In today's episode, Tyler dives into a historic moment as Bitcoin has crossed the $100,000 threshold. Tyler breaks down the factors driving this surge, including the potential impact of Trump's pro-Bitcoin SEC nominee and unexpected praise from Fed Chair Jay Powell. We'll also explore broader market trends, recent moves in our major indexes, and what these developments mean for investors. 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 wonderful Thursday out there today. The big story of the day, it finally happened. Bitcoin crossed $100,000 a bitcoin overnight last night. That really sucked a lot of the news oxygen out of the room today. Every headline all over social media, everyone’s talking about Bitcoin hitting 100,000 overnight last night.

And, you know, a pretty, a couple of other pretty important points here as well. One, it helped bitcoin here that Trump’s nomination for the sec. Paul Atkins is a very pro bitcoin nomination. We already know that Trump is the pro bitcoin president. You know, he had a true social post out today congratulating everyone who’s on the bitcoin train here as well. And we even got some unexpected love for bitcoin from none other than the money printing rock star himself, Fed chair Jay Powell, commenting last night. He said, you know, bitcoin is just like gold, only it’s digital. And what he said next I thought was really interesting.

[00:01:34]:
It’s not a competitor to the US Dollar, but it is for gold. You know, I think that there’s an interesting clarification there. But again, I call him the money printing. We call him the money printing rockstar for a reason. You know, if you can have as many dollars as you want out there, it’s like some of these other crypto, I hate to even say cryptocurrencies kind of crypto scams where they can print as much of it as they want, they can dilute it as much as they want. That’s not possible with bitcoin. You know, if you follow this story for some time, if you followed us for some time, we’ve talked about it here quite a bit. The mark, the limit for Bitcoin is 21 million Bitcoin.

Now, another question on top of that is people have noticed as well. You know, hey, you can buy.001 of a Bitcoin or further down the line. So couldn’t they just inflate it infinitely by selling point000001 of a Bitcoin over and over again. You know, it’s a very valid question there, but the answer is that no, you cannot do that. Bitcoin only goes out eight decimal places. They call those satoshis. And so if you take eight times the 21 million out there, the ultimate supply of bitcoin, if you take every decimal Point in there included as well. So bitcoin plus what they call satoshis, then you’re looking at 2.4 quadrillion.

Yes, it’s a lot available out there. But here’s the key point. The, the number, how large or how small it is doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they cannot print any more than that. You know, looking at the US Dollar, there’s no supply limit there. The money printing rockstar Jay Powell can tell the treasury, you know, hey, we’ll let you keep borrowing, right? There’s no limit on, on that. So that’s it. You know, again, just like there’s only so much gold in the earth. So Jay Powell is right on that point of it being a digital competitor of gold.

[00:03:43]:
Now, don’t get me wrong, we are still big fans of gold and precious metals in general here. So this is not to take away from that at all. Both have their own use cases and their own pros and cons, right? So we’re still big fans and highly bullish on gold here as well. But point being, even at $100,000 a bitcoin now, which we are slightly below it. I’ll get to that here, more in a moment. We did diploma in the last hour and a half or so now at $99,000 of Bitcoin still, what an incredible run. Up about 40% since the election. That’s an incredible run.

Right. But even at these price levels, we remain extremely bullish on bitcoin here, especially over the medium to long term, you know, and we will, we continue to buy bitcoin. You know, maybe you want to wait for a pullback or something like that, that’s fine. But over the medium to long term, getting in now, you’ll be very thankful you did. When bitcoin ultimately crosses well above this level here, you know, we were talking about 200,000, 300,000, a million dollars of bitcoin. You know, Michael Saylor has definitely been the most bullish guy on bitcoin out there. I believe he just said on TV the other day he sees it going to $10 million a coin. So still we do see it, that there will be incredible gains to be had here for bitcoin.

But again, that kind of sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room today as far as headlines go, as far as news goes. But it is fun, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s fun to have been a part of it. Kip wrote about this this morning as well. Him and I both bought Our first Bitcoin in 2014. I just graduated from college, started hearing about bitcoin and we got in at about $600 a bitcoin then and we made a few trades in it here with the vra. But we’ve been following this story and participating for a long time now. Despite all of the haters out there, it has been a very fun run. And one thing I think that is probably underestimated about the popularity of bitcoin is that it’s gotten a, gotten a whole new generation of investors involved in the markets.

