Tune into today's podcast as Tyler reflects on the day's slow market performance, discussing the potential impact of upcoming inflation data and the latest Fed speakers' statements. He also dives into the significance of bond yields and provides insights into the cryptocurrency market, particularly focusing on Bitcoin's impressive performance.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Wednesday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there today. It was another kind of meandering session here for our markets today. Our major indexes did, did finish lower across the board today, but it wasn’t all bad out there. And there are a few positives that come with a bit of a meandering session like this today, which I’ll cover here. But a lot of this is likely looking forward here as all eyes are on tomorrow’s inflation data.

Here the latest look at inflation. We’ll get the PCE data ahead of the open tomorrow. It’s much anticipated because this is what the Fed says that is their main look at inflation. So important data coming out tomorrow. And then of course we’ll get, as they like to do, roll out the Fed speakers. We had a few today, got a few tomorrow. After this data, I’m sure that they’ll have nothing new to say as they usually mean. Why we keep putting these people in front of cameras, why we make these people celebrities.

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They should be public servants, right? Even though the Federal Reserve is not technically part of the government. That’s a story for another podcast at another time. But why we allow this to happen always blows my mind. It never ceases to, but what you can expect to hear, in my opinion at least, is just continued jawboning from these Fed speakers. They’ll parrot the talking points from the Fed, this higher for longer theme. And the interesting part here is that even today when those Fed speakers came out and continued to talk about, well, we’re not going to even think about thinking about cutting rates until we start to see that the 2% inflation target is in our sights. Now that’s another story for another podcast as well. The Fed’s mandate for 2% inflation is a recent mandate.

Before about the mid seventy s or so, the goal was always for 0% inflation. They’ve forgotten that completely, have no intentions of getting back to that. As a matter of fact, they’re going to think about raising those expectations. But go back to today is Fed speakers. The important aspect today was even with those Fed speakers jawboning the market lower, talking about the Fed’s higher for longer theme, the bond market is not buying it. The ten year yield peaked this morning ahead of those speakers and then just shrugged them off completely. The ten year yield ended up closing down over nine tenths of 1% today to a 4.27 as Kip and I have talked about here at length. At these levels, yields do not concern us.

And if you’re not a regular listener, I’ll go ahead and briefly tell you why we’ve equated this time period that we’re in right now. We refer to it as the roaring 2020s. Right. Most closely resembles to us the.com melt up from 1995 to 2000, where the Nasdaq rallied 575% at the time. The average for yields from the ten year at that time was above 5%, and it wasn’t enough to take that market lower. That’s really on the low end. It spent a lot of that time above 6% as well, and it wasn’t enough to derail tech stocks. So yields at this level don’t concern us.

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There’s going to be plenty of people talking about it out there that, oh, well, if yields do head any higher, it’s going to derail this market. We don’t think that that’ll be the case. We’ve said that for some time now, and it hasn’t been the case as we’re still hovering right around all time highs here, even after a little bit of a pullback today, very minor one this morning. We did also get a revised update from Q four, gdp revised slightly lower from 3.3% to now 3.2%. Still a very good number here and one that we like to see. But again, kind of a meandering day for the market. The good news here is that we finished off of the lows of the day really across the board, and the Dow Jones actually finished right at its highs of the day today. So on a slow day like today, that’s what you want to see.

And there’s a real positive here to these kinds of minor pullbacks when you’re right in the range of all time highs, is that our markets have been able to work off any overbought readings here. We’re not just out of extreme overbought territory. We’re really out of overbought levels here across the board for our major indexes. So that’s a bit of a boon from these minor pullbacks near all time high levels, telling us that once we get back to those all time highs, we’ve got room to run before we get back or we have room to run after we hit those all time highs. So let’s take a look here at our market action on the day to day. Again, all of our major indexes did finish lower on the day to day. We were led by the Dow down just zero, 6%. So really essentially flat on the day at 38,949.

Next up, the S and P 500 down 0% at 5069. And I’m going to go back to this overbought conversation really quickly here, because the SP remains within range of its all time high here. And yet only 70% of SP 500 stocks are above their 200 day moving average. Now, does that sound like the signs of euphoria to you or the signs of a market top? We think not. Here. We actually look at that as another reason to remain extremely bullish. The signs of a top when everything’s going up, everything’s extreme overbought. We’re hitting extremely elevated to levels above our moving averages.

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We’re just not there yet. And I’ll cover some more of that in our internal watch. But we do continue to see signs of a market that is broadening here, specifically in the S and P 500. It is no longer just seven stocks, the magnificent seven, keeping this market up. Take a look at this here. Just today with the S and P 500 lower on the day. The equal weighted S and P 500 just hit an all time high today. If that’s not a bright spot on the day, I don’t know what is.

