In today's episode, Kip recaps the record-breaking nine-day run in the S&P 500, and breaks down a rocky start to this week's trading as our major indexes are at short-term overbought and near resistance levels. Kip also shares insights into the VRA Investing System and what he is watching for in this market right now. From technical market signals to geopolitics, you won't want to miss this episode of the VRA Investing Podcast.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA Investing Podcast. Hope you had a good day, been away for a couple of days. Great to be back with you today. Hope you’re all doing well. Look, we just ended a record breaking, really a 21 year record run of advance of the SPF 100. Nine straight days of the market being higher.

10% is how much we ran in those nine days. Pretty remarkable. But as we share with our folks this morning, at the same time we’ve also hit extreme overbought levels only on our shortest term momentum oscillator. So this is not our most overbought reading, which we call extreme overbought on steroids. This is not that. Okay, now bitcoin’s there. Bitcoin hit that last Thursday and some specific issues are. But none of the indexes I’ve had extreme or bottom steroids.

This is a short term indicator only. It’s pretty common that when we’re, when in the middle of a big bull market run that will reach overbought levels like this. We’ll have a cool off period of typically not more than two or three days and then we’re off to the races again. We have to find out are we in a new bull market or now that we’re rallying back just to the 200 day moving average. And that’s only the S P 500 NASDAQ, right. The rest of the indexes have not even gotten there yet. What’s the market going to do? Technically it smells like this will be resistance. That’s what we said this morning and that’s what happened today.

[00:01:22]:
So you know, look, you got 200 day. Every major index now and every leading stock period has a 200 day moving average. Matter of fact, all their moving averages are, have rolled over. This is, this is the thing that concerned us the most when the market started breaking down. If you don’t want to see move these Moving averages, especially 200 day begin to roll over and you start getting these death crosses which of course is what we’ve had. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of controversy about death crosses. Some people say they’re just a bunch of bullshit. They are not.

They tend to, to work sporadically but unfortunately they tend to really be common in bear markets. So as we’ve been saying, look, we had a Zweig bread thrust, okay? These are pretty rare. We’ve only had six now we’ve had 17 of these since 1950 and, but the, they’re so powerful. I mean, the, the analytics of this and statistics are just incredible. In all 16 of the previous cases, the stock market, meaning the S 500, has been higher both six months and one year later, with returns of like 13 and 26%. 13 and 24%. And the market’s never again, never been lower, either six months or one year lower. So that’s fantastic going forward.

[00:02:32]:
But it doesn’t mean they’re automatically out of the woods yet. We could still have a retest and then, you know, because again, retest double bottoms are completely healthy. There’s still a lot of controversy about Trump’s tariff policy. But as we’ve been telling you here, I think what’s going to win the day here is that there’s been, first of all, if you’re going to have something, you’re going to do something big, big like this with the economy, this is a pretty damn good time to do it. Corporate America has never been stronger, period, full stop. That is just without question from every point of view. Yeah, the earning multiples are a little higher right now. They could go lower.

But from a just a balance sheet point of view, Corporate America has never come close to being this strong. And for the first America, the first America is in fantastic shape, continues to support both the economy and the market. So, you know, this was actually a pretty good time to introduce something revolutionary like Trump is doing with his tariff policy. And I think that the demand pull, the front running of these. We talked to, we talked, we’ve talked to a lot of people in the industry, in various industries about this, and they’re saying we are buying everything that we can. So we don’t. So we have product to sell to our customers. That’s happening throughout every industry, folks.

[00:03:46]:
What that means is the second quarter is going to be just fine. We’re not worried. We weren’t worried about this the first quarter. It was a negative GDP in name only. Again, that’s because the demand pool actually catted against GDP growth, which seems like very backward accounting to me. But that’s the way accounting is. And otherwise we would have had GDP of better than 2% for the first quarter. And it means the second quarter is going to be very strong.

So I think the only problem the economy is going to have is going to be the third and fourth quarter. So if we’re going to have a recession, it’s going to be so incredibly mild because this, this, the US Economy is a supertanker. It’s very hard to slow it down and get it off path. And if you do, it’s not going to be a radical turn unless we have something like the plan Dimmick. But even that again was a five week bear market. So we’ve got to get through this rocky period. This is why the internals matter so much. This is why the technicals matter so much.

But we continue to believe that earnings will be strong, continue to believe the US Economy from broad perspective is going to be strong. And it is Trump, let’s remember Trump is the president. So I think that anyone economic experiment that he’s going to try to pull off, I think if it’s just not working, we’ve already seen signs that he’ll pivot and I think that will continue to be the case. But again we are at extreme revolt levels. Short term some weakness here after this run is completely normal as we would say here. It’s just not a great time to put new money to work. It’s just now we get tomorrow be up a thousand points and everything I’m telling you now could be wrong. But historically speaking when we’re this overbought and the charts look the way they do.

