In today’s episode, Kip dives into another eventful day on Wall Street, where markets continued their climb except for UnitedHealthcare, which took a heavy hit and pulled the Dow lower. Kip breaks down the biggest market movers, including soaring gains in Nvidia and Tesla, fueled by major announcements and Elon Musk’s headline grabbing speech alongside President Trump in Saudi Arabia.

Don’t look back to the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the Daily VRA Investing podcast. Hope you had a good day today. Another good day in the markets today, unless you owned UnitedHealthcare, which is down 18%. That dragged the Dow Jones lower on the day by a couple of hundred points. But everywhere else, it was really a continued celebration. If you saw Trump’s speech at all in Saudi Arabia before the crown prince there, which you met him at the airport, which is something apparently is very rare.

Trump is beloved there. You saw a speech there. I mean, he had Elon Musk with him. Marco Rubio was there. I don’t know that J.D. vance was there. I heard him reference J.D. vance a few times in the speech.

[00:00:39]:
But if you watched it, you just had a very good snapshot of why it is that Trump is such a beloved figure by the people that love him at least. Right. And that’s certainly the case in Saudi Arabia because he’s so great at praising others and building others up. But at the same time, again, if you watched it, it looked to me like a stump speech. Like the guys running for office there, you know, it looked like a campaign rallies to, to a degree, but the people just ate them up there. Fantastic. Got some really big news out of there, too. Nvidia and, and Tesla.

Nvidia closed up 5 1/2% today on the they are sending 18,000 of their top AI chips to Saudi Arabia. Tesla’s up you Elon Musk spoke there. Tesla got legs. Matter of fact, during the time Elon was speaking also closing up close to 5% today, up a big 14 bucks today on news talking about the robo taxi and you’ve seen videos probably released last night of it’s now doing a dance with a toe tap showing pretty amazing ambiguity and flexibility and coordination. And then also, of course, they talked about Tesla, they talked about the robo taxi putting out a release saying if you own a Tesla, guess what, you’re about to be able to turn it into a cash machine because your car can be used while you’re sleeping to take people from where they need to go. So a lot happening here, folks. A lot of, I think it was what, $600 billion worth of deals announced in Saudi Arabia in exchange for Trump. Doyle there, of course, he’s also going to get the airplane as well.

I should say the Department of Defense is. But the guys all over the place always jet setting. But you can tell he’s very happy to be back in Saudi Arabia. Where he acknowledged, by the way, the speech was fascinating because as Tyler and I were talking about in pre podcast meeting, he just praised the people there. He said, you know what, the neocons didn’t do this. The warmongers didn’t consolidate your interest and bring you together. You did this. The people in this room, in your country, you built this magnificent area with building sky flying, rising to the skies and just gorgeous, you know, so much more, so many more new things they have there than we have here in our own country.

[00:03:01]:
And as Trump reminded us, that’s because they didn’t spend $7 trillion fighting two wars for no reason whatsoever. Not to mention the 7,000 lives lost and current military veterans. It was 32 suicides a day. Not to mention all the injuries and, and lives, lives ruined. Right. None of that was ever necessary. That’s a point that Trump has been consistent on from long before he got into politics and he’d been exactly right about it. So anyway, it was a good day for Trump, good day I think for America and certainly a good day for Nvidia and for Tesla.

But again, we talked about this yesterday, we talked about this a lot. You know, the comps between this market right now to 2000, you know, to 2020 in the pandemic. And it looks almost, and it does, you know, today the SP 500 recaptured all of its tariff losses and it’s still 5% below all time highs which were reached back in what, February or what was that, February or April? All time highs in the SPF 100 were reached. Yeah, all time high was in actually is the December. No, that’s the wrong, wrong quote. That was for Bitcoin. Yeah, all time highs were in late February for the S500. So we’re still 4 or 5% below those all time highs.

