In today's episode, Tyler dives into what will be an action-packed week for stock market and economic news. Importantly, our markets showed resilience again to start the week. After a shaky start to the day, our major indexes finished higher across the board and even hit a couple of all-time highs. Tune into today's podcast to learn more!

Dont look back because the market is closed. Good Monday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for todays VRA investing podcast. Hope you all had a great weekend out there and an even better start to your week this week. And I hope you came into this week ready to rock because we have an exciting week coming up here for our markets, for economic reports, the latest from the Fed, and we’ll cover it all here today. And we started off the week in a good fashion as well. Our markets this morning came a little shaky out of the gate after we did get, you know, we got all time highs on Fridays, but we finished lower. And the commodity market got hit hard at the end of last week as well.

So it was good to see this shaky start to the morning resolve higher across the board here for our major indexes. A lot of green on the screen for our commodities as well. And most importantly, we got another good smart money hour here today. We saw a string of these last week as well. So we want to see this continue here as we didn’t have a huge day of gains for our major indexes, but we did finish at or near the highs of the day today. And again, importantly, we finished higher across the board here on the day. But first, let’s dive in to the upcoming action. Like I said, of this very eventful week here.

[00:01:41]:
And it did kick off today as well. While the trading felt a little bit like a summer day. I saw a few of those comments out there today. It’s a little early, right? Summer doesn’t begin officially for like another ten days. But I’ll tell you, here in Texas, summer is in full swing. And I wasn’t going to get into this, but a little side note here, I’m sure you’ve seen some of the posts out there, you know, about what lakes have looked like this summer. And I got to tell you, here in Austin, no matter, really, here in Texas, no matter what lake you go to, you are going to find lakes filled with people with brand new boats as well. I have not seen Lake Austin here in Austin as packed as it was the last few weekends maybe ever, except for holiday weekends.

Right? I get it’s kind of the first few weeks of summer. Maybe that has something to do with it. But wow. That, folks, is another sign here of the roaring 2020s, right? People have money to spend. You can ignore a lot of what you see on tv with the perma bears, and now I will. There’s a slight caveat to that. We’ve talked about it here a lot. The fact that they’re really, the divide between the two Americas has rarely been larger, if ever, than it is right now.

But for the sake of talking about a financial podcast, we’re going to remain in the realm of what the first America is doing here because they are making money and they are spending it as well, which ultimately is bullish for the us economy. And the divide between the two Americas is a topic for another podcast that Kip and I could do a series of podcasts on. We wrote a large part about it in the big bribe as well. It makes, it brings us no joy to talk about it. But those are the facts in front of us. And our job here at the VRA at the end of the day, is to help you make money and to help fight against what we’ve seen with these outrageous government deficits that have increased inflation dramatically. And now we’ve talked a lot about the upcoming trends that we do expect to be disinflationary and potentially even deflationary. Right? That doesn’t change the fact that the us government wants to continue to spend more and we have to protect ourselves against that risk.

[00:04:12]:
Right? It’s not that really, at the end of the day, it’s not that home prices are through the roof. It’s that your dollar has been so devalued and. Right. So you have to own hard assets in order to fight against that. That means real estate, that means stocks, it means precious metals. Right? Even we include bitcoin in that list as well. So, you know, come and join us here. If you aren’t already at VRA letter.com, we’ve got a two for a week trial going on right now where we show you exactly how to beat inflation and to absolutely crush the markets as well.

So come and join us. We’d love to have you here with us. And as always, even if you’re not a member, send in any questions that you have to support@vrainsider.com. we’d love to hear from you. The feedback, as always, is amazing. So thank you for that. And if we don’t get back to you in an email, we’ll try to answer the questions here on the podcast as well because it’s so helpful. You know, I guarantee you if you have a question out there, you know, five other people have that same question.

