In today's episode, Tyler covers an eventful week in the markets, kicking things off with a recap of last night's RNC highlighting the incredible energy and charisma from the entire night. From there the focus shifts to the markets, where we break down the week's performance, including key movements and sector trends that every investor should pay attention to. 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 Friday out there. A great end to your week this week. It was an eventful end to an eventful really last few weeks here for our markets. Maybe not the finish to the week we want to see from our markets. But hey, at the end of the day, we did see a lot of bright spots out there that we’ll cover in today’s podcast.

But first, I’ve got to kick it off here with the Trump speech from last night’s RNC. If you, I’m sure you’ve seen clips of it at the very least by now, and you might have watched the whole RNC, the four day event. Really, most of it that I watched were just clips here and there. And then last night, you know, tuning in to see Trump speak, but to see Hulk Hogan out there, Dana White, Eric Trump as well, did well. And then, of course, the headline was Trump. And what just, I had to talk about it today because first of all, what incredible energy, incredible charisma from a guy who just had an assassination attempt on Saturday. He’s got a full schedule. Keep in mind, you know, it’s approaching 80 here and has the energy levels that most young, basically most young people would kill for.

[00:01:40]:
Right? That’s the kind of energy that this guy’s had. And that’s the kind of energy that not just Trump brought last night, but really the Republican Party brought last night. And what I saw from the RNC was the best presentation of the Republican Party, the best presentation they’ve put together in my lifetime, bar none. Not even close. What we saw was a glimpse at authentic american culture, genuine, patriotic Americans coming out to support somebody that they love in time of need. And a glimpse at a country that’s been our side of our country that the Biden administration over the last three and a half years has done everything to demonize, to demoralize, to silence and suppress. That’s all we’ve seen, right? We’ve been called every name in the book. And now I don’t even identify as a Republican necessarily.

I like to think of myself as independent. I choose good ideas over party. Right. I think most Americans probably should look that way at the way our political system works. But the obvious choice right now, that the Democratic Party is in shambles, right? What they try to peg the Republican Party as where they try to make Republicans look like they’re every bit of that. And like, I said absolutely in shambles. There’s one choice right now. It’s very obvious, and that is Donald J.

Trump, especially when you look at, you know, the longest presidential nomination speech ever last night. And sure, he went off the script. A lot of people might hate on him for that and kind of just, you know, doing that, his Trump thing. That’s what he does, though. We can’t really hate on him for it. So, yeah, he might have gone a little long, but you can’t deny that the, again, the energy he brought, the energy the crowd brought, the, it’s tough to put it all into words, but again, what we saw here was freedom loving Americans supporting and cheering for somebody they feel has their back. What I saw from this crowd was people who got excited, excited about free speech, excited about supporting it, even when it means supporting free speech for people whose views you don’t believe with. Can the Democrat party honestly look themselves in the face and say they’re anywhere near that right now? You know, they’re masters of projection.

[00:04:22]:
Whatever you’re accusing the other side of doing, or whatever you’re doing, accuse the other side of doing. And that is what they’ve done for the last, you know, really since 2016, since Hillary was nominated as the Democratic Party nominee. Right. They’ve completely gone away from liberal ideals, actual liberal ideas, and turned into a bit of a mixture of this socialist, fascist kind of regime. It’s bizarre to watch play outd and then watch people in the news take them seriously in any way, shape or form. It really is wild. But not only a crowd that loves free speech, that loves freedom. I saw a crowd who strongly supports no new wars.

That’s a huge theme of what they talked about last night. And Trump is the only president in modern era that can say that there were no new wars under him. While the Biden administration, whether through malice or through utter incompetence, seems hell bent on sending us towards a war, right? The night and day difference, the contrast between the two could not have been more on display than it was last night. And not only that, it was fun, right? The republican party, for most of my lifetime, and RNCs, since before Trump came into the party, were cringe fests, right? They seemed inauthentic. It seemed like neocons taking control of an otherwise rational party. There was no excitement, no joy to be had in any of those, really. It was a bunch of dorks, a bunch of losers. That is the old republican party.

