In today's episode, Tyler offers a deep dive into the exciting developments following yesterday's inauguration of Donald Trump. Tyler discusses the optimistic outlook for the American economy, highlighting exciting developments for cryptocurrencies and the potential for a "golden age" of prosperity under a Trump Economic Miracle 2.0. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a great start to your week this week, as we had yesterday off in observation of MLK Day. And of course, the inauguration of our fourth 47th president took place yesterday as well. If it feels like it here to you as well. It feels much like morning in America here once again. After the last four years of really feeling like the sun was setting on America and on American exceptionalism as well.

Now it’s pretty amazing to be back in what we do expect to be a golden age, much as Trump has talked about, as Elon Musk has talked about and so many other people out there of the things that we can do in this new golden age here of American prosperity. And Trump laid it out very well yesterday in both his inaugural address and the multiple speeches that he gave afterwards as well. I mean, this guy was signing executive orders late into the night last night as well, giving commentary on them as he was doing it. It was pretty fun to watch overall, you know, and as much as the mainstream media is going to want to splice up the things that he said, you know, try to find the hidden innuendos and into what he said and what makes him a fascist, because he said it, we agree with him. We’re due for a golden age here in America, and the opportunity is right in front of us. The question now is, will we take advantage of it? Because it’s not all on one guy. You know, this is going to come down to the hardworking, everyday men and women here in America, the business men and women of America, the entrepreneurs, the backbone, the small business owners of this country. You know, can we take advantage of what is happening now? I know that we intend to here at the vra.

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And we could not be more excited about what’s in store. And it has us only more bullish on the market. You know, a lot of people, we got a lot of hate when we came out with our book the Big Bribe at the end of 2022, when we called the bear market lows and said that we were going to have an incredible bull market run that will last through 2030, taking the Dow Jones to 100,000, the Nasdaq to 50,000. None of that has changed in our, our outlook right now for this market, if anything has changed, is that we may be on the low side of this, we may not be bullish enough. That’s the question we are asking ourselves now. Is, are we bullish enough? You know, again, could not be more excited. It was a thrilling day yesterday. It’s continued into it, into today.

And it’s pretty astounding here, though, to see really anybody. Of course, we see it a lot in the mainstream media, but to see people rooting against Trump in trying to usher in a golden age for America. We’ve talked a lot about this here, but, you know, these are the perma bears that we talk about as well. Not just for the market, but for the economy or for our government as well. You know, the perma bears that you want to ignore here, because these people have an emotional vested interest in seeing our country burn. Right? Because if that doesn’t happen, then it proves that Trump wasn’t a fascist dictator. He wasn’t. All of the bad names and terrible things that they’ve said about him, that shatters their worldview.

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Right? So these people would literally rather see the world burn than for Trump to be successful. You know, these are the people who are saying, oh, Trump, tariffs, they’re going to. Tariffs are going to bring back inflation and it’s going to be worse than it was before. Or, you know, yields under Trump are going to continue to rise, and that’s going to cause a recession in the first few months under Trump. You know, these are the people that we want to ignore, whatever their narrative may be. You know, we’re going to pay attention to the facts here, the things that are actually said, the laws and executive orders that are actually signed here. And we could not be more impressed with, you know, some of his c. Or the nominations that he’s had.

You know, I’ll get to this here more in a, in a minute, but Scott Biss is, is a, a remarkable one. To lead this off, I’ve got a few comments on some stuff that he said recently as well. But the things that they’re talking about, right, the doge with, with Elon and Vivic and cutting government waste by so much. We know that there’s a lot of fat that can be trimmed here. So we’ve got so much to look forward to here and has us even more bullish on the future. If we were bullish under a Biden administration, what do you think a pro growth, pro business mindset at the highest office does for our outlook from here? Again, it has us even more bullish. And nothing has changed in our view from the October 2022 lows. Yes, we had a great day today, which was nice, I gotta say there for a second.

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You know, I usually get the down days here and Kip always gets the update. So it feels pretty good to get a day like today, you know. But this is what we expected coming out of Trump being inaugurated. We didn’t get the buy the rumor, sell the news event that we were looking for a couple months back. But hey, you know, we’re looking for an incredible run from here now. I kind of lost my, I tried to pull a Trump weave there. Kind of lost my train of thought. But going back to, you know, Scott Bisson and what we come to expect from the again, nominations, the people in Trump’s cabinet, the supporting staff around him, we could not be more bullish going forward.