Yes, it was only up slightly 0.4%. But again, that’s the equal weighted S and P 500 there. Again, all time high. So anyone who tries to tell you that it’s just the mega cap names rallying here really isn’t telling you the whole story. Another sign that I’ll cover a little bit in our internal watch as well is that we are continuing to see the number of stocks making new lows. It’s trending downward. If we were at a top here, we’d be seeing stocks selling off. We’d be seeing the number of stocks making new lows increasing.

Again, another sign that this is a market that is broadening here. Yet another bullish signal. Next up after that, the Nasdaq down just over half of 1% to 15,947. I will point out here that the semis did lead the way lower today. That’s not what you want to see. But one day doesn’t make a trend. Down 1.1%. But again, we see this as more of a pause that refreshes more than anything else.

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Keeps us out of those extreme overbought levels before the next move higher. Lastly here, the small caps down zero point 77%. They’ve been leading for the last few sessions. Lagged a bit today. Still, we look for this group to rally from here. But today closing at $2,040 for the Russell 2000. Now, let’s take a look at our internals on the day today. Not a stellar day as you may expect, with all of our major indexes lower on the day, but not a terrible day either.

No big negative beats anywhere here. Declining stocks did beat out. Advancing stocks came in nearly flat on the NYSE, slightly worse on the Nasdaq. But again, no big beats here. No two to one or three to one beats or anything in that territory. So not terrible. No, really red flags there. 52 week highs to lows.

Our bright spot on the day today coming in over four and a half to one positive on the NYSE and just barely under two to one positive on the Nasdaq, just shy of that level there. So good readings from 52 week highs to lows again. We’re seeing the number of stocks making new lows continue to dry up. Lastly here, volume did come in slightly negative for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. All right, next up, looking at our sectors on the day, if you just saw this, you might have thought our markets finished a little better on the day because we did finish with seven out of our eleven s and P 500 sectors higher on the day today. We are led by real estate. If you know us here, we don’t really follow the S and P 500 real estate sector as closely as we do the housing index and home builders. Home builders just hit an all time high yesterday, hit an all time intraday high during the day today before closing down just slightly one 10th of 1%.

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But HGX, the housing index, hit yet another all time high today. As we say here, often new highs beget new highs. I’m not done with the all time highs there, but after that, after the real estate sector today, we did have the financials finishing up. That looks like an all time closing high there for the financials. Just shy today of an all time high intraday. After that, we had consumer discretionary hitting a 52 week high today. Again. That’s some strength.

After that we had utilities and industrials, higher industrials hitting an all time high today. And one more 52 week high today, materials. So we had three sectors hitting either a 52 week high or an all time high today. Again, not the sign of a market that wants to head lower. Our lagging sectors on the day were communication services, followed there by tech, healthcare and energy stocks. Now, finally for today, let me get a refresh of my screens here for our VRA commodity watch. Gold now flat on the day up slightly 0.1% to $2,044 an ounce. Silver now down just over three tenths of 1% to $22.67 an ounce.

Copper now down three tenths of 1% to $3.83 a pound. And oil down as well today, zero point 77% to $78.26 a barrel. Now onto the big news, where really all eyes have been today on today’s action. The main story continues to be bitcoin, which hit yet another 52 week high today. Up now 6.43% at $60,438 of bitcoin. Got as high as 63,915 during the day today. Impressive session from bitcoin. If you’ve been with us here for a while, you know this is a group that we like a lot, especially heading into the havening, which should take place sometime in April.

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But one of the pullbacks from today’s action, at least, was shortly after the peak of today, coinbase temporarily crashed, showing customers that their accounts were empty. Now that is a red flag there. And if you’re worried about where your cryptocurrency is being stored, Coinbase is, I believe, backed to where they’d have to make good on something like that happening. But if you’re afraid of that, there’s always the option to take your cryptocurrency off exchange. You can do a quick Google search to check that out. If you’re not a Google fan, I don’t blame you. But do a quick search on your favorite search engine and you’ll find pretty quickly how to get it off of platforms like that. But after that happened, bitcoin did pull back.

Coinbase went negative on the day. But I’ll point out here, the reaction was short lived. Coinbase even finished higher on the day, up zero point 79%. Also hitting a 52 week high today. And obviously that was a 52 week high from bitcoin as well. Again, bitcoin still up 6.69% at 60,483 a bitcoin. Folks, that is 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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