In today's podcast, Kip discusses the recent stock market action and offers his insight into the sharp movement. He highlights the significance of semiconductor and housing stocks for this market going forward. Kip also touches on the political landscape, including key elections and their implications for market sentiment and policy. Finally, we look ahead to major developments such as the tariff announcements tomorrow and the upcoming Q1 Earnings. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA Investing podcast. Hope you had a good day today. Back to back days here of sharp reversal higher. Tyler covered it yesterday. Big, big reversal yesterday. Dow Jones rally something like more than 800 points to finish sharply higher. NASDAQ didn’t finish high yesterday, but it did rally like 400 points intraday.

And we saw the same kind of action today. This is technically what you want to see. You, you want to see early morning reversals that then result in strong smart money hours.

So even though the Dow Jones finished slightly lower, just down 11 points, every other index was higher today. Again, good reversals, that’s what you want to see. Good smart money hours, that’s what you want to see. Internals were better today. They really have not been bad throughout this, this correction to speak of. And also two of the keys we’re looking at, we’ll talk about more of this in a moment, is we just are not seeing any leadership to the upside from the semis or from housing. I’ve got strange noise in my ear. Okay. But we’re not seeing leadership from the semis in housing. Semis today did finish slightly higher. There must have been news after the market closed because they were, they were down going into the close. And home builders today also we’re after no, they finished up again today as well, just not with big gains. But again, the key point being there for us.

[00:01:35]:
These are leading, these are market leading sectors, semis and housing, they lead in both directions. They’re not only significant to the stock market, but they’re even more important frankly to the economy. And these are our tails. These are our discounting mechanisms, the semis and housing stock. And when they’re leading lower, it frankly makes it very tough to have a dependable bottom. And again yesterday, you know, or yesterday before yesterday, we broke down on Friday we broke down below the, you know, the, the March 11 lows and then you know, really crash those Monday morning with the bad open. So is this a retest? It very likely could be retest or ugly. They’re typically even more scary than the initial decline.

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And that’s how you shake people out of the market. That’s what gives you a dependable bottom. But we really want to see again the semis and housing stocks start to lead higher. And that just has not happened yet. Of course, tomorrow’s a big day, liberation day as Trump calls it. And we’ll find out. I believe it’s we have to double check the time on this. I Saw that Trump was speaking in the White House at 3:00 Eastern tomorrow.

Maybe that’s changed because it would make, no, it make very little sense to have Trump lay out his tariff policy during market hours. That’s just not the way it’s done. So my guess is that’s going to get pushed back, if it hasn’t already, to at least 4:00 Eastern tomorrow. But that’s what the market’s looking forward to. We also have tonight, the some very, actually today going on now, three very big, very important elections. Now, these are special elections. Two in Florida for congressional seats and then the Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. And frankly, you know, based on everything we’re seeing, I talked to Wayne about this today.

[00:03:33]:
He agrees with this. Wayne just Wayne thinks that the chance of Republicans winning, the taking back the Supreme Court, to have a conservative majority there, thinks that very looks very unlikely, that the Democrat has a substantial lead. Of course, you never know until the election happens, right? But Florida, the congressional races there should be solid wins for Republicans. Trump won these districts by 30 points in the last election. So will they win by the same margins Trump did? Probably not. I bring this up today because we normally don’t talk just random elections here on this podcast, but it’s important to the markets because, look, let’s be honest about this. Trump has had a lot of wind knocked out, had so many victories, so many wins, so many great things have happened. But I don’t know anybody talking about those, do you? I don’t hear anybody talking about the victories.

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I hear people, again, this is our business. So maybe that’s why. I hear people talking about consumer confidence crashing. I hear people talking about 401ks losing 10 to 20% of the value. I hear people talking about, is a market crash about to happen again, 51% of Americans believe a crash is about to happen. That almost certainly means it won’t happen, by the way. But again, this is what consumers are feeling, a lot of unease, all right? Inflation expectations, I’ve skyrocketed, okay? Because again, tariff policy. Now, whether that proves to be the case or not, we’ll find out later.

But right now, the expectations are things aren’t going the right way. So the point being? Well, animal spirits have reversed. Think about how this market was rocking and rolling when Trump won and then boom, it has legs cut out from underneath it, okay, because of tariff policy. And it’s not because the markets are afraid of tariffs. I think the markets are afraid of being caught off guard. That’s the last thing the markets wanted to. They don’t like surprises, Right. And so when you have an administration and this is Trump and his economic team, where they just have failed to lay out what their policy is going to look like, it makes it very hard to make sense of it.

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And that’s what’s happened here. It’s been sloppy. It surprised a lot of us, okay? And that’s why we’ve had this correction, because of the uncertainty. And it’s given the bears a lot of Trump enemies. It’s given them the ability to really, to hit this market with the uncertainty that’s out there. So the point being with these elections, it’s kind of backwards, right? If these elections don’t go well for Republicans tonight, let’s say both Republicans win in Florida, but not by much or not as much as Trump did, maybe they went by 15, 20 points. I think that’s kind of about what I’ve seen. And if Democrats win Wisconsin, that’s the biggie, right? To keep Wisconsin a liberal state.

