In today's episode, Kip breaks down a truly remarkable day in stock market history. After Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, we saw the third-best market day since WWII. Kip discusses his perspectives on Trump's decisions, the bond market vigilantes, and what it means for the future of the stock market. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Wednesday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA Investing Podcast. It’s hard to even start this podcast. I’m being honest. What a day today, folks. Wow, wow, wow.

This is the third best day in the history since World War II. Third best single day in history today with this massive reversal move higher, short covering, relief rally. Call it whatever you want to, but this felt good today because we needed it, didn’t we? This has been a brutal stretch again. $11 trillion has been removed, if you will, from the stock market in what, five weeks. This is the second fastest bear market on record. The first fastest, quickest bear market was the Plan Demic. The what is the common denominator? Trump was president for both the first and second quickest bear markets in history. That is, that’s interesting, is it not? Where do we start? We gotta talk about.

[00:00:55]:
Gold today goes up huge. Up over 100 bucks an ounce today. Silver also up big today. Silver is up today. A buck 26. Excuse me, that was. Yeah, that’s right. A buck 26 may not sound big, but it was actually more than gold.

Up four, four and a quarter percent. But the real big wins. Okay, Tesla, did we need this or do we need this? Yeah, we needed it up 22%. Again. All this happened because Trump came out, what was it, around probably 1:00 and said that, you know, I’m sure you’ve seen it by now that as a 90 day moratorium or pause on these tariffs going into place. Except for China where he increased the, actually increased the, the tariff rate there markets did not care because this is what the markets wanted to see. Because there’s been no, there’s really been no strategy here. Right.

It was just throw. Throwing is. It is, folks. And please understand, look, I’m a big fan of the President. You have to know that right before you send the emails in and the bad phone calls. All right? But I just like to call like I see it and I like to make sure I talk about both sides. I mean, I wrote a book in 2016, I was one of the first Wall street types to endorse Trump. I did it pretty loudly.

[00:02:11]:
Caught a lot of shit, lost a lot of subscribers over that, by the way. Again, a lot of hatred for the guy. I’m not one of those guys, but I wrote a book called Crash Free Prosperity Becoming Wealthy in the Age of Trump. I predicted in that book that he would win and then we’d have a massive bull market, massive economic boom. I named The Trump economic miracle. Not that it’s all that new or clever, but I was the first to use it because I predicted it in my book, and all of that happened. I got the book right, okay. And so, yeah, you have to know I’m a big Trump fan, but he handled this so horribly.

It’s really indefensible. And I’m not going to pick on Trump here. I’ve been doing that now for about a month. I know I don’t think I have been, but the feedback I’m getting, I guess it’s coming across that way. Trump has got the most loyal supporters that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. And of course, so much of that is earned, and some of it is just people. People are loyal. Yeah, I’m loyal, but I’m not loyal like other people are.

[00:03:12]:
And this guy is belove. I mean, they did try to take this guy out a couple of times. I get it. It’s not that I don’t get it, but at the same time, you got to keep people honest, and I think that’s what happened here. Matter of fact, I know it is. Between people like me and Wayne Root, they were screaming at Trump as pretty much as loud as we could. I can’t tell you about all of that, but trust me, the message got through. And the.

The biggie really is the bond market vigilantes. Okay? The bond market vigilantes. If you don’t know the story, Bill Clinton was elected and started wanting to, you know, do. Do a lot of spending. And all of a sudden, the bond market started going crazy. He’s like, what? What’s going on here? Why, why, why, why can’t I do anything without this, The. The bond market stopping me? And they complained to him about the bond market vigilance, and he stopped. He goes, the what? Who? This is what he said, okay, who the fuck are the bond market vigilantes? He could not believe it.

[00:04:05]:
You know, country markets all had never heard it. That explained to him. Yes, sir, Mr. President. Yeah, these are the guys. These are like the Wall Street Mafia. These are the guys you just don’t want to get on the bad side of. And Trump just did that.

But you know what? Trump knows debt. Trump is very comfortable taking things right to the edge, certainly when it comes to debt. He’s got a history of bankruptcies. He’s got a history of having a lot of debt. Doesn’t make him nervous at all. I think he actually enjoys it, and so he understands the power of this group. And they got Woken up out of their slumber. It’s been a long slumber and they’re awake now.

And by the way, that’s why I think this is. We’re not out of the woods yet. I do think the lows are in and I think the odds of recession, which I put at 50, 50 just yesterday, I think those odds now are, I would say no more than 20%. Okay, but this isn’t over, right? It’s a 90 day moratorium. Anything could happen. And it is Trump, let’s remember. And so, you know, but it’s a great day. Bond market vigilantes are awake.

