In today's episode Kip dives deep into the current financial markets, looking closely at the impressive rally the Dow Jones has been demonstrating with its 8th consecutive winning day, marking this as the best week of 2024 thus far. We'll explore the nuances of market indicators, particularly the overbought readings on stochastics across major indexes and what this means for potential market movements ahead.

Don’t look back to. The market is closed. Good Friday afternoon, everyone. Kip herriage here with the Daily Bear investing podcast. Hope that you had a good day. Hope your week was fantastic as well, and you have big weekend plans. I know that we do. The boys are coming in town, so it’s always special when they join us for the weekend.

If you’re a little bit older like us, and you get the kids to come in town for the weekend, it’s always a great treat. So anyway, I hope you all have a great weekend as well. Okay, let’s get to it. First of all, a good day today. Good smart money hour. Good day for the Dow Jones flat elsewhere. But we did have, Dow Jones had its 8th straight winning day. That’s four weeks in a row.

[00:00:45]:
And this was actually the best week of the year, best week of 2024 for the Dow Jones to cover that a little bit. Really going to talk about what’s happening inside these indexes, because we’ve already said all of a sudden, guess what we’ve done? We’ve had extreme overbought readings, but only on Stokes. Don’t freak out. Only on stochastics. Only on stochastic. One of our four momentum oscillators that we follow. Stochastics is always the fastest moving. It’s the first one to get to extreme or bought and extreme oversold.

So it’s very useful. And typically, when that happens, you tend to get a little bit of a one or a two day lull. I’m not surprised that the market’s doing what it’s doing, because each of our major indexes now hit extreme overbought on stochastics. Begin. We are nowhere near, nowhere near close to extreme overbought on our other three momentum oscillators. So we have a room to run, a lot of room to run here. This is just the nature of the beast. It’s how these moves develop.

And if you look at the chart, you know, from the, from the mid April bottom, the markets have, I wouldn’t say they’ve been parabolic, higher, but the markets have been very strong. So it’s not uncommon that this happens. So. But again, Dow Jones today did finish as our winner on the day, up 125 points. Again, good smart money hour today. Dows Jones up 125 is three tenths of 1%. SEO hundred up one 10th of 1%. Rough 2000 was down today, down seven tenths 1%.

[00:02:11]:
It actually is at 98% overbought on stochastic. So again, a little bit of a cooling off period here. And finally, Nasdaq the Q is also at extreme overbought on stochastics, only down just a fraction of a percent, down five points on the day of note, the ten year yield, I’m going to touch on this more in a moment. Ten year yield did finish a little higher today, just over 4.5%. Remember the last October, the high was right at 5% and we backed off this week. I think I saw a low 4.42. Again, 4.5. Now talk about what we see for that, because I wrote this up this morning and it’s been at least two years since I’ve said the following words, and I said it on yesterday’s podcast as well.

Don’t fight the tape. Don’t fight the Fed. I have not said that have been able to say that in two years. The tape, you know, it’s certainly been strong move at all time high after all time high. But until we get the, technically, until we get the first rate cut, you really can’t say don’t fight the Fed. So how is it, Kip, that you’re saying don’t fight the Fed already? Well, I’m front running. I’m doing a little front running. Here’s what I’m doing.

And also, again, covered this yesterday, but I got, it’s such an important point. Just don’t see many people making this point. Don’t understand that this, folks, when it comes to rate cuts in the US, I’m going to tell you what the point is because repeating patterns matter when it comes to central banks. Here’s the repeating pattern that everybody should be aware of. And this is why rate cuts are about to take place in the US. I would say if not in June, June is entirely possible. Then the next meeting is July, right? I don’t have the schedule in front of me. There is a, they do have one month off there.

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They should take every month off. Frankly, there shouldn’t be a Fed meeting every month and a Fed presser it’s ridiculous. Our financial masters of the universe. I just love it, man. They know it. They’re our new financial rock stars and they love it. And so that’s never, they’ll probably go instead of once a month presser what, in a year or two, will it be once a week? Probably, or once every two weeks? Because they’ve inserted themselves into this conversation. Financial engineering is real.

You don’t have to like it, but folks financial engineering know this is just getting started. Is just getting started. As these AI programs pick up speed and as more and more complexity gets in the markets. More and more factors are able to be determined by using these advanced AI systems. You’re going to see, I think financial engineering is going to grow big time. We’re seeing it for us, too. You know, it’s not just the behemoths of the world get to use financial engineering because of bitcoin. We do as well.

