In today's episode, Tyler takes a deep dive into the latest market action, and why right now is a great time to "buy the dip". He covers the latest sentiment surprises showing extreme fear for stocks - hardly the sign of a market top. He also unpacks the beginning of tech earnings with a spotlight on a crucial name that you won't want to miss. 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 fantastic day out there today. You know, if you’re bullish on this market right now, which we do remain here at the vra, you know, you look at a day like today as another opportunity to buy the dip. We’ll get into a lot of reasons here today why we continue to see that as the case and some, you know, really compelling reasons why this market has a whole lot higher to go from here. We’ll kick it off with the latest in sentiment, and if you’re not a regular listener here to the VRA Investing podcast, you might be a little surprised by it because we are only, you know, just five days ago we were hitting all time highs. So we’ll get into that here today.

[00:01:05]:
Also, you know, we got a little bit of the beginning of tech earnings this week in addition to the big banks in one name in particular this morning that you certainly will not want to miss. One of the most important names for the innovation revolution that we are in right now, again, looking pretty bullish here when you dive into the data with this company. So looking forward to covering that one here today. Of course, we’ll cover our major market action here as well. A few surprises in there today, but also yields hitting their lowest level since tariff mania earlier this year. So got a lot of exciting stuff to hear. You know, we’ll talk about what all these things mean for your portfolio. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump right in and break this all down because like I said a second ago, we are just five days away in some sectors.

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We have more recently from all time highs than that even, and we’ve just seen sentiment absolutely collapse. That’s just not what you see at major bull market tops. If you’ve been here with us for a while, you know, we talk about it here often, you know, when you get a pullback like this from an all time high and sentiment remains as bullish as ever and everyone out there is saying, buy the dip, buy the dip. You know, then you might hesitate a little bit and say, are we getting close to a top? Even then oftentimes you got a whole lot further to go beyond that because bull markets run a lot longer than many people will expect. And again, Kip covered this yesterday. When you have the talking heads out there like Andrew Ross Sorkin, you know, calling for a top with no time frame, I mean, that’s the biggest joke of it all. You know, Robert Kiyosaki has done this many times as well. Kip covered that one too.

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You know, he’s Kip kiyosaki’s called for 200 of the last two recessions, right? You hear it from these people all the time. You gotta go back and look at their track record. Paul Tudor Jones is another one. Just a few weeks ago was calling for a major market top. And then you go back and look at his track record just since 2022. And it really, I mean, you must know that on the back end of him saying that he’s trying to get people to sell so that he can buy, likely because he missed out on so much of this move that we’ve seen since 2022. But in 2022, he said, oh, the US is on the cusp of a recession. He said it again in 2023, said it again, you know, right before Trump was elected as well.

You’ve got Andrew Ross Sorkin, you know, no timeline, nothing. Just saying, oh, we, you know, we’re, we’re in a bubble. This is going to, we’re going to see a major, major sell off here. A, I can’t tell you when, I can’t tell you how much it’ll be, but it’s coming, right? So that he can look back that in 15 years and say, oh, look, I called it back then because I was nearby where it was, you know, not even this likely, though, will be the case. We’ve called for this bull market to run through at least 2030. That’s been our call since 2022. And you know, a lot of people out there might call us perma bulls. I’m here to tell you today we’re not perma anything.

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If the story changes, we’ll talk to you about it right here on the VRA Investing podcast. But it’s really been harder to find anyone more bullish than the VRA since that time period. And we’ve seen it pay off time and time again in our portfolio. So if you aren’t here with us already, why not come and join us? We got a 14 day free trial going on for right now@vra letter.com through Q3 of this year. We’ve handily outperformed all of the major indexes with over 41% returns through Q3 of this year. We’re looking for a great Q4 here for our markets. October is known as a volatile month. We look at that as an opportunity here at the vra.

And again, we’ll get into some of the reasons why here today because again, let’s take a look at some of these sentiment numbers. Here is these just aren’t numbers you’ll see at a market top. Okay, five days away from all time highs. And check out the fear and greed index. We are now in extreme fear mode, folks. Wow, that’s incredible. Even just when we were at all time highs, you know, just a week ago we were at neutral levels when we were at all time highs. That’s how unloved this bull market is.

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And really the lack of love to does come from, you know, major institutions out there because retail has been buying the dip you know, for decades. We’ve seen Wall street take advantage of their clients, take advantage of retail investors through, you know, media manipulation, all kinds of things out there. You know, it’s time for the individual investor to not only play some catch up, but really outperform what Wall street and we think that’s exactly what we’re going to continue to see from here. So again, that just isn’t what you see. Extreme fear. You know, the semis finished higher on the day. They’re right at all time highs. That is our major leader there.