[00:05:10]:
The 10 year now is at 4.4%. That’s not that much lower than where it was this morning. 4.5%. So bond market didn’t really have a big day today, which you gotta admit that’s kind of interesting, is it not? Listen, I wrote this up this afternoon. We had a lot of updates and alerts today because of this, because of this tariff. It is a little bit nonsense because who here among us wants to manufacture and build things? Now, I don’t personally, I think there’s some of you that want to, but most Americans do not want to go back into building things and making whatever, $12 an hour or whatever. I saw that iPhone, if we built it in the US would cost 3,000 to $3,500. I’m sorry, but that product’s not going to sell.

Okay? So again, we want to, we want to capture the manufacturing that we can. The important things. Things are important to this, to America, certainly for pharmaceuticals. There’s no reason that Ireland should have all of our business because they just had this amazing tax code, you know, that they put in place to get Big Pharma’s business. Right? That should be easy to stop. There are other big projects like that and so many great things we can build in this country that need to be built. Okay? And Trump’s a builder. That’s exc.

[00:06:30]:
But he never conveyed that message. That’s his problem with this. He didn’t have a coalition. It was Trump versus the world. It was hyper aggressive. And pretty much everybody’s like, you know what? You’re coming after all of us. You’re pretty intense guy and you’re pretty good, but you can’t beat all of us. And once the bond market vigilantes sided with that group, it was over.

And so today was the day. If you saw his press conference afterwards, he’s like, here’s his quote. This is so condescending. All right. So condescending and so offensive, to be honest about it. Okay? He’s talking about why he did this. He said, well, people were getting a bit yippee and queasy. I never heard yippee before.

People getting yippee. In other words, they’re getting. They were. They’re soft, right? They. They caved. No, he’s the one that caved. He came to the bond market. Vigilantes.

[00:07:27]:
Okay? That is exactly what happened here. No matter what anyone else tells you. I’m telling you straight up, because I know, again, I’ve done this a long time. I know this group. I was never a bond guy or a debt guy, really. I’ve always been a stock jockey. But I’m telling you, I worked with these guys, and they know they’re number one. They know that they’re financial masters of the universe.

That’s what they are. And when you go against the banking cartel, again, we’re talking about the most powerful cartel on the planet, right? Most dangerous cartel on the planet. When you get into their territory, it’s. You’ve lost. I’m sorry, it’s over. It’s over. And maybe that’ll change. But.

But that’s. That is the way it is. You do not piss this group off. So that’s why Trump pivoted. It was a perfect time to do it, by the way, because again, we’ve gotten so oversold. You know, we share with you the last couple of days, the Vix, right? When the Vix gets over 45.3, which is where it closed on Friday, we told you what happened next. Big rallies. It was just really a matter of time.

[00:08:28]:
You know, you never know how big it’s going to be. But all the data, all the analytics told us there’s a big move coming. Here’s what’s interesting. That data is effective and accurate, and it applies not just for short term, like matters of days, but it does apply there also over years. Because over the next one, when you hit the Vix, over 45 on a closing weekly basis, over the next 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, the market’s up every year, 100% of the time and by a lot. Like, over the next year, it’s like 39%. Over the next five years, it’s 139% in total, right? So again, all of this stuff, the history that we had said this thing was about to end, but we had one person standing in the way and just happened to be the most powerful man in the world who is a loose cannon and that’s what got the shorts heavy in. The guy was serious.

He was not going to change his mind. Mind. But that’s what really caused people to short circuit is because, look, he’d already gone longer than we thought. And now, who knows, maybe this guy’s, maybe he’s lost a marble, you know, again, crazy, right? That’s, that’s always been used as advantage. Crazy Trump. So that’s what happened here. Now, did he, did, did he pull off a good deal? I don’t think you can say he’s done that yet. Certainly not with China.

[00:09:49]:
Again, it’s not over, right? He’s still increasing tariffs on other countries. I don’t spend a lot of time on that today because again, that’s days before you’re going to worry about that again. But the China thing is big and it’s not over. But now we don’t have to worry about all our friendly allies, okay? It was a mist, it was, it was a mistake targeting them all at the same time. Now we got to worry about China. And it’s not a small worry, okay? But I think now that we can focus on our true one, one true economic enemy, China, everything. We can breathe easy now. We can breathe easy now and not be yippee and queasy about it.

