In today's action-packed episode, Tyler covers an exciting day of all time highs from the stock market. We kick things off with a fascinating discussion about Tesla hitting an all-time high and the potential for spin-offs that could further boost the stock's value. Then, Tyler discusses the recent surge in the Nasdaq which closed above $20K for the first time ever, and why the VRA expects that this is just the beginning of the next big move higher. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Ahoy. And don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Wednesday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there today. It certainly was an exciting day in our markets today.

Got a couple little fun facts for you here to start off the podcast today, because Kip and I were talking just before the podcast specifically about Tesla and the all time high that we saw today and the implications from, for the rest of the market from this as well. And the possibility, you know, no rumors are being floated about this yet, but the possibility of the spin offs possible from Tesla if they wanted to spin off some of their other products into other businesses and how bullish that actually would be for the stock itself, compared it to, and Kip compared it to Alexander the Bell companies when they split up and how in the eyes of investors, the sum of the parts was worth more than the whole and how that could apply to Tesla here as well.

[00:01:15]:
So I had to start the podcast with Ahoy, because we were talking about Alexander Graham Bell and a little, you know, somewhat unknown fun fact is that when he invented the telephone, the original greeting was not hello. It was not hi. The original greeting proposed by Alexander Graham Bell was Ahoy. Can you imagine if every phone call you answered every day, you know, we might just start doing that for fun. Just pick up the phone, somebody’s calling you Ahoy. You know, it’d be, you know, lighten the mood a little bit everywhere. But what is kind of funny about that is that it was actually changed by Thomas Edison, none other than Thomas Edison, who really popularized the use of hello, which stuck to today when answering phone calls. And so one other little joke for you there on the Tesla topic.

[00:02:08]:
What do you call a stolen Tesla and Edison, right? Because as the story goes, Edison stole most of his good ideas from Nikola Tesla. Now, no doubt Edison had his own achievements and accomplishments, but that story will likely never go out of style about how Edison did steal from Nikola Tesla. So that being said, who will end it with the fun facts here for the beginning of the podcast? But what a day it was. It really was an exciting session here. The semis leading the way, starting to show some life here now, and tech leading with The NASDAQ up 1.77% on the day to day closing above $20,000 for the NASDAQ for the first time ever at 20,034. Now, Kip and I were talking about this as well in our book the Big Bribe, which was released just over Two years ago, you know, we got called every name in the book for how bullish we were on the market, especially as we were in the throes of a bear market which did not end until roughly two months after we published the book. So it was a fantastic buying opportunity when we published. And here we are today over two years later.

[00:03:31]:
We think this is still a fantastic opportunity to buy this market. Yes, we’re at all time highs, but where we’ll be in two, three, four, five years from now, the upside is massive in our view. So when we published the book, we called for the Nasdaq to hit 40,000 by 2030. Now today we’re just 100% rally from here away from that. But when we published the book, guess where the NASDAQ was. And it surprised even me when we talked about it. I knew where it was generally speaking, but I did not know where it was, the exact date that we published the book. I mean, we had hit a when we published our book, the Nasdaq was at 13,000 on its way to a low of in the 10 thousands range.

Right? So we are up 100% in the Nasdaq since the bear market lows of October 2022. So that’s just in two years. We may be on the low side with our $40,000 price target because that’s 100% move over the next five years from here. So again, we could be to the low side. And for years now we’ve said and backed it up with our track record that we have been the biggest bulls out there. And I think that still remains the case. I don’t know anybody else with the price target on the Nasdaq is high as ours is here, but it’s why exactly we’ve compared this period to the 1995 to 2000.com melt up when the NASDAQ rallied 575%. We think we’re due for more of a move like that.

[00:05:12]:
Right. And so from the bare market lows, we’re only up 100% now, it’s tough to say only up 100%, but that is the case here. And so we have five more years to reach our price target. Again, I think that we will be on the low side here. It’s just a very exciting time all around for this market really. And we’re just seeing again, in our view, the early innings of this year. Now since the November election and Trump getting back into office, we’ve already seen the signs of animal spirits returning to this market. Small business optimism through the roof.

Right. There are so many factors here. But again, we think the everyday investor and on the consumer side as well is just catching up to this story about how bullish we can be going forward from here. So that being said, let’s take a look at some of the big action on the day and I’ll kind of loop back in to the rally that we see coming. You know, it’s a combination of the factors we’ve talked so much about here. The top the Trump Doctrine, the Trump Economic Miracle 2.0 coming in. Kip talked about this a lot on his interview last night on Real America’s Voice on the Wayne Root Show. If you haven’t had a chance to watch that yet, it’s up.