You know, we’re having conversations right now with the company about the raising some money for them. And this is what they’re doing. They’re doing digital ownership, fractional ownership, tokenization of real estate assets. And so this is going to really spread. We said it before, we’ll say it again. It won’t be, it won’t be too far in the future until every financial asset will be on the blockchain. Your home if you want it to be. I don’t know if we go so far as vehicles, but certainly your home, and that’s going to open up a lot, a world of possibilities for individuals.

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And that’s good. Right? So again, it’s always a process, but financial engineering is here to stay. It’s only going to pick up speed. And I do think we’re probably going to wind up hearing even more from these fed speakers than we do today, which is a real shame. But the big reason, again, that they’re going to cut in the near future is that in June, and we learned this this week from messaging from the bank of England and the ECB. Both had their meetings and their pressers, if you will, is that it’s fully expected. They’ve messaged this now. We will see rate cuts in the month of June for both the bank of England and the ECB.

And the reason we’re going to follow that is that’s been the repeating pattern since the birth of Q eight for over 15 years now. When the bank of England cuts and the European Central bank cuts, the US cuts, us central bank cuts again. That’s the repeating pattern that has held up that coordinated approach that they have, and they almost have to, frankly, because without that coordination, things start to break down again. We do have, frankly, as much liquidity we have in our system, as much global wealth as piled up and as diverse as that wealth has become fragile. We’ve seen that with regional banks. Remember the regional bank failure from what, March, April of last year, when the whole thing, the whole system was imploded, had it not been for a bailout? Frankly, that was another form of QE. So it is what it is again, this is our system until we come up with something better. And look, we’re all in favor of ending the auditing Fed for sure.

Ending the Fed also sounds like a good idea. But I think at this point, it’s so woven into our system that had to be something in place to replace it. So that’s not our job, is it? Our job is to beat the markets. And the way we do that is being on the right side of the market. Number one, this is a bull market. People ask me all the time, kip, how do, what’s the best way to short stocks? I’m like, why are we having this conversation? Why do you want to short stocks right now? Don’t make it harder than you have to. Unless you are a very experienced and accomplished short term trader and this is what you do, right, and you’ve gotten good at it, then in bull markets, you only want to go only 95, 98% of the time. You only want to go long stocks.

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Unless you’ve got some good information on a company, you think a company’s in trouble, competition, finances, CEO leaving, that kind of a thing. Unless you think you’ve got some good skinning. I would not. That’s our approach. We do not short stocks in a bull market. That might be a mistake with some of these leverage ETF’s because they’re so horrible. Some of these leverage eTF’s like Uvxy. It’s a cash pretty machine if you just short it.

And we’ve done that. We’ve done that. It takes a lot of focus and you have to know, you have to pick your spots as to when you short it, which is, by the way, the best time to do that is actually they do a reverse split uvXy, which is a three time leverage to volatility. ETF is so poor, so poorly constructed that they have to do a reverse split every about six months just to get it back above $10 a share because, you know, and they just typically do like a 30 for one. So it’ll get the, anyway, you get the point. But the larger point is we only want to go strong long in bull markets, and then in bear markets, we’ll look to go short. But again, that’s why we’re looking for the Fed to cut rates soon. A lot of other reasons.

I’m going to cover a couple of those here. The signals that we think we see. But I do want to say, before I move on, don’t fight the tape, don’t fight the Fed. I never met Marty Zweig, but he’s the guy. He’s the guy in his book, winning on Wall street from 1970, he was the first to at least put these words into print. Don’t fight the tape. Don’t fight the Fed. I think it’s the truest Wall street axiom that holds up that I’ve ever seen.

[00:10:06]:
Because when the Fed starts cutting and you’ve got a market that is, that is advancing, like our markets and us and global markets have been doing, right, you do not want to fight that. Do not get in front of that. So, as I wrote this morning, it might sound a little, I don’t know, a little cocky maybe, but it’s true. I believe it’s true. We’ve. Tyler and I believed it’s true for 20 months now from the October 2022 bear market lows. If you’re not long, you’re wrong. That’s just it.

This market’s headed much higher again with rate cutting. And again, we’ve got. Don’t fight that. Don’t fight the tape. The tape, of course, is very constructive. It’s a big time bull market, we think a generational bull market. So that’s our approach here, and we’re going to stick to it. I think that you’re going to see rates begin to plummet here pretty soon, the larger point.

