In today's episode, Tyler breaks down the latest stock market action to close out an eventful week for stocks. Tyler covers the latest action following Wednesday's FOMC meeting, and the big news out today in the nuclear energy space as Microsoft announces a deal to resurrect three mile island. Finally, we will also dive into the latest action from our major sectors and the commodity space. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Friday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA investing podcast. Hope you all had a great week out there this week. A great into your week for this Friday here. We’ll go ahead and keep this last podcast of the week somewhat short and sweet for you. It was certainly an eventful end to a very eventful week. To quickly recap here, we had more earnings this week.

We had the much anticipated FOMC meeting where the Fed kicked off their rate cut cycle as well. And some even bigger stories under the surface this week. The internals continued to be strong, new all time highs as well. So let’s go ahead and jump right into it here with a quick walk, a recap really quick, what we’re going to cover here today. We did have a mixed day to close out the week this week, but we had a pretty good smart money hour today. Not ideal, but finishing well off the lows of the day today. And we did get a record close from the Dow Jones here once again, even if we just finished up fractionally on the week this week. And I want to recap here on the podcast today, something I talked about on Wednesday’s podcast, which is m two money supply, which I talked about here in the US, is now ticking back up again.

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We’ll take a look today at what it’s doing globally because it is a big number. I’ll tease it with that. I’ll get to it more here in a minute. But I’ll start with perhaps some of the biggest news of the week this week, even beyond what the Federal Reserve is doing. And it just came out today here, and it is in the nuclear space. Now, if you’ve been a longtime listener here, you know that we are big fans of nuclear energy. In my opinion, it is the future of energy, but there is a lack of really public investment opportunities as far as individual companies go. A lot of them, you know, still in their infancy, waiting on products to get to market.

But there are a lot of good ideas out there. Eric Townsend over at Macro voices covers this topic quite a bit with nuclear experts and the stuff that they’re working on right now, whether it is from large scale reactors of a different design that we’ve seen in the past or smaller modular reactors that could be used for smaller purposes, powering neighborhoods, powering individual homes, and even data centers as well. Well, that’s exactly the topic that we’re going to cover here. As Microsoft announced today a $16 billion deal to resurrect the three Mile island nuclear power plant. Now, $16 billion is a bit of a drop in the bucket to a multi trillion dollar company. But it’s. I’ll explain here why this is such a big deal. It’s going to be $800 million a year over the course of the next 20 years, with the project expected to go online again or resurrected in just the next couple of years.

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And they’re using it for a very specific purpose here. They will be the only client of the resurrected power plant, and it will be going to power Microsoft data centers going forward from here as well. We expect a lot of companies, and I’ll touch on that here as well, to follow in this model, because especially we’ve seen data centers growing exponentially, especially with the resources required to power a data center that is responsible for the growth in AI. We’ve also seen it chat GPT OpenAI has talked about this as well, that with their next evolution of chat GPT, the computing power required to run these data centers has also grown exponentially. So they need more power than ever. You know, we can also talk about crypto miners and the power that they use in mining crypto, which has actually been a net benefit. You’re not going to hear that a whole lot in the mainstream media, but we have these tech experts who are now being forced into the nuclear and energy expert side of things because they’re realizing now that the amount of power that they’re going to need to power mining operations again, data center operations, and everything that we need to power the Internet of Things, these trends that we’ve talked so much about. So we’re not only experiencing an AI innovation revolution, which that is what we’ve talked about here a lot.

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But I think we’re also going to be going through an energy revolution, and today might be looked back on as one of those major milestones for the nuclear energy energy industry as a whole. Amazon also just announced as well that they will be hiring nuclear engineers to work on their AWS team. That is their cloud service. Amazon Web Services, which is grown exponentially, has been the largest, our fastest growing portion of their business, at least for some time. That might have shifted a little bit here, but this is a massive, it cannot be understated how massive of a mindset shift this is for these companies. You know, just a few years ago, nuclear was really more of a four letter word for the energy space as companies were trying to focus on wind and solar energy. And now I have nothing against wind and solar, but in my opinion. Those only really work on small scale solutions.