Okay? So condescending, so offensive. But it’s Trump, so we’ve learned to, we’ve learned to love him. Right? So no recession. The lows, I believe are in, but it’s, we’re not out of the woods yet. If you just look at, pull up a chart of each of the indexes. We’ll focus on this in the morning. It’s really interesting where they close today. Okay, Dow Jones S500, NASDAQ.

[00:10:53]:
I didn’t do the Rust 2000. Hold on a second here. Let me just, because I, I know the others kind of by memory here. R2K’s got a little ways to go. But the others, we kind of closed that resistance. There’s a wall of resistance from all the damage that’s been done. And so, and again, we are technically in a bear market. Okay.

The Moving averages were below 200. Moving average, moving averages are rolling over. These are all things that bulls are gonna have to contend with now. So it’s not gonna be, it’s not just gonna be smooth sailing straight up and it’s over. Right. But it’s gonna be an amazing trading environment, which is what we intend to do. We actually had a pretty good one day trade today of 25% within 24 hours. Right.

And so that’s what we’re putting together in addition to our core holdings like Tesla down 24% after hours. You know, our miners gold up over $100 now today. These are the, these are the things we want to stay in along with our VRA10 baggers. I also say as it applies to bitcoin, you know, bitcoin is now above where we sold it last week. Didn’t look, we didn’t want to sell anything. I resisted for forever. But you know, you reached a breaking point again. We’re going to a Friday.

[00:12:07]:
We know the Friday money cycle. It actually played out. The investments we owned got hit so much worse. Had we not sold them, I would have felt really, really stupid. Okay, now Bitcoin’s 832 now we sold it 82 to. Do I regret it? Not. I mean I don’t, I’m not a hindsight guy. I don’t live in the past.

So no, it doesn’t bother me at all. I have no problems at the time buying bitcoin back higher and we probably will have to because what bitcoin did on this was show. Yeah, it’s still bottled. Got down to 74,000. Okay, so it was hit. But it held up so much better than has in the past. In times of heavy market turmoil, this was a game changer in bitcoin’s trading pattern. This, this is very, very good for bitcoin and we will be buying it back again.

We think it’s gonna be a little topsy turvy. This short covering tends to wear out fairly quickly. Again, relief rallies don’t last long. And the bond market vigilantes, I know I keep harping on it, but they’re here and I don’t believe they’re going away. This is again, this is, this is bad. This. Trump woke him up. He’d never admit this, but he woke him up.

[00:13:18]:
And that ain’t good because now not only are they awake, but the traders now that know they’re awake are going to be siding with them. So you’re going to see a lot of volatility in my opinion in the bond market and upward pressure on yields. We may now be in a rising rate environment. That ain’t good. However, as Tyler and I just talked about, however, and we talk, you start all the time during the dot com melt up and. But we still had that set up here that really. Well, we were in a bear market now. But hey, we, we had a 32% bear market in the dot com melt up.

Right. 32% in NASDAQ. So and that was just prior to the final 270% move higher over the final 18 months. So just having a bear market doesn’t, it doesn’t change, it doesn’t change anything about what we’ve said in the past. Innovation, revolution, our five mega trends, none of that changes. It’s just something to be aware of now because now we’ve got resistance above us that we’ve got to work through. And now you got the bond market vigilantes. But we had that then the dot com melt up the average, guess what the average on the 10 year yield was from 95 to 2000, 6.1%.

[00:14:28]:
All right. We’re at 4.4% now. So in the big picture, big scheme of things, this yield in and of itself is not a big deal. Of course we have so much more debt now. Right. So again we’ll, we’ll spend more time on it going forward. I don’t want to bore you too much with this, but I don’t. Again, you get the point how a lawyer for this rally, we’re going to take it a day at a time.

We’re going to pick our spots, we’re going to, we’ll be able to add some new positions now that we didn’t know before. We, we’ve already got these picked out by the way. But we’re going to celebrate today. How about that Tesla now 25 after hours. All right, Dow Jones finishing up 7.8%. Russ 2000 which has been destroyed up 8.6%. I said yesterday the trading in the R2K was telling us a recession was coming. Trump knew it.

He said today he watched Jamie Dimon on FOX with the Maria Bartiromo this morning I caught some of that too. And Trump said when he watched that he made a decision it was time to go ahead and time to come to the table and, you know, work his magic. That kind of how he said it. But that’s what Jamie Dimon said. Of course the JPM head said, yeah, I, I think recession’s coming. And you know, Trump can handle a bear market, but he can’t handle recession. And by the way, neither can his flock. That’s what gets people to turn on, on you.