[00:06:38]:
We send it out to our members this morning as well. Give it a listen. It’s exactly encapsulates what we’re looking at here going forward. And so on those themes, let’s get down into a bit of the nitty gritty here as this morning we did have the latest look at inflation with the consumer Price index coming back in CPI coming in line with estimates here, CPI up 2.7% year over year. So not down to the Fed’s 2% target but continued improvement here with core CPI up 3.10of a percent month over month, 3.3% year over year. Now that’s not a particularly impressive inflation report. It’s not the signs of deflation like we have seen. But again in line with estimates there.

And the the Wall street took it as an all clear sign that the Fed is confirmed to cut rates by another quarter quarter percentage point there, 25 basis points. The odds on the CME’s Fed watch tool today shot up here now a 98.6 probability from the CME’s Fed watch tool of a 25 basis point cut. It was at 88% just yesterday. So now it seems to be baked in the cake that the Fed will cut rates. We’ll get PPI back tomorrow as well. And then all eyes will be on Jay Powell’s comments in the coming FOMC meeting, which is one week from today. It’ll be on the 18th. On the news though index futures immediately turned higher, bond yields fell.

[00:08:18]:
But bond yields did rally back a bit in the session. Still no concerns for us here with yields on the 10 year at a 4.27. Now we’ve talked about this a lot here as well that from that same time period 1995 to 2000 when the NASDAQ rallied 575% yields averaged about a 6% during that time. So we’re nowhere near those levels here. So, no, a 4.27% 10 year does not concern us in any sense here. But we can’t forget that Jay Powell, or really the Fed during Trump’s first term, worked actively to derail the economic growth that we are seeing. Remember, they did a preemptive rate hike because they saw growth coming in to slow down what they saw as an overheating economy, despite the fact that inflation at that time was well below their 2% target. So, you know, it’s always up in the air what the Federal Reserve can do, but we know this is not an unbiased institution here like they claim to be.

[00:09:24]:
Right. They always like to say that they’re above politics. But roughly 80% of Fed voting members are Democrats. So you tell me, are they biased or not? You know, we really saw it in the rate hikes that followed after Trump’s first couple of years in office in 2018, when the Fed continued to raise rates into this time of the year. December, especially around Christmas, is a notoriously illiquid time of the year. People are on vacation, they’re out of the office, they’re spending time with family. Right. And yet the Fed continued to raise rates, which ultimately led to what we’ve deemed the December from hell in 2018, where it led up to we had a half day of trading on Christmas Eve, got an absolute.

The market got crushed that day. Right. No one’s in the office on a half day of trading on Christmas Eve. And yet the Fed actively worked to derail the market at that time. Now, it was a fantastic buying opportunity in hindsight, but it did not feel good for Christmas. Sorry, got the dogs here saying hi in the background as well. But regardless of what the Fed does from here, you know, in a Trump second term here, we’ve already had a strong economy, despite the Biden and Harris administration’s best efforts to derail it, really. But this economy is also in its early innings.

[00:10:53]:
We think it’s only getting stronger from here. And even a bias Fed may not be enough to derail the strength and the animal spirits that we’re seeing right now. We think that’ll be the case. You know, January 20th can’t get here soon enough. So, that being said, let’s take a look at our market action on the day. As I mentioned earlier, Nasdaq led the way, exactly what you want to see Tech leading. And you had the semis up nearly 2 1/2% on the day. Now we’ve talked about this here a lot as well.

The semis have not hit an all time high like we’ve seen from our major indexes, excuse me, since July of this year. So now is the time for the semis to start playing some catchup and we expect them to do so here. The chart looks great. A nice coiled spring has stayed above its 200 day moving average. You know, honestly this might be one of the best looking charts out there right now because we’re nowhere near overbought levels like we see in our major indexes, like we see from some of our bigger names. I mean Tesla has just been on an absolute tear, hitting an all time high today. And this is what really sparked Kip and I’s conversation earlier about the potential spin offs, right? You look at all of the different areas they’re involved in. It’s not just we talk about this here often.

