In today's episode, Tyler covers the latest market movements, reflecting on the past three slightly lower sessions and today's gains across major indexes, then looking ahead to Friday's pivotal jobs report. He also dives into the potential for an October surprise and the potential for a rally heading into the November election. From detailed sector performances to a thorough analysis of commodity movements, we cover it all. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

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. A little bit different of an attire here for today’s podcast as it is playoff baseball time here. So got to rep the hometown team. Houston Astros here. As we are in right now.

The wild card game is a three game series. We’re in game two right now. We lost yesterday to the Tigers, so a must win game for the Astros today. It is tied two to two right now in the top of the 8th as of recording this podcast. So I couldn’t miss an opportunity to rep the hometown team on the podcast today. So a little different of an attire today, but exciting times here. We’ve entered the fourth quarter, obviously, baseball playoff time, and it was a pretty good day for our markets today. Nothing crazy out there, but better than we had yesterday.

And really, the last three sessions here, as we were able to finish higher for three out of our four major indexes today, it was just fractional gains here. But hey, will take it. And it does seem like all eyes have shifted here into Friday’s jobs report. Really, to start off the week it began with Jay Powell speeches, we saw a big to kind of sidetrack here, a big increase in the odds of a 25 basis point cut after Jay Powell’s speech. So that makes Friday’s jobs data even that much more important for the market. And then, of course, yesterday, the October 1 surprise here with the Iran Israel conflict going on. So we’ll see what we have potentially in store for the rest of the month of October. Now to sidetrack again here one more time.

[00:02:01]:
We’ve talked about a lot the lack of independence from the Fed, the supposedly independent Fed, right? Who something like 80% of Fed members lean Democrat. And so, yes, we expect October to be a volatile month. You know, there’s, there’s no doubt about it. It’s notoriously the month where bottoms happen. So that’s not always bad. But it can be a crash month as well. We don’t see a crash in the cards for this year, but again, volatility could be there this month, you know, so in the short term, I’ll talk about this more on the podcast. A common theme today is going to be disciplined on this podcast.

But in the short term, you know, again, volatility. But over the medium to long term, no matter who wins in November, we remain aggressively bullish on this market. Now, you’ve heard us talk about it a lot. It’d be for two very different reasons. You know, Trump wins. We’re talking about the unleashing of animal spirits here once again in the US, unleashing american corporations, lower tax rates, more competitive with international companies as well. Again, the Trump economic miracle is what would drive that. Now under Kamala’s policies, it’d be a very different, be a government led, kind of manipulated market hire, as we’ve seen in jobs data as well under the Biden administration.

[00:03:31]:
So many of these jobs are either part time or government jobs. Right. We don’t think we would see that under Trump. And hopefully, you know, he’s learned something from his first term and can actually this time, you know, at least start to drain the swamp, but really to start to shrink the size of our government. You know, he’s not exactly the president of austerity. So I wouldn’t put my hopes that high. But getting the government out of our day to day lives is a huge boon for Americans. Right? Unleash the american consumer, unleash small businesses, remove the red tape.

And that’s one of the biggest things with the Trump policies, is deregulation, where again, under Kamala, it’s about money printing, government control, Federal Reserve manipulation. So again, talking about the month of October, full circle here. That’s why we would expect October to finish to the upside, because the Federal Reserve, the pledge protection team, that supposedly doesn’t exist, we all know that it does. That’s who they want in office. So we certainly do not put it past, especially the Federal Reserve, from goosing this market higher leading up to the November election. It’s exactly why we wrote the book the big bribe. That’s how they get voters in the Democratic Party or the Democrat party right now, they want to bribe people to vote for them, whether it’s student loan forgiveness, assistance for mortgages, right. All kinds of different ways to manipulate people to vote for them.

[00:05:06]:
And it is exactly why we wrote the big bribe, because that’s exactly what it is. So October could end up being a very good month here. You know, we’re just two days into it now. But again, all eyes will be on jobs data for Friday. And a little bit of hesitancy showing up before that. We saw it today. Put call ratio, finishing above a one for the first time in probably a couple of weeks here that we’ve seen, you know, just lower put call ratios. You know, we talk about this year often anything above a .7 is considered bearish leaning.

That’s kind of the average. Anything above a one is leaning towards excessive bearishness. So to close at a one today shows the hesitancy there from investors. Now overnight tonight we’ll also get back the AAIII investors sentiment survey, which, you know, probably won’t be that big of a deal. But we have seen an elevated readings of bulls here. And with this kind of sideways action, you wouldn’t be surprised for to get a little bit of a drop there. And that doesn’t bother us at all because it means that the weak hands are being shaken out of this market, the so called dumb money or fast money, you know, the type of people, and a lot of them are institutional investors who feel like they’ve missed out on a rally. They buy in late and then take losses.

[00:06:31]:
Ultimately, you buy high, sell low. That’s not what we want to do here at the VRA. And so back to this topic of discipline, because we’ve talked about this here recently at lengthen that this is the time period where you would expect a short term pause. And hey, this bull market is so powerful that we very well might already be on the turning edge of it here because our major indexes, like we’ve talked about, had hit heavily overbought levels. Well, this just three, four day pause here has already got us out of a large portion of those heavily overbought levels. We’re nowhere near oversold level, still pulling out of overbought levels here, which is why we’ve used the VRA investing system here to tell us to pause. Right. We still remain at ten out of, excuse me, ten out of twelve screens bullish here.

