Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Monday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA investing podcast. Hope you had a great day today. Hope your weekend was fantastic as well. We have a lot to talk about today. Some of it really is remarkable. And again, Tyler and I are both, we’re optimists, we’re glasses half full people.
But it is really amazing to me to watch people deconstruct Trump’s actions and now Elon Musk actions with Doge and usaid. Watch them deconstruct this mainstream media. And of course, there are their partners in crime, the Democrat Party. It’s not the Democratic Party. Please, people, stop it. It’s the Democrat Party. They are not Democratics. They are Democrat.
They want to be called. They want to, they wanted to be, to say a democratic process because it sounds like they’re part of that. It’s a scam. It’s the Democrat Party. Let’s please start getting this right. Words matter. Words do matter. But listen, you know, I’m going to cover that a little bit today.
[00:01:00]:
Usaid, we learned about the money laundering operation that’s taking place there, the amazing work that Elon Musk and team are doing, and of course, Trump leading the way. Tariffs. This was the word of the day. It starts the trade war. Trade war, trade war. I’m going to break that down for you a little bit and tell you we’re not at all concerned about that. Matter of fact, it’s a buying opportunity. Never settle on a Monday.
If you’ve been with us here very long, you’ve heard us say it about a thousand times. My first mentor, Ted Parsons, rest in peace. Ted was just a. I didn’t know it at the time because frankly, he was a bit of an asshole to me. But he made me work and he taught me things because he didn’t suffer fools. But one of the things he walked around the office on a down Monday was walking around just saying, don’t settle. I told you not to buy on a Friday. You don’t sell the money.
I told you not to buy on a Friday. You don’t settle on Monday. And he was almost always right. And that, of course, played out again today. Last week it played out with Deep Seek, the Chinese AI that roiled the markets. And so we had a really good comeback today. Can talk about what’s happening in precious metals. Hey, don’t, don’t, don’t fall asleep on this group.
[00:02:06]:
Don’t fall asleep. I’m going to tell you why In a minute. A lot of interesting things happening there. It’s just not bitcoin. Bitcoin, by the way, had a big comeback today as well. Matter of fact, bitcoin’s comeback was the comeback of the day. What else today? Seasonality. We’ve got some important things to talk about there.
The January barometer, which was positive, meaning that the year should be higher like 87% of the time. I think it is. And we do have some seasonality to also talk about. Not really going to worry about it right now. But the, in this, in this part of the, in the presidential election year from February 14th on Valentine’s Day, it’s not a great time, it’s not a horrible time. It’s just not one of the most bullish times to be in the markets. I don’t think it’s good. I really don’t think it’s going to matter.
I just don’t think. I don’t, I don’t. And look, I, I’m not a Pollyanna. Okay. I understand that markets can move in both directions and catch you off the culture flat fitt. That’s why we’re trend followers. So we don’t, we don’t be caught up in the wrong side of the market. Short term trends matter as well, not just the medium and long term, especially if you use leveraged ETFs like we do.
[00:03:11]:
So look, I, we’re completely aware and awake of the risk. I’m just telling you, this is so early in this bull market. This market is going so much higher that I don’t think it’s, I don’t think the timing is going to matter as much. And I just don’t see the dips as lasting long. There’s so much money coming in. Animal spirits. We’ll talk about that too. Like I said, a lot to talk about.
Animal spirits coming back. Let’s get right into it now. Good month. January again finished up for the year. Title covers on Friday. January finished up for the month and that bodes very well when we see a positive January. By the way, it wasn’t just the SP 500. Excuse me, wasn’t just the Dow Jones SB 500.
It was NASDAQ. It was Russ 2000. All four of our primary indexes closed higher in January. When that happens, the market is up the rest of the year, up 87% of the time and is up 12.2% on average. So that was good to see. Remember we started off the year that, you know, the, the last five trading days, first trading days of the new year that was negative. So that’s good to see this reversal and tariffs. Okay, listen, last Monday again was, it was this really deja vu overnight in futures trading.