And again, I don’t hear other people talking about this, and to me, it’s a very big point. Germany, their ten year debt is below. It’s like 2.4%. Ours is 4.5. Yield almost double on the same maturity. You almost get double the yield to buy us debt than german debt. Now, someone explained that to me. We are the largest, most successful, most powerful industrialized country on the planet.

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How is it that tiny little Germany and they are tiny compared to us? How is it, why are their yields so much lower? Shouldn’t it be reversed? Shouldn’t you get more to buy german debt than ours? Right? Doesn’t make any sense. So again, we call it gravity. Supply and demand. Global demand for higher yielding us debt will keep a lid on rates. And that’s what will also continue to force rates lower. In addition to a fed, this would become, this already has become, as we’ve seen, much more dovish than they had been. The other signs that we see of, by the way, Japan, their ten year debt is 0% yield. So would you rather own Japan at 0%, Germany at 2.4%, or us debt at 4.5%? Again, I think it makes the case pretty strongly that rates are going lower.

Gravity and of course, a dovish fed and bank of England and ECB cutting in June. So there you go. We’re also, if you’ve been tracking utility stocks, which I don’t follow very closely, Tyler’s more of our sector experts than I am as far as day to day following them. But it is crazy. I shared the chart this morning, utility stocks, I mean, you look at it, they’ve gone parabolic. They’ve literally gone parabolic from the same time the market bottomed in mid April, utility stocks took off. They’ve had two down days. Utility stocks have been down twice since the middle of April.

Okay. Pretty, pretty rare. And the reason is, there’s two reasons, frankly, the primary reason from what we’re focused on is that, again, utility companies are the largest borrowers in the country. They’re very rate sensitive. So if the markets, as a discounting mechanism believe that something big is about to happen with interest rates, you tend to see it first in utility stocks. And that’s clearly what we’re seeing here. Now there’s also the electrification of the US, of course, which happened with EV’s. We’ve talked about this a lot, and that also plays a role.

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It’s going to be a lot of money going to utilities to build, to electrify these utilities, certainly as battery storage gets better. A lot of factors involved here, but we’re not recommending utility stocks. We don’t play them. But I can tell you they are discounting, in our opinion, lower rates. Also gold, you know, look at what gold has been doing. Gold is a big, again, today we’re now about what, $63 away from an all time high, something like that. Just, just almost 24, 50, say right now we’re in the 23 70 range. And, you know, again, this is another asset that tends to be very rate sensitive.

And so gold, of course, is done on a tariff. So a lot of these factors are pointing to lower interest rates and rate cuts. All right, let’s take a look. I’ll just cover one thing today because I haven’t covered this in a while and I want to talk about bitcoin. We’ll do that at the end. But I also want to mention for our newer listeners here, and I got to tell you, I talk about this because I hear nobody else doing it. And again, this is the kind of thing that drives me crowded if you’re like me or not. But when I, I can’t, when I find something that I think is important and I can hear literally no one else talking about it.

Right. It’s not that they’re not I’m sure somebody else is. But we are in the roaring two thousand twenty s. I don’t, I don’t know there’s any way to. You can debate that. Certainly when you look at the strength of us, companies and consumers. I’m going to cover it very quickly because I think it is that important. The signs are everywhere.

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First of all, markets at all time highs. We have financial engineering again, bitcoin, cryptos, blockchain tokenization, fractional ownership. What’s happening here is remarkable. Stocks at all time highs. Home prices, all time highs. Net equity in homes, all time highs. Important statistics. And you can’t just account for this because you say inflation is making everything go up.

That doesn’t mean that one third of all homeowners should have their home paid off. That’s the reality. That’s a record as well. Consumer net worth, all time high. These are all, all time highs. And again, I hear nobody else talking about this collectively, but I’m not done yet. This is also huge. In the last 15 years, consumers and american companies have cut their debt by 25% to disposable income and to market caps of companies.

Those are massive, massive changes to personal balance sheets. And I know we only hear the negative, right? How many times have you heard? Because I swear I’ve heard this a thousand times. The average person only has enough money. If they lose their job. They’re out of money in two months. They only have two months worth of savings. Something like that. Right.

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I don’t find that to be true. I don’t find that to be true. I really believe there’s a psyop and negativity underway. I know why I think it’s in place. I want to hear your reasons. Okay. But why aren’t we hearing these important facts from the mainstream media? Why aren’t these being reported? You know, when I go on Charles Payne show and I go on Wayne Root show, and we’re talking in the media, Tyler does the same thing. You know, we try to work this into conversation.