So it’s going to be a busy rest of the week. We’ll be continuing to report on all of it here. In addition to to Trump’s inauguration, we also have an FOMC meeting this week where the Fed is is expected to stay put on rates here. So no real big surprises from the Fed expected this week. Of course, you know, we know that Jay Powell does not like Donald Trump. So we’ll see if he tries to throw any curveballs at the market in there this week. But earnings also continuing here this week, really kicking into high gear next week. But there’s still some big names this week.

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Namely we had Netflix after the close today reporting some, some impressive numbers there. Crushing on sales, crushing on earnings per share. The stock is up in a big way in after hours trading. The last I saw was up over 13%. Let’s get a quick refresh on that here, see where we’re at now. Up over 14 and a half percent. That is an all time high for Netflix today, almost at $11,000. You know, there’s not a recommendation from the VRA portfolio there.

Of course it will help our tech positions. But again, all time high, I mean they’re going to add who, let’s see here, 30, 40 billion to their market cap minimum at these levels here. That’s an impressive move and the kind of move we expect to continue from tech earnings. Again, We’ve got roughly 41 of the S P 500’s market cap reporting next week. So stay tuned. It’s going to be a fun week next week. And I mean all around here if you can’t tell. We’re pretty excited again.

It feels like morning in America here once again. So let’s take full advantage of it here. Another exciting area over the weekend since we didn’t have a podcast yesterday, continues to be crypto bitcoin. Hit an all Time high yesterday during Trump’s or just before Trump’s inauguration, hitting an all time high of 109,000. It pulled back into the close yesterday, but up again here today, 3.8% to 106,000. I’ll cover it a little bit more in depth at the end of this podcast, but one action that we got today was the Trump administration’s first steps toward the expected lowered regulatory barriers for cryptocurrency. Gary Gensler is no longer in charge of the sec. And if you go look at his Twitter page, the comments about him stepping down on his tweet about stepping down, hilarious.

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And way more comments than he got likes on, that’s for sure. It’s called Horatio on Twitter. You don’t want to have one of those. You know, that’s how unloved that this guy was. You know, of course crypto has been a bit of the wild west, so this has been a long awaited move here. But again, what we expect to see from these actions for crypto is the opposite of what we got in the Biden administration where they tried to hamstring the crypto industry. They bought, they brought very biased lawsuits into the industry as well. There’s a lot of conflict of interest in there.

You know, some of the lawyers at the SEC going after cryptos like XRP when they own Bitcoin and Ethereum. Right. Almost insider trading, probably more malicious really than an insider trading type of charge. But the SEC has now announced that the acting chairman of the sec, who is Mark uida. I’m not sure if I said that correctly, but they are launching a crypto task force to develop a comprehensive and clear regulatory framework for crypto assets. This isn’t expected to put up any more barriers. As a matter of fact, it should remove barriers for crypto while at the same time adding some regulatory assurances. Right.

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And making crypto even more legitimized. Now under Gary Gensler, he did get the ETFs and options trading approved. So it’s not like he did nothing from that point of view. But this should help accelerate the adoption process for cryptocurrencies and again just adds credibility to the asset class as a whole. So we do remain extremely bullish on Bitcoin. Here again, Bitcoin, not quite back to those all time highs, but one aspect now I’m going to talk about Scott Bisson. As I mentioned earlier, one aspect that I loved about his confirmation hearings last week was that he said he sees no reason for a cbdc. That’s music to My ears.

If you’ve been here with us for a while, regular listener of the podcast, you know that I’ve been outspoken about my disdain for central bank digital currencies. That is a cbdc, and it goes back to the World Economic Forum here. I know many of you are familiar with the World Economic Forum. We’re obviously not fans here of Claus Schwab or really anyone in the organization. But just two years ago, there was a World Economic Forum member who was, I believe, the former either Treasure treasury or the head of Mexico’s central bank. Augustin Carstens was on video at a World Economic Forum event talking about the need for, for a CBDC and how, and I quote, it would give them absolute technological control. That, that. Those were his words.

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But essentially what that is saying is they’ll have control over your spending. You know, they also address. They want to get rid of the gray market people using cash. They can’t track that, and they’re upset about that. They want to know where you’re spending every single dollar that you make. This would also give them the ability to debank anybody that they want. You know, you go buy the wrong product, you donate to the wrong political campaign, you’re out of the financial system. Like we saw in the Canadian trucker convoy, right? Where they had the truckers either debanked, seized their assets, including cryptocurrencies, if they were on major exchanges.

