In today's episode, Tyler discusses the state of the stock market as we head into the early summer months. He revisits the old Wall Street Adage, "Sell in May and go away," sharing some bullish data that may surprise you. Tyler also brings fresh insights on the exciting future of the tokenization of assets on blockchain technology. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there today. Hope it’s been a great week out there as well this week. We’ve certainly had, as I say here often and really has been the case for 2025. It’s been another eventful week here. But for today we got some normality.

It was a bit of a quiet session, you know, didn’t finish higher across the board, certainly, but the losses were fractional.

Barely anything at all. And we spent a lot of the day in the green as well. So fairly quiet day out there today. Of course, the big news of the morning we was the passage of the one big beautiful bill. You know, we spend a whole podcast kind of breaking that, that out here. We’ll see what happens going forward from here. A lot of good stuff in there, but certainly, as we’ve said here many times before, and this bill confirms it, President Trump never said he would be. No one ever expected him to be the president of austerity.

[00:01:22]:
So our debt will continue to grow under this bill. That is, of course, the unquestionable reality of it, especially if you’re going to give tax cuts and not put doge cuts into law. You know, how are you going to pay for these things? Which, you know, at the end of the day, this is where having the world’s reserve currency certainly helps, you know, to be able to print your way out of it partially. But Kip and I have talked about this at length. You know, the, the plan looks to be here to grow our way out of this problem.

And that, you know, like Kip has talked about in his podcast this week’s as well. Who doesn’t want to get back to an environment where GDP is growing at what many would consider like a developing economy would.

Talking 7, 8, 10% yearly GDP growth. And with the technology that we’re seeing right now, it’s, it’s very easy to find that as a real possibility. There’s a lot of people out there who are very smart that disagree with me. Absolutely. And their points, their talking points are very good talking points. But look at the use cases that we’ve seen already from AI. You know, just a couple years ago we were saying that’s a fun toy, but how are we going to use it? And now AI is helping put together, you know, world class level research reports, connecting the dots on ideas that maybe people have thought about in the past.

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But doing it at a speed that is completely unprecedented. And we won’t even get into Quantum here.

If you’ve seen it recently, there’s one big Quantum company that was a small cap, I guess technically still kind of a small cap. But over the last since Trump was inaugurated, this company’s been around for a long time. D Wave Quantum been around since 19, 1999, just went public. I don’t know if they’ve gone public private before like this but you know, most recent iteration went public what just a couple years ago. But since Trump’s inauguration the stock is up like 1500%. They’ve announced huge contracts out there and looking like they’re going to be one of the first to real world case uses on it. That’s kind of the exciting part of that story is Lee at least which could accelerate problem solving even on an order of magnitude greater than AI in its current iteration camp, which is just it’s tough to fathom that kind of speed and potential for what that can solve.

[00:03:51]:
So there’s so many exciting things on the horizon. A quiet day here for the market isn’t too bad, that’s for sure. And it is May, right. We’re starting to enter the summer months here where you might hear a lot of, you know, sell in May and go away the classic, you know, old Wall street adage there and you know, some great work here. We like to reference Stock Traders Almanac here often and their specific version of sell in May and go away looks somewhat like this for the Dow at least, you know, you want to own the Dow from November 1 to April 30. Then for them, they like to switch to a fixed income. You know, some people say go away completely. They’ll switch to a fixed income for the other six months of the and historically speaking it’s worked very well.

The average returns since 1950 from the November to April time frame, 7.4%, you know, not a bad average. So in some really big wins in there as well. While the other six months of the year for the Dow average just a gain of 0.8%. So it is still positive.

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It’s not terrible. But what’s interesting here is that it has not held up so well in the in recent history. In the last 10 years, seven out of 10 have finished positive with some huge wins in there. For example here 2017, which just so happened to be the first summer Trump was president, by the way. You know, so maybe around two here but in 2017, that may to November time frame, the market was up 11, let’s see here. I know, 11.6% in that time frame. Another one, 2020, another big one also, you know, I know that was coronavirus insanity, but we’ve compared this period to that a lot as well because it’s the most recent example of another V shaped recovery.

Where the market went on to make new all time highs. After that, just coronavirus insanity devastating. You know, month of trading that took us so low, you know, we were back at all time highs and far beyond that by year end.

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We were back at all time highs before the end of the summer that year. So again, 8.9% in that sell in May and go away period gains of 8.9%.

