Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Friday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there today, a great end to your week. This week as well as the first month of the year. 2025 is now in the books. The results are in. And even with a bit of a down week for our major indexes here, we were able to finish positive across the board here for the month of January.
Dow, Nasdaq, S&P, Russell 2000 all managed to hang on to those gains. And I’ll get to that here more in a second. But, but first, let’s just quickly cover what we saw in today’s action because we did start the day looking like we were going to finish out the week and the month here. You know, really what has been a rough week kind of all over the place, volatile week for our markets. This week we, it looked like we wanted to finish on a high note. Of course it helped. There was a piece out this morning from Reuters published saying that tariffs had been delayed to March 1st.
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Everyone’s been anticipating this February 1st deadline for the, the first round of tariffs here now as we’re about to complete the fir. The, the first complete the second week here of Trump’s presidency. But that was corrected after this morning’s trading. Like I said, our major indexes liked that news. We were higher across the board the this morning, but that was corrected by the new press secretary, Caroline Levitt. Have you seen any of her news conferences so far? She doesn’t put up with any, that is for sure. I thought her first one was especially impressive. I missed most of the one from this morning.
I’ll have to give some more of it a look. But she so far has been very impressive, for sure. So she came out and said, you know, let the media know that their story was bad information and you gotta kind of wonder if that was planned or not. Right. If it was intentionally, somebody floated somebody in the White House that it was gonna happen. And now we found out who the, the person was reporting to someone like Reuters. Right. Or they might have just made it up all together.
You know, those are the kinds of things that happen behind closed doors usually, though. So we’ll find out. But remember, Trump had a problem with that in his first term of somebody in the White House leaking information to the press. So if there was a plan to try and figure out who it might be, that would certainly be interesting. You know, again, just a little bit of speculation there but, again, the market reaction wasn’t good to that, so it’s kind of tough to make light of that situation. But as Kip and I were talking about this after the close today, as we do in our daily calls, this seems more like a reaction and uncertainty more than anything else. You know, it’s not really about tariffs as much as it might be, just the uncertainty. Markets don’t like surprises, and they really don’t like uncertainty.
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So Trump, you know, gave a great press conference here after the close. I caught part of it, just kind of laid out the plan right. As, you know, his team has been doing. And it’s really too early to get all of the details right. We’ve seen the threat of tariffs already work to get the things that Trump wants to accomplish, like we saw with Columbia. Right. So we’ll see what the market’s reaction is like next week. You know, we don’t think that this is going to be a major problem for a market.
We think Trump made that clear as well, that he sees this as more of a prosperity thing and being able to lower taxes for the Americans by char. For American citizens by charging these tariffs. And there’s some good historical precedent to back that up. A lot of people like to refer to the latter end when we kind of got out of control on the terror front. You know, Charles Payne was pointing this out today as well, gave a great breakdown of what tariffs looked like in the late 1800s through where we stopped, you know, I guess the pre. Just Pre World War II era on those tariffs, and they kind of got out of control there. So, you know, that’s certainly something worth the deep dive into. Very interesting topic here, but nothing that we saw this week has us any less bullish than we were already.
Whether it’s the deep seat story, whether it’s this tariff story, again, I think the deep sea story is actually pretty similar to this tariff story that the market freaked out about this, and it was more so about the uncertainty of what it created. You did American companies, are they about to get dethroned, right? Did they spend way too much money developing this AI? It was just the uncertainty that scared people so much. But as the details finally really started to come out, we realized it was a bit of an overreaction. So, you know, again, markets don’t like surprises. We got a few of those this week, and it was a bit of a rough week for our markets. But the good news here, again is that January was able to finish positive across the board and some big moves in some of our, our largest names here in the US to the upside as well. Our sectors finished very strong on the month this month going into the session and in this morning training. The S and P was up over 3% for the month.
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Still managed to finish up roughly. Let’s see, let’s get a final look here. But it’s in the 2.7%, 2.7 on the dot for the month for the S&P 500. But here’s where it gets really good. You know, when The S&P 500 finishes January higher, it bodes well for the rest of the year. And when The S&P 500 finishes up more than 2% in the month of January, it gets even better. Ryan Dietrich, we reference here, often does very good work with analytics, and here are the numbers that he has for the January barometer here. When The S&P 500 is up more than 2% in the first month of the year, the market is higher in the next 11 months nearly 88% of the time with average gains of 18.4%.