[00:05:20]:
Tom, this is not a great time to put new money to work. If you’re a short term trader it’s probably not a great time to have a lot of exposure to the market. Frankly that’s not our approach here. We’re position builders. We do, we do use short term trading an environment for our leverage etf, but which we don’t own any of those now. We have one on as a hedge as a matter of fact. But again medium to long term we aren’t concerned. It’s only the short term that is presenting some potential challenges and the technicals I believe back that up.

One other thing we’re keeping an eye on here. One of the signs that told us this market was in trouble was the fact that we had, we had gold going higher while the US dollar bond prices and stocks moved lower. Now these are not, this is not a correlation you typically see play out and it’s beginning again. We’re only two days into this matter of fact bonds actually finished higher on the day to day. This has only happened for a couple days of trading here over the last week. But it’s something we don’t want to see return. We’ll keep you, we’ll keep you in the loop on that. But again the 10 year rallied back today to a 4.35% yield.

[00:06:30]:
That’s not that far away from 4.5, 1% where we were just about three weeks ago. So we’ll keep an eye on that. Gold is the story though. Gold is just a house on fire today. The miners. This is, this is where the leadership comes in. Gdx, this is what you want to see. GDX gold was up over 100 bucks an ounce today, by the way.

Gold. GDX, the minor ETF, up 4.3% today. GDXJ, the junior miner gold ETF up 5.8% today. That’s the biggest move we’ve seen in that in a long time and it continues to trend that we’ve seen over the last month where the junior miners. First of all, the miners are leading gold. That’s the recipe for a bull market, right? It’s like the semis leading the rest of the market. That’s what you want to see. So the miners have been leading goal for the entirety of 2025.

And now we have the junior miners leading the senior miners. This is textbook bull market action for this group. And I hate to disappoint all the folks out there calling a top in the gold market, but you’re wrong. You’re just wrong. This is a bull market that’s underway. It took over a decade for this bull market to build and you still can’t find anybody that wants to buy gold. A few more people are starting to buy gold now. You can find very few people that want to buy the miners.

[00:07:47]:
There’s just very little love out there in the investing world for either gold or the miners. Less than 1% of the population owns gold, period. So this is one of the lowest percentages we’ve ever seen. And again, when the public hates something this much, it’s a recipe for a bull market. It’s just. It doesn’t matter what asset class you’re talking about. That’s just the way that it works. So we’re continue to be very bullish on gold.

We came into the year, our number one sector for the for 2025 were the miners. And that’s exactly as played out. They are the top performers of the year again. GDX up 4%. Better than 4%. GDXJ up better than 5.7%. Today we look for this move to continue. Gold today up.

[00:08:29]:
What was the final quote here? Gold today up Salt today. Yeah, up 3.2%. Massive move higher today. Up 107 at 34.30. While I’m on the commodities, let’s go and talk about it. Silver. They also had a Big move higher up 2.9% at 3341 an ounce. Copper today also up 1.2% at $4.75 a pound.

Again the global economy according to Dr. Copper looks very good. Crude oil today rallying back a bit. Actually pretty good move today up 3.8% at, excuse me, 3.3% after getting smoked here over the last week or so. It’s still below 60 at $59.05 a barrel. And finally for the, for this space here. Well, we talking about bitcoin usually at the end. We’ll do it here.

Now. Bitcoin today rallying back again after getting hit down to 93,200. Right now 94,869. Hard to keep bitcoin down. Yeah, On Thursday of last week it extreme hit our most overbought reading of extreme overbought on steroids when bitcoin was at 97,000 and change again it’s had a slight pullback to 93 and change this morning. But still bitcoin is decoupled, clearly decoupled from tech stocks. All right, they traded. You can overlay one chart over the other for years and you think you’re looking at the same chart.

[00:09:52]:
They traded the same way. Bitcoin traded like a tech stock. That is no longer the case. Bitcoin is both decoupling from tech stocks and from the broader market while actually joining it a similar pattern to gold moving higher. So we’ll wait for this pullback to take place, this overbought pause as we see it in bitcoin to get repositioned here. But again just trading like it’s absolute beast mode. Certainly everyone seems to think this is the beginning of the next move that’s going to take bitcoin through to all time highs which of course now pass 109,000 a bitcoin. What a story.

What else today? Yeah, I think that’s most of the topics that I wanted to cover with you today. Again, the miners, I gotta tell you, this is a group that Sochi there was a major acquisition. I say major. It was a two billion dollar acquisition in Australia. It sounds, sounds almost insignificant in today’s investment world but it’s one of the larger acquisitions to take place in the mining space took place in Australia. Miner was acquired last night and I think that it was a junior miner and I think this is where the action is going to be. We happen to be very high on a couple of these so we like that idea. But again we’re starting to see now for the, for the full year so far, just in 2025, there’s already been M&A activity approaching $25 billion.