[00:04:23]:
It felt like last Sunday night and Monday, didn’t it because of the deep seek news. But you know, look, if you, if you read our work, you know, we said this morning and look, it’s nothing new here, we don’t sell on Mondays. We just don’t do it because it’s almost always a mistake. And today once again was a buying opportunity. Dow Jones rallied over 500 points off the lows, still finished down 122 points but again 500 point move higher off the lows. Nasdaq about, about a 200 point move higher off of the lows, but it did finish down 1.2% losses across the board. Russ 2000 is our big loser on the day. Down 1.3% S100 up, down 7, 10 of a percent.
Nasdaq again down 1.2% on the day. But again big, big recovery day. As I said a minute ago, bitcoin, Bitcoin hit a low of 90,000 and right now is trading at 101,000. Yes, 101,000, 620. So it’s got back all of its losses and finished higher on the day. That is a sign of garlic, strong strength right there. And again we continue to pound the table on bitcoin on declines. But again, the news over the weekend was about Trump’s tariffs.
[00:05:36]:
Look, we had big gains. Tyler covered this as well on Friday. We had big gains like until like an hour before the close. And then Trump was sitting at the Oval Office and just somebody asked him about tariffs. Oh no. He said, oh no, they’re, they’re going in a place this weekend. Yeah, they can’t go and like what? Oh yeah, no, they’re going to be full, you know, 20, 25%. Here we go.
China, Mexico and Canada. And then that took all the life out of the markets. Markets closed lower. Didn’t like seeing that going to the weekend. But one thing about Trump is this guy, he is, he, he is a, he is hard to figure out sometimes because I know for a fact, and I know this is very well documented that Trump pays very close attention to the stock market. However, he’s not a short term guy. That’s the difference here. Look, you say President Trump.
Why do you have to say, why do you have to get negative just before a weekend? Well, is always a method to his madness because Trump knows what he’s doing is beneficial to our economy and to the markets. He just doesn’t care about the short term. And frankly I kind of think, you know, if, I don’t think he’s day trading his own account. But you know, if you can build in all the negatives early on, what does that leave? That leaves you with positives when the results start coming in. And they will start coming in. But the big point for the media, again, the media just, just a disaster. It’s very hard for me to, I watched Bloomberg in the morning, I haven’t watched cnbc in now 4 and a half years from the pandemic propaganda that they were spewing. Just, I haven’t turned it on once and don’t, don’t intend to.
[00:07:09]:
But they are attacking Trump, Bloomberg even, although not as bad as he did in the first term, but still going after him about the negatives of his tariff policy. Right. But he’s made it very clear. It was on the campaign trail, if you watched him, I’m sure most of you did. We got a very patriotic group here, America first group here. That’s what makes this group so fantastic that we’re with pretty like minded, not all Republicans, by the way. We’ve got a lot of Democrats here among this group. Again, not Democratics, they’re called Democrats.
But on the campaign trail, his primary talking point, his primary campaign issue was the border. And for two reasons. Stopping illegal immigration, which includes human trafficking and putting an end to the fentanyl scourge. Because that is not even a good enough word for it. The media doesn’t give these totals, they’ll just say, oh, they’re like Bloomberg this morning. Oh, last year there was 37,000 pounds of fentanyl or something, you know that they came into the US for some reason, they want to quote the amount of pounds that were seized. Now you know that that’s just a fraction of what got through. But the reason Bloomberg and others want to talk about that is they don’t want to talk about the death total.
[00:08:28]:
Now, remember when the pandemic was happening, remember the Chiron at the bottom of the screen every day they put the new death total. Oh, 7,000 people died today. It’s just running death total on your screen 24 7, right. Driving it home that this is Trump’s responsibility, he’s president, hang this on him. And look, they rigged the election, of course, but I mean it did work. But the point being they never talk about these death totals. So I went back and did some research. This Weekend using Grok, which I love the AI for X.
Elon Musk has his own division, but it’s included in the X package. X Twitter, now X. And I love using GROK for research. In the last five years, 340. What’s the exact total? 340,473Americans have died from fentanyl in the last five years. It’s just now you know why they don’t talk about it? Because most of these, of course, would hang the Democrats on it because of course they’re the open border party. And that’s what Trump is saying the entire time. He’s been a broken record on this fix.