Of course, it’s an important swing state. Trump only won that by 1%, but of course he did win it. But that’s going to be the message coming out of this, is Trump’s brand has been damaged. Terrorists opened the door for the left to claw the way back into the national conversation. And now consumer confidence in the market’s lower with people afraid of a crash. And now if these elections don’t go as great as they could have gone, you can see where I’m going with this. That’s actually good news for the markets because it’s going to take some of Trump’s power away from its hardline stance on tariffs, because you’re looking at the losses now beginning to pile up. And trust me, people are already getting ready for the midterms, okay? And they’ll be here before we know it.

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So. And that’s. I’ll leave on this note. So, again, if the elections don’t go great tonight, I think that’s going to be good news for the markets. It can take away some insurance power. The other thing is these, and I heard this today, and I must. I don’t know why I haven’t heard it before. I don’t watch a lot of media, but these tariff policies are being done with executive order, executive action, so eos, which means that all it’s going to take is a Democrat president to get rid of them.

So it had these codified to have these passed by Congress. I would think it’s really important to Trump. And there’s just no way that’s going to happen, you know, certainly not in this, in this environment. Republicans have a very slim majority in the House as it is now. So, you know, a lot of questions about Trump’s tariff policies here and I think those need to be answered because right now it just looks sloppy and was horribly communicated, has been so far. Maybe Trump can clean his elder tomorrow. You know, maybe, maybe it’s a classic art of the deal and tomorrow we’re going to find out that he’s pulled off a rabbit out of his hat. All these deals have been struck and if that’s the case, you get ready for it.

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Rip your face off. Stock market rally tomorrow and Thursday. If Trump pulls a rabbit out of his hat and announces that he’s got deals with all these foreign countries or if he comes out, know we’re just gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna make it simpler, right, because it’s not simple now. So the markets are set for a big rally, there’s no doubt about that. We got, we’re now in the second best month of the year. April, second best month of the year. And again, investor sentiment, consumer confidence are both in extreme fear now. So this market is set up for a major contrarian move higher.

And again now we’ve had back to back strong days, reversal days, strong smart money hours. You can see it won’t take a whole lot from Trump tomorrow to give the markets a reason to go up. And then, by the way, we’re going to start having front running of Q1 earnings because they start, folks, believe it or not, first quarter earnings take off in 10 days from now. That’s April 11th is when the big banks start reporting earnings. So front running of that will happen. I believe that’s going to be positive as well because first quarter earnings are going to be solid. There’s just no doubt about that. And I think that’s something else the market’s really not ready for, especially when it comes to tech stocks and the Mag 7 and the semis that have just been battered.

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These sectors are now cheap, right? Certainly to where they were just a month ago. Remember our all time highs were just five weeks ago. Right. So we’re down to crunch time on tariffs. We have all the regions in the world for this market to go higher. That might be added to tonight by the election results. We’ll be watching this closely to see what impact they might have on Trump’s policies. And I’ll just mention this as well, if you’re with us here at the vra.

You know, one of the folks that we share their work quite a bit is Rich Ross, the technician at Evercore. And he remains very bullish. His latest out yesterday afternoon. But he has put stop losses in on the SP 500 and Nvidia and the semis, again, market leaders, meaning that if we go much lower, he’ll be stopped out. And he’s been, he’s been bullish, not as long as we’ve been, but for a long time. Edgardini today was on Bloomberg again, he’s been very bullish. He’s now moderating. So you’re seeing this happen left and right.

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All the other big investment firms are taking down their price targets. And again, usually that’s the kind of capitulation that you see at bottoms, right? And we have not done that. But as we wrote, as we write against, we wrote again this morning, you know, we’re not far from it because, you know, again, unless it’s semis and housing stocks start running, start reversing higher and leading and we believe that’s going to happen, by the way, then, then we’re, we’re in trouble. We, we could be going into a bear market. We don’t think that’s going to be the case. But, you know, our job is not to tell the market what to do, but to interpret its action. And this has been ugly action by the market leaders. And that needs to change.

I hope this is something Trump’s paying attention to. You have to believe with his advisors. These are all Wall street, you know, smartest guys in the room. So if we’re talking about on this podcast, if we’re telling you how important the semis and housing are both to the economy and to the market action, then, you know, Scott Besson, right, Peter Navarro, Kevin Hazard and the commerce secretary, I’m drawing a blanket his name now, but I don’t know how that’s possible. But obviously they’re saying the same thing in Trump’s ear because they know the significance of this. We may even learn, by the way, that Trump was serious when he said he’s not even watching the markets. Maybe that’s the new thing and maybe we’re going to have to go through a year of getting rid of the garbage, cleaning up the system with, of course, the great work that Musk and Doge are doing. And, you know, maybe that’s, maybe that’s, maybe that’s the way it’s going to go.

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We’re just going to keep paying attention to what we pay attention to. The VR investing system right now sits at 7 out of 12 screens. Bullish. That means, that means we’re still, we’re still on the market. If we drop one more number though, go to 6, we’re, we’re no longer buyers and we’re looking to be sellers. And that’s, that’s the last thing we want to do here because everything else about the economy, economy is strong. We still have The Franklin roaring 2000s are still intact. We have five big bribe megatrends all still intact, led by the innovation revolution.