But we did get back and regained all of our losses from the beginning of the kind of tariff meltdown we are now hitting, just an FYI, not all of our indexes. But I say, well, you know, there’s a couple like NASDAQ, NASDAQ 100 are now beginning to hit our most overbought readings of extreme overbought on stairways. And that’s not a level that we think you should sell at unless you’re a real short term trader and you’re worried about a shakeout here taking place. We’ve come a long way, short period of time, but it is a level where we start, we start pausing our buying and anything that’s at this level of our bot, we’ll Write that up for you tomorrow and tell you where our individual holdings are and what we’re doing here with our own money. But we’re getting to that level again. This is, this is not a sell signal. It’s probably not a reason to stop buying because we’re just now hitting that level. But as we covered off with you over the years, once we get to this, this level overbought.

[00:05:28]:
That is where bad things happen, at least in the very short run. But again, not a sell signal by any means. This market wants to go higher again, the parallels to 2020 are right in front of us. Okay, almost, almost everything. We had a four to five week bear market in both cases with losses in this particular move lower of more than 30%. In the 2020 bear market we had losses of like 45% on the average stock. So this one wasn’t that bad, wasn’t as bad as 2020. But everything else about this feels the same, except for the fact that we’ve yet to have all the trillions of dollars combined between stimulus and quantitative easing, $9 trillion that was forced into the economy in 2020.

How could stocks not go up and how could we not have massive inflation at 41 year highs? Because that’s exactly what happened here. So we don’t have that here. But we also have something else happening here that’s, that’s different. Now the market started falling not just because of Trump’s tariff policy. I think maybe he even knew this, but because we’re. Doge was cutting jobs and cutting expenditures. Right now some of those have not been codified. I’m not sure any of them have been.

So we don’t know they’re going to stick even. But one thing, the markets like, they like the flow of easy money. They want money supply soaring. Look, this is what drives inflation related assets. And we’re talking about equities, we’re talking about gold, we’re talking about bitcoin, and we’re talking about housing. You know, I think what’s giving the market this is, if you’re a, if you’re a conservative person, you believe we should balance our budget. This is not what you want to hear, but it is the reality. I talked about this yesterday, that look, this is the world that we live in.

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I’m not sure any politician has the courage or the political capital necessary to change this. Because they’re the outliers. You know, the Chip Roys and the Ron Paul, the Senator Rand Paul of, of Congress, they’re the outliers. They’re the minority, everybody else is in let’s spend money mode. And I think again, that’s what the markets love. Yesterday you may have seen this, that the, the House, Republican House has proposed a new budget which includes $4 trillion in tax cuts. Fantastic. There should be even more than that.

Let’s go for 10 trillion in tax cuts. But 4 trillion tax cuts and 1.5 trillion in spending cuts. Those are mostly accounting tricks by the way. Looks good, sounds good, not really much of anything. So we’re looking at another 2.5 trillion added to the deficit this year. That’ll get us close to $29 trillion deficit this year, which is still, by the way, only 125. At that level we’ll be at 123% debt to GDP. I say only that’s because Japan and China are so much higher as our other European countries.

We’re again 123% probably by the end of the year. But Trump should also have revenues increasing, meaning GDP should be growing. And so that’s always been the Reagan mode. Right. Let’s supply side economics. Let’s grow our way out of this. And so I certainly rather see that than a far left Democrat plan which is just spend, spend, spend, raise taxes, raise taxes, raise taxes. But the longer term concern is that over the next decade, just the next 10 years, we’re going to be adding more than $20 trillion to our national debt.

[00:08:47]:
So this is going to be a day reckoning coming, but that day is not now. And our job here is to beat the markets. Our job here is to make sure we’re in the best investments to beat the markets. We’ve done that 18 to 21 years. I feel pretty confident we’re going to do it, do it again this year. And I think this, this again that the comps to 2020 are extremely accurate. We made all time highs again in August of 2020 after the plandemic. I don’t think, I don’t.

We’re only at 4 or 5% down. It’s not going to take us to August unless we have another big shakeout, which I don’t see happening. Why would we. Right. I think the lows are in place not just for the year. The lows are in place for the rest of Trump’s presidency. I think we can get back to the fact that just almost about every dip is going to be bought. And the reason is it’s the same reason we’ve been talking about here.