[00:12:15]:
Tesla is not just a car company, they’re a tech company first actually that happens to make cars. And the value here is really in the data that they, they collect. Now that GM has announced they’re doing away with their driverless program. You know, we think it’s just a matter of time until you start to see licensing deals from Tesla to GM to Ford to the other car manufacturers out there to utilize their full self driving product. And once those deals start to come in, it’s game over for those companies. And Tesla is the clear winner. And even right now you can already see the writing on the wall that Tesla is the clear winner. Their biggest competitor now that GMs out of the picture is Wayo.

Wayo has a fleet of less than 1000 cars. How is that even considered a competitor? Right? Tesla has over 7 million vehicles on the road in the US alone. Now those not are not all accessible to full self driving. But guess what they are doing? Sending the data back to Tesla. And that’s proprietary data. Now I’m sure that Elon, with all the open source stuff that he’s done, he’s very anti patent, you know, he might even let that data go to some extent. But regardless here the, the fact of the matter is Tesla is clearly the winner already. And it’s just really the signing of the paper.

Tyler Herriage [00:13:40]:
Once they get these licensing deals done, that’s official game over there. Now we’re just talking about one division of Tesla though, right? You’ve got Optimus, the robotics division, right, which has really flown under the radar until the rollout that we saw at the robo taxi event. You could Lump in the Robotaxi with the car side of things, then the battery storage side of things. Remember they bought SolarCity, so they’ve got solar panels that they’re working on. And especially the battery storage though is one side of their business that you could spin off. So you can see here how the sum of the parts could be in the eyes of investors, worth more than the whole. Now. Probably said too much already.

[00:14:24]:
If you want to know our full analysis on Tesla, you know, come and subscribe if you’re not with us already. We got our 14 day free trial going on@vrainsider.com so go check it out. But man, this is a fun story. So all time high Today, Tesla up 5.9%, hitting a high of $424. Is up even more in after hours, up over to 425. But back to tech and the semis. Good to see semis leading the tech. Semis leading tech and onto the news today.

Big news here from Broadcom really leading the way higher for the semis as it was announced that Apple will be partnering with Broadcom to work on a new line of AI chips that would hopefully make Apple less reliant on Nvidia chips is the goal. That’s the headline goal at least. But Broadcom up six and a half percent on the session today. So again we’re starting to see the catalysts come in here for, for the semis. We think that the timing couldn’t be better and it is time for the semis to go on a tear. You know, there’s been a lot of talk about this rotation into software, which I think is completely justified. You know, for the last few years it’s all been about hardware. Think about the journey that Nvidia alone has been on.

[00:15:44]:
Right? It started out, oh, it’s a, it’s a graphics card chip. It’s mainly for gaming. Gamers use Nvidia products. And then bitcoin started to go on a tear. It was okay. Well actually it can also be used for mining bitcoin. That’s the biggest part of their business in the future, mining cryptocurrencies. And then AI came out.

It was just, you know, whoa, okay, maybe that’s the future for chips here. Right? So, you know, all eyes are on what’s the next story there. And that’s kind of the journey again of the hardware side. And so I think it makes sense for software to play a little catch up to the incredible run that the semis have been on. But now that everybody’s Talking about that story, I wouldn’t be surprised to get a rotation back into the hardware side which we remain incredibly bullish on here with the semis. Not to say that the software names won’t do well as well, but time for the semis to really start making some moves because we’ve seen those moves on the software side. If you look at the software etf, igv, you know, made up of big software names like Salesforce, Adobe, which just reported earnings after the close with a slight miss down in after hours about 6% on Adobe right now. You know we don’t recommend that stock individually here, but not a bad name, right? But these names have been on incredible run.

[00:17:07]:
Software just hit an all time high or at least a 52 week high just a few sessions ago. And again now that that story has blown up so much, I would not be surprised to get a little bit of a rotation back into the hardware sector. After that we had the S P500 up 8.10of1% to 6084, just shy of an all time high there for the S P500. After that small caps up just about half of 1% to 2,394. And finally here for the day, our one loser on the day was the Dow Jones down 2/10 of 1% to 44,148. Next up here, let’s take a look at our internals on the day to day which did come in a little light for a day with all time highs but certainly not bad readings here. But we want to get back to the broadening action. You know we’ve talked about this here a lot over the last couple weeks as well.

We we’re due for a time where the generals took charge again and that’s what we’ve seen. That’s what’s keeping our market at all time highs. Apple finished lower but hit an all time high earlier. Google, after this news about Quantum computing was up 5% yesterday, up 5 and a half percent today, hitting an all time high as well. Then you had Amazon also hitting an all time high, up 2.3%. So that’s the rotation we’ve been talking about here is this is when the generals earn their stripes. They’ve been doing it. That keeps our market at all time highs while we can work off the overbought conditions and some of the small to mid cap names that we’ve seen broadening since the election in November.