That is the Republican Party of Mitt Romney, right? That’s not what we want to go back to, that’s not what we want to be associated with in any way, shape or form. And last night’s presentation reflected that in spades. It was a spectacle. It was entertaining, it was fun. It was light hearted to some extent. When Trump came on stage and spoke about what happened last Saturday, that was a somber moment. And outside of that, it seemed like a whole new party. That old Republican Party has died.

[00:06:46]:
And what we saw last night was the Republican Party rising from the ashes like a phoenix. Really. It was. It was. In my opinion, it was that monumental of a night. You had Hulk Hogan. Just love him or hate him, he’s a performer, he’s an entertainer. You’re coming out of retirement here to put on a hell of a show.

I saw a bunch of tweets overnight. They were like, hey, imagine you don’t know much about american culture, and you tune into the RNC and this is the first thing that you see is Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off emotionally, giving a speech in favor of Donald Trump. I’m fine with that. America, that is a, you know, freedom loving fight for our people. Unity was a huge message as well as was expected, of course. But you either love seeing that kind of display, in my opinion, or you should probably maybe think about moving to another country, because that is a part of american culture on display. There is winners on display. And that was another theme as well.

Getting back to winning. It felt refreshing. It felt like it did pre Covid. When America’s economy was doing well, things were hopeful. People saw an optimistic future. Now contrast that to what we’ve had over the last three and a half years, where everything you hear is America’s best days are behind us. This is an empire in decline. We’re watching the fall of ancient Rome in real time.

[00:08:22]:
That’s the message we’ve heard for the last three and a half years. And I’m going to get to Trump’s comments in a second. But it’s exactly what he said. We’ve been told for years that we should expect less as a people, and he was there with the opposite message. No, we should expect more. We should demand greatness. We should demand excellence from ourselves, from our leaders. But it begins with us, right, as individuals.

And at the end of the day, what’s the smallest minority? The individual. Right? People can talk about minorities, break them up into race, religion, creed, whatever. At the end of the day, the smallest minority is the individual. And it is up to us if we can get that kind of a culture, that kind of enthusiasm about supporting our country and going to work every day and looking out for our fellow man. That is the message that we need to take and continue to pay that forward. Then after Hulk Hogan and a few other speakers, Eric, we had Dana White. What a guy. And I’ve really enjoyed following this guy for years, and I’m sure many of you do as well.

But what a straight shooter. If you watch interviews with him, he’s not afraid to call it like he sees it. He wasn’t afraid to say in public, I’m not getting the vaccine. You know, he openly criticized it right from the get go. He, when the certain countries wouldn’t let them do fights, he went and brought it to an island, right, so that they could continue to have UFC fights during. COVID This is a guy whose endorsement means a lot. He’s a truth teller at the end of the day. And what he said time and time again, and I believe is true, there’s no one out there who can tell Dana White what to say.

[00:10:14]:
And so there’s no way that he would get on stage and say something inauthentic. And that’s exactly what he said last night. No one could tell him what to say. He is, he was there of his own accord because he believes this is that important. And he had probably the best line of the night. I love this. So if you don’t know who Dana White is, just a quick background. He’s, I believe he bought UFC early on, but he might have been early involved in it in more ways than one.

But now he is the head guy at UFC. And we’ve seen what that sport has done and blown up into over the last decade. He’s been there the whole time during this massive growth of the USC. So he deals with fighters all day. Right? And here’s what he said. He said, I’m in the tough guy business. And this man talking about Trump is the most resilient, toughest human being. Again, massive endorsement and just so cool to see really good people stepping up to support this campaign now.

So to kind of close it here, didn’t mean to spend the first ten minutes of this podcast on a political ramp, but it really, it was exciting. Incredible charisma all around, not just from Trump, but from the other people on stage. And I told, I told Kip this as well. Before or earlier this morning, that last night, you know, it’s in Milwaukee, so it’s on central time. I’m here in Texas. We’re on central time as well, getting to be about 1030 at night, I’m sitting down watching this, and I go to turn off the tv, start to kind of call it a night, really wrapping up the day. And immediately it hit me. This guy just arrived in assassination attempt on Saturday, was playing golf on Sunday, has been working, running for president of the United States, and he’s still going right now.