So it helps us as well, helps the community. And, and, you know, thank you all for being here with us. We really do have an amazing VRA community and we’re growing rapidly as well. So thank you for being here with us. All right, taking a look at the upcoming action this week. Again, it did kick off today. We had the Apple event really kicking it off with their worldwide developers conference, which is taking place. I believe it’s over the next couple of days.

[00:05:48]:
Really the only big news out that everybody wasn’t maybe 100% prepared for is that Apple announced a deal with OpenAI to integrate chat GPT directly into the iPhone. And with Siri as well. We’re going to be seeing a lot of this with the AI craze going on. We’ll see what features it really comes out with and how helpful it is. You know, sometimes you see it in this first generation launch. Apple has done this a number of times. Think about the Apple Maps launch, which I just saw a piece about this that went so poorly that people still refuse to use it. I even don’t use it now, despite they just did a study on this, that it is the fastest to get to your location, best directions, and best avoidance of traffic as well, compared to Google Maps and two ways.

Now, I mean, I haven’t done that study myself, so I couldn’t give you the exact data on it, but it shows how important the rollout of a product is, or maybe even a little bit of how unimportant it is because it’s done so incredible performance wise, despite that rollout. And there are a whole lot of people who use it. Of course, at the Apple event, they’re talking more and more about their m series of chips that they’ve used. I gotta say here, I do use Apple products. I’ve got a few of the. Let’s see, I’ve got an m one and an m two product here. This might be an m three. I believe they’re onto the m four.

Now, this is Apple’s in house chip meant to work with their devices. And I will say that the performance of these devices compared to what you used to spend a whole lot more on from Apple, it is really impressive what these devices can do. So no doubt about it, Apple is still a huge player out there. Of course, I think that’s an understatement, but they really haven’t done anything to push the boundaries. No massive product launches. Even the Apple vision is already being discontinued. Right. So you want to see Apple being the innovator.

We just haven’t seen a whole lot of that. But regardless, still a solid company putting out solid products and definitely potential market mover as well. Also, today was the first day of trading after Nvidia’s stock split here. You know, there was a lot of talk about a buy the rumor, sell the news kind of event. We think that might take place later. If it does get included into the Dow, that’s when you really might expect to buy the rumors, sell the news kind of event. But the stock was up three, three quarters of a percent today, just below its all time high here. And then looking forward to what we have later in the week, this week, it really, all eyes from an economist point of view are on Wednesday, which is the FOMC conclusion of their meeting.

[00:08:44]:
And we’ll get Jay Powell’s Fed presser as well. But before that meeting, we will get the latest look at inflation with May consumer price index coming in on Wednesday morning. Excuse me. So you can guarantee that will be a big topic of discussion at the FOMC meeting. And then afterwards on Thursday, we’ll get the producers, excuse me, got the hiccups here. Let me get a sip of water. All right. Then on, so Thursday, we’ll get the producers price index as well.

And again, kind of going back to the Fed here with that report, a lot of eyes will be on the Fed, especially now that other major central banks like Canada, like the bank of England and others have already begun to cut rates here. It’ll be interesting to see not only, well, really the question and answer side, where they’ll likely ask him some questions about those. That will be interesting to see Jay Powell’s response, but we’ll also be watching the CME’s FedWatch tool here, which will be affected by the inflation data. And then, of course, by Jay Powell’s comments. As of today, the probabilities are at the first rate cut being in November, pretty decent margin above the staying put level there. But it will be interesting to see how these numbers change as the week goes on here. So stay tuned. I’ll continue to report on that here.

Looks like I’ll have Wednesday’s podcast as well for your Fed coverage here at the VRA. All right. All that said, let’s take a look at our market action on the day, because it is an eventful week and you’d like to see the market finishing higher leading up to those events. Certainly not a bad thing. You know, it means that buyers are stepping up despite the bit of hesitation leading up to this event. And again, it wasn’t a big day to the upside, but we started off the day shaky and finished higher across the board and again at or near the highs of the day today, which is really good to see, especially during the struggling session. Again, it means that buyers showed up. When we get to the internals, you’ll see volume was a little light today, especially on the NYSE.