We’ve seen how unreliable they can be, as Trump talks about. You know, what do you do when the wind’s not blowing right, or when the sun isn’t shining? So they’re better on small scale uses, powering your home, powering small farms, more so than powering communities, powering cities, powering data centers, for example. And not to get off on too much of a tangent here, but a large part of that has likely been because of the oil and gas industry’s interest in keeping their industry alive. They know we’ve seen massive investments in solar and wind from oil and gas companies. Right? They know, in my view, that’s a lost leader for them. If people are going down that avenue, it ensures that we have to continue to use oil and gas. And now, let me say this as well, that I am a massive fan of the oil and gas space. However, nuclear is the future, in my opinion.

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But oil and gas will always be a part of our energy consumption here and will help bridge the gap between now and then. So I think oil and gas will continue to be heavily used and usage will increase in the years to come as well. Now, once we can start getting into, especially these modular designs of nuclear power plants, where they can come off an assembly line, right? Not talking about massive reactors being built that take 510 years to be built, not including regulatory approval. So add another ten years on top of that, talking about, again, assembly line types of reactors that can be strung together to create even greater power as well. And that’s not even going into other aspects of nuclear, like thorium, which a lot of people have talked about as well. But again, in my view, nuclear is the future. We have a position here at the VRA. You can go to vralettr.com, check out our 14 day free trial to find all of our positions while you’re there and see everything that the VRA has to offer.

Again, that website is vra letter.com. but uranium having a massive day to day, up 4%, and at least in the short term, here on the chart, breaking out from its downtrend line, from its 52 week high that we saw in May. So again, I don’t think that the importance of this deal should go understated here. This is a very big deal. And again, kind of going back to the, what oil and gas has done in this space, and the media as well, even the headlines today talking about, oh, they’re resurrecting the plant, the home of the US’s worst nuclear disaster. From what I understand, no one died during that disaster. There were no aftermath, you know, cancer popping up in communities. None of those horrifying details really ever came to pass.

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So I think most of what people know and think they know about the nuclear energy sector, it just, again, has been a four letter word, and I simply don’t think that that’s the case. We’ll see where we go from here. Constellation Energy group, which I believe is the owner of the current three Mile island, the partnership that Microsoft is doing here, was up a massive 22% on the day to day. So this is a big deal. And I think we’ll look back on this day as kind of the beginning of a new nuclear revolution. And it’s a, you know, like I said, there’s not a whole lot of companies out there right now of a smaller size to really take advantage of this. But go to the VRA letter.com and check out our position there for taking advantage of this nuclear revolution. All right, next up here, let’s take a look at our market action on the day today day.

It was a quadruple witching day here, which doesn’t get a whole lot of press, but it’s only a day that only happens four times a year, where we have stock index options expiring, stock options expiring, futures options expiring, and single stock futures expiring as well. So added a little bit to the volatility of today. But it’s been an incredible week for our market, news wise, all time high wise. So, you know, no big concerns for us here, and really could have been a much more volatile day than what we saw. Instead, we got an all time high from the Dow Jones today, our one major index to finish positive on the day, up just fractionally less than one 10th of 1% to 42,063. Next up here, the Nasdaq, or, excuse me, the S and P 500 down two tenths of 1% to 5702. After that was the Nasdaq, down three tenths of 1% to 17,948. And lastly here, small caps were down 1.1% to 22 27.

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But what a run that they have been on here. So no concerns for us there. We hit a little bit of overbought levels on our short term VRA momentum oscillators still. And keep in mind, we’re still in one of the worst seasonally week periods of the year, the final two weeks of September. Now, we have just six trading sessions left in September, and we look for a massive Q four from this market as we head into October, which will give us new end of month fund flows, beginning of month fund flows, from pension accounts, from retirement accounts. So, yes, we do remain extremely bullish going forward from here. Now, I will point out the transports had a rough day today. When I talk about the Dow, I talk about the transports here often after FedEx’s earnings today did come in weaker than expected.