You know, we talk about this here often. You want to see tech leading the way and semis leading tech. Well, we got that today. I’ve got a great chart to show here in a second about that. Then let’s take a look at the AAII investor sentiment survey. Yes, we had two weeks, yes, three weeks of readings with more bulls than bears. And then, I mean we hit all time highs last week. Look how this just collapsed here.

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You know, 12.2% drop in bulls while a massive swing higher in bears. Again, these just aren’t the kinds of readings that you see at major market tops. At major market tops. You know, we’re getting phone calls on a daily basis. When we get a day like today, you know, hey, what should we be buying out there? You’re getting, we’re getting stock recommendations from our Uber drivers, you know, people that you don’t know. You’re getting stock recommendations from your waiter or waitress at restaurants. Again, not what we’re seeing here and this is anecdotal, but I get a lot of calls from friends who know what we do and how much we’ve outperformed the market. That’s in 2021.

Those were the kinds of calls we were getting right now. The kinds of calls I’m getting in the kind of comments I’m getting from friends Are, are we in an AI bubble? Is this a bubble? Are we, are we looking at, should I sell everything here? Again, not the kinds of conversations that we’re having at major market tops when we’re getting close to a top, when everything’s doing great and everyone’s making money hand over fist. The kind of calls we get aren’t about what stocks we’re buying. I’m getting a call. It’s like, hey, I just loaded the boat on this stock. What do you think? Right? They’re calling me after the fact. Hey, I just bought a ton of this. What do you think about it? No, no, no.

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That’s the kind of action that you see at a market top. Not, hey, are we in a bubble? I’m getting scared here. You know, again, we are so early in this bull market. The. We’ve compared it often to the 1995 to 2000.com melt up when the NASDAQ rallied 580%. Even with this slight, very slight pullback here, the NASDAQ rallied some, you know, 125% or so since October of 2022. Again, we’ve got a long way to go here. We’ve seen nothing like a red hot IPO market, nothing like the NFT craze that we saw in 2021.

You know, and when you’re looking, or yes, when you’re looking at those kinds of things, when you’ve got, you know, these meme coins and, and really, coins is what a lot of people call them that are rallying hundreds of percent in a single day. Right? An IPO that comes out at an already elevated valuation and rallies 100% on its first day of trading and days after that as well, 20, 30% rallies. You know, we’ve had some decent IPOs, but nothing like that kind of major top action that you would expect to see again at major market tops. So we’re still early in this. This is an opportunity here to buy the dip in this market. And you don’t want to sell the rip the other end of that. You know, I get it. You see these big red candles when you go look at a chart like Friday’s action, and it looks scary, you know, oh, man, I got to get out of this.

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Right? Well, that’s where the old adage comes in. A lot of these old adages really work, you know, so it’s escalator up, elevator down. But again, buy the dip remains the move here. All right? And here’s a prime example of that is today we got earnings from really one of the most important tech companies out there. Not the largest market cap, not a name that you know, really, unless you pay attention to the tech space and semiconductor space. You might not even know about this company. Maybe you’ve heard about it, but you don’t know what they do. And that would be Taiwan Semiconductors, an absolutely essential piece of the supply chain for semiconductors.

I’ll break it down here a little bit in what we saw today. Now that can be a little scary because we’re talking about, you know, massive tariffs on China. Are they going to try and take Taiwan? Well, you know, we can, I can spend a whole podcast trying to break that down for you here. But China, the supply chain for semiconductors. Let me back up. The supply chain as a whole for semiconductors is incredibly fragile. But that leaves China just as exposed as we are here in the US Actually. So I don’t see any of that escalation coming because China knows this as well, that there’s a whole lot of international companies that are essential to again, the supply chain for some semiconductors which they aren’t able to replicate at this time.

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That these countries that have these essential pieces in the supply chain, they’re our allies, they’re US Allies. You know, we just saw a takeover this week from a European company that was, you know, had been bought out by a Chinese company, had a Chinese CEO and they’re taking back their company. Now. Again, this does scare China. They know how fragile this is. For all of the big talk of, oh man, the rare earth minerals and what are we going to do if this happens? You know, yes, there’s a lot of essential things in, in there, but there’s a whole lot of other essential things that they won’t talk about in the financial mainstream media because it didn’t pay for them to talk about it in that way. They want to bump up the fear and we’re seeing it in the semiconductors. So Taiwan, again, absolutely essential to the semiconductor space.