Right. And some of the exchanges did their best not to comply with that. But still, at the end of the day, when you have government force of that level, you don’t like that. Right. As a, as a citizen of these countries, you don’t want to see your fellow citizens being debanked because of an unpopular view. So think about how close we were to that potentially happening f Trump wasn’t elected or if the bullet last year that narrowly missed him had just been a couple of millimeters off. That’s how close we got to this type of, of totalitarian control. Right? And the left is masters of projection.

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The fact that anybody thinks that Donald Trump is a fascist, totalitarian dictator, you know, whatever name that they want to call him, you know, it’s pure projection from the left. Everything that they call him is exactly what they are. You know, I’m sure the, the totalitarian president who just got in office and signed a bill to not ban TikTok. Yeah, but that’s the guy who’s the totalitarian. Right. I mean, we all see it for the lies that they are. But again, you know, great to see somebody Like Scott Bisson, who’s going to be Treasury Secretary coming out against the cbdc. You know, ideally we’d want to just go ahead and get rid of the Federal Reserve.

That’d be the next step. So there could be ever a risk for central bank digital currencies. But we’ll have to wait and see how far they take that, you know, in limiting hopefully the power of the Federal Reserve. All right, so briefly here, just because I know that some people are going to want me to talk about this a little. I’ll touch on it briefly. Trump also launched a meme coin on Friday and we saw Trump Coin Mania over the weekend. The Trump coin was announced on Friday. He had a crypto ball for his inaugural on Friday evening.

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It opened at 6.29 a coin and hit an insane 1,000% gain by Sunday, hitting a high of over 74. So from 6 to $74 in just a couple of days. It has since fallen, excuse me, to roughly 44. That’s the last quote that I have here from you know, a few minutes ago. Still lots of, still up roughly 600% from that launch. And just a few details about it here in case you’re interested. Now, we have no recommendation on this. As a matter of fact, I’ll go ahead and say I’m not sure exactly the purpose of this coin at this point.

I’ve seen a lot of ideas floated out there about meme coins like this, right? Whether it’s an NFT type of offering where you buy this coin, you can get access to certain things as well. The, the primary example I’ve seen of that is an artist who releases an album which gives you kind of the right to have a possession of that album which can be traded. You know, it says in the paperwork this is not an investment opportunity. It’s more of seen I guess by the community as like a collectible kind of deal. You know, if I’ve got that wrong, shoot me an email about it. I love to learn more about it. But so far, here’s what we know, the tokenomics of it. There’s a total supply set at1.1 billion coins.

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Launch on Friday gave access to 20% of those coins. So 200 million coins were offered in, I guess what they would call this an ICO initial coin offering. And the other 800 million will be gradually unlocked over the course of the next three years. So there is a lockup period here. Now we’ll see what that looks like because it they’re freed up in three month intervals over the course of three years. So I guess in three months we’ll find out what that looks like. Right? So at least there’s a limit on these in lockup period, you know. But the concern there is it’s not exactly a good look, right.

For the incoming president to be launching a meme coin to make money off of it kind of gives the oligarchical sentiment to an ammo for the mainstream media to attack him. And the people around him is oligarchs here, you know, so I’ll withhold judgment, but that’s kind of on the outside, both looks of it. There could there be some interesting aspects to this and you get access to certain things. I’m not sure what they would be, but I’ve seen people do it again, artists with albums or people who host regular events that hey, you know, you buy this token and that gives you access, gives you one ticket to this event. Right. So there’s ideas out there for how this can work. I think we’re just in the early innings here. Kip and I were talking about this before the podcast.

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It does have a bit of the feel of a dot com, the melt up side of things where people didn’t know what these companies did, but you had to be in them, right, because they’re going to go to the moon, right? So you just got to be in them. It’s a bubble, right? But no one can tell you how high a bubble is going to go or when it’s going to pop. But from the outside, that is what these meme coins look like. And so what the ramifications of that will be for crypto as a whole, you know, Bitcoin, the others, Solana, Ethereum, Ripple, you know, what that, that will look like for them, we’ll see. Because there are certainly some winners coming out of the dot com bubble, right? I mean, household names today that were around back in and had phenomenal runs, you know, Google, Amazon, Apple, many, many more.