It’s a retail investor. It just powered the day they are the showstopper. They are the reason that we didn’t frankly have a big crash. The Mrs. Watanabes of our era. Bloomberg had a piece on this yesterday and it showed just how horrible institutional investors had been positioned going into the tariff news that we had over the weekend with the US and China. Institutional money managers were on the wrong side of every major issue. They were short of stocks long volatility of the vix, short the dollar and short Bitcoin.

That’s how they were set up. Whereas retail investors had been buying the dip. They’re aggressively long, they’ve supported the market and that’s what’s continuing. So as we recovered yesterday, this is when you see really big moves like Melta moves higher take place again at the Dow Jones of UnitedHealthcare hadn’t announced what they announced today. Basically pulling all their guidance. I think they their CEO’s gone stock down 18% today. But if that hadn’t happened, we’d see sharp gains across the board for every major index today. And I think that’s what this market really wants to keep doing because institutional investors, the big money look what they have to do.

[00:10:53]:
They don’t just have to cover their shorts or you know, again, shorts were record highs. Okay. They don’t just cover the shorts. Didn’t have to go long as well. That’s double buying in effect. That’s a lot of fuel for the fire. And I think that’s what’s going to continue also. And this is the key point.

I’ll share this chart in tomorrow morning’s letter. Take a look at the semis. The semis bottomed on April 6th. The evening of April 6th. Okay, that’s that the market bottom on the 7th from that day, from April 7th. If you pull up a relative string chart. I think I put this on Twitter today on X today the semis had been leading from exactly that point leading the S500 higher. And so that’s the ultimate Buy signal right there.

Semis leading nasdaq, NASDAQ leading the market. That’s exactly what’s taking place again today. SMH Semi ETF up another big 3.3% after 5.8% yesterday. A Nasdaq today up 1.6% again. Nasdaq led all the broad market and SMH led nasdaq. This is textbook bull market action. It continues here again from the exact bottom lows on April 7th. I don’t think that’s an accident and I think it continues.

[00:12:08]:
The lows are in for. Tyler was giving me A rundown of the Mag 7 names. They’re everything but Apple, which was only up about a half percent today, has really been. And Google, Google’s really been floundering of course because there’s search issues. I don’t know that story very well, but apparently the use of AI like Grok, which is just unbelievable, is really cramping the search feature of Google and other search engines. Then why wouldn’t it? If you use any of these, you don’t have to worry about the garbage. You don’t have to filter through four pages of searches to find out what might be the real story. They’re not going to massage, manipulate what your Google searches are.

So Grok is just right at you. It’s highly accurate. It doesn’t get everything right. There have been a number of times where I’ve had to press Grok on an issue or two and you know what? They come right back. You know what, you’re right. It just admits it. You’re right. I got that wrong.

Sorry about that. Here’s the reality. You’re right or it gives you what the, the real story is. So what’s interesting about Grok, by the way? And I, I don’t think this takes a rocket science to figure this out. If you use the, the, the, the voice activated Grok, it’s just incredible. You just have a running dialogue with this thing. I know most app AI apps have this now but. And yet you’re careful because it, it’s running in the background all the time so it’s picking up everything you say and, and it will just answer you when you’re just on a phone call.

[00:13:35]:
I’ve had that happen. It’s kind of, kind of jarring a little bit. You got to remember to turn off the voice feature but it is always listening, which is a bit of a problem maybe, but you know, this is where we live in, isn’t it? Privacy. What privacy. But again the, the real story about Grok is this is the brains of Optimus. This is what we’re looking at. It’s the brains of Optimus. And so it’s training the AI how to have a dialogue and to help people help our human being.

Friends with what I think today Musk said there’ll be 10 billion robots on the planet here. I forget exactly when he said but you know, it’s coming in the next decade bargain outnumber human beings and being working throughout every industry and they’ll be in most households and that’s just the day that’s coming Pretty soon. Wild future we live in here. But again, all of this is bullish. It’s a roaring 2000s. It’s the innovation revolution, not we. None of that ever went away. We just had our tariff kerfuffle and that put a, put a crimp in everything again.