You know, I’m gonna break it down really too low level probably, but all that needs to be said here. You hear about Nvidia every day. They design these chips. Taiwan Semi is the company that actually packages them and produces these chips. And there’s about 10 other companies along the way that are just as essential that, you know, do one minor fraction of a piece of that chip. It could not be produced without each and every one of those. But Taiwan Semi especially is incredibly important. Came out today, absolutely crushed on earnings, revenue, sales over 33 billion.

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A massive 30% year over year increase there, beat on earnings per share, gross margin increased as well. And hinting at some new processes that could even speed up the production time for semiconductors. That’s going to be essential as, as we continue not. We’re not even in the heart of the innovation revolution yet. This is early innings here. I know that it’s tough, we’ve talked about this here a lot. To buy stocks. When you’re hearing about all time high, after all time high, we’re just five days away from that.

I get it. But blue sky territory like that, when no one has a loss, rarely is there a better time to buy stocks. New highs beget new highs. That is so true for the market. And we’re just now, you know, after April, the April tariff mania sell off. These all time highs are early inning highs here. So any chance that you get to buy the dip, you may not buy the exact low, but I will tell you that over the next 12 months, the next two years, three years, as we head into 2030, you’re going to look back and, and thank yourself for taking that risk now because it’s only going to get harder as we continue to hit all time highs. All right, so net income, again, just absolutely crushing estimates here.

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We expect this to be the case for the rest of earnings season. Kip has talked about this a lot as well. You know, we’re looking at 12 to 15% increases in earnings. And just again, for such an essential piece, again, this company actually does the final processing on these chips that all of our major tech players are buying. So that means that if their sales are up this high, all of these companies down the, down the line have more demand for these chips. They’re making products that are being bought as well. Of course, we’ve heard all the stories about data centers, right? We’re also talking about chips that go into automobiles. Obviously the data centers are AI, but these chips go into just about everything that you own.

Now, you know, what device do you have that’s not a smart device yet? And if it’s not a smart device, I guarantee you they make a version of it that is a smart device. Help. They even got light bulbs now that are smart devices in and of themselves. You’re not just turning off and on, but all kinds of different things. So again, this company is absolutely essential to the innovation revolution. They produce over 60% of global semiconductors and over 90% of the nano wafers, right. That come in below 10 nanometers. We’re getting some of that production Moving here to the US now you’ve got a contact here that actually works in one of these manufacturing plants here in Central Texas where they are producing 3 and 4 nanometer chips.

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Again, China doesn’t have that capacity yet. They’re ha. They’re, you know, really hamstrung at about 7nm. It was tough to dive into all of the reasons why that’s essential, but just incredible, you know, how interconnected this supply chain is and why we don’t see, you know, the China US issues blowing up into something else. You know, obviously we want to see the US not only become energy independent as we were under Trump 1.0, but also technology independent as well. And that’s a lot of what this tariff war is really about. And there’s nothing wrong with China being technologically independent as well, you know, but we want to be the leaders. At the end of the day, you don’t want a totalitarian government run by a dictator and much less a communist government running it.

So that all being said, we look at this as very bullish for the market. So let’s take a look here at our markets on the day. You know, not the action that you want to see where we open higher and finish lower on the day. Right, you want to see the market opening lower and finishing at the highs of the day. But I’ll point out we did finish off of the lows of the day. Excuse me, just what you want to see here. Tech leading the way. Nasdaq down just over 410 of 1%.

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But hey, look at this. The semis just off of an all time high. I didn’t have this chart prepared but I’ll go ahead and pull it up for you here really quick. The semis finishing up almost half a percent on a day where the rest of the market, major indexes and sectors were lower on the day, just off of its all time high. But this is what’s even more important a, a pattern that we’ve keyed off of here for a long time and especially from the April lows, is the semiconductor outperformance hitting another high here Again, new highs beget new highs. Especially when you’re seeing something like this, you want to continue to see the semis leading the way. So that’s where we were in April of this year in tariff mania. Here’s where we are today.

We expect this to continue for years to come. All right, next up here we had the S P500 down just over six tenths of 1%. Dow Jones right in the same territory as the S and P. But also point out one that I’ve talked about here, Kips talked about. You want to see the transports participating here as well. We have not seen that. Well, they bucked the trend today. Transports finishing up over 1% on the day to day.

