold ratio. So silver’s got some catch up here to do. Copper though, at 5, $5.80 a pound right now, just below those recent highs of $5.93 a pound. Oil, as I mentioned earlier, down at $65.07 a barrel. And bitcoin, you know, making a nice support level here after this incredible run that it has been on. And now some of the other coins are starting to participate as well.

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You just like with our market. Good to see that kind of broadening action. That means people are staying in the market. They aren’t taking their ball and going home.

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They’re cashing out their chips for one stock, putting them into another. That is again, early signs, bull market action. But folks, that is all that we have time for here today. Again, hope you had a fantastic Friday out there. We’ll see you back here on Monday of next week for the close. Hope you join us for a couple of those interviews in there as well. As always, you can sign up to receive our daily VRA Investing podcast every day at the market close. Go to VRAletter.com, click that podcast link at the top and we’d love to have you with us.

You also find our transcript and other comments there as well. So, folks, again, have a great weekend out there. We’ll see you back here on Monday for the close.