We think we’re gonna beat the average this year. That’s been our call from the very beginning here. You know, again, bit of a rough into the month and February typically isn’t the best month of the year, but we’ll see what happens here. We think we’ve got a lot of good catalysts to the upside for this market coming. Remember, we’re just two weeks in to Trump being in office and so many changes have already been made that we see as bullish already. And he hadn’t even had his full cabinet confirmed yet. Right. Still going through that process.
The highlights from it this week have certainly been enlightening, I guess you could say, in a lot of, a lot of places. But what great candidates I think that he has put forward, people who do put America, their country first, they want to take care of American citizens. You don’t have to agree with them on everything. But can they get the job done? And I think the answer to that is yes so far. All right. So it’s going to be an exciting next, you know, time, lot of time to come here. As we talked about here often, we’re in the middle of a golden age for America, an innovation revolution. Roaring2020s.
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Right. There’s so many things to be optimistic and excited about here, not only for our market, but just in general. So I hope you’re excited. Love that you’re here with us. Thank you for being here with us every day after the market closed. So that Being said, let’s jump in to the market action on the day. As I mentioned earlier we finished higher across the board for January. So let’s run down it here quickly.
The Dow actually led the way on the month up 4.7% for the month of January. Good month here for the dow was down 3/4 of 1% on the day today to 44,544 1. One more chart here. That is you know we’re right in the range of an all time high. So I wanted to see if that was an all time monthly closing high. It was not there. Just shy of it. We do expect the Dow to get back to all time highs here.
We are a little bit short term overbought now though in the Dow. You know we alerted to you about that in the semis at the end of last week and we saw what happened on Monday. You not saying that something like that’s going to happen but at overbought levels is when you typically expect a pullback. The good news about this action this week is that the semis and tech for that matter are now at short term over or well the semis are at short term oversold levels here and I’ll point this out. I was going to get to this here in a second but I’ll go ahead and do it now. NASDAQ did actually hold up the best today finishing down less than 310 of 1%. The semis which had a very rough week right with the deep seek news. Nvidia.
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Nvidia sell off still managed to finish positive on the month of January. Yes, just slight gains here up just over half of 1%. But that’s after finishing down 6.8% this week on the deep seek news. So yeah, not the end to the month that you want but some resilience there at least on some front. You know we continue to look at this deep seat news as a bear trap and you know obvious panic inducing kind of event but not the kind of catastrophic news that people predicted on Monday. Back to our major indexes here though. The Nasdaq did finish up 1.6% on the month. Then we had the S P as I mentioned up 2.7% on the month but down half a percent today at 6040.
And finally here the Russell 2000 down 8/10 of 1% on the day but up 2.5% on the month. One other factor here, yields. Interesting month for yields. If you remember it wasn’t that long ago that market watchers and you know talking heads Were freaking out once again that yields are, you know, breaking out here. And yes, we did hit, you know, a new recent high in yields at a 4.8. And I say recent, you know, in the last few years, recent still below the 4.99 that we saw at the end of 2023. We expect the move lower in yields to continue. If you’re a regular listener, you know that here as well.
But again, just a couple weeks ago, people freaking out, they’re going back above 5% and then it’s five and a half percent after that. And the Fed’s actually going to have to raise rates in 2025. Yes, they really went that far as to say those things. Right. If you’ve, if you’ve been here with us, you know, our tune has remained unchanged even on January 14th where we saw that peak at a 4.8%. Still, that’s a, not, not a prohibitively high 10 year yield first and foremost. But we said at the time that they were at overbought levels on yields. Well, since that time, yields are down over 15, over 5% since that time.
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Right. That was January 14, just 17 days ago. And the 10 year yield actually finished down for the month of January. So if a positive month for the S and P usually means a positive rest of the year for the major indexes, you know, let’s see if a negative month to start off the year for yields is a sign of things to come. Bad news for yields in 2025. We’re not saying that we’re going to have to have an event, you know, like a, I guess the most recent one is obviously the coronavirus event where the Fed is rushing to cut rates or even like Silicon Valley Bank. Right. When that implosion happened in the Fed.