[00:15:44]:
Okay? You cannot have a recession and not have even your most loyal supporters turning because the recession 1, 2 year painful process. Right. And it just eats at you day after day after day as millions of jobs are lost that could not be allowed to happen. And again, all this combined is why Trump did what he did. All right. But if you hear him say it was a stroke of genius or as another example out of the deal, you know, honestly, if you throw up a little bit in your mouth, I won’t blame you because that’s what I’ll be doing. But again, it’s Trump. You know, I’m good letting be Trump, be Trump.

I love the good stuff about Trump. The other stuff I chuckle at or I get really mad about it because it costs us money. And this, again, I’ll wrap with this. What we just lived through should never have happened. It should never, ever have happened. I think he knows that deep down. Right. A lot of pain that we never had to go through.

[00:16:36]:
Should never have had to go through. $11 trillion in losses in the stock market. OK, what else? Nasdaq today. This is. Wow. 12% in Nasdaq gains today. Wow. 12%.

Wait, I’ll get to the eternals, folks. I want to save that for later because that’s unbelievable. So it was a great day all around. The Vix today crashed 35% back down to a 33 again. This is what we kind of expected. Right? That’s what we talked about. And again, it just happened all in one day. So now we’re meeting resistance in every major index, Tom, except for small caps.

You got more room to run because they were so destroyed. But now we’re getting very close to resistance. So I as, as we said today. Yeah, I think it’d be. I think it’s. I think it’s a mistake to buy here, in case you’re wondering. I think there’ll be a better opportunity. We’re looking for shakeout.

And again, we’ll use technical averages that I think she’ll hold up really well. Okay. Support lines and resistance lines. We’re going to be using that quite a bit going forward in our trading both the parabolic options and for the vra, because I think they’re going to be some amazing trades here. Maybe for what the. More terms. 90 days. This may be a 90 day trading range.

[00:17:46]:
We know where we don’t break out, we don’t break down. Right. But the moves are good. Nice, healthy moves and fairly reliable because again, this should be a technical recovery. This should be a technical recovery and that’s what we’ll be spending our time on here. Okay, what’s. All right, let’s get to the internals. I, I just gotta.

This is crazy. I had to run these numbers several times. I like what am. Have I forgotten how to divide what is going on here. Kip, check this out. 98.5% upside volume day in NYSE. We’ve had at least I remember one day better because we had one of these days during the pandemic, okay, during the recovery, like when the market was up like 12% one day. Okay.

You know, pretty close to what we did today. But today of course is number three. Number two was from the plan D, but 98.5% up volume day. NYSE advanced decline for NYSE was 93.4% stocks advancing. All right, that’s, that’s, that’s remarkable, right? That’s the best word I can come up with that NASDAQ also fantastic. Just not as good. 79.1% of. 79.1% of volume day with 82.8% advanced decline.

[00:19:04]:
Right. So again, these are fantastic readings. But then you also have this one. And this I can tell you through stands out. We had 27 stocks hit a new 52 week high today to 1581, hitting a new 52 week low. Now again, just a cumulative list. So once you’re on it, you can’t get off it. But still that is attention getting.

Okay. We’ve had very bad readings here during this cataclysmic decline because of Trump strategy. It just is what it is. And now we’ve got some technical work to do to, to to recover. All right. And sector watch today. Imagine that all 11 sectors on the high end of the day. Technology up 14%.

Isn’t that interesting? Technology of 14% when the NASDAQ was only up 12%. How’s that possible? Well, because I this, the semis are up 17% today. Right. So you, you know, you got communication stocks, semis, you got, of course, you know, a lot of small caps are in this group too. So. Incredible. Really incredible. Dial around sectors 1111 tech led the way.

[00:20:09]:
We had four sectors up 9% or more. The worst sectors today was utilities, only up 3.9. Only up 3.9%. Again, one for the record books here folks in our commodity watch. And again, this is fantastic. Gold has been a rock star. Yep, look, it got hit from 3,200 back to what below? Just below 3,000. But again, it’s the ultimate store of value.

As bonds were being hit during the decline, that’s what really freaks so many people out. That’s how you do the bond market vigilantes. Because when the market gets hit really hard and we get into a bear market inside of five weeks, most of that in a short period of time. Yields are supposed to collapse. I said this yesterday when the, when the yield was 4.2% 10 year. I said the yields should be 3.2%. This kind of destruction that takes place, the people should be buying bonds hand over fist and rate should be collapsing. The fact that they didn’t told you this was different.

