In today’s episode, Tyler Herriage recaps a lively market rebound after yesterday’s downturn, sharing insight on the latest earnings from major players like Tesla, Intel, and Ford. Tyler spotlights why shareholder voting power matters, especially in the wake of Tesla’s recent drama around passive index funds. He also covers today’s market internals—including eye-catching sentiment indicators, tech and small cap rallies, and bullish movements in semiconductors. 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 fantastic day out there today. Hope your week is going well. I’ve got a bit of a quick podcast here for you today, or we’ll see if we can keep it a little on the shorter side. I’ll let you know why here in just a second. But first, a lot of exciting stuff to cover in today’s podcast if you’re a regular listener here.

You know, we, Kip and I have a running joke that, that he usually gets the all time high days, the big up days, and I get the big down days. Well, Kip wanted to cover Tesla’s earnings yesterday, which meant that he got the down day this week and I got the bounce back day today. So very grateful to be here with you today. Always grateful to be here with you. But we have some other exciting earnings coverage today. We had intel after the close, Ford after the close, and we’ll go through a little bit more of Tesla’s earnings. Just one more quick point there as well that I want to cover and especially on the voting side. So if you’re a Tesla shareholder, you won’t want to miss this here as well.

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And then we’ll dive into all of the market action on the day to day, our internals. Also what we’re seeing from sentiment indicators and of course our VRA commodity watch as well. Uh, but quickly. One reason why this will be a quicker podcast today is that tonight we’ll have a VRA members only webinar. Uh, we do these fairly regularly. We’re now going to start doing them more regularly though as well. So if you ha aren’t with us already. Why not? We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now@vra letter.com Go and check it out and you’ll get access to tonight’s website webinar at 8 Eastern Time, 7 Central.

So hope you can come and join us. It’s going to be a great one. We’re going to have some fun with it as well. So come and join us tonight. We’ll dive into the VRA portfolio positions and a number of other topics as well, so hope you can make it there for our members. Looking forward to having you on as well. All right, so that being said, let’s jump right into today’s action. We’ll begin here with, like I said, a little bit of Tesla’s earnings and why this vote is so important.

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I want to do a slightly different screen share here today, something I don’t usually do. Usually we’re going through charts or various web pages like the sentiment indicators, various economic data, you know, here I’m going to let the others speak for me. Why reinvent the wheel, right? We’ve got two great threads here from X breaking down why, you know, individual investors voting for these things in companies is so essential here. If you tuned into Kip’s podcast yesterday, which if you want the full breakdown of Tesla’s earnings, I highly recommend you go listen to that podcast or come and join us again. He put out a great update on it this morning in today’s letter as well. But here is exactly why Elon Musk referred to ISS and Glass Lewis as corporate terrorists. Again, I won’t dive into the full story here today, but what fantastic earnings these were for Tesla. So here’s what Elon put out just yesterday and Kip covered this a bit or sorry, didn’t cover this yesterday because it came out after the podcast.

But this breaks down in a little bit more detail. You know, exactly what’s happening here in the problem with passive index funds. You know, we’re big believers in, you know, especially if you’re not a regular investor, you don’t want to be in the market. You know, we’ve talked about the necessity of owning stocks, owning inflationary assets and being out of money margin money market accounts, right? So index funds are a great way to do that. Passive index funds are a great way to do that. But, but as you’ll see in the second thread from Cathie Wood as well, this likely wasn’t what the intentions were by the creators of passive index funds, where as a shareholder of these funds you essentially give up your right to vote in what happens for these companies. So something has to change here in the regulatory framework because as Elon points out here, let’s go ahead and kick this off. You know, the fundamental issue here that roughly half of all publicly traded shares are controlled by these passive index funds who outsource their shareholder votes to advisory firms, specifically ISS and Glass Lewis, who have no actual ownership themselves here.

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So they can vote. Tell these index funds how to vote along their political guidelines, right? It could be esg, dei, all of these things that especially most of us red pilled Americans conservatives do not want to be a part of. So why do we want our shares being voted? In a way. So if you’re an owner of passive index funds, just remember this, you know, again, not that they’re Saying they’re, they’re the root of all evil or anything. But something has to change here. If, if you know these passive index funds are going to vote on behalf of the shareholders who own these funds, you should have a say in what’s happening there. Something has to change here. Either the shareholders of these funds get to vote based off of, you know, their rough approximate shareholder value in these companies, or they don’t get to vote at all.

