In today's episode, Kip recaps the week's market movements covering market dynamics, political events, and economic indicators. He also breaks down the peculiar day of trading to end the week, including, significant fluctuations, market internals, and sector performances. Lastly, we will take a quick look at commodities and Bitcoin.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Friday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA investing podcast. Hope you had a great day today. Hope your week is fantastic as well.

Got a few things to talk about of interest today. Let’s start with Donald Trump. I haven’t said that in a while at the start of a podcast, but not so much to the debate.

Of course, we know he did debate last night in Atlanta, but what happened today, the guy goes from debate last night where he just destroys Biden. And it’s hard to, hard to not feel sorry for the guy if you watched Biden feeble performance last night. But anyway, Trump does his debate, clearly wins it, and he gets it this morning, plays 18, flies back to Marlogo last night, gets up, plays 18 holes this morning, and the videos are out there. He’s just got this incredible swing, just hits the ball so pure. And then now he’s flown back out to Virginia and he’s doing a rally in Virginia. It is really remarkable, this guy and what he’s able to accomplish. So the energy that he has, he’s indestructible and his positivity, it is remarkable. And he did, he had a great debate last night.

[00:01:12]:
On the flip side, just a horrible debate from Biden with pretty much everybody calling for him to resign. Now that’s changed a little bit today. We’ll see how things move forward. But predicted.org and these betting sites for the election have Trump a clear favorite, even more so than he was. So we’ll see how things play out. But just, there’s, there’s just no one, there’s been no one like Donald J. Trump in our lifetime. And it’s fascinating to watch this guy.

I gotta tell you, it’s very inspirational, motivational to see someone his age is able to do what he does. What is he doing? How can we bottle it? How can we take that? Right? Kind of a strange day in the markets today. To wrap up the week, we got this morning some good economic data. Again, inflation continue to move in the right direction with the PCE price index, which is called the Fed’s preferred inflation data. We got that data this morning, came in better than expected. It was actually met estimates. However, we also saw personal incomes rose a half percent of the month. That’s 6% growth for incomes a year.

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And people are wondering why the economy is doing so well. How can the markets keep doing so well? Have it. Yeah, we still have inflation right now, 2.6% again, based on the PC PCE inflation data, of course, it’s come way down, but incomes at 6%. That tells you there’s something very interesting happening beneath the surface with this economy. As you know our views. We continue to see this as the innovation revolution and the roaring two thousand twenty s and that this market is going to continue to head higher. But it was, again, it was a strange day today. We had a good open today.

At one point this morning, the Dow Jones was up over 220 points. And then here came the sellers again. Fridays are hard, especially summer. Fridays are hard to figure out sometimes. We had a big sell off from Dow being up 220 to as much as down to 100. 7180 points just after 02:00 today with less than an hour in trading to go. And there came another big rally. Dow Jones today finishing down just 45 points.

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That’s down one 10th of 1%. SPF 100 down 14th 1%. Roast 2000. Excuse me, Tyler covered this yesterday. Roast 2000 led yesterday. Up a percent. Up today another half percent. Good to see small cats getting going again.

They’ve been in a very kind of an ugly trading range now for a couple of years, and we need them to break out. Of course, 70% of all small cat earnings come from the us economy. That is a good sign. Nasdaq today was a loser, finishing down seven tenths 1%, down 126 points. However, the SMH, the semiconductor ETF, finished up eight tenths 1%. So again, a very strange day today. Also on top of that, the Dow Jones transports finished up 1% today. So what does this tell us? I think it tells us this was a Friday day of trading during the summer, and these have always been like this.

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It’s hard. I don’t think you can make sense of it, except to say our bullish trend remains, and we look for more of this to take place again. Remember, we are in a very bullish month. We’re entering now a very bullish month. July is one of the most bullish months of the year. It is the top month of the year for Nasdaq 100, which was. I was surprised that Nasdaq was down today. I really expected to see, like we saw at the open today, front running into what’s going to start taking place on Monday, with fund flows coming in, massive levels of fund flows coming into equities.

Of course, we saw that was over the last month. We saw all time high record fund flows into technology stocks. We do think that’s going to continue, but it’s a little topsy turvy at these high levels. In addition again, starting in two weeks, we’re going to get Q two earnings. Analysts now estimate that earnings for this 500 grew by 9% in the second quarter. That’s going to be the best in about two years. Again, we believe those are going to continue to pick up speed. I think that will come in instead of 9%.

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I think. Bye. The time earnings season is done, we’ll have seen earnings grow by 1213, maybe 14%. It’s going to be a very good quarter. And again, we also expect to see the same thing in the third quarter. What else today? You know what? Let’s, it’s a Friday, right. Let’s, let’s get right to the internals. Talk about what happened beneath the surface, because this is, this is also very positive.

Again, Nasdaq down 126, but you would have known it from looking at the internals today. Advanced decline was positive for Nasdaq, not hugely so, but still positive by about 300 issues. Advanced decline, also positive volume, also positive for Nasdaq. Again, not by a lot, but still positive. We did have more 52 week lows than highs, but not, not a big number there. NYC, also positive across the board. NYc, one and a half to one. Positive decline volume today for upper NYSE, also positive by 1.5 to one.

[00:06:19]:
And we had more than 100 stocks hitting a 52 week high than hitting a 52 week low. And our sector watch mixed bag here. We had, what, five sectors finished higher, six finished lower. Led to the downside. Back communication services down 1.6% again, they just hit an all time high yesterday. Back to back days, all time highs. Case them back today. Consumer discretionary down 1.3% to the upside.

Real estate, energy and financials all up four tenths of 1% or better in our commodity watch. Kind of a quiet day today. Gold had been rallying into this report, but did finish down a dollar an ounce at 23.35. Silver today finished up six cents, one percent, or $0.17 an ounce at 29.43. Copper today, up three cents a pound at four hundred thirty seven a pound. Crude oil today gave back a little bit of its gains, down twenty four cents a barrel at 81.50. And finally, the day. Where are we doing with bitcoin? 1 second here.

Bitcoin had a soft, was soft today, down right at 2% on the day over the last 24 hours as calculated at 60,192. All right, folks, we keep this a little brief today. Again, hope you had a great day. Hope you have an even better weekend. We’ll see you back here again Monday after the close.