In today's episode, Tyler breaks down this week's turbulent market action for the shortened holiday week. While September is a historically weak time of the year, we continue to see fantastic buying opportunities in a market that wants to head a whole lot higher. He also covers the latest economic data and what it means for the future of the Federal Reserve. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Dont look back because the market is closed. Good Friday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for Todays VRA investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there. Great end to your week this week. As for our markets, it was not such a great end to the week and a bit of a rough week for our major indexes today and most of our major sectors here as well, which I’ll cover all of in today’s podcast. But I will lead with this, especially for some of our newer listeners out there. I want to kick it off with what we’re seeing right now on a large scale view, which is the fact that we don’t see this market action that we’ve seen this week and really from the all time highs that we saw, you know, just over a month ago now that we don’t see this as the beginning or a continuation of something worse for this market.

So for any new listeners out there, I wanted to get that out of the way. We’ve been talking about this here for some time, which is the September timeframe for the market in general is historically one of the weakest times of the year’s year for stocks. So this is certainly already just a few days in been a September to remember for stocks. It was a brutal week this week. We had tech leading the way lower, which is not what you want to see, the Nasdaq finishing down 5.77% on the week this week and the semis leading the way lower down over eleven and a half percent. So obviously not what you want to see for our markets. Now, add into the fact that we’re not only in one of the weakest times of the year, seasonally speaking, September. Add in the fact that it is an election year.

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So there’s that added uncertainty there and there’s very little the market likes less than uncertainty. Then add in the fact that as we’ve been talking about here for some time as well, the Federal Reserve is offsides here and should have already been cutting rates. And as we’ve talked about here a lot as well, the last few rate hikes that they did were a mistake. And now we’re watching that mistake play out in real time. Add in the overall geopolitical tensions around the world has a lot of people concerned right now. And again, adding to that uncertainty for this market, what do we call this here? We call that a wall of worry for our markets. And as we start to get some resolution to a few of these items, the Fed coming up to cut rates on September 18 and maybe a little bit more clarity on the election situation after the debate that we’ll get next week as well. What we see now again, a wall of worry.

And what does our market love to do? The markets love to climb a wall of worry and at the same time to get as many people on the wrong side of the market as possible. I’ll cover that here in this podcast as well, what we’re seeing right now from sentiment and the 180 that it has done in just the last week. So overall, though, again, in our view, we don’t see this as the beginning of something worse. We think that we’ll look back on this as another fantastic buying opportunity here, as has been every pullback in the market now, going back to the October 2022 bear market lows. If you want to go back further than that, you could technically say that every pullback in the us stock market has been a buying opportunity. Now, there will come a day where that might not be the case, but we don’t see that as in the cards right now at all, and not anywhere in the near future as well. So I’ll say this, we wrote to our subscribers this morning that this end of the week weakness, which I’ll cover here more in a minute, if we were to get a continuation into Monday morning and we get a lower open on Monday morning, there are fewer times that you’ll get a better buying opportunity than a lower open on a Monday morning after a pullback like we’ve seen from this market. So if that’s the case, we think it’ll be a fantastic time to be adding two positions, putting on new positions, even if you’re not yet in this market.

As we’re now reaching oversold levels. We’re not at extreme oversold levels here, but as we’ve seen time and time again from bull markets, you often don’t get all the way to extreme oversold levels before the rally begins again. So we have hit heavily oversold levels, especially in the semis and tech. Now we’ll look for semis and tech to lead the way back to the upside. So just one more time here, we do not see signs of more weakness to come. Does that mean the lows are in? I wouldn’t say that exactly, but we also don’t see signs, like many people are calling for that. We are entering a recession here. Now, the stock market’s not the economy.

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We talk about that here often, but it is good to see that the fundamentals still are strong here and that we see this and continue to see this as a structural bull market of size and scope. Remember, we’re not even two years into this bull market yet, which on average last four years. Our last most recent bull market ran for eleven years. This is the kind of strength that we are looking for from this bull market. So just to cover some of the strong fundamentals, we just wrapped up another strong quarter of earnings. GDP continues to be in the growth column here, right? It may have been slowing a little bit, but we’re nowhere near negative prints on GDP right now at all. Then, as we saw this morning, jobs data. Yes, it’s continuing to slow here.

A lot of people say normalize, right? But it is still growth at the end of the day. Now, you can make the argument, as you’ve likely seen. I know we’ve got a great smart, muddy audience here, that the number of jobs created are going to foreign born individuals and not to us citizens. That’s a conversation for another podcast, though. You know, that is the destruction from within of our country that we’ve talked about here often on the podcast as well. And another feather in Donald Trump’s cap of why he should be the next president of the United States. Just this absolute destruction of jobs for the american worker, right? Not foreign workers coming here into the United States, mostly illegally. Now onto the other strong fundamentals we have nationwide housing prices still at all time highs.

