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 great day out there today. If you’re watching our markets today, we did have a bit of mixed action on the day. A few low spots, but more importantly, quite a few bright spots out there as well, which I’ll cover here in today’s podcast. Got a lot to cover here, but I’ll go with to my first thought here that I just have to talk about. It’s an exciting day for the innovation revolution, specifically as we have our two leading.
Now it’s pretty cool to say we have two leading rocket companies both having significant milestone launches here today. Began this morning with Jeff Bezos Group, Blue Origin launching their first ever rocket that reached orbit. That was the first time ever that Blue Origin has done it. You might have seen, you know, kind of the, the famous video of Jeff Bezos taking it up to a suborbital height there, you know, and coming back down safely as well. And then, you know, the more exciting one here really, as we all know, is SpaceX. They’re just so much further ahead of their competitors. You know, if you look at, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but SpaceX this year is gonna more than 10x, I believe, the next closest rocket company out there for launches. And these are successful launches delivering payloads into orbit.
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Right. And today is the very exciting one, the third attempt here of the Starship Catch. Right. Have you seen the video with what they called the chopsticks, which come in and catch the, the starship out of the air? It’s incredible to see. Of course, in their last attempt that President Trump came down here to Texas for in Brownsville to take a look and watch, they had to scrap the Catch that day due to weather issues. This, this launch as well has been delayed by a couple of days here. So we’ll see if we get it off here. It’s probably going to happen while I’m recording this podcast.
So by the time you’re listening to this, we may know, you might have seen the videos already of the Catch or not. But again, it’s such an exciting time. And again, another evidence here of the innovation revolution, Blue Origin, you know, is flying under the radar because they really haven’t had that many consequential launch attempts. You know, they’ve been around for 24 years. This is their first time to get into orbit. Know better late than never, though. So we’ve seen there are a couple of other public now publicly traded space exploration companies here. So SpaceX and Blue Origin are both privately held, but there is Rocket Lab and Firefly and some other smaller ones out there.
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Not all of those dealing in rocket design, some of them, you know, satellite design. All kinds of incredible things that are going to enable technology across the globe. I mean, Elon is just such a leader in this. But look at Starlink, right? And the help that he provided by giving Internet access and cell service to people in North Carolina after the natural disaster there, people in California now in the wildfires, you know, who don’t have access, don’t have cell service. They’re able to reach out to people thanks to Starlink. And as the. This is still a new technology, right, for a project that we’re working on here in Wyoming. A lot of you are probably familiar with Lost Soldier Oil and Gas, you know, when they initially were putting out the sites out there.
And I, I need to follow up with them on this actually of what they’re using to get Internet access out there because they were using Starlink as well. And now for T Mobile users believe that they’re trying to roll that out. Right now we’re just about anywhere you go. If you have T Mobile, you’ll have access to Starlink as well. I know people who like to, to take road trips a lot. They’ve got Starlink in their systems as well. So, you know, there’s so many cool things out there happening with this technology. So I’m excited to watch this video here today.
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Long story short on that one there, but be sure to tune in, it’ll be fun to watch. Even if it’s not successful, we’re still steps in the right direction and kind of leads me into a point that we talked a lot here about. But I think that people are really waking up to now is not only the innovation revolution, but how the Trump Economic Miracle 2.0 is going to help unlock that future. Now, for example, here I was just looking at a few projects here in Austin, Texas which are entertainment projects. But there are three to four companies right now, including Kelly Slater, if you’re familiar with surfing at all. He’s, you know, the goat, the greatest of all time for professional surfing. I think he’s one of the most world titles at least and definitely probably the most popular household name for that. And his company is working on a project here in Austin, Texas to bring a surf pool into Austin, Texas.
Very cool. They’re the first to break ground. They just Broke ground on it this week. Now there are three to four other companies with different technology coming out for these same designs. Now, that is, again, entertainment. Probably not applies to the innovation revolution, but still some really cool stuff. The reason I bring that up now, as you’ve probably heard a lot about what is rebuilding California’s coastline going to look like? How many years is it going to take to get permits and regulations? So the story here in Austin that these companies have massive investments that they want to make in the city, but they can’t break ground or even break ground on some of the other aspects, which some of these surf plan communities have condos, have houses on them, but it’s going to take them two to three years just to get the permitting done. So they’ve raised the money, they’re ready to get to work.
