In today's episode, Tyler breaks down the market action to start the week and lays out what the VRA expects from this week's inflation and economic data. He also explores the intriguing surge in meme stocks, led by notable movements in AMC and GameStop, which have seen substantial gains. Tune into today's podcast to see what the VRA Investing System is telling us today.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Monday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA investing podcast. Hope you all had a great start to your week out there. Hope you had a great weekend as well. And to all the moms out there, a happy belated Mother’s Day weekend as well. Hope you all we’re able to spend it with some loved ones and to be able to cherish this time together as well. Hope you all had a fantastic Mother’s Day weekend out there.

To kick off the week. This week, though, we got a little bit of mixed action from our markets today, similar to some of the action we saw last week. Kind of a slow day. Now why would I say it’s a slow day? That sounds like a term that would get people to tune out from this podcast immediately. But I say it for a reason, and there’s a key here. And it’s important to remember on days like today, the old market adage never short a dull market. I talked about this last week as well, and we got a strong into the week, although today we did wrap up the dows winning streak here. I believe it was eight sessions in a row of gains for the Dow.

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You know, really pretty much flat. Kind of uneventful day out there. As all eyes are now on this week’s inflation data. You know, it’s really turned quickly here from all eyes on earnings to all eyes on economic data and the hope here, and don’t ever invest on hope. That’s not a good investing strategy. But looking at what we have to expect this week, I’ll compare it to a few weeks ago during the Fed meeting when I said the week before that or the week of that, I can’t remember was on the podcast, though, where I said, you know, looking back on this week, we want to be able to say the FOMC meeting was a non event. The jobs number that was coming out that week could either be a good thing or a non event. That’s how we wanted to be able to look back on that week and just look at how good earnings were and what the market did that week is exactly what we saw during that timeframe.

We’ve gone on to have a nice rally from that time period. And so as we go forward past this week, it’d be a great week to get some, at the very least, non issue inflation data, as tomorrow we’ll get back the producers price index and on Wednesday the consumer price index as well. And what everyone is looking for is indications that price pressures here are on our easing now. This morning we saw some consumer confidence numbers that came in above or below expectations, depending how you’re looking at it. But Americans are expecting inflation to be higher, again above current expectations from economists and market watchers. The american consumer is looking for hot inflation. Now, I don’t put a whole lot of thought into these surveys. They are just surveys.

After all. These are opinions, these are not facts. But they’re a fantastic gauge of sentiment. And as contrarians, you know that we love to use sentiment when everyone is on one side of the market. We love taking the other side of that bet. Just like earlier this year, or, excuse me, a couple years back. It wasn’t 2022, I believe it was 2021. We’re going into the year because 2022, we did have a bear market, 2021, though, going into the year after a crazy 2020.

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No one can fault all of the economists who said basically 100% of economists agreed that we were going to have a recession in 2021, 100%. That told us it was time to go long this market. So same thing here. When we’re looking at what the consumer confidence numbers are, we love to take the other side of this as well. If everyone thinks that inflation is going to be hotter next year, or at least too hot next year, then we love taking the other side of that. First of all, I know absolutely no one who’s ever been asked to be polled. If you’ve been asked to be polled for one of these economics data research ideas, let us know, because we have not heard from anybody who’s ever been polled in one of these things. So, yes, we’ll continue to use them as contrarian indicators here.

You know, another example of this is going into this year, the market was talking about six rate cuts in 2024. We said at the beginning of the year that was a failure fantasy, right? And what we look at with these things is kind of the psyop of negativity where everyone thinks things are going to be bad and it makes everyone just a little bit more negative. It makes people want to stay out of this market when they’re missing out on incredible gains. So don’t follow the crowd, folks. Come and join us here@vrainsider.com. If you haven’t already, now back to rate cuts. We do still remain optimistic for two to three rate cuts this year and overall for inflation data. This week, we’re looking for inflation pressures to begin easing.

Right now, expectations are for inflation to show an increase of 3.6% year over year, well above the Fed’s 2% inflation target and even higher above what should be the goal, inflation, which is 0%. That was the Fed mandate for the longest time until they changed it in recent history. But again, at 3.6%, it’s hotter than you’d like to see, but it would be the smallest increase in just over three years. So we don’t put too much emphasis on these individual monthly readings. They will have a short term impact on the market. But we would like to see some improvement from this reading and continuing to see the trend. Trend of lower inflation. Now, we have seen three reports in a row of worse than expected inflation numbers.

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Still, our view remains unchanged here, that if you zoom out that inflation is trending lower, we are seeing disinflation, and it was never going to go down in a straight line anyway. So we continue to look for inflation data to trend lower. Looking at our markets here, we see a ton of reasons to remain bullish here. One of the great, one of the reasons here today especially is some great work, again from Ryan Dietrich. He does some phenomenal analytics work. And here’s another one from last week that we just had three straight days with 74, more than 74% of NYSE stocks at advancing. Since 2000, when that has happened, the S and P has been higher one year later, 100% of the time with average gains of 23%. Those are the kind of analytics that make us want to say, back up the truck.