[00:06:12]:
Right when bitcoin went on some of its other big tears, when it hit all time highs and pulled back and people saw, all right, maybe I want something that is a little bit more conservative in addition to my bitcoin, it’s gotten a whole new generation of investors into the market. I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve had with people around my age who were interested in bitcoin. Maybe they missed the move, but you know, it got them into the market. Maybe first it was buying some of the public crypto miners and then it was buying a semiconductor name and then, you know, it just keeps rolling and rolling from there. Now they’re trading options. You know, it’s smart and conservatively, right? Not just making bets out there, but actually studying the markets and making really good trades on it as well. So I think overall it’s very exciting. We actually had a chapter of it in our book the Big Bribe about this as well, about what bitcoin has done.

And also, you know, I’m not a fan of Robinhood here at all. But there is a huge plus to apps like Coinbase and Robinhood. It makes investing incredibly easy that you can do it with just a few clicks of a button. You know, you don’t have to call a broker, you don’t have to use complex terms. They lay it all out, tell you exactly what it means. It’s kind of that we refer to it as the gamification of investing. And a lot of people don’t like that, you know, because it’s, oh, it’s not a game. This is your life savings we’re talking about.

But I’m not talking about investing itself. I’m talking about learning about the process of investing. And if gamifying things helps people to understand it better, you know, it changes the reward structure. It’s not all about just dollars at the of the day. You got to learn about it as well. I think it’s a phenomenal thing for the market as a whole going forward. And increasing financial literacy across the board is always important. So, again, exciting day today.

[00:08:20]:
We have pulled back a little bit now. You know, tune back into the end of this podcast. We could be back at 100k by the time I get to the VRA Commodity Watch at the end. So, that being said, some of the headlines that kind of flew under the radar today, the Atlanta Fed just raising their GDP target. Here again, another example of the Trump effect. You know, we’re seeing it in optimism surveys as well about what we can expect from 2025, whether that’s small business owners, investors, what have you. The optimism is certainly going up. So now the Atlanta Fed just raised their GDP target to 3.3% for Q4, 2024.

That’s up from 3.2 just earlier this week. As they see private investment growth increasing to 1.8% from 1.2, you’re looking at deregulation for especially in sectors like the energy sector or the mining sector. You know, I think the mining sector, not just for precious metals, but for rare earth minerals, is going to be a very interesting sector to watch in the coming years. As China has already announced, in retaliation to Trump’s proposed tariffs, they will start stop sending certain rare earth minerals to the United States. Those minerals we have in abundance here in the US Why we’ve been so reliant on foreign countries in the first place really makes you scratch your head. We should bring in, bring some of those mining operations here on shore as well. So from that point of view, if you’re looking at deregulation in these sectors, yes, we’re going to see private investment growth increase drastically. Right.

This money used to go into overseas projects, whether it was, you know, look at a South American copper mine or Myanmar or somewhere in Africa for a gold mine, you know, for those maybe. But you’re looking at other things like, you know, uranium, geranium, these other aspects that again, China is looking at limiting some of these rare earth minerals. We have them here in the US let’s get after it now. And that is another wave of prosperity we’ll see here in the US Providing jobs, providing income, boosting our gdp. There’s just so much to look forward to here. Now, to close out the week, though, all eyes will be on tomorrow’s jobs data. Now, I don’t expect any surprises here. You know, I actually, I would be surprised if it’s a bad number because they want to make it at least a decent number to make Biden look strong for his second to last full month in office.

[00:11:07]:
The reason I say that is because these revisions to the other months continue. We’ve talked about this here often. There is some serious manipulation happening in jobs data, whether it’s adp, the bls. There are, it’s, it’s financial engineering. It’s, it has to be right. Just earlier this week, ADP October payrolls were revised lower by the largest revision in over a year and a half. And that has not been uncommon. Remember, just a few months ago, the BLS came out and reported that they had overstated jobs numbers from the previous 12 months by at least 800,000 jobs, with some estimates as high as 1.4 million jobs being overstated from the previous 12 months.

And the gaslighting from the mainstream media about it was incredible. You know, Trump mentioned something about it in one of his speeches, possibly in the debate as well. And I think it actually was around the time of the RNC and the DNC that he made a comment about it. And the mainstream media tried to say that he was lying, despite those numbers being directly from the bls. And I forget who it was now. Little side tangent. It was one of Biden’s economic advisers who said, oh, that’s just Trump propaganda. And the reporter was like, this is directly from the bls.

And she’s like, well, what’s that? It’s probably a Trump propaganda. No, that’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics. How are you an economic advisor? And you do not know that? I mean, unbelievable, the incompetence that at least we’re getting it behind us, right? We’re focused on the future here. And so we can hopefully forget about the incompetence that we’ve seen from the Biden Harris administration time and time again. Now, I’ve got plenty other topics that I could get to on that, just that we’ve seen today as well the incompetence of this administration. But again, we’ll keep looking forward here. So that being said, let’s take a look at our market action on the day today. You know, Kip and I joke about this here often.