Very similar to another 2020. And then boom, it’s over. And now we’re off to the races again and again, institutions on the wrong side, they have to keep buying. So this market semis are leading. We’re seeing all the signs there that this market wants to keep going higher, which it almost certainly is going to do. By the way, the percentage, this is interesting. I think the percentage of stocks above the 50 and 200 day, this is kind of one of our tells when we go, okay, we come too far, too fast. We’ve flown too close to the sun.

[00:15:04]:
The percent of S500 above the 50 day moving average is up to 69.8% today. That’s, that’s fairly high. Okay, but the, the yearly high was 87, so we still got room to run there. And it’s even better on the 200 day. The percent of S P 500 above the 200 day moving average is only sitting at a 52.4. Okay, so 83.2 was the 52 week high there. So we’ve got room to run before the, the market as a whole starts becoming overbought. So short term, yeah, we’re hitting overbought levels, which could be a little concerning.

But longer term, medium term, long term, not even close. This market wants to keep going higher. Just watch the semis folks, and the semis keep going higher. You want to keep being on the market. That’s about as simple as it is because that’s just exactly how it works. Let’s take a look under the hood today. Also, by the way, tonight we have. I should have started the podcast with this.

We have our VRA members here. We have a members only podcast tonight with vista Gold at 8 o’ clock Eastern. You should have gotten that email. If you don’t for any reason shoot me a, shoot me a text or, or shoot us an email and we’ll send you that, that, that member’s Zoom link to join us tonight. It’ll only be 30, 40 minutes with CEO Fred Ernst, but looking forward to that. It’s a lot happening with that company and I thought there was one more thing I wanted to share here. No, I’ll save the rest for tomorrow morning’s letter. Again, let’s look under the hood today.

[00:16:31]:
Here we go. We had internals, were good today. Not great, but good now. They were very good yesterday. Today we had advanced decline. I make it simple. Both for NYC and NASDAQ came in at 1.5 to 1 positive again with the Dow being down today 268 points. Not a real surprise.

UnitedHealthcare drove and of course there’s a lot of selling taking place in big pharma stocks. Good riddance to all of you as far as I’m concerned. We don’t need any. We don’t need any. We need some of you, we don’t need most of you just go away modern and fights go away, don’t come back. But yeah, that, that, that’s a drag in the market, but I think that’s a good kind of drag. I think we can agree on that. Can’t wait.

These vaccines, these, these death jabs, get them. Why are they still in the market, by the way? What is going on here? Why are these things still. You’re looking at 9 million kids a year. This is from the latest from the. I believe it’s from the either National Institute of Health or CDC. 9 million kids a year still taking these, these jabs, right? Kids don’t have risk from, from, from COVID What, what, what’s the purpose of this? And, and a lot of times they’re getting like, I think the recommended doses is two or three a year for something, for an illness that can’t even impact them. But we know it has severe short term, medium term, long term side effects, even death effects, myocarditis, kids just dropping dead. But there is no reason.

[00:17:57]:
I don’t know what’s going on. It’s very frustrating. I know no president is perfect, but RFK Jr. You know, have you been compromised? What’s going on here? Because that’s the first thing you said that was coming off the market and they’re still on the market. That really has to change. Just from karma point of view and from. It’s just, it’s frankly, it’s evil. It’s just evil that these things are still on the market.

That, that because there is, you, there is no good reason for this. Okay, get them off the market. Pull them now. This stain, this is stain on Trump, on his presidency and everybody that’s been appointed by Trump within the HHS and nih, all of them. This is a stain on, on you and your reputation every day that goes by that these evil jabs remain on the market. Speak up, make your voice heard because apparently that’s the only way to get this, get their attention. What else today? The sector watch today also good, not great. We had seven sectors finish higher, four finished lower.

Led to the upside by technology again leading the way up 2.2%. Consumer discretionary again that’s what you want to see people buy things they don’t really need. Up 1.4% today. To the downside again health here led by UnitedHealth down almost 3%. Real estate down 1.3%. 10 year yield hit a hit back right back to the same levels that the 10 year was when we had our tariff semi meltdown. Right. That’s where we are now.