So again, similar to what we’re seeing today. That’s why I bring up that period specifically. But again, in recent history, you know, again, this hasn’t held up quite so well. Seven out of the last 10 years were positive. And while it’s too early to tell, I mean it’s been a strong start to the month of May.

It’s May 22nd now. We have huge gains to show for it here. Nasdaq up nearly 8 1/2 percent. Semi is up almost 14%.

S&P up nearly 5%. The gains go on and on. So certainly hasn’t been a sell in May kind of and go away kind of year so far. Now, Kip and I have talked about this as well. We are at overbought levels. And even in 2020, there were pullbacks along the ways to all time highs. Right. Specifically in the semis we saw multiple 5% plus pullbacks.

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One I think was as high as almost 8% before we got back to all time highs. So there will be buying opportunities. And that’s the point. When we get those buying opportunities, you know, we’ll look at them as exactly that. When we get those dips, we’ll use them as buying opportunities. So kind of to wrap it here on that note, you know, rather than looking at sell in May as a scary time where stocks can’t perform well, that’s not the case.

I think I just laid out pretty clearly that’s not always the case. So again, we’ll look at this as an opportunity. If we get a pullback, it’ll be a great time to dollar cost average. And if we continue to head higher, you know, then you’re going to be excited. At least you didn’t miss the move completely.

By making Trading decisions off of old Wall street adages. You know, these old adages are very useful, right. They’re, they’re there for a reason and they’ve resonated for so long for a reason. But these aren’t facts that must be acted upon every single time right. Now then you could say there might be some analytics that you can refer to that’s more important. But again, the time period for the last. Since 1950. Yeah, the, the average gain is only 0.8%.

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But again, point is, it’s a gain, right. So it definitely doesn’t mean that we have to sell off this summer. Doesn’t mean that we have to retest the lows or something like that. So again, we’re looking at pullbacks as buying opportunities here, especially, you know, next topic here before we get to our markets, especially when you have President Trump out there being the greatest salesman America has ever seen, you know, well, on his way to his goal of $10 trillion in capital flow to the U.S. you know, on this successful tour in the Middle east, you know, roughly $3.2 trillion in commitments from various Middle Eastern countries.

And outside of that, separately, the White House has disclosed $5.1 trillion of U.S. investments. So if that’s not included, the Middle east is not included in that. We’re at, you know, nearly eight and a half trillion dollars. And Trump’s only been in office for four months. That’s. That is pretty incredible right there.

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As I mentioned, a lot of that’s from Middle Eastern countries. Japan is boosting its yearly investment in the U. S by about 200 billion, taking it over $1 trillion a year. And then of course, the private Companies, Nvidia, Apple, IBM, Taiwan, Semi SoftBank, Oracle, open AI right, that’s just to name a few of them. You know, these are, that’s. He’s all says often he’s the biggest cheerleader for America. And this is a clear evidence of that. He’s done a great job of it. And now it’s become a salesman for America.

And with that, sentiment has been back on the rise. Of course, it’s been an amazing move from the April lows. We’ve recapped this here a lot. But the Fear and Greed index led the way.

So we’re not back to extreme greed yet. We’re at a 66 greed mode. And this one was interesting. For the first time since February 5, AAII Investor Sentiment Survey bulls outpaced the bears. You know, not a huge increase, just a 2% less than a 2% increase in bulls week over week, but roughly over 8% drop or just about 8% drop in bears week over week. And wow, how long of a time is that’s a long time to have more bulls and bears again. February 5th. So that’s a key reason there and point that we wouldn’t look at this as a concern yet by any means.

[00:10:33]:
Until we get to the point where the AI is the flip of what it’s been for bears where you’re seeing bullish, massively outweigh bearish sentiment for weeks and months on end. Then we’ll start to get concerned about a top in this market just flipping from bulls to bears and it’s just 1 percentage point above bearish sentiment. Right now we’re at 37.7 bulls, 36.7 bears. So certainly not excessive bullishness by any means. You take a look at the put call ratio which Kip pointed out this week as well has been lower than what we’ve seen previously.

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Means people are buying the dip. Not necessarily a bad thing. But we close out the day in the nines. 0.94 is where we finished today for the put call ratio. So certainly far, far from excessive bullishness.