And the earnings call, not great either, as the CEO came out and said that the Fed’s 50 basis point cut reaffirms their view that the economy is slowing. Again, as we’ve talked about here, yes, maybe slowing, but not contracting. Right. We’re not seeing negative GDP prints. As a matter of fact, the Atlanta Fed raised their Q three GDP X estimates to over are right at 3% employment. Yes, it’s been, it has slowed and we’ve seen massive downward revisions. Of course, that only benefits one party, and that would be the party in power right now. Um, but again, not a contracting environment from jobs or on the economic growth front.

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But we did see the transports down over three and a half percent on the day. Not what you want to see just after hitting a 52 week high yesterday. So no major concerns for us here just yet, but something we are keeping an eye on here as well. Next up, looking at our internals on the day to day, kind of a quiet day here on this front. We did have some negative readings, but no major concerns here. The internals as of late have been impressive, and if we started to get spikes in the declining number of stocks, spikes in the stocks of hitting 52 week lows or a big spike in downside volume, we would alert you to that here. It’s just not what we’re seeing now. We did have more declining stocks than advancing stocks on the day.

That was not on the week, however, but just shy of two to one negative. So again, no big red flags there. 52 week highs, lows did come in as our bright spot here once again with 424 stocks hitting 52 week highs to just 134 stocks hitting 52 week lows. Lastly here, volume did come in negative for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq, but just fractionally lower. No big beats here as well. No two to one beats or anything like that. So again, no kind of a quiet day on the internal front overall. Next up, let’s take a look at our sectors on the day to day.

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We finished with just three out of our eleven s and P 500 sectors higher on the day. Utilities resuming their leadership here after taking a little pause, hitting an all time high today. You know, it helped a little bit that yields, you know, I’ll say fell, but, you know, a little bit off their 52 week lows from earlier in the week. Now still back above a 3.7, down three tenths of 1% today at a 3.72. On the ten year. You know, we had hit extreme oversold levels in yields and extreme overbought levels on bonds. So no surprises there. We expect the long term trend of yields to continue lower as well.

Then our laggards. For our sectors today, we were led lower by industrials, materials and technology. Finally here for today, I’ll get a quick refresh of my screens here. Our VRA commodity watch where we saw some impressive action today. Gold once again hitting an all time high today. Excuse me, just off of those levels now, up one, one, 4% to 26 47. And we got exactly what you want to see. Outperformance from the gold miners, up just about 2% on the day today.

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And that is a 52 week closing high from the miners as well. A group here, precious metals, and the miners that we remain extremely bullish on here. And look at what a year gold has had. We started off the year at about $2,000 an ounce. We’re up almost $650 from that point. Now, that is some serious work. Now back to m two money supply, which I again talked about on Wednesday, that we’ve seen an uptick in money supply here in the US. When the Fed began their rate hike cycle a couple of years ago, we saw a peak in m two money supply and a slight contraction after that.

Now, m two money supply here in the US is back on the climb. And just today we found out that global m two money supply has now hit an all time high. Now, as I said on Wednesday as well, when money supply is growing, that is not an environment where you want to be short stocks, you want to be very long. Inflationary assets. That means precious metals, the miners individual stocks as a whole, housing, bitcoin. Again, inflationary assets is where you want to put your cash to work. This is not an environment where you can stick your money under the mattress and expect it to hold any of its value. It’s just not that kind of an environment here.

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So again, this is very bullish for precious metals, for commodities in general, and for stocks here. And we expect that the growth in m two money supply to continue from here. Next up, silver, now up two tenths of 1% on the day to $31.48 an ounce. Oil also slightly higher on the day up just over one 10th of 1% to $71.25 a barrel. And finally here for today, bitcoin did get back above $64,000 a bitcoin earlier in the session. We have pulled back some now down now down a quarter of 1% at 62,873. But that was earlier in the day, the highest level for bitcoin for the month of September. Now we have reached short term overbought levels on our VRA momentum oscillators, but this chart is improving.

We have not hit overbought on our medium to long term indicators, and we do remain extremely bullish on bitcoin at these levels.

So, folks, that’s all we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VrA podcasts every day at the market close. You can sign up@vraletter.com click the podcast link at the top. You’ll find all of our transcripts and notes for the podcast there as well, so we hope you’ll join us. Hope you all have a great weekend out there. Until next time, we’ll see you back here on Monday for the close.