In today's episode, Tyler breaks down today's market action and offers insights into the latest economic data. He discusses the impact of Tuesday's CPI report, today's retail sales numbers, and the potential effects of upcoming events like the PPI data and Nvidia's earnings report. We also dive into the latest market internals, sector performance, and commodity performance. Join us as we explore the latest trends and developments in the investing world.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there. Today was another good day for our markets today after Tuesday’s big down day, after the CPI report coming out that morning. Those days are long forgotten now as you’ve got nice back to back rallies here. A good Valentine’s Day yesterday, and we got some love in the way of the Valentine’s Day indicator here as well. So this is just kind of a fun one for you here, but it is a real statistic worth covering here briefly going back to 1951 when the s and P 500 is up more than 4% or more through Valentine’s Day.

The market is higher for the rest of the year, 92% of the time. And this isn’t a small sample size either. This has happened 27 times since 1951 with average gains for the rest of the year of 13% and some big wins in there as well. So got a little Valentine’s Day love there and a little post Valentine’s Day love as we did have a good day today for our markets. And this morning we got some more economic data back as well. It obviously didn’t do what our market did after the CPI data on Tuesday, but today we got retail sales numbers seeing an unexpected decline of eight tenths of 1% from December to January. And again, like I talked about on the CPI data on Tuesday, all of these are quote unquote, seasonally adjusted. So like most economic data from most governments nowadays, take it with a grain of salt.

[00:02:08]:
But the market did seem surprised by that number, despite the fact that just about every year retail sales do fall in January from December. So no real shock here, no big news on the data today. But after the news did come out, bonds yields, that is, did fall and stocks were able to rise a little bit, especially into the open and into the close today as well as we got a good smart money hour today, again, really making three days in a row of good smart money hours on Tuesday. Despite the lower close, we still got a strong smart money hour yesterday. We got a strong smart money hour today. We’re seeing it again as the Dow finished at its highs of the day, the Russell 2000 finished near its highs of the day, and the S and P 500 finished near its highs of the day. Tech was our laggard on the day. I’ll get to that more here in our market watch, but that said, our view does remain unchanged here even after this retail sales report the american consumer remains stronger than most so called economists out there are willing to give the american consumer credit for, although now this does add some pressure to the Fed in their pivot to cutting rates here.

And that said, all eyes will now be on tomorrow’s PPI data. That’s the producer’s price index, especially after the consumer price index on Tuesday triggered the worst day for stocks on the CPI release since 2022. So stay tuned. We’ll be reporting on that here tomorrow Kipwell after the close. All right, so let’s take a quick look here at our market action on the day today. Good day today. Finish higher across the board here. And small caps leading the way here, up 2.45% to 2061.

Now just about one point away from a 52 week high from the small caps. That’s based off of the IWM, the Russell 2000 ETF. Small caps have been unloved for a long time, seeing some big pullbacks, especially after their 52 week high in late December. Then we saw eight and a half percent plus sell off from small caps. Now getting back to a 52 week high. Very good to see here. After that, the Dow Jones was up nine tenths of 1% to 38,773. Also just shy there of an all time high.

[00:04:58]:
One other factor I want to check, transports were up a little bit today. Still got some work to do to get back to their all time high level from mid year last year. After that, the S and P 500 up zero point 58% to 5029. Also not far away from an all time high there. Let me check one more factor here. Yeah, not far at all. The Nasdaq was our laggard on the day. Still managed to finish higher, up three tenths of 1% to 15,906.

I will point out the semis did finish lower on the day to day, but they’ve had a hell of a run, too. So no real concerns here. And what is interesting is early in the week we talked about, and last week as well, we talked about the fact that we were at extreme overbought levels. Now, we never got to our highest distinction of overbought readings. We call that extreme overbought on steroids. But that one day of trading, Tuesday’s pullback was enough to get us out of extreme overbought territory. So gave us a little bit of room to run from there. But going forward now, we weren’t that far out of extreme overbought territory.

And next week will be a big week because we’ll get Nvidia’s earnings back on Wednesday after the close, and we’re looking at what could potentially be a buy the rumor, sell the news event. If we get a rally into again tomorrow, early next week, we will be back at extreme overbought levels there. So stay tuned. We’ll continue to report on that here and keep you updated. But that’s a potential possibility because Nvidia really started this whole thing off. Remember their Q two earnings report last year where they gave massive forward guidance, sent the stock on an incredible run. The market overall on an incredible run, really building this AI hype. So this upcoming earnings report will tell us a lot on where we go from here.

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And the reason why. I say the buy the rumor, sell the news type of event is that, as we say here, often at extreme overbought levels, that is when bad things tend to happen. It may not even be a bad earnings report. It could just come in line with expectations. Hell, it could even be a slight beat and the market would be saying, oh, well, that’s the end of that run. We can expect less lower forward guidance from here and the AI boom might take a little bit of a pause, right? That doesn’t change anything in our long term view. It would just be a short term, take a little bit of profits, look to get back into those stocks at a lower price. It could be a little bit of a rotation out of the magnificent seven, which really did not perform that well today.

A rotation out of the megacap tech stocks into the other 493 stocks that are in the s and P 500. Again, that would not concern us here. We think it’d be short term and over the medium to long term, we remain ultra bullish on this market. Nothing has changed in that view. And one more earnings report here we got after the close as well is just another reason why we see we’re in the roaring 2020s. Coinbase posted big beats today, much better than expected earnings. And the stock is now up. Last time I checked it was up over 8%.

