In today's episode, Tyler unpacks another exciting day of market action and covers the fast-paced developments of the Trump administration, exploring the ongoing changes and what they mean for the economy and investors. From market reactions to tariff talks, inflation data, and the latest in the innovation revolution, there's a lot to discuss about how these factors are shaping opportunities for growth and wealth creation. 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. And wow, it was another eventful day here for our markets. And this has definitely been a trend for the first three weeks or three and a half weeks of Trump’s presidency here. It’s pretty amazing the speed at which this administration is working right now. I mean, it, we’ve, we’ve talked about this on the podcast already, that news outlets have been completely unable to keep up with this lightning quick pace that the Trump administration has been moving at.

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Especially, you know, the left leaning outlets. They can’t even choose where to pick a fight because by the time they’ve written a story about it, the story has changed or a bigger story has come out already. It really is incredible. And even for people who are on Trump’s side, it’s tough to report about some of these things because every time I get off recording one of these podcasts, by the time I’ve hit publish, there’s three new stories out that I wish that I had a chance to talk about. Right. It’s exciting. It is a breath of fresh air. Absolutely.

Something that, you know, at least in my lifetime, I’ve never seen, I think in most people’s lifetimes right now have never seen from a president, from, from our government. Real change appears to be happening right now. And I think we’re just scratching the surface of what is to come. Not just from, you know, limiting the size of the government and figuring out where all this waste, fraud and abuse is going to, where it’s coming from, what departments are responsible for this. You know, those are kind of the, the great things that we have to get to the bottom of. Right. But they’re not the positive side of things. Right, but that’s what’s getting all the attention right now, and rightfully so.

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But so much is also happening that is so good for our country. Whether it’s, you know, the reaction that we’ve seen, the pattern change from our market when the talks of tariffs are happening. Remember, just two and a half weeks ago, we had the deep seek Monday sell off and a slight recovery. Then the next Monday, we got the massive sell off on tariff news once again and we recovered from that. Now when we get tariff headlines on a day like today where we heard more about tariffs and the possibility of reciprocal tariffs and, you know, hey, we’re just doing to other countries what they’re doing to Us and the market loved it. Right? That’s, you know, exactly what we want to see, the kind of pattern change we want to see from our markets. And so as I, as I mentioned, if the waste, fraud and abuse side of things, again, not a negative, that’s the wrong way to put it. It’s certainly a positive for our country, but that’s not talking about growth, right? That’s not talking about the innovation revolution.

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That’s talking about things that have already happened and again, things that must, we must get to the bottom of. But so little time is spent on the positives going forward and, and like K. Kip and I have done so much here and I know that so many of our listeners are phenomenal audience here. Thank you for being here with us every day at the market close. We know that we have a lot of optimists from our listeners here as well. And so we like to focus on what this means going forward. And again, not only what it means for the stock market, but what it means for small business owners, what it means for, for everyday Americans and how we can take advantage of, of what’s happening in front of us right now and use it to have fully funded retirement accounts. Right? Create generational wealth opportunities that we think are right in front of us for the taking here.

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You know, you got to go out there and get it. But the government is no longer going to be an obstacle and that is just such a, a boon for every American citizen and ultimately for the American economy as well. So again, what an exciting time has been. I’m sure there’ll be three more stories by the time that this POD podcast is published that I’ll be looking forward to talking about on the next podcast. Already it just has been lightning fast. You know, we got RFK confirmed today. We got Tulsi Gabber confirmed today. So we’re just tough to say we’re even at the tip of the iceberg.

If we’re on an iceberg, we’re just scratching the surface, right? It’s incredible and we want to see it not only continue, but let’s accelerate this pace. Let’s keep moving here. It’s been a fun time so far and it’s only been three and a half weeks. So let’s take a look at a few of the factors that we saw today from this market. Of course, this morning we got back the another look this week at inflation data, this time the Producers Price Index. And we got the absolute opposite of what we saw yesterday from this market when we got CPI out Yesterday, you know, the markets took a hit, yields rallied significantly, you know, not too big of a hit. We saw the Nasdaq finishing up yesterday, right. So it wasn’t like a massive sell off, but yields were up big.

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The possibility of rate hikes is what everybody started talking about again. You know, it seems like every couple of months they’ve got to reverse the narrative and start talking about hikes instead of cuts. But we are seeing a big drop in the expected rate cuts for 2025. We’ll see if that changes as we get more data. You know, we’ve talked about this here ad nauseam, right, that at these levels rates are restrictive. They’re not prohibitive though. And we do continue to see them coming down, especially on the longer end of the yield curve as well. We expect those rates to continue to head lower from here.