[00:09:37]:
Immigration, which is going to stop human trafficking, illegal, illegal aliens from coming in, and the deaths and the damage they’re doing both to economy and individuals. And it’s going to put an end to the fentanyl scourge. And he said, Canada, Mexico, China, fix this. And guess what? The tariffs will go away. I don’t know he’s ever said that. He loves Harris. Okay, there’s, there’s old video footage going back many, many years, like over, over 10 years of Trump saying the same thing. This is how he’s going to fix problems.
And so listen, we, during, during Trump’s first term there was, when he first came out with his tariffs, the markets didn’t know what to make of it. The markets went through, you know, a pretty good yo, yo. Now we’re kind of seeing that now there’s no real trend. We’re bouncing back between support and resistance. That, that’s a very tough, that’s a very, unless you’re a short term trader, that’s a very tough market to trade. We’re trend followers. We prefer to have a better trend to follow and then trade off of that based on our momentum oscillator. So this is a difficult environment to trade off of.
[00:10:43]:
But if you’re a stock picker, I think it’s a great environment. Okay? But the bottom line is that there may be and probably will be some short term volatility. We saw it today from his tariffs. But look, I think people learned from Trump’s first term. This made America stronger. For those that again, that are worried, these totals for percentage of GDP with Canada and Mexico is just very enlightening. Okay? Mexico’s exports to the United States as a percentage of their GDP is 35%. 35%.
Canada’s exports as a percentage of their GDP to the US is 22%. These are huge numbers. So obviously the US has all the leverage here, by the way, United States exports to Canada as a percentage of our GDP, 1.5% to Mexico, 1.2%. These are tiny numbers, right? But again, the media is, you know, they love to pound the drumbeat of negativity. And the next thing you know, the futures are lower. Next thing you know, people are piling on. But folks, these are, these are buying opportunities. That’s, that’s it.
[00:11:51]:
This is, we set it for, for now, for almost two and a half years from August of 2022, that we believe this is again, roaring2020s and this is a generational bull market. We’ve never backed away from that. And we’ve also told you repeatedly that the smartest of smart money strategy is going to be buy the dip. We believe and are very confident. And that’s going to continue to be the case. By the way, there are also some real big positives from, from, from this. You know, look, Trump’s made it clear, hey, if you don’t want to pay tariffs, guess what? Open factories in the United States, you won’t have to pay those tariffs. Have a factory here, you can hire our people, you can sell to our citizens without any tariffs.
What an easy win. So we saw this happen in first term economic production, manufacturing, job growth surged again as part of the tariff policy. By the way, Trump started talking about this on the campaign trail. He mentioned once or twice. Now, more recently, he said it even more. Tyler covered this as well. We did not have a income tax for individuals until 1913, by the way. What a horrible year.
[00:12:58]:
Federal reserves were created, 16th amendment was passed. We paid all our bills, if you will, by tariffs. And then of course, they destroyed that because Woodrow Wilson is the worst president, yes, even worse than Biden, the worst president in the country’s history. But inflation, it should not be a concern, okay? Because again, in Trump’s first term, all four years, inflation averaged just 1.9% with the same type of aggressive tariff policy. So the US has all the leverage here. And a point that, again, I’m not hearing this made. And I think it’s a real mess because people like Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, these are the smartest people in the world Trump’s got on his team now, financially speaking. Okay? And if you think for a second they haven’t modeled this fully and they have a very good idea of what the end result is going to be for the economy, the markets.
I think the people that haven’t either haven’t thought it through or they’re listening to the wrong people. So again, as far as the stock market goes, again, never sell on a Monday. But again, we get back to the primary reasons that we’re bullish. Again, this is laid out in the book in the big bribe. August 2022 are five mega trends. That’s what’s driving the market, the strength of the economy, both consumer and corporate. You know, again, the innovation revolution has been a key theme of ours still in just the, I believe since the first inning, all of it combining to produce a generational bull market. Now, when you add the fact that now we have the Trump economic miracle 2.0 in tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation, we continue to believe that within at least 18 months, I think this year, I think GDP is going to be growing at 5%.