Getting back to easy money policies kind of quickly there. Right. Or at least attempting to in some ways we don’t expect an event like that. Of course, you know, most, it’s very hard to expect a black swan event. But we see a steady move lower in yields coming from here. We think that’s the likely scenario for 2025 on yields. All right, so next up here, let’s take a look at our internals on the day, which were positive earlier in the session. And unfortunately some of the weaker internals that we’ve seen recently.
We did get a couple of two to one negatives here on the day, but there was a couple of bright spots out there. So first and foremost, we did have more declining stocks than advancing stocks. A little over 2 to 1 negative on the NYSE just barely shy of that level on the NASDAQ. 52 week highs lows did manage to come in positive here. I’ve seen some people starting to talk about the new lows taking place on the Nasdaq, which we talk about here often. Not all Nasdaq players are prime time know ready for action stocks here. Some of these probably were made private companies or they were SPACs or all kinds of different things that do have access to in the Nasdaq. That being said though, I’ve taken a look at that chart as well and you do see a series of lower lows and lower highs in that chart still going on right now, you know, below the end of year level of new lows.
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Right. So that was just a couple of months ago go. So no concerns for us there in the internals. Of course we don’t want to see another day like today, we don’t want to see it continue. But again, you know, no red flags here just yet. You know it takes more than one day for something like that. On volume though, we did come in almost 3 to 1 negative on the NYSE. But another bright spot here, we did come in positive on the Nasdaq here today.
So again not all bad there. And again today we look at is more of a reactionary kind of move from the market today. Next up here looking at our sectors on the day we finished with just two sectors positive. Communication services, which was one of our leading sectors on the month as well, was up another 3/4 of 1% today. 50 finishing up the month of January, 5.75. That’s a big move. Of course the largest holding in here. We, I talk about this often that the communication services sector is really a proxy for the technology sector as well.
The largest holding is Meta. Meta was up 17.7% on the month this month and the second largest holding and they’re neck and neck. It might actually, you know, sometimes it’s Google is the largest, sometimes it’s Meta. Right. Regardless, the two make up about 40% of communication services. Google or Alphabet also up 7.7% on the month this month. After that for our positive sectors, just one other positive, Consumer Discretionary which did have a good month here as well. Let’s see, you know, most of our sectors were positive on the month.
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I’ve got all the numbers here somewhere in my notes. But let’s get the high notes here. Our other, our, our sector that led the way this month might surprise a little bit here. Healthcare actually up 6.76% on the month of January here. Then like I said, most of our sectors did finish positive on the month. But for the day we did finish with 9 out of our 11 sectors negative. On the downside we had energy down a pretty big 2.7% on the day today. Followed by tech, materials and consumer staples.
Finally here for today, our commodity watch where we had a very strong month of January. Gold is slightly lower on the day today. Still right around its recent halt. All time highs from this week or sorry did hit an all time high earlier in the session day at $2862 an ounce. Now at $2835 an ounce. Gold finishing up the month. I mean almost 8% on the month. Let’s see if I can can get that chart for you here on the month.
Excuse me. Up 7.35% on the month this month. And just what you want to see. The gold miners outperforming the precious metal here 2 to 1 outperformance just about at 14.89% positive on the month for GDX, the gold mining ETF. Again exactly what we want to see from this group. Next up here. Silver also having a good month. Up over 10% on the month for silver as well at $32.26 an ounce.
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Copper now down on or sorry. Well silver was down on the day by 7/10 of 1%. Still $30.26 an ounce. Copper down 610 of 1% to $4.27 a pound. Oil slightly lower on the day as well down just over a quarter of 1% to $72.53 a barrel. Did I just quote copper and ounces? I might have said that it’s pounds by the way in case I did. Finally here. Bitcoin was better earlier in the session today.
Now down 2.8% to $102,073. A Bitcoin, you know as we did hit an all time high in December. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that January might not have been a great month. You know the all time high did happen earlier this month as well. But again in December is 108. That was midway through December. Hit 109 here in January. But after that kind of end of December sell off.
You know we got the bottom in in January. Finished up on the month by nine and a quarter percent as well. Good month there for bitcoin. I guess it’s not over yet for Bitcoin trades 24 7. So still got a few hours left. Maybe a little more upside action there. But folks, that’s all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcast every day at the market close.
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