[00:21:08]:
That’s what, again, that’s what got Trump’s attention. Know that, right? I, I think even he can’t ignore that with a straight face. But again, gold has been fantastic. Up 109 right now. 109 an ounce. Been a while since we’ve seen that. It’s up 3.6% last trade, 3,100 on, on the nose. Silver today up an even bigger 4.3% last trade 30.96.

Silver again has been hit pretty hard. Silver was what, 34 and change just a few days ago? Only 30 and change now. Right? The gold has been really been the standout here and it’s not, this is, we said a long time, this is the beginning of the biggest bull market in this group, right? We didn’t, we didn’t sell, we sold some stuff last week. Did not sell our miners, our, our junior miners, which is where we want to, we want maximum exposure in the two names we have, which you, you know, Vista Gold and Snowline Gold. Because of what’s about to happen to this group, we’re going to have, I think in historic bull market gold is telling us that now. And these, by the way, this, this whole group is a huge today, right? Let me tell you, let’s get, let’s get perspective on that. GDX today was up 8.4%. Okay.

[00:22:22]:
Gold at 3.6. So better than 2 to 1. Kind of surprised it wasn’t a little more than that. But I think that you’ll see that the miners really start to pick up. Tom, we’re looking for 100% gains in the miners this year. I think that’ll be on the low side. That’s been our target from the beginning of the year. And remember, our target for gold by year’s end is $4,000 an ounce.

Again, we’re at 3,100 right now. Okay. Massive buying, massive, massive buying of central banks, China, the elite. I mean this is, this is, this is that bull market. We said it for a while. This is that bull market in this group. Physical only, folks. Remember, Physical only.

Okay? If you don’t have someone that you buy physical gold from, feel free to reach out to me. I’ve got a great guy here. In Houston now, you know, he’s, they’re, they’re a family shop. They don’t put up with any nonsense, I’ll tell you right now, but they’re salt of the earth. And if, if the shit ever hits the fan, really does this, these are the guys, they know everybody, okay? But what you should do ideally is find someone in your neighborhood, somewhere in your area, I should say, and develop a relationship, become friendly with them. Not friends, but friendly with them. So you can call, ask questions, not pepper them. But in case something goes wrong, hey, you know what, man? I need somebody that knows how to do this.

[00:23:39]:
I need somebody that has an insight here with the police, whatever. Those are the guys that know everybody, okay? So I think it’s important, as we move forward, it’s going to become even more important. We live in a very volatile world. Look, now I’m just gonna make this point about Trump last comment, because I, I, I’m telling you, this is the reality. And I know he must be feeling this too. Trump, if this had gone on any longer, Trump would, would have been impeached, would have been impeached because Republicans would have been swamped in the midterms next year. It’s not, there’s no if, ands or buts about it. They would have been smoked.

It would have been, it would have been, it would have been horrendous for Republicans, okay? That’s the kind of anger that’s been building up here. You saw it from Republican senators and Congress people like, what are you doing, man? And of course, the left already hates him, so they would have taken back the House and the Senate, there’s no question about that. And they would impeach them, but this time they’d have Republicans that would side with them just to get him out. Okay? That’s how close Trump was to losing everything. I’m telling you straight up, folks, that’s how close he was to losing it all. And he knew all this, okay? So he pivoted. He does what he does when he has to do it and he can’t get any more out of the negotiation. Right? That in of itself, that is classic Trump.

[00:25:06]:
Okay, okay, what else here? Copper today, up a big 7.8%. Copper been destroyed, too. Remember, it was just 540 a pound. Two weeks ago, it was up 8%. Today it’s still down, it’s still 440 a pound. Is this some great buys here in this, in this group? Crude oil, nice recovery here too. Crude oil got down to what, 5662 now, right? Up three bucks a barrel on the day, up five and a quarter percent. We already talked about bitcoin, but I’ll give you a most recent quote here because again, we just talked about it.

Bitcoin, last trade, now 83,400. And again, love, just absolutely love the way bitcoin just hit. Not as well as gold, but for bitcoin. I’ve never seen bitcoin do this. In times of turmoil like we just went through, this was a game changer for bitcoin. We will be buying it back before long. All right, folks, that’s it for today. Hey, I hope you had a great day.

Everybody can breathe a little easier tonight. Maybe actually get a get some sleep tonight, right? And we’ll come back and get them again tomorrow. Okay? All right, folks, have a great night. We’ll see you tomorrow after the close.