And so we don’t want to be selling positions right now. But this is when we pause our monthly dollar cost averaging programs because we do want to make sure we’re still positioned for the next big move higher, which could be any day. And I’ll explain a little bit more. But one key factor here telling us that was the semis today, which were positive at the open this morning when our major indexes were lower and led the way in a big way today. So I’ll get to that here more in a minute. And they are nowhere near extreme overbought territory either. So in a bull market, a young bull market like we have here, we often don’t get all the way back to oversold readings to get us an opportunity to get back in the market. So that’s why we haven’t taken profits here.

[00:08:14]:
But we paused our monthly dollar cost averaging programs. But again, we want to hold those positions right now for the next big move higher. All right, so with that being said. Well, one last point, as we keep running through our charts. Kip and I have been talking about this at length. These charts are looking very healthy right now. And especially the chart of the semis from the August lows that we saw for our major indexes. And for the semis after the July sell off, we’ve seen a series of higher highs and higher lows, which is exactly what you want to see.

And it’s exactly what we’ve gotten here in the short term. Alright, so let’s take a look at our major indexes on the day today. As I mentioned, we finished with three out of our four major indexes higher on the day. Again, just fractional gains here we were led by the Dow Jones up just under one 10th of 1% to 42,196. Next up, the Nasdaq, up 0.08% to 17,925. And lastly, the S and P 500, essentially flat on the day today at 5709. Our one laggard on the day was small, caps down just 0.09% at 21 95. Again here, going back to the semis this morning, when all of our major indexes were in the red, the semis opened higher and were leading the way.

[00:09:41]:
And this chart, I got to tell you, looks very good. And when the semis are leading, you do not want to be short this market. You want to be in this market. And so again, after this, just little bit of a three day pause here, we are no longer in overbought territory for the semis. And again, we in a new bull market like this, you do get some situations right, where you get back to oversold levels and we use those as buying opportunities. But it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the next big move right back off to the races, just gets us out of overbought territory and then we’re right back up to it again. One of the kind of paradoxes of overbought levels and why we didn’t use this as a selling opportunity is that it also can be very bullish to see a market that gets overbought and stays overbought.

So you don’t want to miss out on those moves either. But overall, again, in the short term, you know, we could get an October surprise. There’s a lot of factors at play here right now, but any pullback that we saw we’d continue to use as a buying opportunity. So again, not a reason to sell here. And another bullish factor here was the internals. Even with our major indexes lower earlier in the session volume was strongly positive, and we did finish mix on the day overall for the internals, but overall, not bad numbers here. First off, let me get, let me get a quick little refresh here, make sure I don’t miss anything. All right.

[00:11:17]:
So we did have more declining stocks than advancing stocks for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq, but again, just marginally lower, essentially flat on the day to day. So no red flags there. 52 week highs and lows did come in positive on the NYSE, just slightly negative on the Nasdaq, which we don’t like to see. But the Nasdaq also contains a lot of names that just aren’t quite primetime players. Right. So you don’t, you know, this isn’t exactly unexpected here from the Nasdaq. And then on the volume side of things, this is where it was really bullish. Some nice beats here today for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq for solid positive volume here.

So good readings overall. And again, adds to the bullish factor that we’re looking at here. Next up, looking at our sectors on the day to day, we finished with four out of our eleven sectors higher. On the day to day. We had energy. Leading the way is oil. You know, as you might expect with Middle east tensions, oil has been on the rise here. After that, we had tech, which again, is exactly what you want to see, you know, tech helping lead the way here.

And then financials and utilities, our laggards on the day, consumer discretionary, consumer staples and communication services. And one little side point here. I know Kip covered some yesterday about what an impressive month of September that it was. How many sectors that we saw finish at an all time monthly closing high on the month? Well, you know, what led the way in September, which I think might surprise a lot of people, especially with how much talk there’s been about, oh, we’re seeing weakness from the consumer. Are we, though? The leading sector for the month of September was consumer discretionary, and there are so many factors that we talk about here with just how strong the consumer is here. And, you know, I gotta go back and take a look, but we got some data this week as well. We’ve seen a lot of downward revisions on jobs. We actually just got some upward revisions on the strength of the consumer as well.

[00:13:28]:
So more good readings from the economy finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch where, let me get a refresh here. A little bit of red on the screen for precious metals. Gold now down four tenths of 1%, still at very good numbers at 26 2000, excuse me, 26 80. Next up here, silver up 1.17% to $32.11 an ounce. Copper now up 1.6% to $4.66 a pound. And oil, as I mentioned earlier, up big today now of 1.68% at $71 a barrel here. And finally here for today, bitcoin has had a pretty big pullback here. You know, no major concerns for us.

You know how bullish we are on this group right now. And we look at this as a buying opportunity here as well. Now at $60,741 of bitcoin, you started off the day above 62,000. So certainly a pullback there. But again, a group that we remain extremely bullish on here. All right, folks, that is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcasts every day at the market close. You can sign up@vraletter.com click the 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.