That’s the kind of market we’re in. Our view, has remained unchanged since the bear market lows of October of 2022. That buying the dip continues to be the smart money move. And we’re now starting to see, especially today, some animal spirits coming back into this market as the meme stock era looks to be back here yesterday. The creator who really made the GameStop saga famous is a guy who goes by the handle of roaring Kitty. You know, started out on Twitter, started out on Reddit with Wall street bets on Reddit, and then, of course, had to do congressional testimony. Now they’ve made a movie about it. Well, today or yesterday, he tweeted for the first time in a long time, just a simple image of somebody leaning forward in their chair as if they’re paying attention.

But that was enough to send the meme stocks flying. Today we had AMC now in after hours trading on the day is up 108%, GameStop up 83% on the day today. That is including after hours trading. So today’s trading plus after hours, just incredible moves here. So we’ll see if the meme stock era is back now, but it wasn’t just game AMC and GameStop. It was a lot of the meme SoC names really roaring back in a big way, still far, far below their highs. I mean, AMC is still only $6 a share. So yeah, it’s 100% move, but it also has been crushed.

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We’ll see if it’s able to hang on to these gains, but it was interesting to see that GameStop was halted multiple times today, kind of reminiscent of that meme stock era. We’ll see what happens here. We don’t have any positions as of yet, but this has been a fun story to follow and we’re going to continue to do so here. All right, so let’s take a look at our market action on the day today. As I mentioned earlier, we did finish mixed on the day with two out of our four major indexes higher on the day. But we were led by exactly what you want to see, tech. We had Nasdaq up 0.29% on the day to 16,388. I will point out the semis were higher earlier in the session, finishing just roughly flat on the day, down one 10th of 1%.

Then we have the Russell 2000, also positive today, up one 10th of 1% to 2062. After that, the S and P really flat on the day, down just 0.02% to 5221. And lastly here, the Dow Jones down two tenths of 1% to 39,431. And what a lot of people have missed about this market is the move that we’ve seen from the mid April lows. Folks, we are right back in the range of all time highs here. And yes, we are starting to hit extreme overbought levels on our short term vRA momentum oscillators. We are not there yet at all for our longer term VRA momentum oscillators, which makes us remain extremely bullish here, especially right in the range of all time highs like we are. We also saw the ten year continuing to fall today, down half a percent now at a 4.48.

Interestingly, today, though, the VIX was up 8.37%, still at a very low level at a 1360 here. Some of that is likely due to the anticipation of inflation data coming out this week affecting things like the ViX. So no big concerns for us here. And if we get some good inflation data, expect that to fall quickly. Next up here, let’s take a look at the internals on the day to day. As afternoon trading started today, we were mixed for our markets when our markets were higher this morning, the internals were higher as well. When the markets went down to mixed, the internals remained positive. We look at this as a market tell of which direction the market wants to head, and the internals right now are telling us this market wants to head higher.

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When you finish on a mixed day with positive internals, you love to see that. So let’s take a look. We had advancing stocks beating out declining stocks on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Really no big two to one beats here or anything, but hey, we’ll take the win. Next up, 52 week highs to lows coming in significantly positive as well for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. And lastly here, volume also coming in just over two to one positive on the NYse and almost right at three to one positive for the Nasdaq. So good day today overall for the internals here. Next up, looking at our sectors on the day, just two out of our eleven sectors finishing higher, but no big losses today.

That’s what was interesting here. We had tech leading the way. Again, exactly what you want to see. Real estate was the other sector finishing higher on the day. You know, we love housing here, could care less for the real estate sector. The real estate sector and the S and P is made up mostly of reits. We, like the home builders, gives you a little bit more direct access to the industry. Home builders were down slightly on the day today, though also for our sectors on the day.

I’ll point out that the utilities during the day today hit another 52 week high here. And why would I point out the utilities? Why would I point out that yields were lower? Well, utilities are the biggest borrowers of debt in the nation. Huge expensive costs to get utility plants, power plants up and running. And again, biggest borrowers in the nation. So when they’re hitting 52 week highs, what does that tell you? It tells you that the market, well, first of all, the market’s a forward looking mechanism. So if utilities are hitting new highs, it tells you that yields are likely headed lower from here. And then for our laggards on the day, we’re industrials, financials and consumer staples. All of those, though, down less than four tenths of 1%.

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So really minor losses on the day today. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Let me get a refresh of my screens here. And while I’m waiting on that, actually, let me cover one more aspect that I meant to cover in our market watch. So if you’re still here listening, you’re getting a little bonus point. Not only are we seeing us indexes nearing 52 week highs, all time highs. We’re seeing it globally as well. The euro stocks 50 ETF just hit a 52 week high today as well.

China rallying in a big way, breaking out to multi month highs here as well, depending on which ETF or which index you’re looking at. And we’re seeing it across the globe here, really. A lot of these stocks, if they haven’t recently hit a 52 week high, they’re very close right now as well. We’re looking at a global bull market here once again. All right, so taking a look at our commodities, a little bit of red on the screen here today. Gold now down 1.39% to $2,342 an ounce. Silver down less by two tenths of 1% to $28.44 an ounce. Copper now higher on the day today up 2.4%.

Big day here for copper. This is another 52 week high for copper at $4.77 a pound. And lastly here, oil still below $80 a barrel, but it is higher today, up 1.27% to $79.25 a barrel. And finally here for today, bitcoin now up about 3% to $63,099 a barrel. Bitcoin, 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. You can sign up at VRA letter.com, click the podcast link at the top, and you can sign up on our individual podcast page there. You can also go there to view our transcripts and some notes from the podcast as well.

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So thanks again for tuning in. Until next time. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.