[00:11:04]:
But again, good to see buyers showing up when you want them to. All right, so taking a look here, NASA led the way today. Exactly what you want to see. Tech leading and the semis leading. Tech and the semis did that today, which hit an all time high. We also saw an, an all time closing high from the Nasdaq 100 as well. Not quite there for the Nasdaq Composite, but right in range of it, up 0.35% to 17,192. After that.

The S and P 500 also an all time closing high today. You know, we usually don’t report on the closing highs as much, but I like to from time to time because as we say here, often new highs beget new highs. And a closing high, it isn’t just, you know, one close out there. That’s it. You know, it’s a memorable day to get an all time closing high. So s and P closing at 5360. And next up, the small caps up a quarter of 1% to 2031. And lastly here, the Dow Jones up just under two tenths of 1% to 38,868.

[00:12:17]:
Let me check one more screen here. One more screen here. Did get transports up nine tenths of 1%. So leading our major indexes, more importantly, leading the Dow today. This is a group that has not been participating since really about this time last year when it hit its all time high. And you do want to see the transports playing a role here as well. A little side note on our international indexes today. I saw the India stock market, the Nifty 50, which I believe is closely or India’s version of the Dow 30 here.

But it hit an all time high today, finished slightly lower, but did hit an all time high earlier in the session. Again, new highs beget new highs. And we want to see a global bull market here as a rising tide lifts all boats. So we want to see action like that continue. We haven’t seen the all time highs from european major indexes. It’s only been a couple of weeks. We’re hitting all time highs in mid May. Similar with the Nikkei, Japan’s stock market hitting all time highs earlier this year has pulled back since then.

The all time high was in March of this year. So it’s not uncommon to get a little bit of a pullback after a big rally like the Nikkei had. It was a huge rally, but we do want to see those all time highs continue going forward from here. Next up, looking at our internals on the day, which I’m going to get a refresh here as well. Yeah, I’m glad I did. These started to turn positive around midday. We finished mixed here. But this last refresh, I mean, this is mostly positive now, just at the close, you always get about a refresh.

[00:14:05]:
With about 30 minutes after the close of the final numbers of the day, this refresh got us almost positive across the board. Let’s cover them here because this is interesting. We had more advancing stocks than declining stocks today on the Nasdaq. Not a huge beat, but hey, we’ll take it. And just before the close, this was negative by about 100 issues on the NYSE. So I probably still would have called that flat to negative earlier. We finished negative by just one issue, one more declining than advancing. So not a win on the day, right.

But that’s essentially flat. So, hey, we’ll take it here, especially after the way they looked this morning, which weren’t terrible, but again, mixed to negative. And we finished flat to positive on the day. Always good to see. 52 week highs. Lows did come in positive on the NYSE, under two to one negative on the Nasdaq. We talk about this here. Often, though, the Nasdaq is not full of primetime players.

There’s a lot of companies in there, whether they’re SPACs or some of these smaller cap companies, that, again, just aren’t primetime players. So tough to read too much into that piece of data and is a bit of a lagging piece of data as well. Lastly here, volume, as I mentioned earlier, was not huge on the NYSE. But this settled number here at the end, I mean, it was negative by about 100 million going into the close. And we finished dead even on the day, dead even for advancing and declined volume. Again, that’s not the numbers you want to see, but we did close at the highs of the day, which is good to see, and then just shy of two to one, positive for volume on the Nasdaq as well. So overall, today’s action, not bad. Internals again, mixed to positive or flat to positive, I would say here.

[00:16:01]:
All right, next up, let’s take a look at our sectors on the day today. We were led by a sector that may surprise you a little bit. Utilities, which have been unloved since their recent rally pulled back, got two extreme oversold on our short term momentum oscillators. But we’ve talked about this for some time. Yields are, sorry, utilities being higher in the face of yields being higher. We look at that as a tell because utilities are such an interest rate sensitive sector that what do utilities hitting 52 week highs and all time highs tell you then? As a forward looking mechanism, it tells you that yields are going to head lower going forward. So yields were up on the day, almost nine tenths of 1% now to 4.4. You know, no concerns at this level for us for yields.