And just right on Q. After the PPI data this morning, which did also come in hotter than expected, much like CPI yesterday, the 10 year gave up all of its gains and then some from yesterday down 2.4% on the day now at a 4, 4.5. Let’s see, yesterday we got up to a 4.66, closed at 4.63. So again we closed below those levels today. So we gave up all the gains and then some from yesterday. We’re continuing to see the US Dollar move lower. And that’s another story on the day here as well was what the comments Trump made earlier on the bricks alliance and talking about how countries are, you know, we’ll have to wait and see this play out, play out. But from what Trump is saying so far and, and seems to be the case, countries are distances distancing, excuse me, a little tongue tied there.

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Countries are distancing themselves from the bricks alliance. And what Trump essentially said was that going forward these countries are going to be embarrassed that they were in bricks. It’s just going to dissolve with a whimper, right? They’re going to want nothing to do with it anymore. As he talked about what he would do to these countries that decide not to transact in the US dollar. Interestingly enough, the US dollar was down 7/10 of 1% on the day here today, which I mean very similar to what we saw in Trump’s first term where the dollar peaked just ahead of his inauguration and then moved lower from there. We think we’re going to see a similar move here in the dollar and in yields. Let’s see here, I’m jumping around all over the place here. I’m going to go back to Tariffs here for a second, because this is another really interesting one.

Here has been the reaction from the economists. And if you’re a regular listener, you know we’re contrarian. So as all the economists begin to agree on something, we love to take the contrarian side of that. We wrote about this to members earlier today. We’ve talked about this on the podcast here at Linked as well, that in early 2021, just before 2021, 100 of economists polled said there was going to be a recession in 2021 and a brutal bear market. We said then and we said on the podcast, we said it to our members that we went aggressively long there and it paid off as a phenomenal year for the market right now. Of course, 2022 was a little different, but again, the economist missed. So now what we’re seeing in 2025, those same economists are telling us that tariffs will not only lead to more inflation, but also a recession.

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You should be scared. You should be very scared because all the economists said it once again here. We’ll take the flip side of that coin. Absolutely. We’ve. Nothing has changed in our tune. That’s been our view that the tariff impact, while it will have an impact on our markets, it’s been way overblown by these economists in today’s reaction to more tariffs being announced in the market, rallying NASDAQ up one and a half percent. That tells you that the market is not concerned about it and the market tends to be right far more often than the economists do.

As Kip and I have said for some time, we continue to see disinflation on the horizon. I said this on my Tuesday podcast. Inflation was never going to go down in a straight line. Right? I think that’s what we saw this week from inflation. I think that’s what people were waking up to this morning after freaking out yesterday about cpi, right? Oh, well, maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. We see all these policies going forward that are going to help bring down inflation regardless of what the mainstream media says. These are common sense policies that Americans can’t agree with. And one thing that I have loved from Trump supporters, you know, they keep saying on the left financial or left mainstream media, you know, that hey, this isn’t what Trump supporters wanted.

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No one wanted, you know, this complete disruption of our government. You know, but their support from Trump’s side has been remarkable. You know, it certainly isn’t what we saw in Trump’s first term where people are saying, hey, I’ll trade inflation again. Just to get rid of this government corruption that we have. Right. I think that’s a trade that we would all make in the short term. You know, I’ll suffer through a little more inflation to get to the bottom of what’s happening in our government right now in the scam that they’re pulling on their taxpayers. Now I don’t think that’s going to be the case.

Right. But I want to mention it that the support here again has been phenomenal. We’re only three and a half weeks in. Again, I think we’ve got a lot more excitement ahead of us here. And again we do continue to look for disinflation ultimately could be leading to deflation thanks to the innovation revolution. Right. Bringing down costs in so many different areas. I mean we, we’ve done podcasts on this.

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We could do a whole one on it right there. But again, you just love to see it when the all the economists are on one side of a story. We like taking the other side. And is one reason here that we do remain so bullish. And what’s another interesting factor here is sentiment. Another contrarian tell from us here. We got the AAII Investor sentiment survey another high, another multi year high in bears here. Can you believe this? The S&P 500 is less than 10 points away from an all time high and we have nearly half of investors Bearish in the AI sentiment survey.