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They’re waiting on the city of Austin to do something and pass this paperwork across a table. It’s going to take them longer to get these pieces of paper across the table than it will to build the actual designs. And that’s not just an Austin, Texas problem, that if anything, it’s better here than it is in most places. I bet Florida might be a little bit better, but it’s certainly better here in Texas than it is in California, and that’s how long it’s going to take. Similar kind of going back to the space exploration topic. It took longer to get approval from the FAA to launch Starship than it took to build it. This is the largest rocket built in American history, larger than the Apollo rockets that took us to the moon. It took longer to get the paperwork done than it took to build the rocket.
There’s something backwards there. I think we all recognize that now. If we can get deregulation for multiple industries out there, energy, especially on the nuclear side of things, but also of course, oil and gas as well on infrastructure side of things, right? For whether it’s roads, I mean, all kind roads, bridges, you know, name it from that point of view, housing deregulation as well. I mean, we. I won’t die that I could do a whole podcast just on deregulation. But when you think about what we’ve done to the oil and gas sector and how we villainized it in this country, and what happens at the end of the day is Dems have, at least historically, recently have held up these new oil and gas projects while then we go buy oil and gas from other countries that don’t have the standards that we have for clean drilling. So we’re net. It’s Worse than letting US Companies drill because we do have the best practices here are not done by, by regulation.
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Right. We did it because it’s the right way to do it. If you talk to anybody in the oil and gas field, they want to do it the right way. Right. And this needless regulation is what’s holding us up. When you it takes longer for a piece of paper to go across a table than it does to build the project itself, you know, you have a problem. Right. So again, all that being said, to talk about how excited we are just now less than four days away from the inauguration here and so taking it.
Let’s turn the page here a little bit to the market side of things. You can tell how bullish we are and we’ve talked about it so much here on the podcast as well. But the market, on the other hand, is not as bullish as we are. You know, it’s interesting because the financial mainstream media has loved to be talking about the optimism out there right now, which is great. We’ve seen the optimism increase for small businesses, the highest since 2018, of course, under Trump as well. We want to see that level of optimism coming back into the market. But for specifically the stock market, bearishness is starting to take over here for the first time in months. There are now more bears than bulls in the AI AAII Investor Sentiment Survey.
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You know, Kip and I vote in this and, and Kip’s done it for a long time. But we follow this one pretty closely. And sorry, not the first time in a long time because we did switch from more bearish investors than bullish last week. But again, that was the first time in quite a while. But bearish investors, they hit their highest level since late 2023 today, the end Q4 of 2023. We had a phenomenal year in the market last year. So any price you bought in Q4 of 2023, we hit all time highs at the end of last year. So as we talked about here, that’s blue sky territory.
No one in it has a loss at that point. So as contrarians, we love to see this kind of setup here. You look at the fear and greed index which barely ticked up yesterday despite a phenomenal session yesterday. Now back down to a 28 which is just on the cusp of extreme fear here at these levels. Keep in mind, we are fractured. I mean, let’s have the numbers here. The S and P is less than two and a half percent away from an all time high or right at two and a half percent Away from an all time high. And we essentially have extreme fear in our major sentiment indicators here.
Just 25% of investors bullish to over 40% investors bearish here. Wow. Again two and a half percent away from all time highs, you know, and again there’s, there’s fewer people who are more bullish than we are out here of course on stocks, but the economy as well. We continue to look for GDP growth to surprise a lot of people and especially surprise economists from here where we do look for GDP growth to hit 5% inside of the next 12 to 18 months. So again we think we’re seeing a great opportunity here for the market even though we’re just two and a half percent away from all time highs. And our view the smart money move has remained since October of 2022. That buy the dip is the smart money move. So let’s take a look at our major indexes here on the day today.
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Not what you want to see. Leading to the downside was the Nasdaq down almost 9/10 of 1% to 19,388. But what you do want to see are the semis leading, which the semis, you know, finished well off their highs of the day, close to their lows of the day today, if not right at it, but still managed to finish up 410 of 1%. TSMC had phenomenal earnings. Kip talked about that yesterday as well, you know, and for the Nasdaq it was really the Mega cap names that held the NASDAQ back today it was Apple down 4%, you know, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, all of these lower today, you know, but they’ve been on phenomenal moves here as well. Outside of Apple. You look at the other ones and they’re right at all time highs as well. Pulling back from their overbought levels that we saw in December.
This is one of those rotations that we, we’ve seen time and time again from this market. And right on cue there, the mid caps actually performed very well today. So again this rotation here out of the Mega Cap into either some unloved names, could be even value names, different sectors. And we expect the generals here, as we call them the Mega Cap, the Magnificent Seven, whatever you want to call them out there, they’ll resume their leadership here in time as well. Especially now having pulled back from the overbought levels that we did see in December after the Nasdaq we had the S&P 500 down 210 of 1%. Again though, mid caps, the mid caps were up 3/4 of 1% today. That’s not a minor day when you have the rest of our major indexes essentially lower on the day. So you know we’ll look at that as certainly a bright spot here.