It does not go well. Typically, it does not go well. I remember one time Charles said, well, kip, you need to get out. Get it, get out of the yacht club and go visit the regular people more. That was his comeback, and I got the point. But, you know, Charles doesn’t know that I come from that second America much like he does. So it’s not that I’m an elitist. I’m just reporting facts.

These are facts. And there’s another big one, too. Corporate debt to market cap is at 50 year lows, there’s so much liquidity. Corporations don’t need debt, certainly not to the great they ever have. The reason all this is important, it’s about the ability to lever up, because this is the everything I’ve just shared. These are the things you see at the birth of economic expansions. Not the end, not when things are in trouble, right? All the dire straits and the Perma bear nonsense that we hear, I tell you, it’s a slap of negativity because the facts tell a very different story. Very different story.

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And I’m not saying everybody is flush and everybody’s had party in twenty four seven and all that, but I’m just saying relatively speaking, the american consumer and american companies are in the best financial shape in decades. That’s a reality. It just is. But the ability to lever up is significant because with debt at these low levels, once we get to a later stage of this economic expansion, people will start to lever up and they’ll start to use that ability. And credit scores are also all time high. So you’ll be able to add people that if they finally start to get a little strapped for cash, they’ll go into their bank or go into another financial or use a credit card or whatever because they got the balances paid off, they’ve got a lot of cash. You know, that is getting a little worse. We’re starting to see that fray around the edges a little bit.

But still, we’re talking about even in the worst case scenario, you’re seeing consumers in the 80th to 90th percentile as far as being the best, the best, I guess that’d be 10th percentile that they’ve ever been, at least in modern times. So when the economy starts to slow, when consumers start to have less of a job flexibility and the ability to change companies because there’s so many employees, so many more jobs are available than we have people, which still remains the case. When that starts to change, the ability to lever up, that will be a significant part of the economy. And that’ll be typically, we’ll see that in the last two, two years or so of an Evanek. When, you know, an economic expansion is in trouble, we start to see the lever up process take place. You know, in the market, you see margin, dollar amounts reach, reach new highs. Again, we’re nowhere near that now. And these, again, credit card balances, you know, again, people getting maxed out on various debt that they have, that’s just not the case right now.

But it’s important to track it that’s what we always do here. But this is, again, it’s a very powerful time of the american economy where the birth of economic expansion, not the end. That’s the key point here. And again, our primary point since we wrote the book has been that we are in the innovation revolution, as we’ve called it. Others call it the fourth industrial revolution and that this is the best opportunity for significant wealth creation for stocks since the 1995 to 2000 melt up. I think it actually extends throughout the economy because we have so much more flexibility, so many more options available to us to build wealth, either as an employee or as a business owner. I just don’t think that story’s being told enough. And I think that’s, again, I think there’s a psyop and negativity out there that wants to keep people down, you know, and again, I, I want to tell you the reason that I think it is, and I’ll probably write this up next week.

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I’ll just say it has something to do with communism. So I want to keep this a positive podcast on a Friday because demoralization is a big part of their communist attempt to take over a democratic society. There you go. Okay, let’s talk about the internals today. These were not great internals, but again, we’ve reached extreme robot on stochastic across the board in our major indexes. So not uncommon to see a policy. Again, it was a good week. It’s been a good run today.

We had negatives for advanced decline both NYC and Nasdaq. Neither was two to one negative. NYC was only a couple hundred more issues declining than advancing. Nasdaq was about 1.7 to one negative. And our new 52 kaisal lows, this is a very big positive here. We had 370 stocks hitting a 52 week high to 124 hitting a 52 week low. And volume was, was negative. But, but again, by this is a, like a 46% positive volume day.

So not great ratings. Not horrible either. In our sector watch today, we had six sectors finished higher, five finished slower. Almost nothing in either direction. A pretty quiet day today. Our leader, December staples up six 1%. The downside, consumer discretion. Consumer discretionary down six tenths of 1%.

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So the flip side of that coin in those two sector readings, by the way, our put call ratio today after having back to back days over a one, we did fall below that today. Still 0.89. That’s an elevated put call ratio. It means you’ve got people buying puts. Maybe it’s just because they see stochastics hit extreme verbot, maybe that’s it. But the level, what was it three days ago that we saw? We hadn’t seen this level of that put call reading since 20. I think Tyler said 2017, it was so incredibly high. Again, that’s a lot of people on the wrong side.

Not surprised that the markets rallied from there as contrarians. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. In our commodity watch today. Gold today up dollar 30 an ounce. Again, we talked about this yesterday. Love the miners. The miners, you may not think they’ve done much, but from the February lows, GDX, the gold miner ETF up 34%. The leveraged ETF that we own, ngt up 74%.