The list goes on and on and on here of structural reasons, fundamental strength of this economy. Now, as we talked about here often, yes, we do live in a society now of two Americas, which hurts to even talk about. A lot of people don’t even want to go there. And I totally get it. But again, if we want to create generational wealth, there is no better money making vehicle than the stock market. It’s the greatest wealth generation vehicle ever created in the history of the world. Right? And if you aren’t owning inflationary assets, because as we head back into a Fed cutting cycle, you know that the next round of quantitative easing is just around the corner. As we’ve talked about here as well.

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The Fed’s target might be 2%. They’ve, they’ve shifted gears here, folks. They’re no longer worried. They’ve already done their victory lap on inflation. We saw it at the Jackson hole meeting where the Fed, Jay Powell and their ilk were yucking it up about the missing on the transit, laughing about missing on the transitory comments. Right? So they don’t care about the second America. And that’s, again a conversation for another podcast. It’s absolutely a disgrace what the Federal Reserve really has always been, but even more so what it’s become today.

But now they’ve shifted gears, right. They’ve declared victory on inflation. They’re not worried about that anymore. Now they’re worried about the jobs growth side of things. And so I think that’s the emphasis that we’ll see from Jay Powell in their next Fed meeting, which doesn’t come until September 18. We’re just twelve days away from that point now. And I’ll get to that a little bit here in a minute. But as we see it, this is still a structural bull market with a long way to go to the upside.

And yes, these pullbacks shakeouts are painful while they happen. We’ll be the first to tell you that here. We’re in the same positions that we talk about here on the podcast. What we’re doing with our money is exactly what we talk about here. So we are 100% in this boat with you. So yes, it’s painful while it’s happening, but if you look back twelve months from now, we think we’ll look at the pricing that we’re at here and say that was a gift from this market. Tom Lee, phenomenal market watcher as well, just said this about Nvidia, that even if Nvidia were to retest its lows at 90, that going forward twelve months, we will look at that as a gift. That’s how we are looking at this entire market right now.

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We like the small caps as well, so we love the semis here. We think that this is a gift ultimately from the market, but it’s painful while it’s happening. But you don’t want to be part of the hot money, right? The so called dumb money, that when you get pullbacks like this, you ended up buying high and selling low. No, that’s not what we want to be in here. And that’s one of the big reasons why we do what we do to help people avoid that. That when there’s blood in the streets, that’s when you want to be a buyer. When everyone’s getting greedy and you’re getting stock tips from your Uber driver, that’s when you look for the signs of a market top. And we just aren’t in that kind of an environment right now.

If you talk to the everyday person they have, they, they want nothing to do with the stock market, and for good reason, right? We’ve seen what we saw from 2008. There’s a whole lot of people now calling and saying that, oh, this is 2007 all over again. And in our view, that just couldn’t be further from the truth. Look at all the fundamental reasons I just named earlier. You couldn’t say any of those things in 2008. So, you know, let’s take a step back here, see where we are. This has been a phenomenal bull run for this market, right? It’s been a phenomenal last two years from the October lows and it’s still been a phenomenal year this year where you have the Nasdaq still up over 14% on the year. And I’m just eyeballing this here.

It could be bigger than that. Let’s eyeball the s p here. Still up 14.5% on the year. If the year were to finish now, everyone would call that a win. So don’t let these short term shakeouts and fear mongering from the perma bears out there get you out of a great position here. And again, be looking for buying opportunities. Just a few weeks back, we were talking about pausing our purchases as we headed into this weak seasonal period for the market. But now we’re firmly out of overbought territory and we think we’re gearing up for the next leg higher.

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So we think we have a long way to go for this bull market. All right. Next up here, let’s talk about the economic data that came out this morning. We talked about it a lot here this week. All eyes were on the jobs number this morning. We did miss expectations, which we talked about this week. You know, this is really a win win for the market. If we came in above expectations, no one was going to believe it.

If we missed expectations, it would reaffirm the view of a Fed 50 basis point cut versus the expected 25 basis point cut. Now, but we didn’t quite come in weak enough. But who’s to say that this number won’t be revised significantly lower? We got July revised lower here once again. Now, we came in today, expectations were for 161,000 jobs created. We came in at 142. And we did see average hourly earnings rise. But it’s mostly, we talk about this often, jobs manipulation in the data. These are not the jobs that people really want.

These are jobs that people are being forced into because they’ve been let go by better companies. And now instead of having one job, they’re going to have to take on two part time jobs. Right. I have some data on this which I just want to see here. I sent it anyway. I don’t have the exact numbers here, but numbers of part time jobs in this number were absolutely astounding right? We talked about this here often as well, this manipulation of job statistics that is done by the BLS. But on the news, we did get yields falling today, initially falling to their lowest level, falling below the lows that we saw from early August, which is a 366. At the lows day, we got down to a 3.64.

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We finished a little bit off the lows, still down half a percent at a 3.71 on the ten year yield here. And again, it wasn’t quite big enough of a miss to increase the expectations of a 50 basis point cut. Right? Now, yesterday we wrapped up the day, it was about 60 40, 60% for 25 basis point, 40% for 50 basis points of a cut. We saw it, the divide grow a little bigger here. Now we’ve got a roughly 70% probability of a 25 basis point cut and a 30% probability for 50 basis points. Now here’s the deal as Kip covered today on making money with Charles Payne. The market leads and the Fed follows, especially with Jay Powell at the helm. He is not a leader by any regard.

