In today's episode, we're diving into another exhilarating day for the markets, hitting all-time highs once again. We'll explore the impacts of a second Trump economic miracle, analyze last year's bullish trends, and discuss key factors like seasonality, tax cuts, and regulatory changes that could continue driving growth. We'll also touch upon significant geopolitical developments and the Federal Reserve's latest moves. Plus, we'll review market internals, sector performances, and commodity updates. 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 great day out there today. There’s another strong day for our markets. They have all time highs here. So we can welcome you back to the Trump bull market. We got another day again of all time highs today.

And we think that’s a prelude to what we can expect from a second term from Trump, a second round of the Trump economic miracle here. Remember, after Trump won in 2016, over the next 14 months, the S&P 500 rose 29%, but the Nasdaq soaring 39% during that time frame. So as we see it, this is the smart money front running another potential move like that. We think it’s going to be a very exciting next year, next four years and potentially beyond as well. But here’s what the question that we’ve been asking ourselves here. Are we bullish enough? Which may come as a bit of a shock because it’s been tough to find anyone on the street more bullish than we have been over the last couple of years. Yes, even under the Biden Harris administration. Right.

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Under the Biden Harris administration was when we came out with our book the Big Bribe, where we predicted Dow Jones 100,000 by 2030, NASDAQ 40,000 by 2030. Now we’re starting to think we could be on the low side of things here, but that’s over the long term. Let’s take a look at just the short term here during the final months of 2024 and ahead of the inauguration on January 20th of 2025. So first of all, seasonality, we are just entering the most bullish three months of the year for the market. We’ve got November, December, January. This is especially bullish time for semis tech and the small caps. But again, another primary theme was the market action from 2016, the anticipation of Trump getting in and what he did in his first year. Again, this could be an even better time frame.

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We’re looking at the extension, at the very minimum, the extension of Trump’s tax cuts being done right, potentially more tax cuts on top of that, deregulation. Getting back. Kathy Wood was just talking about this on Bloomberg. But getting Gary Gensler out of the sec, getting a more pro business person in there, allowing for more mergers and acquisitions, specifically in the tech space too, where they have been hamstrung on many of these issues. So all in all, a very exciting time ahead as we see it. But again, the main case being, our base case really here for the last few years has been that we are in a generational bull market. We are in the roaring 2020s and an innovation revolution. Combine all of that with the Trump Economic Miracle 2.0 and that’s why we’re asking ourselves, are we even bullish enough? Remember something we don’t.

We do talk about this a lot, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of mention in the financial mainstream media in a while. And that is the level of cash on the sidelines which we would have blamed no one for over the last four years, especially under the Biden Harris administration. Now that we’re front running a Trump economic miracle, round two here, we expect that six and a half trillion dollars in market money market funds near a record high there to begin coming off of the sidelines here. So again, we’ve got a lot to look forward to here and it’s tough to state just how bullish these factors are going forward. Look at what’s happened in just the last day and a half since Trump has become President elect, right? Not, not president. He hadn’t been inaugurated yet. A day and a half since becoming President elect. Some of these things just came out today.

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First off, probably the smallest one. Companies like Steve Madden halting manufacturing in China, saying it’s going to come down by 50% over the next year. Companies reshoring their businesses back to the U.S. hugely bullish for the U.S. economy. Next up, Hamas calling for an end to the war in the Middle East. Again just one day in to Trump being in office. The Iran backed Houthis also announcing a ceasefire here.

And perhaps most importantly, something Trump talked about a lot was that he could get the Ukraine, Russia war solved very quickly already. Putin said that he’s ready to work on peace in Ukraine already. And Putin even went a step further mentioning that they have no intention of abandoning the US dollar. So for all the fears out there about dollarization around the globe, which are are not unfounded fears, especially with the BRICS alliance which many in our intelligence agencies on the economic side of things laughed at the BRICS association when it was started, it’s not a laughing matter by any means and it certainly isn’t anymore. So it’s a big deal that Putin talked about this and again, no intention of abandoning the US dollar. How about that for a first day and a half as President elect. Those are some pretty big wins issues that we’ve been dealing with since Trump got out of office solved in a day and a half. Or at least on their way to being solved for the first time in four years, three and a half years.

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There is light at the end of the tunnel here for some of these issues that have plagued not only the US but the world here. So buckle up, folks. It’s going to be an exciting, exciting time here in America. And one of the big pluses here is, you know, Trump wasn’t a politician when he came into office as he talked about on Joe Rogan, you know, when he got into office and he has these thousands of cabinet or just appointees, right, that he has to get through. He listened to the wrong people. And, you know, props to Trump for admitting that as well. And now he’s got some experience here. One of the most exciting things I thought that he talked about on that podcast was the transition team, because in his first presidency, again, there wasn’t a transition team until this time.