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You know, we’ve, you know, had a nice base here in this. We want to see this continue from here for the transports. But really good to see finally here, the Russell 2000 did lead the way lower on the day, but they actually hit an all time high earlier this week as well. Iwm we’re, I mean just hit an all time high yesterday. Right. Again, new highs beget new highs. Just what you want to see. So no big concerns.

Again, those big red candles scare people. But in a bull market, again, it’s escalator up, elevator down, an opportunity to buy the dip. All right, so I said earlier as well that I would cover yields because this has been another major theme in forecast for us here in 2025. We said at the beginning of the year that we’re going to get in Trump 2.0, exactly what we saw in Trump 1.0. Yields peaked just before the inauguration. Exactly, exactly like we saw in 2016. Now look where we’re going. That is the lowest level for the 10 year since April of this year.

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We do expect yields to go lower. The Fed, even without government data coming in. And you know, again, as our good friend Wayne Allen Root has said time and time again, it’s not more complicated than KISS usually means. Keep it simple, stupid. In terms of a government shutdown, it means keep it shut stupid. And absolutely could not agree more. And get rid of a lot of these non essential government employees. We’ve seen a lot of stories here for years about these government employees that just do busy work all day, nothing essential at all.

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A lot of them don’t even know why they’re doing it. It’s processes that we needed years ago and the job just stayed open for some reason. We’ve got to cut down on this. Got that’s, you know, I wouldn’t necessarily call it fraud because these people, I guess, you know, feel like they need to have a job. But it’s definitely waste. It’s absolutely waste. We’ve got to optimize our government. So yes, keep it shut, absolutely.

Also, you know, a lot of people scared of the VIX up big on the day. Another sign of a bull market is these massive rips in the VIX that are then followed by it falling significantly. So Again, yields at these levels. Good to see it getting back below a 4. We’ll see if it stays below a 4. It’s not going to be straight down just like everything. Stock market doesn’t go straight up either. But we do continue to look for lower yields here going forward, which will lead to, you know, a number of downstream effects, whether it’s for the housing market or just, you know, larger purchases in general.

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Even automobiles. Right. Rates are incredibly high, way too high. And who does that hurt the most? This is where the Fed is so out of touch. Jay Powell, you know, just hanging out with all of his rich buddies. These yields don’t affect them. No, it affects somebody on the lower end of the income spectrum who needs to go out there and buy a car. Can’t even buy a used car without getting hit with a 6, 7 8% interest rate on a car that’s 7, 8, 9 years old.

That’s just, it’s should not be happening. Right. This affects, absolutely affects the lower end of the income spectrum more than the upper end. Again, the Fed just incredibly out of touch. Can’t wait to get Jay Powell out of that job. All right, next up here, let’s take a look quickly at our internals on the day here. You know, about what you would expect for a down day like today. You know, just over 2 to 1.

[00:22:05]:
Negative. More declining stocks than advancing stocks on both the NYSE and the NASDAQ 52E highs, lows did come in positive. A bit of a lagging indicator here, but man, we definitely got a lot of all time highs that you might not expect. I’ll get to one more here in just a second. Volume also negative on the day. Roughly two and a half to one. Negative for both the NYSE and the nasdaq. Next up, our sectors on the day.

We did finish with 10 out of our 11 sectors lower on the day. But we got the leadership you want to see. Tech did finish positive on the day. X. Okay, the Tech Sector ETF for the S&P 500 positive on the day and then defensive names leading the way lower again. That’s not the sign of a bull market top. We’re seeing a top. You know, it’s, it’s the what has been the leaders also lead the way lower again, Tech has been the leader to the upside for the S and P sectors not leading to the downside here.

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Laggards here, the financials which everyone is scared about right now. If you got Jamie Dimon saying that, you know, there’s credit cockroaches in the system, you know, essentially saying there’s some bad loans out there, which JP Morgan is certainly guilty of. But we don’t see this as a larger issue for the financials. Right. And if you do see bigger issues for the financials, you’re going to see the Fed step up. Absolutely. And especially with a Treasury Secretary like Scott Besson who is so much more capable than Janet Yellen was. You know, we don’t expect it to be a structural long term issue.

You’ve also got a lot of talking heads. You know, again with Jamie diamond talking about credit cockroaches. A lot of people thought it was the regional banks and that may be the case in some situations. But it’s also a bank like JP Morgan. But the fears in the regional banks, you know, a lot of people look at the regional banks as an indicator that before recessions, regional banks are, are the early warning signs. This just isn’t the same sector that it used to be. Pre 2008 financial crisis. In 2007 there were roughly 1800 regional banks.