Because this is absolutely unfair here. And again, when you have these massive funds and we most people just don’t even know that this is happening. Right, so here’s Cathie Wood’s breakdown of the whole thing. Trying to go through this here quickly. So you know, Eric here also pointing out very pro index funds would be fine if they were stripped of their voting rights. Exactly, exactly. Why not? So you let serious investors do it. Although again, I think that some of these shareholders should at least have the option to, of voting even in a passive fund.

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Passive doesn’t have to mean that you don’t get to vote, just that you, the allocations and weightings are changed. That way you don’t have to pay attention to it on a daily basis. But again, these are a great tool. And as Cathie Wood goes on to say here, you know, we’ll take a quick look at this and I’ll get to it. What do, what do these companies know about the risks that Elon is taking about the convergence of all from robots, energy storage, artificial intelligence, robo taxis, humanoid robots. What do they know about these things? I really, they’re not even, they don’t have a stake in this at all. So have they researched the odds of Elon leading Tesla to 10 years, 41 EBITDA growth on average, just like what we saw in Delaware. And Kip covered this yesterday as well.

Your Delaware shooting down Elon Musk’s pay package. That’s shareholders already agreed to this. Basically no one could have done this. I can’t think of another CEO that could have innovated in the way that Elon Musk has. Again, Kip covered this yesterday as well. In the regards to the question of what are, you know, is this going outside of Tesla’s core competencies? He basically said, well when we started this company, we had no core competencies. This is what we do here, right? So as she says, based on preliminary research, no company in history has grown EBITDA 41% an annual rate or 30 fold in 10 years. If they meet these goals, it’s going to impact Everything.

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This is the wealth creation that Elon talked about in the shareholder meeting yesterday. I mean, but when you look at what Tesla has done, you start to think maybe they can do this. Look at this. From 10 years ago, revenue for Tesla has increased 2,900%. Revenue for Q3 this year came in at 21 or 28.1 billion. Again, a 2,900% increase from 10 years ago, which was below $1 billion. Vehicle deliveries all time high compared to. All right, it’s 49,000 497,000.

Over 497,000 deliveries in this quarter compared to less than 12,000 ten years ago. Again, massive moves here. So again, they’ve been menaces to innovation. Absolutely correct. As Elon said, corporate terrorists here. When John Bogle had the idea of lowering costs and democratizing investing, this is not what he had in mind. It could not agree more. So if you want to take a full look, go check out Cathy Woods Twitter.

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That’s from a few days ago there. But again, another reason to get out of some of these funds if you don’t have your voting rights. I heard this from somebody and it’s a great point that you could really make an entire living and outperform these funds by just owning their top 10 holdings. If you want to start a portfolio like that, I’m not recommending that here today. But when they rebalance their portfolios, oh well, we can’t have Tesla making up more than 10% of the portfolio and it’s up 50% on the year. So now it’s at 15%. So we got to rebalance it. They’re selling your shares.

You could greatly outperform these, these passive funds and indexes just by doing that alone. I got a great story here from a friend of mine whose name I won’t say, but his mom was a schoolteacher in, you know, the 90s and she saw Apple computers being put into their schools. She called their investment advisor and said, hey, what about this company? Tell me about Apple. And the, the advisor said, oh, you know, it’s a good buy here, go ahead and buy it. So they bought shares of Apple. As we all know, Apple became the first trillion dollar company just about less than a decade, about eight years ago or so now, maybe six years ago even. But regardless, from the late 90s and through the dot com bubble and then afterwards, when Apple really started to go on a tear, she got constant calls from her investment advisor saying, this makes up too much of your portfolio. Sell it.