And then it began, right? He began his transition team for this second term now months ago. So they have a leg up here. They have. They’ve already started taking steps in the right direction. And just look at the A team that he surrounded himself with. All of these people have their own strengths and weaknesses. And I love what Trump has said. For example, rfk, bringing him in on the health advisory side of things, right.

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And saying to him, hey, stay in your lane, basically. I know you’ve got views about energy and these other areas. We want you to focus on health care. Right. Elon Musk, for obvious reasons, great person to have on your team, Vivek Ramaswamy, who, when he first started coming out, I’ll admit I was skeptical about, you know, very intelligent, clearly, but just didn’t know who he was. This guy seems to be the real deal, Right. I won’t go out on a limb and say that it’s 100%, he’s the real deal, but very much keeps coming through in big ways. Tulsi Gabbard, right? Who honestly could step up in a big way in the next few years of dims, and especially the corporate media want to claim that US Citizens wouldn’t vote for a woman as president.

They wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris as president. They wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton as president. Tulsi Gabbard is somebody over the next few years who does the right things, stays true to her word, doesn’t go back to the dim side of things, right? That is somebody who has the potential to be electable, Right? So again, for anybody in the financial mainstream media saying that Americans won’t elect a woman president. That’s. I simply don’t think that that’s true. First of all, it’s just they put forward terrible, terrible candidates. So I think we have a lot to look forward to here in the coming years. All right, so next up here, though, something that kind of took a little bit of a backseat here, at least over the last few weeks, has been the Federal Reserve.

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And hopefully that’s a sign of things to come where we can start ignoring the Federal Reserve a little bit more. But going into the meeting today, which was moved back a day typically wraps up on a Wednesday. I’m sure they moved it because of the election. Going into the meeting it was all but certain, it was certain that they were going to cut by 25 basis points here. One thing I did want to check, which I thought was not surprising from the Fed by any means, that, you know, Jay Powell really stuck to the script today. And I’ll talk more about this of a 25 or sorry, saying data dependent going forward from here. But the expectations, once they started the rate cut cycle, you know, their forward projections were to continue to cut rates. The odds of the Fed staying put here at their next meeting is now at 29%.

It was a little bit higher. It was at 32.8%. Probability the Fed would stay put in September going into the meeting today, closing at about a 29%. Again, the Fed stated they were going to remain data dependent. And I will touch on that here more in a second. But just before the minutes came out at 1:00, the NASDAQ was just shy of its highs of the day to day. And then as expected, we got the 25 basis point cut, moving the Fed’s benchmark down to 4 and a half to 4.75% here. But this time it was unanimous.

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Remember, there was one descent in the September meeting. Now everyone’s on the same page over at the Fed. So let’s see here. Looking at my notes, one item of interest in the Fed notes here was the committee moved that they have gained confidence that inflation is moving sustainably towards 2%. They did leave in that they judge that the risk to achieving its employment and inflation goals are roughly in balance. And I think Kip and I have talked about this a lot in thinking about it. How much FL floating of the idea of moving the Fed’s inflation target? Have we heard over the last few years that it shouldn’t be 2%, it should be 3%? I, I think that that’s terrible, right? If you look at again, we talk about this here often, but if you look at the 2% inflation target compounding, that means your money’s cut in half every 35 years. Right? Who wants that? How are you supposed to save when that’s happening? Right.

Of course, their fear is a deflationary environment, which in our current financial engineering, economic model, deflation would be a death sentence. Right. That’s why the Fed has fought so hard to defend against that, because we’re stealing from our future to pay for today. That’s how our current economic structure works. Now we’ll see what changes can be made to. That has to be a little bit delicate because again, so much of our system is highly leveraged right now. If you were to go and say just, you know, we got to get back to deflation here in America, we would see equity prices get hit pretty hard. So it is a delicate situation there, although we do think that it’s probably the right one.

But most of the questions here today for Jay Powell were about how is the committee prepared to change for the next administration. Now, at first, Jay Powell really avoided this question, you know, saying there will be no impacts on policy decisions and that the Fed’s going to remain data dependent. Data dependent. Data dependent. We heard it time and time again. So he stuck to the script in that regard, which is why the market was able to finish higher for the most part on the day to day, two out of our four major indexes, higher here. But what was the best quote? And I’ll get to the worst quote too, but what was probably the best quote from the presser? It was when he was asked about the strength of the U.S. economy.