[00:12:06]:
I had to turn the tv back on and finish it up. I wasn’t gonna let him. Yeah. Stay on stage longer than I was willing to keep my eyes open. Good chances he got right back to it this morning as well. So again, the energy levels there and the mental acuity, rattling off facts and names so quickly, that is elite level performance from anybody, not to mention a nearly 80 year old man running for president. This guy, as has been said before, he’s done almost everything right. He’s accomplished so much, he even successfully became the president of the United States.

He could take his money, go be relaxing on a beach somewhere, enjoying his family, his grandkids, and his accomplishments. What an incredible life, right? And yet here he is, night after night, risking his life for us, promoting a message that we can be better than we think right now. A message of optimism that is somebody who really, really cares. And again, it’s heartwarming to see, and I could not agree more with kind of his closing message, talking about that our best days are ahead of us here in this country and that we are going to win and we are going to have success, and success will bring us together. You know, I played college baseball, played baseball growing up, my whole life, sports my whole life. And one thing I heard a lot from coaches, especially during a tough time, was just go out there and win, because winning solves almost all problems. And to get back to a winning type of mindset, the things that it can, we’ve seen the impact it can have on our country in just a short time. Look at what happened from 2016 leading up to coronavirus insanity in 2020.

We were back on the right track there. There’s no doubt about it. And it’s tough to fight, especially when you’re looking at what Joe Biden and his administration have done. But he repeated the goal time and time again. That completely flies in the face of everything that you’ll hear from blue and on that, I do love hearing that. It does seem QAnon was always kind of just a fringe type of deal, regardless how you felt about, sure, there was some good stuff in it. Lewanon is a real problem. The fact that so many people have fallen for how many hoaxes that they’ve used against Trump now.

[00:14:33]:
But if you watched that speech last night, and for anybody who’s on the left, if you watched that speech last night, you cannot come away from it thinking still that this is an angry, hateful, bigoted racist on stage, right? That’s what they always cry about when they talk about Trump. But the message over and over and over from every speaker last night was that we want to make this country great, not just for half of the country, not just for republicans, not just for any one race, creed, or religion. We want to make America great for everybody, for every individual. And the biggest take home was that it didn’t seem forced at all. It felt genuine as well, really, all around. Sorry, I’ll get off of that topic now. But it was so good. And again, probably the best I’ve seen in my lifetime from the Republican Party.

If we can take that message and continue to run with it, I have no doubt in my mind, and Kip and I have talked about this a lot. And even regardless before last night, I know in my heart that America’s best days are still ahead of us. All right, that being said, let’s take a look at our markets on the day today, the reason why we’re all here, right? So cover it quickly here for you on this Friday after I just spent 15 minutes talking about last night’s RNC. But it was that exciting. Had to do it here. All right, so it wasn’t quite the closeout that we’d like to see to this week, especially a week that saw all time highs from the Dow, from other areas, from some of our favorite sectors as well. But we got a sell off into the close of the week. But one of the key points here that we’ve seen with this sell off is telltale signs that were nowhere near market top.

At market tops, you see sentiment remaining extremely bullish despite a pullback. And today, the last two sessions, really, we saw the fear and greed go from greed all the way back down to neutral, hovering around fear. Now, as contrarians, we like to look at this as a confirmation signal that we’re just nowhere near a market top until we get to the point where everyone’s bullish and everyone believes that stocks can only go up and we get a pullback like this, or maybe even a deeper pullback than this. And the fear and greed index remains fully in greed territory. AAII remains extremely bullish. I’d be very surprised if next week’s AI report didn’t see a massive shift in bulls. We’re starting to get to the excessive side of bullishness from that reading, but we’re still not there yet. So stay tuned here.

[00:17:18]:
We’ll continue to report on that. Until we get to that point, though, we’ll look at pullbacks like this week as buying opportunities. So stay tuned. Still looking for that here. We don’t want to catch a falling knife. Right. That’s a kind of a core tenet of trend following as well. So we’ll be looking for a capitulation esque kind of event.

You know, in a new powerful bull market like this, you don’t always get the capitulation event that you’re looking for. It could be Monday. We’re right back off to the races. Who knows at this point. But as a general rule of thumb for any new traders out there, we generally don’t like buying on Fridays. And it doesn’t help that this Friday we happen to finish near the lows of the day and for the Nasdaq and the semis near the lows of the week. So that’s a little bit of added risk that we don’t need to take on and where we think patience pays off. If you happen to miss.