Again, that’s from the February low. So the miners have been leading. That is, that’s a classic buy signal that we look for the miners leading gold. When that happens, it’s a buy signal. And when you add everything else up again, this is the great looking charts. They got extremely bought at all time highs for gold and then they went through a shakeout period. And now that’s over. And we think gold is going to hit back all time highs.

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I would expect all time highs in gold in the next week or two, probably next week. And then again, our target then becomes $3,000 an ounce for 2024 gold, $30 an ounce at 23.70. That’s 1.3% silver today. A little flatter, but still up $0.06. It’s had a big run now, 28.42 an ounce, up two tenths of 1% of the day. Copper continues to charge ahead back to two years. Not far from all time highs now, folks. Better than two year highs.

Almost all time highs. Up another 1.6% today getting the electrification of the planet. This has got to take a lot of copper and we don’t have it. Big shortage. Copper is going to keep going higher, I think. Last trade, 4.66 a pound. Crude oil today was down a dollar one a barrel at 1.2% at 70 30. Really love energy stocks here finally of the day.

Bitcoin. Bitcoin shakeout data. You know, it was trading good this morning back over 63,000. I wrote it up this morning. Very constructive chart pattern. It is in a, it’s in a channel. And when it breaks out of this channel and it’s now hit its second most oversold levels. Bitcoin has second most oversold levels of the last year.

[00:24:49]:
We’re getting very close to, to our most bullish buy signal that we have because it’s also bouncing off the 100 day moving average. So look, unless you’re trying to time it exactly, I think this is a great time to buy bitcoin, as I wrote this morning. Look, we all know the supply demand story. You’ve heard us say it a million times. Again, there is no better supply demand story that I know of at least. I’ve never seen a better one in my career. What do they have? They’ve printed minted, what, 19.7 million bitcoin. That only gets a 21 million.

The halvings continue to make that more expensive and more difficult. We just course completed a halving. Bitcoin is typically weak in the month that follows a halving and then it begins to accelerate. I think that acceleration process is very near to happen because in addition to a very constructive chart pattern, we know the supply demand story. Again, the story that I think is probably least understood is that most financial advisors, money managers, cannot buy bitcoin. That’s the vast majority, not just in the US, but globally. We’re looking like 80% have not yet been approved by their own firms. By their own firms.

And the ones that do have to take the order unsolicited from their client, because these firms are not ready, they do not want the exposure, the liability. But that process is happening. At first it took the SEC approving the ETF’s. That had to happen first. Now the firms have to do their own due diligence and they have to go through the motions. Higher expensive law firms and they got to finally give it their blessing. Their clients have to sign off a risk disclosure form. So all that’s happening.

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But it’s a process right now. The smaller firms have approved it first. It will continue to gravitate to the larger firms as well. And again, this is not just us story. It’s globally as well. You can’t, in Europe, you cannot buy. If you’re an individual, you cannot buy throughout. I think.

I think every country in Europe, you cannot buy a bitcoin, ETF as an individual or institution. So that again, that process is underway. But I think the real shocker is going to come when we get either a really big name like a Warren Buffett. I doubt it would be Warren Buffett. He’s called, he’s called it a scam way too often to backtrack on that. And that’s Charlie Munger. That was his view. So I just don’t see Warren Buffett doing that.

But someone like Warren Buffett coming out and announcing that they’re building a position in these bitcoin ETF’s or in bitcoin? Either one. And I think the gigantic move higher will come out when it’s released that a sovereign wealth fund has started buying bitcoin or these ETF’s. So I think you just want to have your positions in place. Our approach here is monthly dollar cost averaging. I believe that’s the best way to add to it. So you don’t get emotional about your prices or try to pick your price points. But put $100 or $500 for whatever amount you feel comfortable with into bitcoin every month. Keep stacking right.

[00:27:55]:
Keep building those stacks and that become a hodler with the rest of us. Now, we don’t plan, we have traded bitcoin once. We do not plan to do that again anytime soon. I would be surprised. I would be surprised that if we sell bitcoin before it is 100 5200 thousand and I don’t even know that we’ll do it then. It would just take a level of overbought and other factors to be involved before we even make that decision. But we’ll keep you on loop as always. Right now we’re just buyers.

We’re buyers and we are Hodlers for sure. All right, folks, that’s it for the day. Hey, I hope you had a great week. Hope you have even better weekend. We’ll see you back again Monday after the close. Bye.