So what happened after the dot com bubble though, once the bust happened, people realized years later, okay, here was the use case they were going for back then before the out the valuations got outrageous. It could happen quicker with, with crypto, where we might see, you know, that kind of a blow up. And I’m just speculating here, kind of talking, thinking out loud, if you will, that we’ll start to see the use cases of these kinds of coins over time.

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You know, we’re not really there yet where they have a clear communicable story to people of what is the use case for a meme coin in the long term. Right. I think we’ll get to that point because there are all kinds of use cases. You know, Kip and I have talked a lot and, and wanted to find more projects that talk about, you know, the tokenization of hard assets, whether that’s real estate, commodities. Right. These are, those are very useful use cases. Potential use cases, I should say. So again, you know, kind of just an exciting story to talk about there.

Just wanted to touch on it briefly here today. One other headline coming out, of course, is tariffs. Trump proposing a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada by February 1st. And what just a roller coaster ride it’s been for the anti Trump crowd on these tariffs that, oh, day one, Trump’s gonna get in office, announce these tariffs, that’s gonna cause more inflation, that’s gonna cause a recession, that’s gonna cause the US Dollar to go through the roof. That’s gonna cause yields to go through the roof. They can, you know, worry about it all they want, but they don’t have any facts. It’s all sentiment based. Right.

No one knew what the Trump tariffs were gonna look like because he didn’t want to tell anybody. He said, these are a negotiating tactic. I’ll, I’ll show you as you need to know. Right. And so as it came out that Trump wasn’t going to implement tariffs on China on day one, the US Dollar began to fall right on cue. Much like Trump in 2017, just the dollar peaked just a week before his inauguration. The dollar peaked last week as well, earlier this month. It’s almost a mirror or almost an identical image of that time period as well.

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We do expect the US Dollar to weaken here. We don’t expect that to cause any problems for its status as the global reserve currency. That for us here, always we’re watching it, but not a concern at this point. Similar with yields, we’ve been talking about this at length. We’ve seen or in our view, yields will begin heading lower. They already have pulled back from their 4.8 earlier this month we said for some time as well. Even at that level, yes, real yields are restrictive, but they’re not prohibitive. Now we’re down from that 4.8 just a couple weeks ago all the way to a 4.57.

Wow. And we’re not even at oversold levels yet. So we do expect this move lower in yields to continue. It won’t be a straight line down. Right. But we can, we expect to see higher, hot or, sorry, lower highs and lower lows from yields going forward from here. All right, that being said, as you know, those are some bullish aspects for the market and the market reflected that today. So let’s take a look at our market action where we finished higher across the board here today.

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We were led by small caps again a yield sensitive group, a group that we like a lot and remain very bullish on, especially in the Trump economy. Russell 2000 up 1.85% 2, 3, 17 finishing at its highs of the day today. And we, you know we finished at or near the highs of the day today, just about across the board. After that we had the Dow Jones again also finishing at its highs of the day up 1.24% of 44,025. Just what you want to see. We had the transports higher today and leading the Dow up 1.4%. Next up after that, the S P500 finishing near its highs of the day, maybe just slightly off at 6049. And finally here the Nasdaq.

We do want to see tech leading the market obviously, but still finishing higher on the day and being led by semis. So we continue to like tech and the semis a lot here. The Nasdaq up just over 6/10 of 1% at 19,756. The semis I’ll touch on here briefly as well in a similar boat finishing just slightly off their highs of the day to day still up 1.6%. So leading the Nasdaq exactly what we like to see here. And we continue to love this chart of the semis as we just got a breakout here today hitting their highest level since just after their all time highs in July at 264 at the highs of today. That makes a new at least in the short term higher high for the semis and marks a higher low from its recent low as well. It’s exactly what we want to see on the chart here.

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We’ve been talking about this coiled spring in the semis here. We expect liftoff from here because one other great thing about this chart, we’re not even at overbought levels even on our short term VRA momentum oscillators. So that is indicating to us that this move is just beginning. Of course, massive earnings coming in next week should help here as well. If we get anything like we saw with Netflix today for the semis over this earning season, it’ll be a rocket ship move higher. They’ve been the only group that hasn’t hit an all time high. You know, of our Major groups that we watch since Trump was elected in November. So we look for the semis now.