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There’s been so much consolidation in this group, whether it’s the big banks buying them or them combining. Right. There’s today there’s only three to 400 regional banks managing less assets than they did in 2007. So again, not the same group that it was before. So again we don’t see this as a massive issue here. After that, energy companies were lower on the day to day. So much bearishness in this group. There’s a lot of opportunity to be had.

We might be a little early on this one, but a lot of opportunity to be had. I’ll cover this a little bit more when we get to our commodity watch and talking about oil after that, utilities, consumer discretionary and and consumer staples. Again, 10 out of our 11 sectors finishing lower on the day today. All right, let’s take a look here at our V Commodity watch where we got another all time high from gold on the day. In my final chart here for the day, you know, going into the year, if you had told people how gold would have performed, no one would have believed it. There was really no bigger bulls on Wall street than than us for gold. Our year end price target for gold was $4,000 an ounce. Well, we have blown through that here now at $4,344 an ounce, up 3.4% on the day for gold.

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And this is a bigger story than just US Dollar devaluation and debasement, which is a different topic from inflation. I won’t break it, you do a whole podcast on just that. But that was a Trump thing. From the very beginning, countries like China have used currency manipulation against us. These this is just simply righting those wrongs. Look at gold’s performance though has now outperformed all of the Mag 7 this year. If you said that at the beginning of the year we would have believed you, but a whole lot of hedge fund managers would not have believed you on that. Then we also got GDX the gold miners.

You know exactly what you want to see here. Even with Gold up 3.4% GDX outperformed up 3.65% on the day to day. One of our favorite names here at the vra up over 7.8% on the day to day. If you want to get the exact name. Because this is still so early for our two favorite gold miners here at the V Kip covered this yesterday as well. We’ll be publishing more about that here likely tomorrow, but definitely in updates to come. Come. So if you’re not already a member again, come and join us.

[00:26:51]:
These are two names that you will not want to miss out on is we see gold going a whole lot higher from here. This is really again similar to the currency story. This is writing some wrongs here because gold has been such a heavily manipulated commodity, whether it’s by the big banks. Things to the great work at folks the folks at Gada for for that they have done so heavily manipulated. We see gold going far, far higher from here. Even from these all time highs. Again it won’t be straight up. You know there’ll be buying opportunities along the way.

But again as as we go through the next three to five years, you’ll be very happy even paying this price today. Same is true for the gold miners is a old adage, right? You want to own the picks and shovels when you see gold going higher. Also silver hitting an all time high today as well now at 53.43. Now it’s another VRA recommendation there. Copper just below $5 a pound at 4.98 a pound and oil below $60 a barrel making further moves below $60 a barrel at 57.42 a barrel. Not too low where oil companies can, you can’t make money but low enough to start bringing down, you know, the end product gas prices. Right. Trump did just say he wants to see gas at about $2 a gallon.

[00:28:20]:
So this looks like it will be helping. Absolutely. So that was kind of my final comment on the energy companies there. These Companies have gotten so much more efficient. This isn’t 2014 where we saw oil and gas companies just, you know, printing money under Obama. When we’re at what, over a hundred dollars a barrel, $130 a barrel, they were getting irresponsible. These are well capitalized, efficient companies as well. You know, people talk about rig count going down.

Don’t look at that, look at production. We’re producing more with less rigs than ever. So even at these prices, our energy companies here in the US Are making money and they, and we’re looking at more deregulation, which again brings down their cost per barrel, which means that they can keep making money with lower oil prices. Finally here for today, bitcoin now below $110,000. Bitcoin down 2.3% at 108,267. You know, people are talking about some fears out there with bitcoin as well. It’s just, you know, a selloff, getting caught up with the other sell offs. Right.

[00:29:29]:
It’s something that you can liquidate easily compared to, you know, owning a physical gold and silver. Maybe people are trying to buy more physical gold and silver. We’ll look at, we are looking at this as a buying opportunity in bitcoin as well. As a matter of fact, we just released our second ever crypto recommendation here at the V. A very exciting name here. You know, the intersection of, of crypto and AI. So again, come and join us. We got a two free week trial going on right now at VRA Letter.

If you’re not also a podcast subscriber, you’ll find our podcast every day at the market close@ vraletter.com. click that podcast link at the top. We’d love to have you here with us. You’ll also find our transcript and comments on the podcast as well. So, folks, that is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe again if you haven’t VRA letter.com and we’ll see you here every day at the market close. So till next time, Kip will see you back here tomorrow for the close. Thanks everybody.