We’d like to see this series of lower highs and lower lows continue here, you know, so the high we’re looking at is a 4.63 right now. That’s the high from the end of May that we’d like to see it stay below. Again, really, anything below the 5% rate is no concern to us here, though we talk about it here often. We’ve compared this time period most closely to the 1995 to 2000 dot melt up, where the Nasdaq rallied 575%. We think this bull market could be even better. And during that time frame, yields averaged over 6%. So again, no 4.5% rate on a ten year does not concern us here at all. And utilities continue to rally in the face of bond yields being higher on the day.

Today is another confirmation signal for us here. After that, energy had a big day today. Oil was a big day. Also has been hit hard lately. We’ll see if this is the beginning of the turn for the energy sector over the longer term. We do remain very bullish on this sector as a whole. After that, communication services and consumer discretionary, our laggards on the day. I will point out the financials have been hit hard as of late now, not so much in just the financial sector, right? The big names that are in XLF which is the financial sector ETF.

[00:18:24]:
And it wasn’t a huge down day for the financials either here, down 0.39%. But we do want, and we have. Let me go back here, we have no love for these big banks, but we do want to see these large financial institutions participating in this bull market, right? That’s part of a healthy bull market. A rising tide lifts all boats. So lately when I’m talking about the financials not participating again, I’m not talking about just the big banks, which are not far from an all time high. I’m talking about the regional banks here. So if you want to check it out yourself, KRe is the regional bank East ETF, which usually can be a forward looking mechanism of if they aren’t, the regional banks aren’t participating. It can spell trouble for the market.

It’s not always a guarantee, but you do want to see them participating to the upside. And I’m not trying to scare anybody here by bringing this up because we’re not even at red flag levels here or black swan event types of levels. But it does have our attention and will continue to watch here as KRE, the regional banking ETF, dipped briefly below the 200 day moving average today. It closed above those levels. Now, we’ve seen it dip back to its 200 day moving average before. We saw it most recently in April. And if today’s lows hold, it is another higher low from this sector. No, I’m not trying to scare anybody, no red flags here, but we do have our eye on it, especially around these crucial support levels here.

And you know that this is something the fed is watching and noticing as well. As people have pointed out, you know, before the financial crisis, regional banks were the first to really peak and head lower. You know, some people out there looked at it for that technical reason that they led lower. And so a lot of people continue to watch for it now. So we’ll continue to report on this here. But again, no red flags here, but something that we’re watching. Our other two lagging sectors were consumer staples and materials, so defensive sectors mostly there. So no big concerns.

[00:20:41]:
Ultimately, eight out of our eleven sectors finished higher on the day to day, which is a good day. All right, finally for today, our VRA commodity watch, as I mentioned earlier, a much better day today here than with a sell off we saw on Friday. But green across the screen today, excuse me, gold now up just over one 10th of 1%, 0.13% to be exact, to 23 27. But was night. What was nice to see today is gold miners, which did, did get hit hard on Friday and were able to bounce back today, not quite getting back all their losses, but up a nice 1.5% on the day to day. And it is a group we remain long and strong in here after that. Silver up 1.38% to $29.84 an ounce. Copper now up 1.6% to $4.55 a pound.

And oil up big today. Over three and a half percent now at $78.23 a barrel. And finally here for today, crypto, you know, continuing to pause around the $70,000 mark, you know, not just right in the range of all time highs. You know, the way bitcoin moves, it could take that out tomorrow, you never know. But right now, down two tenths of 1% at 69,598. A bitcoin folks. That is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcasts every day at the market close.

You can sign up@vraletter.com again, that’s vra letter.com. click the podcast link at the top. You can sign up there, as well as read our transcripts and other notes from the podcast as well. So thanks again for tuning in. Until next time. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.