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I’ve got a few more bright spots I want to cover here today in the market action as well. After that the Dow Jones was down 0.16% on the day to 43,153. And here’s the bright spot for the Dow. The transports continuing to lead the Dow here. If you’re a Dow theory fan, this is something that you like to see. Transports up nearly 1% on the day today. You know got close to their a support level around their 200 day moving average and really healthy action happening here. Hitting overbought on our short term VRA momentum oscillators.
But on the longer term we have room to go. So there’s plenty of room for the transports to continue to lead the Dow here. We would like to see that absolutely. Then our leader on the day today. Again back to the rotational theme. Small caps, you know just fractionally higher on the day up 0.15 but we’ll take it to 227066 for the Russell 2000 next up here. Another bright spot here today, the internals which throughout the session, you know, even when our major indexes turn negative we saw a brief period where the internals were negative but they bounced back into the close to finish. Mostly positive on the day here today.
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Almost 2 to 1 positive advanced decline for the NYSE just shy of that. A little narrow, narrower on the NASDAQ but still positive there. 52 week highs, the lows came in positive for the NYSE. Slightly negative on the NASDAQ. No concerns there. It’s a lagging indicator and you know with the NASDAQ and some of the smaller, not quite prime time players, you know the 52 week highs and lows just is not as reliable as it used to be. It’s more of a confirmation signal than anything else then for volume positive across the board here coming in nicely for the nyc. I just wanted to check one thing here.
Sorry, bear with me. We had really good volume yesterday as well. So good to see some follow through here today. You know not quite the extra I think we had an 82% upside volume day yesterday in the NYSE so you nowhere near those levels today. But again with three out of our four major indexes negative on the day, we will certainly take positive internals as a bright spot. We’ll look at that as a little bit of a tell from the market as well of what’s happening underneath the surface. Next up, another tell here was our sectors again. 3 out of our 4 major indexes negative on the day, but 8 out of our 11s and P500 sectors positive on the day today.
So before I get to that, our leader, utilities, let’s talk about yields for a second. Continuing to move lower here now at a 4.6 on the 10 year, down another 1.1% on the day today. Remember, it was just a couple of sessions ago. We were at a 4.8 and everyone, you know, was freaking out about it. We have seen mortgage rates back on the climb. You know, again, I talked about this on my podcast Tuesday. You know, you we’re looking yields had just hit extreme overbought levels. This is when we’d expect to see that pullback begin.
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And it’s almost right on cue. It’s almost uncanny how similar this is to the 2016 election of Trump in 2017 when he took office. Both the dollar or I have to run the chart of yields again to see exactly what day yields peak. But the dollar peaked roughly a week before Trump was inaugurated. The dollar just peaked most recently three days ago. We’ll see if we get back to those levels. We think that the dollar has been on obviously a great run here. We don’t think that that continues going forward.
We think we’ll see similar dollar action to Trump’s first term where obviously we need to ensure the strength of the US Dollar as the global reserve currency. But that doesn’t mean that we need to see strength like this here. Trump in his first term was a fan of a weaker dollar from that point of view, not in a weaker point of view of the of being the world’s reserve currency. We think that we’ll see a similar type of deal next week on Monday after the inauguration. It’s going to be exciting. We’re excited about it here. Absolutely. But what we think utilities here leading the way is telling us is that yields are going to head lower from here.
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The stock market is a forward looking mechanism. You know, yields had just hit an all time high. I mean they’re up big today for, you know, there’s actually I think going to be a lot of opportunity in utilities as we move towards nuclear and things like that. But it’s just such a slow moving sector. We’ll have to see after that. We had real estate also up on the day. Another sign of yields potentially heading lower like we expect the home builders, though we watch those even closer. Also up over 3/4 of 1% on the day today after that, industrials and materials and energy.
Leading the way today are laggards, as you might expect, with the mega cap names, lower tech and communication services, followed by consumer discretionary as well. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. A lot of green on the screen here. Gold now up over 1% to 2,746. We continue to like gold here a lot as well. Silver up a quarter of 1% to $31.60 an ounce. Copper higher as well. Dr.
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Copper up over 1% to $4.43 a pound. And then oil has hit a little bit of a pause here. I mean, it’s been on a big run for what, the last month or so now? Now at $77.90 a barrel. And finally here for today, bitcoin working hard to get back and stay back above 100,000, right? Right now we’re at $99,897 a bitcoin, 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 vraletter.com, click the podcast link at the top and we’d love to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in.Until next time. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.