So this is almost certainly a correction. And then what happens in a correction is you get a capitulation and then you have a bottom. And so that’s what it feels like. We’re very close to now. And Trump might be able to make sure that’s the case tomorrow with some clarity on his, on his tariff policy. Let’s take a look on the hood today. Again, not bad at all. We were sharply lower earlier today.

[00:14:06]:
Internals actually wound up pretty good today. Quick refresh. Yep. So NASDAQ advanced decline was positive by 400 issues. NYSE advanced decline almost 2 to 1 positive. That’s very good. Again, these readings have held up pretty well. Now we did have 585 stocks for new 50 week low today to just 80 new highs.

But again, these are cumulative data. So it compiles throughout the day. Once you get a new 52 week low, it can’t go away. So that’s indicative, indicative of the declines we had yesterday and today before the reversals took place. So it’s misleading is my point. And finally, volume for Both NASDAQ and NYC was both higher, 58% up. Volume on NASDAQ 56% of volume. And NYSE sectors strong here as well.

[00:15:00]:
We had nine sectors finished higher, just two finished lower. Healthcare was down 1.7%. That’s really it to the upside. We had four sectors finish up very close to 1%, 1% or better. And again, solid. Nothing to write home about. But again, good internals. Nine of 11 sectors finishing higher on the day.

Commodities again, this is a look, we love this group. You know, we love gold and silver in the miners. We have for a long time. We’ve done very well in this group. I think that this is, this is just, this bull market is just getting started. However, in the very short term, we are hitting our most overbought designation of extreme overbought on steroids. We’re just now getting there. That doesn’t mean they had this group has to go down.

It just means we stopped buying here. That’s what it means. We use discipline and we stop buying this group. It’s up to you whether or not some, some of our followers, we know very well when, when you get to extreme horbital steroids. They’re selling their positions because why take a chance? We totally get that there are times where we’ve been more aggressive and traded that way, but not in this group. So we’re not selling gold and silver. First of all, we’ve owned these two since 2003. We have phenomenal gains.

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We save in gold and silver. So instead of in fiat currency, that’s what we’ve recommended. What we’ve done since I first bought gold in 2003 and it served us extremely well. But we’re not selling these positions, nor are we selling the miners. Just letting you know that we have hit a very overbought designation and there might be a plateau here. Again, if, if, if Trump, if Trump comes out and says, okay, we’re done with tariffs, here’s the deal, then you’re probably going to see some kind of reversal because again, so had so much social flights of, flight of capital has gone into this group because of fears of tariffs and the damage that we do and the risk that they may represent to the global economy. That’s, that’s, that’s the store of value that gold represents. Trump, if Trump announces a big deal, I would be surprised if gold and silver and the miners don’t fall.

So again, just a use of discretion here. Hey, if Trump’s out tomorrow and says, you know what, we’re going to be even more hardcore, we’re going to add another 30%. They raise theirs, we’re going to double ours. You know, I don’t think we can, I don’t think, I don’t think any of us can rule out Trump doing anything because this is, this is, you know, he’s got all the power now, second term, he probably isn’t going to run again, although rumor mills hot about that. So he, you know, he’s not worried about getting reelected necessarily, and he may just do what he wants to do. And he said he could go even hardcore on terrorists. I don’t think anyone knows at this point, including his economic team. Again, that’s what’s made this a struggle.

But again, just, you know, we’re not selling gold, not selling our miners, we are not buying here. And you know, look, this, this, our target for year end gold is $4,000, right? We’re 3,148. You know, obviously we’re not selling. We. At the beginning of the year we said mining stocks would be at a GDX. The minor ETF would be up 100% this year. And so we’re getting close. We’re up like 40% now.

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It’s only beginning of April, so the group’s been very good to us. We think that’s going to continue. But again, it is overbought in the very short term. Wouldn’t be surprised to see a little bit of a shakeout here or maybe some plateauing at least. Gold today finishing down $2 an ounce at 31.48. Silver today down 25 cents an ounce at 34.35. Copper today. Today down.

Excuse me. Yeah. Down a penny a pound at $5.03 a pound. Again overbought as well. Crude oil today down 31 cents a barrel has had a pop back over 70 now 71. 17 a barrel. And finally the day bitcoin. Let me get a.

Bitcoin’s acting better here, isn’t it? 85 again. It’s great support around this level. 80,000 level or so right now. 85,256, up 3.4% again. The big money, frankly is yet to even come into bitcoin. So it’s the best supply demand story of all time. It almost doesn’t matter when you buy at this point because everything is a dip compared to where it’s going to be again. Our year end price target is 200,000.

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Cycle High is 350,000. Do not sell bitcoin. Don’t sell. Don’t even think about selling bitcoin if it goes any lower. You know, mortgage your family if you have to. Mortgage the kids, mortgage the house. And add two positions in bitcoin, gold and the miners for sure. And of course, our favorite tech stock is Tesla.

That remains the case today as well. All right, folks, that’s it for today. Hope you had a great day and you’re a better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after we close.