[00:13:16]:
He gets the all time high days and I inevitably get the down days. And we got that today as we had three out, three out of our four major indexes hit all time highs yesterday. Today, all four of our major indexes finished lower. Now the NASDAQ did hit an intraday all time high on the day today. So it wasn’t all bad out there and just finished fractionally lower. The S and P also hit an all time intraday high as well. So we’ve been on a hell of a run really since the November election and we have hit overbought levels and really you could say we’re at or approaching extreme overbought on steroids. So that’s about the, about the time when we use discipline in the VRA investing system that we would expect to see a pause.

That’s not to say a sell off is coming personally here. We expect more probably likely sideways action to work off some of these overbought conditions. And it’s not uncommon to get a weak start to the month of December. You’ve got year end tax loss selling, year end portfolio restructuring. You know, a lot of these things taking place during this time. They’re usually done though about midway through the month and we start to get into the Santa Claus rally, which we fully expect this year to come as well. But to lead up to that, if we got a little sideways action, it wouldn’t worry us here, especially when we’re just coming off of all time highs. And what’s so interesting about this, and I’m going to skip ahead here for a second, I was going to talk about this with the internals, but Kip covered this yesterday.

We look at this as more of a rotation than something to be worried about. Since the election, we’ve been talking about how this market has been broadening. Small caps have been acting really well. The number of companies advancing versus declining in the internals really until about the last five trading sessions has been very good. While the Magnificent Seven names were kind of trading sideways. These are the generals, right, The Mag seven names I’m talking about. And it had been a little while since they had been hitting all time highs. Now they’re getting back to the generals earning their stripes.

[00:15:43]:
And that’s why we say we’re looking at sideways action instead of a big pullback because the generals have some room to run before they get to extreme overbought on steroids. Maybe not across the board. There are some that are certainly overbought here, but they’ve been due for a little bit of a run. So if the broadening aspect of our market takes a pause while we get a rotation back into the Mag 7 again, doesn’t worry us at all here. But just take a look at this today. Apple all time high. Amazon all time high. Tesla 52e high.

Microsoft up over 1% as well. And the list goes on here. You know, the, it’s, it was a good day for the Magnificent Seven here and we, you know, again we would expect that to continue as well. So quick recap of the markets. NASDAQ was our leader if you want to say that on the day down just less than 210 of 1% at 19,007. The S P right about down about the same amount. Dow Jones down just over half a percent to 44, 765. And lastly the Russell 2000 was down one and a quarter percent on the day today.

All right, so looking at our internals here, back to what I was talking about a second ago, you know, the numbers haven’t been terrible, certainly not terrible from the internals, but we would like to see better. Again, think we’re working off some overbought pressure here. We did have both more declining stocks than advancing stocks on both the NYSE and the NASDAQ. You know, slightly negative on the NYSE but just shy of 2 to 1 negative on the Nasdaq. At least we beat it. But we are getting closer to those two to one negative kind of readings. 52 week highs to lows on the other hand were our bright spot on the day today. Coming in over 5 to 1 positive on the NYSE.

[00:17:33]:
Just shy of 2 to 1 positive on the Nasdaq. And lastly here, volume just barely negative on the NYSE today and did manage to come in positive on the Nasdaq. So there were some bright spots in there today for sure. Looking at our sectors on the day to day, we finished with 5 out of our 11s P500 sectors higher on the day to day. We were led by consumer discretionary hitting another all time high here. And as we say here often new highs beget new highs. So always good to get an all time high on a day with the major indexes red across the board. After that we had consumer staples and energy higher on the day.

Our laggards, you know, pretty defensive sectors, materials, industrials and health care. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Got some red on the screen here today. Gold now down 8/10 of 1% to $2,654 an ounce. After that silver down 3/10 of 1% to $31.82 an ounce. Copper, excuse me, essentially flat on the day today. Copper now at $4.19 a pound. Oil down just over 1/10 of 1% at 68.45 a barrel.

And I’ll go ahead and recap bitcoin one more time a little lower than we were earlier now still up on the day by 810 of 1% at 98,619 dollars a bitcoin. Folks, that is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up@vra letter.com click the podcast link at the top. We’d love to have you with us. And I’ll go ahead. And one last point here. We are currently running a very special 2024 holiday offer for our everyone who emails us@supportrainsider.com if you haven’t received that information already, I encourage you to take a look at it.

[00:19:45]:
It’s going to be an incredible next four years, and you’re not going to want to miss out on these moves. Higher folks, thanks again for tuning in with us here today. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.