Start playing some catch up next up here. Let’s take a look at our internals on the day. Again, really good numbers here. Exactly what you want to see. We had more advancing stocks than declining stocks coming in just about or just over 4 to 1 positive on the NYSE just shy of 3 to 1 positive on the NASDAQ. 52 week highs lows, strongly positive here as well for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. And lastly here, volume also coming in over 3 to 1 positive or maybe just right at 3 to 1 positive on the NYSE today. Strongly positive on the Nasdaq as well.

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Not quite 2 to 1 positive but still solid outperformance there today. Looking at our sectors here on the day, we finished with 10 out of our 11s P500 sectors higher on the day. I’ll start with our laggard here. Energy, which has been on a terrific move since December. You know, we saw oil prices rising going into really the last week or so. So energy did really well and now we had hit overbought, extreme overbought levels there for energy. You know this is a group we do remain bullish on, you know, the energy companies themselves. We think if we can get back to drill baby drill, kind of a mindset.

Trump signed an energy emergency executive order last night as well. So we look for the price of the commodities, specifically oil to come down from here. Nat gas had been destroyed going into this. So we’ll see what happens for the prices there. But you know, if oil can kind of, we would expect it to kind of peak out here at this is a healthy level I would say for the price of oil where it allows energy companies to expand. You know, they’re still making money while it’s not quite so painful at the pump. But if we can bring them down even more, I’m good with that. These energy companies are well positioned to handle any storms that are thrown their way.

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And we think that if one of the benefits here of what we’ve seen in disinflation, whether it’s well, I’m not going to get, I could do a whole podcast on this, right? How the downstream costs for energy companies will come down with lower energy prices which actually will help them increase their profit margins. Right. If they’re well capitalized, well structured companies. This isn’t 2014 is my point where we saw oil go to over $120 a barrel plus and oil and gas Companies were printing money and spending it just as recklessly. These companies have much more secure financialization now and much more manageable market cap. So we don’t expect anything like that from the sector as a whole. But we do expect energy prices to come down. So for our sectors on the day, back to our positive sectors, we’ll go back to that.

Some interest rate sensitive names leading the way today as I think it’s now going to be expected that yields are going to head lower. And Trump has commented on it as well that he wants these. He thinks yields are too restrictive here too, you know. So we’ll see what kind of financial engineering, one of our big bribe themes we can get into under this new Trump administration. I mean he’s the self proclaimed king of debt. I think there’s going to be a lot of negotiating going on here. So our leaders on the day, industrials, real estate and utilities, you know, number four. But healthcare was up there as well.

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But I’m talking about interest rate sensitive groups here looking good on the day, leading the way today or laggards if you want to call them that. Other than energy, we did have tech up just fractionally on the day, followed by consumer staples and financials overall from our sectors today. Good day. Finally here for today, our V commodity watch. Let me get a quick refresh here. We’ve got gold now up over 310 of 1% on the day today to $2,758 an ounce. We’re just roughly 40 or so, 45 or so dollars away from an all time high again in gold. And just what you want to see.

The gold miners leading the way up a big 2.34% today for GDX, the gold mining ETF. Another group we remain bullish on here. Silver also up a nice 1.3% today to 31.55 an ounce. Copper now lower on the day by 7/10 of 1% to 4 $4 and 33 cents a pound. And finally here for today, as I mentioned, oil pulling back here. Let’s just get a quick look at what its high was last week. I want to make sure I get it right. Just shy of or maybe right at 79 was the high.

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You know, we’re down another 1.4% on the day today to 75 a barrel here for oil. Now I already quoted bitcoin, but I’ll go ahead and call it out one more time here as we are up 2.6% to $106,000 of Bitcoin. Really all around good day for crypto on that new regulatory framework that I talked about here earlier on the podcast as well. So folks, hope you had a great day today. Hope you’re enjoying the good morning here in America. We could not be more positive on what we have to look forward to here again. We do expect and want to be part of participate in contribute to this golden age for America. Right? We’ve talked about this so much.

We’ve got the innovation revolution that we’ve talked about here for years now. We’ve got that met with the Trump Doctrine or Trump Economic Miracle 2.0. Again, the question remains, are we bullish enough? Of course, there’s always going to be pullbacks along the way. We’ll continue to use those as buying opportunities. Folks, hope you all had a great day today. Once again, you can sign up for our podcast every day at the Market close. You can sign up@v letter.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.