[00:19:20]:
Again we talked about this yesterday. Look, the economy is back in growth mode and so against 10 years now back to 4.5%. Economy’s back in growth mode. I think the estimates now are for Jay Powell and his band of merry money printers to cut rates only twice this year. And I guess that’s just going to be the, that’s going to be the kind of the carburetor on Trump’s presidency. That’s I guess the bond market vigilantes think they can control them like this and maybe they can. But there is no good reason for this. The CPI numbers today came in at 2.3%.

Estimates were a bit higher than that. That’s another good sign we have disinflation in this country, not inflation, oil prices of course which oil was up today. But oil prices have really gotten smoked as well. It’s all the drivers of inflation that you can’t find, you can’t find signs of inflation in this economy to speak of, certainly not as a whole. But anyway here we are. 10 year yield, 4.5% but it just doesn’t matter. It really just doesn’t matter. We’re back in growth mode.

The bond market at this level is just not going to cause a big problem. We’ll probably get to a point we get to 5%. I think we’ll have a shakeout until people if we do. I don’t think we will. But if we get to 5% yield on the 10 year. By the way the 30 year yields hit a 18 year high last night. So again it’s attention getting but I think we’ve got a ways to go at this time before it’s going to be a problem for the market’s point of view. But 5%, you betcha that that’ll be a wake up call for people.

[00:20:53]:
But again as a reminder in the during the biggest bull market in this in this country’s history. 1995 to 2000.com melt up. The average on the 10 year yield was 6.1%. So yes, we have far more debt now. Yes, it’s a much bigger deal now to have to pay interest on on a higher debt levels. But again the market had no problem melting up then. I think we can support a 4.5% yield. 5% is if we get there again.

I don’t think it’s going to happen if we get there. I think you want to have some cash. I think you’ll want to have raised some cash. The markets, the markets will shake things out here. Okay, let’s take a look at commodity watch today. Gold today I hit late refresh here. I think I’ve got this right. Gold finish up 9/10 of 1% today at 3255.

Silver up 1.4% at 3310. Copper today. Also a big 2 1/2% today. Crude oil today again bouncing back better than 2% to 6358. Remember it was 55 not too long ago. This is more of a comfort zone for crude oil. I think energy stocks make a makeup make for a very interesting addition to the portfolio. Something we’re looking at here.

[00:22:02]:
By the way, we’ve got some very good news today on Lost Soldier Oil and Gas. I’ll save that for our zoom meeting we’re going to have which is by the way been moved to next Thursday, not this Thursday. They’ve got multiple announcements coming out that we’ll be able to share with you then. So not again, not this Thursday. The following Thursday at 8pm Eastern. All VRA members will have a zoom with loss. Soldier market calendars for that please. By the end of the day, Bitcoin.

Yeah. After breaking down to that hundred thousand range, not really 98 to 100,000 range. Now starting to consolidate gains here at 104,200. I see no reason this move doesn’t continue. Remember, the all time high is 192 or so. The entire market cap for Bitcoin now is just over $2 trillion and it’s ready to go a whole lot higher as the best supply demand story of all time. And there’s just so many great things happen unless there’s a hack, unless there’s a big. I honestly don’t know what’s going to stop Bitcoin at this point.

Right. Technically it’s back on a buy signal. It is overbought. Yes. That’s why it’s consolidating here. But, you know, I don’t know, from a, like a big picture macro point of view, what can really stop Bitcoin at this point? It’s not going to be regulation. That’s over with. Right.

[00:23:11]:
Unless there’s some kind of a hack. You know, as we looked into it, quantum computing will pose challenges to the, to the blockchain, but that’s a decade away, minimum. That’s what, at least that’s what we’re hearing. That’s what Grok said, by the way, just last night. So I think we’ve got time there. I don’t know what’s going to stop Bitcoin at this point. And I think what’s really interesting at this point is not just Bitcoin but bitcoin related companies. Okay.

They’ve really jumped back to life here. We had a couple of favorites here that we have as well. And we’re following this very closely. All right, folks, that’s it for today. Hope you had a great day and even better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close.