A 0.7 is the average. So anything above that is seen as bearish leaning really. And again over ending over one is almost excessively bullish at that point. So we’re just not seeing that from this market again. Doesn’t mean there’s not going to be shakeouts. We are at your short term overbought levels. Quickly cover here the action in yields today because it was interesting with that bill. A lot of people talking about yields on the rise today and the 30 year did finish higher but the 10 year finish as lows of the day.

We think this looks more like a normalization of yields for adjusting to to a new environment here. You know, nothing that we’ve seen. If you like Kip talked about, if you zoom out on the chart, it really looks much more manageable.

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Even the 30 year hadn’t taken out 2023 high. It’s getting close to those levels. But if it were to fail now, well, that’s a lower high.

And if I were buying a stock and we made a lower high, it would make me hesitate before adding to that position. Although it is at 52 week highs.

But a lower high from 2023, again, just some point points to to watch for there. Again we, we’ve not seen yields. We’ve said that the Fed has been overly restrictive, right? No doubt about it. But not excessively restrictive to the point where we’re going to hamstring this con economy. And nothing has changed from that point of view at this point. So let’s take a look at our markets on the day. Let’s start with the most exciting story possibly of the day. I know I waited 12 minutes to get to it, but of course that is bitcoin breaking out to all time highs overnight.

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And that’s really just one story of the broadening action we’re seeing from cryptocurrencies as a whole here. So let’s take a look at crypto to start off, bitcoin again overnight hitting an all time high, getting almost to 112,000 today. The, the high was 111,953, right. At about 111,000 right now. And it is spilling over to the other cryptos. You’re not quite breaking out to all time highs for some of these, but a good day for other cryptos. And this again, of course, bitcoin at an all time high is an incredibly exciting story by itself. But the real story here has been this evolution, evolution in tokenization.

Mike Novogratz, the CEO of Galaxy Digital, was on Bloomberg yesterday talking about this. And then Kraken’s announcement here is very interesting. So we’ll see if Galaxy gets into a similar environment. But Kraken today announced, which is another cryptocurrency exchange, probably could be compared to like a coinbase, right? If you’re, if you’re not too familiar with the space. But Kraken now plans to allow non US customers to trade Apple, Tesla, New Nvidia and other popular stocks as tokens over a digital ledger. The company says that this will give access to these stocks 24 hours a day, just like the crypto market, even when the US Stock market is closed. Which is a very interesting point there because this is something younger traders have been asking for, right? These younger traders, whether they’re millennials, Gen Z or below even, you know, they were introduced to investing a lot of the times because of crypto, right? You had a friend or something that made a bunch of money in it and then you started trading cryptos. A lot of people started out with sports betting.

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Let’s be completely honest about it, right? You know, hey, I can do this all over nat now I can trade over an app also, right? It’s just an, it’s gamification of investing. We wrote about it in the Big Bribe. This is not a new trend here, right? Really. But this is the evolution of it and again, makes us so much more bullish, right? This is more liquidity for the system here, right? More liquidity for stocks, more liquidity for global assets, right? And so you get why the younger trading community is asking for it. They already have access to it for cryptos. And even most of these trading platforms allow you to place after hours trades already, right? Not even tokenized. They just allow you to make after hours trades. So why can’t we just trade 24,7? There’s pretty much a market open at all times, right? Somewhere along in the world, if there’s buyers and sellers give us access to them.

I get that. I definitely get that. But the, even the bigger Trend Here beyond 24 hour trading continues to be this tokenization of assets. So this will be rolling out by Kraken in the coming weeks. Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia. Again, not US customers, which sucks. But it’ll also have ETFs, and they’ll be based on the Solana blockchain platform to keep track of all this. And this is really where it gets interesting because this would be a proof of concept for more access to blockchain platforms, right? We’ve been, Kip and I have been watching this space of tokenization of assets for years.

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We’ve both said it has the potential to absolutely revolutionize asset ownership as a whole. As a whole, seriously smart contracts. If you haven’t done, you know, much digging into what these are, it’s very interesting, right? It’s basically a digital contract that when these criteria get met, then your money can be sent off, right? That’s the at least one use case of an asset. Here’s another one here, right? Just off the top of my head to give you some examples here. These aren’t going to be perfect, right? There’s no working examples I have of some of these yet. But to give you an idea of what this would look like, right? The stocks make sense, right? Because you can already buy fractional shares on some of these exchanges. So you’re just doing it in a different manner. But what if you could apply this to your home? Or what if you could apply this to other real estate assets? You know, if you want a vacation home maybe instead of a timeshare or a small ownership group of friends and you share the time, you know, that’s a complicated process when you get money involved in friends, you know, doesn’t always end pretty.