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And he said he’s been talking to banks, to regional banks, and his response was, I hear that the next year’s economic growth could be stronger than this year. Yes, you love to see that. And we would completely agree, obviously, as for all the facts that I just stated, but, you know, it almost seems scripted here, the amount of questions he got about Trump, the threat of Trump removing him from his position, asking him to step down. His response was no, that he wouldn’t step down. No, he wouldn’t resign. And then he really went next level on it and just said he repeated himself, too. I forget his exact words, but essentially what he said was, it’s not possible under the law. And they asked another question.

It’s not possible under the law. Well, someone should inform Jay Powell that if you really want to get down to brass tax here, the Federal Reserve is not possible under the law. It is an unconstitutional organization. It’s an illegitimate organization and therefore his role at this organization is illegitimate. That’s a personal opinion there. But as I do talk about this here often very much agree in the words of Ron Paul that we should end the Federal Reserve. How amazing would it be if Ron Paul Swansong really was to be nominated his chairman of the Federal Reserve just to end it and then he can retire in peace, right? No. Yeah.

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I don’t think Ron Paul seems like the kind of guy to ever retire. He’s going to keep going and going and going. You know, being from the great state of Texas, Ron Paul, big fan, but. All right, so back to the Fed though. What was good to see today after Jay Powell’s speech was yields falling in a big way today. Now yields are still relatively elevated compared to what we’ve seen recently. Saw a big run up after the Trump election. You know, probably predicting economic strength, but yields were down big on the day, down 1.9% to a 4.34% on the 10 year.

As we talk about here often at a 4.34, it could be 4.4, 4.5. No concerns to us here really below 5%. We don’t think that’s enough to derail this market here. Might cause some concerns from market watchers, a little trepidation. Right. But not enough to derail this. The Trump economic miracle, innovation revolution, roaring2020s, all of the things that we talk about here so often. All right, that being said, let’s take a look at our market action on the day to day.

As I mentioned earlier, two out of our four major indexes finishing higher on the day to day. Just what you want to see, tech leading the way in an all time high from the NASDAQ of 1 1/2% to 19,269. And even more so what you want to see the semis leading again today. Semis up 2.44%. And given that the semis here are still roughly 8% away from an all time high, we think this is a must own group right here. Next up the S P500 up three quarters of 1%, also hitting an all time high to 5,973 after its best performance in the in the history of the S P500 on the day after an election. Good to see, you know, meaning that’s foreboding of what’s to come in a very good way. Next up, the Dow, which also saw its largest surge yesterday in a post election gain since 1896.

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Flat on the day to day almost exactly flat at 43,729. And lastly here the Russell 2000 down 4/10 of 1% today to 2,382. That was an all time high intraday from the Dow Jones. I’ll point that out as well. Next up here let’s take a look at our internals on the day to day. Good numbers here, positive across the board. Slowing down a little bit though in the last couple of sessions on the advanced decline line. Still coming in positive for both the NYSE and the nasdaq.

No two to one beats or anything though. Next up it looks like we got a little refresh in the 52 week highs to lows. Finishing here with 688 stocks hitting 52 week highs combined to just 120 stocks hitting 52 week lows. And lastly your volume solidly positive on the NYSE. No 2 to 1 beats or anything though. And then really big up volume today on the NASDAQ finishing with $6.85 billion in advancing volume with 73% of the overall volume on the day being to the upside. So good to see. Next up here looking at our sectors on the day today.

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We finished with 8 out of our 11s P500 sectors higher on the day today and some more all time highs here as well. Communication services leading the way. That is an all time high. Followed there by the tech sector which despite the Nasdaq hitting an all time high today. The tech sector just shy $0.02, two pennies shy of a all time high there after that consumer discretionary also an all time high. And then our laggards on the day were the financials followed by industrials and energy stocks. Finally here for today our VRA commodity watch. Let me get a refresh of this one as well.

All right coming in gold now up 1.4% on the day to $2,714 an ounce. Silver now up a bigger two and a half. Over two and a half percent on the day to $32.14 an ounce. Copper now up a big four and a half percent on the day- to day to $4.43 a pound. And oil higher here as well just shy of 710 of 1% higher to $72.18 a barrel. Finally for today Bitcoin now essentially flat on the day to day at 75,616 but did hit an all time high earlier in the day at 76,837. This is a group we remain extremely bullish on here as well. Folks, that is all that we have time for here today.

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Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up@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.