[00:14:43]:
So Trump’s playing the long game. Would he rather see the market go up? You bet your buddy would. He loves, loves seeing the stock market go up. He knows it’s an instant barometer for the public because they’ve got so much money in the markets, you know, 401ks, IRAs, outside investments, et cetera. So he knows it’s important, he knows it matters. But this is his first year. He’d rather, I believe, have a little bit of uncertainty, maybe, maybe pay the price in the first year, knowing what’s going to happen going into the midterms. That’s really it.
You know, this year we’re still forecasting a 20% gains in the S&P 500 this year, 30 to 40% gains in the semis and Nasdaq. And we are hyper bullish, as you also may know on gold, silver and the miners. And boy, that’s happening just real quick on that. Gold’s up 7% for the year, 7% in the first month. Silver up 9% in the first month. GDX the gold miner ETF up 17%. So again, our forecast for the year is that the miners are going to put up gains of better than 100%. It’s time for them to go.
[00:15:51]:
Gold was up big last year, up 26%. The miners only up 10%. So I believe this is, it’s their time. Look, inflation is going to continue to fall. Rates are going to continue to fall. This is hyper bullish for the miners who with gold now again at all time highs. Rich Ross today the the text the savant at Evercore just put out a piece. His target is 3100.
Initial target is 3100 on gold because he says that’ll be a 5000 year high. In gold. Well, we hit an all time high today, so I’m not sure what he’s saying there, but I will take it. But as I, as you know, if you listen to me, I believe gold. This move will take gold to $5,000 an ounce. But the real money is going to be made in the miners. We love gold, silver as well, and the miners. So we keep pounding the table on our mega trends and the macro trends that we see playing out.
And one of those, by the way, again, this was in the big bribe. Animal spirits, the return of animal spirits, Red pilled America, getting the president they want need combined with animal spirits. That’s what it brings. Now here’s proof of that. We learned this over the weekend. JP Morgan put this out last week, just US stocks saw a weekly inflow of $8 billion. That’s the largest weekly inflow into stocks in two years. Again, that’s evidence of animal spirits because we got $7 trillion sitting in money markets.
[00:17:19]:
Everyone’s been wondering when is that going to start coming out? When is it going to start going in stocks, folks? It’s coming out now. It’s going to stocks now. That’s why these dips are going to continue to be light. The public knows what’s coming. The public gets it. They see rates falling, they will continue to fall. Right. We’ve been unabashedly bullish on bonds, meaning bearish on rates.
And again with inflation, they’re both going lower and we love being the minority on that call. It makes us even more comfortable and confident in our research than we ordinarily would be. Contrarians to, to, to the death. Right? But the public knows what’s coming. A surging economy, a golden age for America. Trump’s exactly right on this. And again, a generational bull market along with the Trump 2.0. The right president at the right time.
So many reasons to be bullish. Again, we are not concerned about tariffs. I think it’s going to work out just fine. Thank you very much. Also today, if you saw the news on usaid, oh my God, this, this, it really looks like USAID is a criminal organization, money laundering organization that Doge and Musk are just ripping to shreds. And Marco Rubio now is, is the de facto head of USAID and they’re shutting down all of this NGO money laundering operation down. Non government organizations really purportedly doing good things abroad. I’m sure there are some good things that this group does, but you’re starting to see the facts come out about where this money’s been spent.
[00:18:52]:
Money going to terrorist groups, money going to drug, drug cartels. Again, the fact the Mexican government is in bed with them, that’s no secret, right? It was pretty funny watching Mexico’s president deny that they were, that they were had a partnership with drug cartels. I mean, how did she do that with the straight, Seriously, how did she do that with the straight face? It’s the worst kept secret in the world that the cartels run Mexico. Right? And so again, it’s just, it’s laughable. It is just laughable. So, yeah, good to see Doge and Elon Musk just taking a sledgehammer to this ridiculous spending. We’ve had our taxpayer dollars, man. This is what really gets people so pissed off about paying taxes.
You, you find out this, right? The Ukraine now Ukraine. So less king. You see this over the weekend. Zelensky is saying, hey, you know you’re on the books for giving us 175 billion. Well, we’ve only got 75 billion. Where’s the other hundred billion? Money laundering operation. I said this when Trump got elected. In my next letter, the very next morning, I said that I believe there will be searches, Internet searches will start to really pick up for countries that do not have an extradition treaty with the U.S.