The Fed never leads. And today, what we saw from the market was a market telling the Fed that they are offsides, they need to cut rate by 50 basis points. And at the end of the day, the market is usually right about these kinds of things. So again, we see this as a message to Jay Powell and company that rates need to be cut and they need to do it quickly here. 50 basis points minimum. Now, will that be what we get from J. Powell? We’ll see. As we’ve talked about here, often, we see this as another major policy error from Jay Powell here.

So let’s take a look now at our market action on the day. Again, not going to sugarcoat it. Rough day. Rough week. We finished lower across the board here, finishing near the lows of the week this week as well. But before I get to that, I have to point out that we are starting to see the, the light bulb moments for contrarians that’s getting us excited here. Sentiment had not really been hit that hard in the most recent pullback into August. Yeah, it wasn’t good.

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But on the back when we started to rebound, we quickly got back to bullish sentiment here. Well, first of all, today, the put call ratio above a one all day today. Spent most of the day above a 1.1 here, which anything above a 0.7 is seen as bearish. Anything above a one is excessive bearishness so firmly in the bearish colony? If we know anything about the market, it likes to get as many people on the wrong side of the market before a big move. So when everybody’s super bulled up, that’s when you look for the signs of top. When everyone’s super bared up, that’s when you’re looking for the signs of a bottom. And here’s another one here, probably the biggest piece, and that is the fear and greed index, which this week rose all the way to a 65. We were lower earlier in the week for our major indexes, and the fear and greed index went up on the day.

You know, that could be signs of a little worrisome for the bulls out there. Well, that did not last long. Again, we hit a 65 earlier this week. Today we fell drastically all the way down now to a 39. So we shifted from greed mode in this market to fear mode quickly. That tells us that the hot money is running for the exit early here, and again, that the market still has a long way to run to the upside in our view. So that is something that makes us even more bullish here. So looking at our major indexes quickly here, we were led lower by the Nasdaq, down two and a half percent to 16,690.

Next up, the small caps down 1.9% to 2091. The S and P down 1.7% to 5408. And lastly, the Dow Jones down 1% to 40,345. Again, though, we are reaching oversold levels here. And again, in a new bull market like we’re experiencing right now, you usually don’t get all the way down to extreme levels here, so we wouldn’t be surprised. Again, we’re looking for a lower open on Monday morning. We treat that as a massive buying opportunity here. Looking at our internals on the day.

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Again, not, not good readings here. But I gotta point out, just the end of last week, this may surprise a lot of people. The NYSE advanced decline line hit an all time high, right. As we say here, often new highs beget new highs. So we think it’s just a matter of time before we get back to all time highs there as well. But this week we saw some weakness. We, and especially to wrap up the week, declining stocks beating out, advancing stocks on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Coming in over three to one negative on the NYSE.

Slightly better after a last minute refresh here, right at three to one negative for the Nasdaq as well. So not awful. You know, obviously not good, but could have been a lot worse. 52 week highs, lows, had our bright spot on the day today. We had more stocks hitting 52 week highs on the NYSE than 52 week lows. Again, that this is an area where we haven’t seen the red flags yet. When we start to see big ticks higher in the stocks hitting 52 week lows, that’s a little bit of a warning sign there. But on the Nasdaq coming in, just over two to one negative.

And on light numbers on that note as well. Again, nothing really overly concerning there. Lastly, volume coming in negative as well. Over three to one negative on the NYSE and over three to one negative after the last refresh here on that as well. So certainly not good readings, but no major red flags here yet. Looking at our sectors on the day, going back to housing, real estate was our only major sector to finish higher on the day, which we talk about here often. We prefer to use the home builders well, those also finished higher on the day to day. So good to see there.

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I mean, xlre, the S and P 500 real estate sector just hit an all time high three days ago, so no big concerns for us there. But we did finish with ten out of our eleven s and P 500 sectors lower on the week. We were led lower by communication services, consumer discretionary and tech. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Let me get a quick refresh fresh here of this as well. Some red on the screen here, too. Gold now down six tenths of 1% to 2526, still not far away from an all time high. Silver down 2.8% to $28.26 an ounce.

Copper down 1.76% to $4.06 a pound. And oil making another new low for 2024, down just under one and a half percent to $68.16 a barrel. Finally here for today, bitcoin also lower here as well. Down pretty big today by over 5%. Now at 53,171 of bitcoin. Nothing has changed in our view here. We continue to buy the dip in bitcoin. You know, this is something of a new market for bitcoin here.

Now that we have the ETF’s trading, it’s tough to see exactly how much short interest there is for this market. Now. It’s something a little bit newer for bitcoin here, and we’ll see how it handles it. But in the long term, medium to long term, we remain extremely bullish on bitcoin, folks. That is all that 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 and we’d love to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in.

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Until next time, we hope you have a great weekend out there. We’ll see you back here on Monday for the close. Bye.