Excuse me. Yep. Excuse me. If you happen. Pardon me. All right. We’re ready. If you happen to miss the exact bottom, but you’re able to get in a few percentage points away, I think you’re still going to be very happy with that trade over the next six to twelve months.

[00:18:37]:
But again, kind of a general rule. We don’t like buying on Fridays. And this Friday specifically, you know, finishing lower like it did today didn’t exactly encourage us to act. And that’s also because you go into the weekend, you’re unable to act on Saturday and Sunday. Sunday, who knows what news could come out in that time? It could be bullish news. Who knows? But again, that’s why we like to wait here. And again, we’re looking for a capitulation style event and we have the semis leading lower on a Friday. Yeah, we’ll go ahead and use a little bit of patience here.

So again, not the action we were looking for today. We did try to get a little bit of a rally in the smart money hour, but with about 30 minutes left, it seems like the Bulls went on vacation for the weekend as we finish not at, but near the lows of the day. Small caps led the way today, down just 0.63% to 21 84. For the Russell 2000, the s and P 500 down just over seven tenths of 1% to 5505. After that, the Nasdaq down eight tenths of 1%, just over that to 17,726. As I mentioned, semis did lead lower, finishing down 2.9% today. So again, less than ideal. And finally, our laggard on the day was the Dow, down over nine tenths of 1% today, 377 points, still above 40,000 at 40,287.

I will point out the transports here tried to stay positive in the close. Finished flat on the day today. A little bit of a win there. You know, you want to see the transports leading. At least they held up better here today. Next up, looking at our internals on the day. As you might expect, not great numbers here, but summer trading numbers. Nothing terrible.

[00:20:32]:
No big beats anywhere. Which tells us, again, this is a market holding up well. Resilient is a great theme for this bull market, has been for some time now. And again, we’ll take it as a win that there weren’t worse numbers today. No big two to one beats or anything like that. But we did have declining stocks beating out, advancing stocks for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Again, no big beats, though. Then 52 week highs and lows had our one bright spot on the day.

Coming in positive on the NYSE. Did come in negative, though, on the Nasdaq. And then volume here, you know, again, kind of a Friday trading kind of day, not necessarily extremely light volume, but relatively so, coming in negative for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Next up here, looking at our sectors on the day, just two out of our eleven sectors finishing higher on the day today. Healthcare and utilities were those two sectors. I will point out, though, one sector that finished flat on the day was higher. Most of the session continues to be housing. HGX.

The housing index finished almost exactly flat and right at an all time closing high. Still, that may surprise many people to hear that the housing index is right at all time highs. So don’t pay attention to everything that you hear in the news. Then, our laggards on the day were led lower by energy. Oil getting hit today, followed by tech, and then financials were lower on the day. But I got to point out here, regional banks were able to finish positive on the day to day, even if it was just half a percent. Regional banks hanging out here near their 52 e kais should be looked at as a bullish sign. It’s good to see the regional banks holding up.

[00:22:24]:
Well, it doesn’t always work this way, but regional banks can be one of the first sectors to show warning signs for a deeper sell off, warning signs for the economy. So the fact that they’ve been resilient right when we wanted them to, we started talking to this to, about it here on the podcast about a month ago now, and we’ve seen them hold up well. So we’ll look at that as another sign here that this dip will ultimately be a gift and another buying opportunity. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Some red on the screen here. Gold now down 2.18%, still above $2,400 an ounce at $2,402 an ounce. Silver back below $30 an ounce, down 2.68% to $29.41 an ounce. Copper Nat on 1% to $4.23 a pound.

And oil, as I mentioned earlier, getting hit hard today, down 3.26% to $78.65 cents a barrel. Finally here for today, bitcoin catching a bid here into the close of the week. Got above 67,000 for the first time in over a month. Today, just below its all time high of 73,400, right in that range now up on the day, 4.9% to 66,954. You know, it’s been a good week here so far for bitcoin, but, you know, we’ve gotten used to some of these big days. This could be one of those moves where we hit an all time high over the weekend in a very short order here. We’ll see and we’ll report back here to you on Monday. But 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 at Vra letter.com, click the podcast link at the top, and we’d love to to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time, we’ll have a great weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday for the close. Bye.