[00:20:11]:
and that happened. You can check it yourself because look, these people aren’t going to be protected. They’re ripping off the band aid and that’s what the Democrat Party and these Marxist groups, that’s what they’re so upset about, the fact that, yeah, guess what, they’re shutting these money laundering schemes down and now they’re going to start unveiling and revealing who is responsible and what, who’s been getting paid on this? Okay, the names are going to be shocking. It won’t shock me, probably you, but the public is going to be, I think, most shocked and really pissed off from what comes out of this. Again, I don’t think we deserve Elon Musk. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t think we deserve Trump. Yes, his first term. I had some issues.
Still do it. By the way, these death jabs must be removed from the market. Don’t know why that hasn’t happened yet. Just every study that comes out tells you these are poison death jabs and so that they, they had to be removed. Besides that and his, you know, his lockdowns. Look, obviously I’m a huge fan of Trump. I don’t know that we deserve him, but thank God we have him. Same thing with Elon Musk.
[00:21:21]:
Right. By the way, Tesla stock got hit today. It was down as much as 6%. Just came rallying back here at the close right now, down three and a half percent at 390. Because I think people are realizing, okay, these cars companies, yeah, guess what, they’re going to be impacted by tariffs, but Tesla’s not really one of them. Tesla makes most of their parts and cars in the U.S. so the, the tariff issue would not apply to them, certainly nowhere near what it would apply to, you know, for gm, et cetera. So Tesla, as I’ve heard us say, often buy it, buy it on every dip of more than 3%.
And you know, we saw it today, right? So again, we’re big believers in monthly dollar cost averaging. But I think anytime you’ve got some extra cash laying around, that is the one you want to buy. As Elon Musk said on his earnings call last Wednesday, what a great. You really should yield to yourself. To go back and listen to his opening, I’d say 20 minutes or so where he opened the call. He always opens their earnings calls. And he just kind of gave the state of the union for Tesla. And he said very clearly at the beginning, you know, we’re.
[00:22:26]:
People should really realize now we’re not an EV company. We are truly an AI company. And then laying out what that means for Optimus, laying out what that means for fully autonomous driving. We took a trip this weekend to see Tyler and Sam in Austin. And on the way there, I drove because, I mean, Tesla is a great, It’s a blast of a car to drive, but we used it probably 56% of the way there on the way home. I used it 95% of the way home. And I can’t tell you how awesome it is to be able to put it on hurry mode where it goes about 10 miles over the speed limit and just watch it do its thing. It is, it is, it is really amazing because I don’t mind driving, but when you got to take a trip that’s about three hours long, that’s kind of the distance between here to Austin.
And you don’t have to worry about driving. You do have to keep your eyes on the road again, because they still. You’re not fully approved. You take your eyes off the road, then you can start getting beeped at. Okay, that is a little annoying. But they, they just. The last thing Tesla can do is start having accidents happen and wrecks happen, because that will ruin everything. So I completely understand.
[00:23:35]:
And I, and I’m compliant as much as possible with that. There are some cheap modes you can do get away with. But I think that when people realize just what’s coming with Optimus, what’s coming with fully autonomous cars and the Robo Cyber cabinet which by the way, it’s all June of this year, it’s going to be out fully, fully throughout Texas and California. Full autonomous driving by end of this year and those two in these two states and then next year every state in the union, that’s what Musk said will be and then they’ll be doing licensing deals with all the big auto companies. So that’s going to be exciting. Optimus will be the biggest product launch ever. If you’ve looked into this at all. I think that’s a very true statement.
There really is no second to, to Optimus for what they he can already do. They’re gonna have about 10000 of them this year in just in Tesla factories. And then next year, you know, 2026, look out, you know, it won’t be long till there’s a million every year. Then, then they’ll, they’ll, they’ll, it’ll be exponential growth. So go from a million to 10 million to 100 million to a billion. They were looking at that by 2030 they’re going to be everywhere. And so that’s, that’s why we’re so confident and it’s why we like this stock so much. It’s always, it’s always a good buy on pullbacks.