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But she was in the school seeing how Much people loved Apple products and she said, no, don’t sell any of it. And she stayed true to that. And by the time that my friend got to college, she was able to pay essentially the equivalent of his entire tuition from Apple stock alone because she refused to sell it. That is a fantastic financial decision on her part. Now that won’t be the case for every, you know, high flying company out there, but one great example of how, you know, diversification in that regard can hurt you and rebalancing your portfolio just because one stock has seen incredible gains. This is an environment here again we’ve compared often to the dot com era where you want to hold on to your winners. All right, so one last point here on Tesla that I do want to share. If you follow Kip on Twitter, he talked about this today as well.

Let me zoom in a little bit here, make this a little bit easier for you. All right, so as you can tell, you know, Tesla has not gotten back to these all time highs. But here’s what I want to point out is right here, this massive green candle Tesla today had what is seen as a technical buy signal for a lot of technicians. This is a massive bullish outside day. So an outside day is where you have a low below the previous day’s trading. Tesla opened lower on the day and then closed just about at its highs of the day, which is also above. I’ll zoom in a little bit more here and get my head out of the way if you can tell there. I know it’s a little tough to tell closing above or didn’t have to close above.

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It has to close above the previous day’s close. But without getting into the nitty gritty of it, there was a low below yesterday’s and it rallied to get above and finished above the the highs of the day before. So in technical analysis again this is called an outside day and is a technical buy signal here. It’s known for a, a reversal of the current move. So this short term move here that we’ve seen from 470 would be seen as a downtrend. This should be a sign of a reversal in that trend. Is a counter trend move signifying again bullish that the move to the upside that we’ve seen from the April lows should continue from here and in our view that will be to all time highs and beyond here for Tesla Again we’ve called it the number one stock to own for the innovation revolution. All right, so quickly here I’ll try to cover some of our other topics on the day.

Like I said, going to keep this one short and sweet today as we do have our members only webinar so tonight. But after the close today we had more earnings where we got intel which has been you know, really a laggard, really not even a player recently in the chip space until President Trump got involved. I mean this guy really has had the golden touch lately. The timing couldn’t have been better of the purchase of of intel which essentially the US government now acquired 9.9% of the stock at $20.47 a share. Well in after hours we’re still up Roughly, let’s see 10% on the day for Intel. Six and a half percent in after hours has been as high as 11% which now means the US government has nearly a 100% gain in intel shares. Like I said, bought shares at 2047 now trading at 4069. So an impressive move there from Intel.

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We’ll see if this rally can continue as they did have better than expected earnings today. So good to see and should be good news for the semis tomorrow. I’ll touch on that here briefly in a second as well. But first our leader on the day for our markets was not tech but the small caps. Good to see. We’ve covered this here as well. When the Fed starts cutting rates, small caps typically before outperform large caps by 5 to 7% over the next six months. So Russell 2000 up 1.27% on the day to day but the NASDAQ had a good day as well, up nearly 9/10 of 1%.

Still just below its all time high which is why it’s so amazing that these sentiment indicators remain very fearful here. I’ll get to that here in a second but but just what we want to see from this group. The semiconductors leading SMH up nicely on the day but SOX the semiconductor index up over 2 1/2% on the day to day. So 2 1/2 to 1 outperformance from the semis a day. Exactly. Textbook bullish action from this group. And now intel for smh, the semiconductor ETF which was up. Well let’s see, I’ll give you the exact number here.

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SMH was up 1.83% on the day but intel makes up 5 and a half percent of the portfolio. So should be if intel can hang on to these gains. Should be a rocket ship kind of day to close out the week. Tomorrow’s the seventh largest holding for SMH is the 12th largest holding out of 30 for the semiconductor index. So still will be a good move tomorrow coming. And again that is why it’s so shocking in the semis right at their all time highs as well, just fractionally below them right now. And yet we have the fear and greed index still just hovering above extreme fear mode. One week ago we were, we were in extreme fear.

Today we’re at a 28 again fear mode. Overnight we got back the latest AAII investors sentiment survey. We got a slight uptick in bulls from last week, but still far more bulls than bears here. A lot of neutral investors here until we get to the point where we have a larger pullback from all time highs than what we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks. Until we get, you know, you’re seeing a 5% plus pullback and, and we remain at extreme greed on the fear and greed. We remain with significantly more bulls than bears talking, you know, 40, 50, 60% bulls. I would say 50 to 60% plus bulls in the 40s isn’t quite as high, but at least, you know, again, 60% plus bulls for weeks on end. That’s when we’ll start looking for the signs of a top.