Now up just under 7% in after hours trading. Let me see here. That would be just shy of a 52 week high for Coinbase there. And bitcoin has had a very good day today as well. I’ll get to that here just after our bra commodity watch. But overall, again, stay tuned here. Got a lot to report on as we head into Navidea’s earnings next week. That’ll be a must watch event again Wednesday, believe after the close.

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Next up here, let’s take a look at our internals on the day today. This is an area we’ve talked about for some time that we’ve wanted to see some improvement in. A lot of people were talking about after December that we had peaked in advancing stocks versus declining stocks, but we’re also seeing the number of stocks hitting 52 week lows on a cumulative basis has been going down. That’s a good sign there. There’s fewer and fewer stocks hitting 52 week lows. So we’re not seeing that show up under the surface, which gives us another breath of confidence here for this market. And today, those strong readings continued. Advancing stocks beating out declining stocks.

Just under five to one positive on the NYSE. Just under three to one positive on the Nasdaq. 52 week highs to lows coming in very strong as well. A combined roughly 470 stocks or so, hitting 52 week highs to just 80 stocks hitting 52 week lows. Good readings there, and volume coming in strongly positive as well. NYSE showing 81.7% upside volume today. Nasdaq not quite as strong, but looks like we got a little bit of an adjustment after the close. Coming in nearly well, I would say under three to one positive, but still a good reading today from Nasdaq volume as well.

So good internals, positive across the board. Just what you want to see next up here. Let’s take a look at our sectors on the day today, where we finished with ten out of our eleven sectors higher on the day. I’ll start with the laggard here. Was tech not what you want to see? But we did still get the Nasdaq finishing higher. Like I said, the semis were down on the day to day again. Maybe just a little bit of a rotational swing there. No big concerns for us here, but it was really good from our sectors on the day to day again, finished with ten out of our eleven sectors higher.

[00:11:18]:
On the day to day, four of those sectors hit either a 52 week high or an all time high. Folks, that is strength right there. On a day when the primary sector, tech technology, is lagging, that we were still able to get four sectors hitting either 52 week highs or all time highs is very good. So our leader on the day today has been our laggard as of late, energy leading the way. We were followed there by real estate. Then we had materials, which if I’m not mistaken, is also very close to a 52 week high as well. Take a look for you, not too far away. Still has a little bit of work to do, though.

Sorry, I lost my screen there. There we go. After that, we had the financials for all of the concerns about banks here. The financials have been performing much better as of late. KRE had a good day today, up over 3%. That’s the regional banking ETF. That’s really where you want to watch if you think there’s going to be trouble in the financial sector. We saw it last year.

KRE sold off much more than the overall the big banks, which is in XLF, the financial sector ETF now right on queue. XLF hit a 52 week high today, just shy of its all time high as well. So that’s some healthy action from the banks. Now if you tuned in with us here for a while, we’ve got no love for these big banks. A lot of these are corrupt institutions to be totally honest with you, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to see them performing well as part of a healthy bull market, you want the financials to participate. So hitting 52 week highs is another bullish factor here. As we say here, often new highs beget new highs. And seeing four out of our eleven sectors hitting new highs, we see that as bullish going forward.

[00:13:17]:
After the financials, we had utilities as bond yields were down on the day, we were down six tenths of 1% now at a 4.24 from the ten year yield. I’m trying to refresh my screens here as well after that recent peak at a 4.32. We’d like to see that be the high from the ten year yield. That’s not the case. That doesn’t negate our thesis here though. After that, sorry, I’m jumping around a little bit here. After utilities we had consumer discretionary. Okay, sorry again jumping around a little bit here.

Also just shy of a 52 week high for consumer discretionary. Then we had healthcare which hit an all time high today. Then the industrials also hitting an all time high today. And our last one for today, communications services was just fractionally higher on the day today. But good to see this is a proxy for tech. Most of these companies are really tech companies. I believe meta makes up like 22% of this portfolio. Google makes up another 20% of this portfolio.

So it’s really the tech sector still now also hitting a 52 week high today. So good action from our sectors. The last one here was consumer staples on the day today. And finally for today here our VRA commodity watch. Let me get a quick refresh of these screens. Some green on the screen here. Gold now up just over half of 1% to $2,015 an ounce. Silver up more 2.6% to $22.96 an ounce.

[00:15:02]:
Copper up as well, over one and a half percent to $3.75 a pound. And oil now up 2% to $78 a barrel. That’s its highest level in roughly about a month, right? At near its highest levels in a month as well. And then finally for today, bitcoin hit a 52 week high overnight. It is now lower on the day, still above 50,000, down just a quarter of 1% to 51,615 of bitcoin. Again, we remain extremely bullish on bitcoin as we head into the having a lot of people talking about an accelerated timeline for this. Having stay tuned. Based off the current rate of mining, expected to be in April could be a little sooner, but we’ve seen crypto assets going up a lot in anticipation of this event, and we expect that to continue as well.

Kip talked about this a lot yesterday on his podcast as well. Highly encourage you to go back and listen to that one. And as always, we’ve got our transcripts on our website as well, if you would like to read them. But that is all that we have time for here today. If you’d like to sign up for our podcast, you can see all of our podcasts, all of our transcripts, and everything we have to offer@vraletter.com. Click the podcast link at the top. We now have the sign up form there correctly. I know we’ve gotten a few requests for that over the last few weeks or so.

That’s now all up and running as well. So come and join us@vraletter.com. Click that podcast link at the top and we’d love to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.