[00:11:17]:
That’s more than that existed in the entire industry last year. So M and A activity is increasing, really starting to build again the miners are leading gold. The junior miners are leading the senior miners. Again I got to tell you this is, everything about this is textbook bull market action for a move that we could believe will continue to head higher under the hood today. Not great internals but again the markets day, day was down. Dow down 390, SP 500 down 43. That’s seven tenths of 1%. Our loser on the day was Nasdaq.

Excuse me rose 2000 down just over 1%. Nasdaq today down 8/10 of 1%. However after the close. Let’s see. AMD just reported earnings. Let me take a look here. The semis did finish down 7/10 of 1% today but it looks like AMD reported the steers are now trading up 2%. So the street most likely number.

[00:12:11]:
Let me just. Yeah, they beat, they beat. Stock is jumping on good news so we’ll take that. We’ll have the details for you in tomorrow’s letter. But that is good to see amd they’ve had their struggles. They pre announced because of shipments to China and the way the terror policy can affect them, affect them. So they pre announced what was it, two, three weeks ago. But it’s good to see the stock rebounding here now 2.2% and after hours at $102 a share.

One of the leaders of course in the chip space. Again the internals today were not great about what you’d expect in a down market today. Advanced decline today slightly negative for both NYSE and NASDAQ but that, well NASDAQ was close to 2 to 1 but again we’ve had a hell of a run here again Zweig breadth Rust tells you the internals have been incredibly strong. Volume today was a 1 1/2 to 1 negative for NASDAQ. Just slightly negative for NYC and we had slightly more new 50 week lows and 50 week highs but again not, not, not a big deal here. This group, this, this area has been so strong. Sector watch today was negative. We had nine of 11 sectors finished low on the day.

[00:13:15]:
Led the downside by Healthcare down 2.7%. Nothing else really closed down much healthcare. A lot of changes coming in this space with government spending which is about time. Tired of seeing a new hospital spring up, aren’t you? Tired of seeing a new hospital spring up around you. You know, you go, you go through a commercial development and nine of the 10 buildings are based, are healthcare based. Right. I just think, I think AI is going to disappoint. A lot of the money has been spent in this group.

I don’t know about you. When I have a healthcare issue or I have any issue now, what do I do? My first, besides calling Tyler my first, my second, he always has the answer to everything. My second thing to do is to go check Grok. Grok has the answer to. Doesn’t matter what the topic is. It is. If you’re not using Grok, part of xai. Of course, if not using Grok, I highly recommend it.

Just extraordinary, extraordinary the way this AI works. And I think it’s going to replace a lot of those jobs. What do they say in five years all of the top surgeons will be AI? All of the top surgeons. Not some, all it’s change. The world is changing fast, folks, to the upside. Today we only had really one group of utilities up 1.2% today. Again, energy was flat on the day. All right, I think that’s, I think we covered all the bases here.

[00:14:38]:
Again, Bitcoin, last 94, 700 and overbought market. I don’t think a bigger reason to be concerned. It would be nice to see some deals getting closed on the terror front. But we do think the, we think the worst is behind us. A shakeout here wouldn’t surprise us because we are of a bot, but we think now’s the time to be focusing on what you want to own going forward for the rest of Trump’s presidency. Because when these lows are in, folks, that’s going to be it. There won’t be new lows. Right.

They’re likely in now. One thing you know about Trump, this is his, this is his going away tour. Okay. This is his legacy tour. He wants to get the bad news. I don’t think a recession would bother him whatsoever because he knows it would be shallow because he wouldn’t let it get, he would not let it get bad. Right. Of course, tomorrow’s Fed meeting and Jay Powell presser, you never know what to expect except, you know, he’ll say something that will slight Trump.

[00:15:32]:
You know, that’s going to come. But outside of that, Trump is going to get the bad news out of the way in his first year in office. So the last three years can be that golden age of America. I think that’s the primary theme here that we’re focused on. I know Tyler is. And, you know, we just have to get through this rocky period. And now’s the time to find the stocks that you want to own for the remain for the final three years of Trump’s presidency, because this market is going to rock and roll. The innovation revolution is still incredibly much intact, and so are the roaring 2000 and twenties.

People don’t talk about that anymore. You know, we go through a rough period, and people forget all the good stuff. We haven’t. So we just got to get through this. And then we’re back on the road to making a lot of money with our investments. And I think that’s going to be I think it’s be a very fun time.

All right, folks, that’s it for today. Hope you had a great day. Even better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close.