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Now that not saying that that means the top is in because if we can stay very bullish for weeks and months on end before that top finally comes. But again, just another reason here why we want to buy the dip and don’t sell the rip. All right, quickly here are internals on the day today. Nothing crazy here. Roughly 2 to 1 positive for advanced decline on both the Nyse and the NASDAQ. We got positive numbers here. Nothing massive from 52 weeks high, high to lows but still good to see. And then volume coming in nicely positive.

Not any 70 or 80% upside volume. But a good day today overall looking at our sectors here on the day. Energy leading the way. I’ll get to this a little bit more with oil as the price of of oil per barrel is going up here. There was an announcement today that Trump will be putting additional sanctions on Russia. So that likely helped out oil quite a bit. I mean up five and a half percent again. I’ll get to that here in a minute.

Followed there by the industrials, materials and tech. And then to the downside, defensive consumer staples leading the way lower followed by utilities and then real estate. Real estate’s down. You know, we’re big fans of the home builders here, which has been, you know, really a counter call to the rest. There’s so much bearish sentiment around housing right now. That’s the kind of opportunity we love to look for here. No one’s looking this way right now, which makes us think we’re, we’re still early, early early on what will be a massive move higher for housing as the home builders were actually higher on the day to day XHP, the Home Builder ETF up over 9. 10 of 1%.

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As we just got news this morning that mortgage rates plunging to the lowest level in 12 months coming in at a 6.19. That’s according to Freddie Mac. Again that’s just from this morning. Kip talked about this on X today. Just imagine where we’ll be as mortgage rates continue to move lower. If you’ve been here with us for a while, that’s been our call for bond yields to continue to move lower which are still below 4% even after being up on the day. Still below 4% on the 10 year yield. But once we get into the fives for mortgage rates and then below the fives, then we’re looking at a rocket ship kind of move higher for housing and really for this economy as a whole.

Take take a look at this one last chart that I have here today. This just shows you the strength of the housing market. Okay, this is home equity, homeowners, home equity. Right now we have record high. Over 39% of homeowners own their home outright. That is a record high. But even beyond that, people are not underwater on their homes. We’re not seeing the massive increase in helocs.

Right. Home equity line of credit like we saw during the financial crisis in 2008. None of that right now. Record highs in home equity right now for homeowners. Oh, that’s in billions right there by the way. So that’s $35.7 trillion in home equity alone in the US that can almost pay off our nation’s debt. Homeowners could do that. That’s an incredible, incredible number.

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Now of course we’ve seen this massive increase here. A lot of that has to do with the debasement of the US dollar as we’ve seen money supply hitting all time high after all time high. But another reason there that we must own inflationary assets as they continue to run the money printer hot. You need to own stocks, you need to own housing, you need to own precious metals, which means physical gold and silver. And of course one of our favorites, the gold miners and the new kid on the block, Bitcoin as well. If you haven’t joined us as a V member, we just recommended our second ever crypto position as well, so come and join us. Find out what that is. Gold having.

Sorry. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Sorry, I’m trying to move a little quickly for you here. Gold bouncing back nicely today. Still above our year end target. So no concerns for us here at $4143 an ounce. Silver also up over 2% on the day to$48.64 an ounce. Copper up 1.82% on the day at $58 a pound, Dr.

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Copper as they call it. And then oil like I said, up big on the daytoday, up above $65 barrel here at $65.96 a barrel. And lastly here for today, bitcoin has been really hovering around this 110 level now at 109,725 a Bitcoin folks. Excuse me. That is all that we have time for here today. Hope you can join us this evening for our members Only webinar. Again, if you’re not a member, come and join us. We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now@vletter.com While you’re there, sign up to receive our podcast every day at the market close.

Click that podcast link at the top VRAletter.com  you’ll find our transcript there. Notes just about everything that we have to offer on the free side as well. So again, that’s all we have time for here today. Yeah. Hope to see you on the webinar tonight. Until next time, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.