Instead of doing something like that, you could be part of a group, it could be Anonymous, if you wanted it to be. There’s all kinds of different rules that the owner of the asset, the one who starts the token, has the ability to make. So let’s say it’s a vacation rental, right? And you want to invest in. Instead of spending a million dollars on a new property, you know, you want to spend $50,000 and you want to be able to go X amount of days per year, but you don’t really want to get in a timeshare. It seems a little scammy to you? No. A token actually gives you full ownership access, right? So you could turn around and sell it at a higher price later to somebody else. I mean, I’m sure with timeshares there’s all kinds of creative ways and good ways to do it. I’m not saying that they’re all scams or anything.

[00:18:10]:
I think this is an easier way. There’s. It cuts out the middleman here, right? You can just find a tokenized asset and bid on buying parts of that token from somebody in a marketplace, right. Instead of finding a timeshare company to do it or a dozen of them and going through all of their terms and stuff, right? So that’s one example, another one here that I thought about the other day. In Austin, boat clubs are very popular, right? Because some days you might want a pontoon to go out, you got a bunch of friends. Other days you might want a boat that you can fish in pretty easily, or maybe you want to pull the kids behind on a tube, so you want a wakeboarding boat, right? Well, so those clubs are popular to give you access to all those kinds of things. What if you tokenized boat ownership instead? And maybe you did want to do it with friends or maybe again, an anonymous group of people, but you want a specific type of boat, you can tokenize it again, help pay for it, right? You know, in the real estate front, maybe instead of a reverse mortgage as well, you can sell 20% of your home. And with the contract, you could stipulate that, hey, this is.

[00:19:12]:
Does not grant you any. Any access to the home, Right? It’s just part ownership of the asset. That’s it. They don’t get access to any of your records, nothing. You could stipulate all of that in there and give yourself the option to buy the tokens back at a specified price in the future if you want to own your home outright again.

So I’m sure that there will be plenty of manipulative ways that this is taken advantage of. But the point is, it’ll all be on the blockchain now, so. So that everyone can view it.

It’s going to be incredible. I think it will revolutionize asset ownership. Absolutely. All right, getting a little long winded here, so we’ll quickly cover our market action. Again, relatively flat action on the day today. Quiet day. We did, you know, sell off a little bit into the close, which of course isn’t what you want to see, but we finished still off the lows of this morning and the NASDAQ managed to finish positive on the day up just under 3. 10 of 1% to 18,925.

[00:20:15]:
The S&P flat on the day down.04% to 5,842. Dow almost exactly flat. Excuse me, on the day today to 41 8. 59. And the Russell 2000 flat or sorry, yes, essentially flat at 2. 45. Looking at our internals on the day, they didn’t slide off quite as far as our markets did into the close here. Some pretty good numbers.

We were just slightly negative with more declining stocks than advancing stocks. Slightly negative. 52 Ekais lows but positive on volume for both the NYSE and the nasdaq. Looking at our sectors on the day today, we finished with just three out of our 11s and P500 sectors higher on the day. That was consumer discretionary, consumer communication services and tech. So good to see. You know, most of those are really tech proxy related sectors and then industrials were unchanged on the day as we’ve talked about. We saw some more all time highs from that group this week as well for our laggards on the day.

[00:21:21]:
Utilities, you know, I’m sure a little bit of a retreat there on the fear of rising yields followed by health care and energy. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Let me get a quick refresh of these screens here. We have more flat action on the day here. Now this might actually be the. It’s getting a little late on the podcast. This might be the futures price here, but gold now at $3,294 an ounce here and we’ve seen some continued good action from the miners here. You know, it’s been a good solid move over the last few sessions.

Couldn’t hold on to it today after, you know, roughly three positive sessions in a row. Gave a little bit of that back today. Just about half a percent though. Silver at 33.18 a pound. Copper 4.60 or sorry, silver $3 33.18 cents an ounce. Coppers and pounds at $4.67 a pound, one oil right at about $60 a barrel, $60.64 a barrel. Then of course, as I mentioned earlier, Bitcoin up over 18% or so in the month of May, hitting all time highs today just below 111,000. Folks, that’s all that we have time for here today.

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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. Until next time. If I don’t see you tomorrow, have a great long weekend. And yeah, we’ll see you back here either tomorrow or Tuesday for the close.