47.3% of investors polled in this survey bearish. Right now, only 28% bulls. Again, we look at this as another tell. This market has a whole lot higher left to go. This is not the kind of action you see at a market top. And on the plus side there as well, we are this close to our all time highs and none of our major indexes are anywhere near overbought territory right now. Even on a short term basis it’s, it’s pretty impressive. So that tells us this move has the potential to be the breakout, you know, two all time highs and beyond from here.

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I think we’ve got a lot to look forward to here. So let’s go ahead and jump into our market action. On the day we were led by the NASDAQ up one and a half percent on the day to day to 19, 945. You know, we’re just, let’s see here. I’ll take a quick look. About 200 points away from an all time high in the NASDAQ. After that we had small caps up 1.17%. Then the S&P 500 up over 1% as well at 6115.

So 13 points away from its all time high. Could very well take that out tomorrow. We’re up 63 points today. And then lastly the Dow Jones up just shy of 8/10 of 1% to 44,711. Just a couple hundred points, maybe 400 points away from an all time high there as well. So again, amazing how bearish investors are here. The fear and greed index is now back out of fear mode which it entered into again yesterday, still in neutral territory. You know this until we start to get to the point where we’re at extreme greed on the fear and greed index for not just weeks but months on end.

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And we see instead of 50% bearish investors, you know, you get to 50% bullish, 60% bullish and we stay there once again stay there. That’s a key point of it for weeks or months on end. That’s when we’ll start you really looking at hey, you know this could be a top that we’re looking at here. You just never know how long they’re going to run. But again we’re just not seeing that right now. And we’re getting all the confirmation underneath the surface as well as today. The internals were very strong here as well. Well let’s get a quick refresh of my screens here.

Looking at our internals on the day we had more advancing stocks than declining stocks over three to one, almost four to one positive on the NYSE. Just shy of three to one positive on the NASDAQ. 52E highs lows coming in just about two to one positive as well for both the NYSE and the NASDAQ. And volume perhaps the most impressive here with 73% upside volume on the NYSE and even better on the Nasdaq today with 76% upside volume. So good day today from our internals, exactly what we want to see under the hood of this market right now. Let’s see next up here looking at our sectors on the day today. As you might expect, all 11s and P500 sectors were higher on the day to day. We were led by materials which was interesting given the tariff news.

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Again you know, kind of on like a day where yields head higher and so do utilities. Especially a couple months ago when we saw utilities making all time highs with yields hitting new highs. Right. That told us then if the stock market is a forward looking mechanism and utilities are hitting all time highs, is the biggest borrowers in the nation. They are yield sensitive. That told us then that Yields were heading lower, materials heading higher could be a little bit of an indicator that tariffs once again, as I mentioned earlier, will not have as big of a negative impact as people thought. So these reactions have been overdone. Will they have an impact? Very likely.

Will it be as big as these economists are saying that’s going to cause a recession in a bear market? No, we don’t think so. We also got an all time high today from the communication services sector. It’s essentially a proxy for tech as Meta wraps up like 20 days of gains in a row. This chart is kind of crazy. A lot of green on it there. Of course it is at extreme overbought on steroids, but Meta hitting another all time high here today. So of course helping out communication services between Google and Meta makes up about 40% of that portfolio. Google was also up 1.38% on the day today then for our laggards, if you want to call it that, industrials, utility and healthcare.

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All three of those still finishing positive on the session though. Finally here for today, our VRA Commodity watch. Let me get a quick refresh of these screens here as well because gold was working on an all time high just before I started recording this podcast and we’re still just about 10 points away from an all time high in gold at $2,957 and out the all time high 2,968. Again we have hit overbought levels in gold and the miners I would say though over the medium to long term we do remain extremely bullish here. Gold miners having another good day as well. Up nine tenths of 1%. But again we are hitting overbought levels there. Silver up over half a percent to 32.97 an ounce.

Copper up 1.7% to $4 and 78 cents a pound. That’s a multi month high in copper. And also I mentioned it was a multi month high in in gold miners as well. Good to see but copper at $4 and 78 cents a pound, oil up slightly on the day, still hanging out on the low end of the 70 a barrel. Spectrum up up 210 of 1% to $71.51 a barrel. And finally here for today, bitcoin still kind of stuck in this trading range in the 90s to low 1/ hundreds today. Down 1.2% at 96,478 but earlier in the session it was high as 98,000. Again this is another group we do remain bullish on as well folks.

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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 at 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. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.