[00:24:51]:
It’s the one stock to own for the innovation revolution. That is our call. Again, we finished higher in January. I told you a second ago, there is a bit of seasonality to be concerned with on February 14th. I just don’t think that’s going to wind up being a big deal. By the way, January, we also had 10 out of 11 sectors finished higher than month. So it was a, it was extraordinarily good month. January was.
Tyler just told me Fear and greed index is at 44. That’s back into fear mode and it will also sell. Also news today. I’ll just mention this briefly. More proof of animal spirits. This came out today. ISM manufacturing index just climbed to a 27 month high of 50.9%. Animal spirits.
As the Dow Jones news article said, the index is surging on optimism about Trump’s vow to cut taxes and reduce regulations. You think? Yes, that is what’s happening here. Also we learned today that construction spending also climbed to a for a third straight month. Again that was, this is for December and so Again, you’re going to see just more and more of this. I tell you, everybody, we talk to business owners, we talk to companies, we’re on conference calls with all say the same thing. It’s like night and day. It’s like night and day between Biden and Trump. Again, that is the definition of animal spirits.
[00:26:24]:
It’s going to show up in the stock market and it’s absolutely already starting to show up in the economy. We would be more concerned about the Fed and Jay Powell if it weren’t for the fact that we see rates going down naturally anyway along with inflation. So we are not concerned about a strong economy, meaning the Fed’s got to raise rates. And I’ll just say this for our newer folks, I don’t care about race anyway. It just doesn’t matter yet. Matters to housing. But look, my first house interest rate was, I think it was 10, 11%. Kind of painful to remember that, but it was, we just paid it because that’s what you had to do.
Also in the dot com melt up 95 to 2000, the average yield on the 10 year T note was 6.1% was spiked over 7% and it didn’t stop stocks from going parabolic in a five year melt up. So tech stocks are highly interest rate sensitive, or so we’re told. It didn’t matter back then. So right now the 10 years at 4.5%. So you see, I just don’t think the rate story matter, but it will matter when rates start going down certainly for the housing market and other derivatives of it. So you know, housing is the most important financial asset. It is the leading economic indicator period. There is not a close second based on our work.
[00:27:47]:
And so it is very important. We do want to see rates come down. It’s going to help so many people be able to qualify, get into a home and get into the home that they really want to live in. So yeah, Trump, Trump. It’s important to Trump, it’s important to us. It’s going to happen. I just don’t think it matters to the market very much. So we’ll see how that plays out.
All right, let’s look under the hood today. The internals were not great. Today we had 3 to 1 negative advanced decline for NASDAQ. NYSE was 2 to 1 negative. Not as bad. Volume today was 50. These are both negative volumes days by the way, a NASDAQ 52% down volume day, NYSE 67 down volume day. And then we also had, we had 100 stocks at 50 week high to 331 hitting a new 52 week low.
Not great today but again these, these Mondays can can freak people out in our sector watch today. What is this? Five sectors finished higher, six finished lower. No real damage done here. Technology again the leader to the downside with the Nasdaq being lower. Semis being lower as well. Technology down 1.8%. Consumer discretionary down 1.3 to the upside. Consumer staples up 7/10.
[00:28:58]:
Utilities up 5 10. No great harm or gains. Anyway there could come back again in the markets today. That is, that is what you want to see on news of this. This the the media does their damnedest to make sure is is scary to us. By the way, bitcoin just rallied now back over 102,000. Let’s take a look at the at the at the screen now. Commodity Watch just talked about a minute ago.
Love, gold, silver and the miners. Gold today all time high up 16 bucks an ounce at 2850. Silver up 29 cents announced at 32.55. Copper today also up. What is that 1.2% today. Copper at 433 a pound. It’s a great fundamental story technical as well. Crude oil today gave back some down to 20 cents a barrel at 72.33.
And again finally the day bitcoin last trade exactly is. There’s my. You know what? This is pretty close. 102,200 at the high of the day right now. That puts it up 8, 10 1% for the day after hitting a low of what 90,000 actually overnight in futures markets. Now back again to 102,200. All right folks, that’s it for today. Always appreciate you.
Listen have a great day and even better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close.