[00:18:46]:
So yeah, no, no concerns for us there on that little bit of a rotation. And now that we’re getting to overbought levels on the Magnificent Seven type of names. You know, this is when we’d expect to get that rotation once again. All part of a healthy bull markets action. So taking a look, we did have more advancing stocks than declining socks on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Good to see 52 week highs of lows also positive for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Then we have our one downside on the day. We did have negative volume on the nyse, but nothing to write home about.

Just barely negative. But we do want to see this improve, right? And then almost 2 to 1 positive shy of that. But good numbers here from the NASDAQ on the day to day for volume. So again a little light for a day with all time highs. But no, no red flags there from the internals. Next up, looking at our sectors here on the day today we finished with 5 out of our 11s P500 sectors higher on the day to day. And also as you might expect, some all time highs here as well. We were led by communication services today.

[00:19:57]:
One stock that makes up a big portion of this. It may not surprise you why Communication services hit an all time high today. The two biggest holdings, Google and Meta. I already mentioned Google up over 5 and a half percent on the day. Meta also up 2.16% on the day, hitting an all time high as well. So you’ve got you know, four out of the magnificent seven or maybe more than that because we had Tesla too. So five, you know, we had Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Tesla. Yeah, five of them hitting all time highs today.

It was just an intraday all time high from Apple as it finished down half a percent. But hey, we’re counting it here today. It was a good day today. But again communication services leading the way. All time high. Next up we had consumer discretionary also all time high today. After that, tech and the financials, our laggards on the day, healthcare, consumer staples and utilities. Finally here for today.

Really a lot of green on the screen all around. Let’s take a look at our VRA commodity watch here where we had gold up 1.3% now to 2,753. And exactly what you want to see here from this group is the miners leading the way. We talk about this here often. You want to see the miners leading the commodity. That applies to a lot of sectors much like you like to see semis leading tech. But the gold miner ETF GDX today up nearly 3% on the day today also Another good looking chart here. Not near overbought levels has held on above its 200 day moving average.

[00:21:35]:
Getting back above its 100 day moving average today. Try to get back over the 50 day as well. We think it’s just a matter of time. Next up, silver up just over 1/10 of 1% at $32 and 79 cents an ounce. Copper now down 2/10 of 1% on the day to $4 and 26 cents a pound. Oil back above $70 a barrel here. Up a nice 2 1/2% on the day at $70 and 38 cents a barrel. Let’s see if we can hang on to that.

The same rings true. I was on Wayne’s show a few months back and he asked me about oil stocks because during the coronavirus insanity when oil went negative right. In the financial markets, at least we made the call at the time that oil was going back above a hundred dollars a barrel within the next 12 to 16 months was the time frame I gave at the time. We got there almost exactly 12 months later across $100 a barrel. Now, I would say with Trump getting back into office, the deregulation policies that we expect to see, you know, I don’t expect $100 a barrel of oil, you know, in the near future here, but given the deregulation and the downstream effects of that. Was just talking to a buddy of mine in the oil and gas space about this yesterday. You know, how does this look for y’all at below $70 a barrel? Yeah, he’s basically like, well, you know, with deregulation, getting these things in here, the downstream effects of what it lowers the costs on, it raises their break even margin. So if they used to have to have oil above $70 a barrel to break even, well, because their costs are lower now, that number becomes $60 a barrel.

[00:23:20]:
Right. Could even be lower than that depending on the field that they’re working in. So I think that over the medium to long term, I remain extremely bullish on energy companies, more so than the actual oil and gas itself. Yeah. That being said, you know, I actually need to take a closer look at the gas market in that regard because natural gas has been hit so hard. So I don’t want to speak out of turn there on that. But again, oil at these levels here, still very bullish on energy companies as a whole. And then finally for today, bitcoin having a nice rally today as well.

[00:24:00]:
Getting back above $100,000 of Bitcoin started off today at 95. Now at 101 a Bitcoin, up nearly 5% on the day today. You know, even at 100,000, we think that this story is still early here. You’re working on a few different pieces that kind of line up with this again. You know, if people thought that the high end target, that a hundred thousand was high on bitcoin, think they’re going to be very surprised with what comes in the coming years for this. So, yeah, that being said, we remain extremely bullish on bitcoin here. But 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 at vraletter.com click the podcast link at the top, and we’d love to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.