In today's episode, Kip unpacks a wild market day amid rumors of Fed Chair Jay Powell's potential ousting and its investor impact. Celebrating VRA's 22nd anniversary, he shares his Wall Street-to-VRA journey and mentor lessons that fueled decades of wins. Discover why the bull market's best is ahead—tune in for actionable optimism!

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Wednesday afternoon everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA investing podcast. Hope you had a good day today. A lot of things happened today if you paid attention to the market today. Some wild swings. We had a lot of rumor mill about Jay Powell getting fired or resigning. We’ll talk about that a little bit.

The man’s got to go. I mean, but I’ve said this for years. I’ve said this on no fewer than, I don’t know, 10, at least 10 appearances on Charles Payne and of course, probably every appearance with Wayne and Alan Root that this guy has got to go because you don’t get to make the bad calls that he’s made. We got five policy mistakes, big ones that Jay Powell has made since he’s had the job. Now, the problem is that it was Trump that put him in the job. Trump seems to have a hard time admitting that. Even today on tv, he was like, he can’t believe. He said he can’t believe that Biden put him in.

[00:01:03]:
Like what Biden didn’t. You did. What he’s trying to say is by the left of it, okay, but no, Trump put him in. Trump has a real hard time admitting any flaws. That is a flaw right there. But I get up off topic here. But, you know, look, you can’t make the mistakes that Jay Powell has made, especially the, you know, no inflation to a little bit of inflation. Oh, oh, it’s transitory.

Oh, no, it’s 41 year high, right? That’s the one. When you are the insider’s insider and you get a call that important, that wrong, you don’t come back from that. So that’s been our view for a long time that Powell should be gone and now Trump wants him gone because, yeah, for policy purposes, now Powell should absolutely be gone. We have no inflation. I talked about this yesterday on the podcast. Anyone you hear anyone telling you that yesterday’s CPI report showed anything like dangerous inflationary signals? You know, you are hearing something from either someone that is a straight up liar or they’re an idiot or they’re in on it. I guess you got three options there, okay? Because there’s nothing in that report that’s inflationary. The core CPI was lower than the estimates.

[00:02:20]:
And that again, that’s what the insiders really check. That’s what Jay Powell tracks, right? So there is no excuse for it. 7% mortgage rates. And what’s happened? Credit card rates at all time highs. Car loans all time high. As far as interest rates. Second America. And by the Way a lot.

In the first America too, I did make a pretty fair amount of money, but are just barely getting by. But certainly the second America, that has debt, that has credit card debt, car debt and a mortgage, they certainly can’t buy a home. And now all the data tells us that people are really struggling to make these payments. Jay Powell must know this. There’s no way he doesn’t know this. So just giving people some relief, right? Bringing, bringing the fed funds rate down from 4.33% to 3.5%. That’d be a three quarter point cut. That would bring mortgage rates would fall by more than 1%.

[00:03:18]:
The mortgage rate would drop from 7 to below 6. And people get some relief from these car loans and credit card rates as well. But it’d be a step in the right direction. It would renew people’s confidence in the system because right now it’s not there. And what’s the reason? Because Jay Powell hates Trump. It’s not just Jay Powell. It’s the Federal Reserve. It’s the banking cartel.

This is how they control Trump. This is one of the ways they control Trump. Trump knows this, of course, and this is why he fights back the way that he does, to apply as much pressure as possible to Jay Powell. How’s it going to end up? I have no idea. Trump today said that, no, he has no plans to fire Jay Powell. So all the, all the insiders info that we heard in the last 14, 16, 18 hours was all nonsense. According to Trump, there was no paper. He didn’t show any Republicans a piece of paper that was going to, he was going to sign it and fire Jay Powell.

[00:04:13]:
Trump denied that. I mean, it really is a shit show. It is a shit show and we’re better than that. But, you know, I go back to what Steve Bannon said when he was running Trump’s campaign. Let Trump be Trump. That’s kind of how we’ve all learned to deal with this guy, right? Because there’s so many great, enormously great things this man has accomplished for us. Look at where we’d be without him. We’d be lost.

We’d be lost. We’d be Europe. We’d be, we’d be, we’d be the uk. We’d be Canada without question, without Donald J. Trump. That’s why, as upset as I am with him to this day about the poison death jabs, the fact that you’re still in the children’s immunization schedule, that’s evil, criminal. Okay, that’s almost, I think it is unforgiven if you’re killing people, especially children. You’ve heard about this, right? It’s just died suddenly.

[00:05:10]:
I don’t know you come back from that. But I’ve made peace with that because I fought this for so long. All I did was lose friends, family members. I lost 10, 15,000 followers on Twitter. I got shadow banned. My tweets and posts used to get a thousand, two thousand likes and retweets. I got like five now. I mean, it’s just my whole social presence online on Twitter.

I’m not. Anything else has just been destroyed because of fighting this. And I got family members who won’t talk to me. Okay, but you know, you try to do good, it doesn’t always come across that way.

But anyway, I’ve worked my way past that. And so now we’re dealing with what I can control, which is helping people make money.

All right?

Helping the Herriage family, helping our subscribers, helping our clients to navigate these very confusing waters in what is otherwise an extraordinary bull market. And that is the bottom line for us. We’ve got an opportunity here to make a lot of money. I wrote it this morning. This is the 22 year anniversary of the VRA. Founded the VRA in 2003. It was actually in June, but round up a little bit. So been 22 years now.

[00:06:26]:
And I left Wall Street. A lot of you know this story. I wrote it up this morning. Michael Metz, director of bopa, one of my mentors, along with Ted Parsons. Michael Metz was director of research at Oppenheimer. And about nine or ten months before the dot com turned into the dot bomb, I was still on Wall Street. Mike had me read a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madden the Crowds. When he gave me the title, I’d heard of it, but I never read it.

When he told me to read it, I was like, first of all, I’m in. I love that title. It sounds fantastic. And I’ve always wanted to read it, so let me do it. I had no idea why. I just thought it was another book recommendation he was giving me. Well, I realized pretty quickly why he told me to read it, why he recommended that I read it.

That’s what a good teacher does. It’ll tell you they recommend, right? And then it’s up to you whether or not you listen to them. Well, this is the classic book about the biggest investment bubbles throughout history, written in 1841 by Charles Mackay. Tulip Mania, of course, South Sea Bubble. Just an extraordinary read. I recommend it for everyone. But after I read that, I’m like, okay, Mike, I get it. You’re telling me that dot com is probably going to end this way.

[00:07:37]:
And look, I’ve done this 15 years. I’m ready to move on anyway, so I retired, sold my book, retired, came back home, got my clients out of the market, saved them a lot of money and losses they would have had. And then we all know the end result. Just a few months later, I think it was like five, six months later, after I left Wall street, the Nasdaq, the bomb began. And Nasdaq lost 75% over the next couple of years. Also, just in just a few years, 90% of this red hot dot com stocks were just out of business. They’ve just gone.

So then founded the VRA Wealth Masters. You know, I wrote that up again this morning. But what I didn’t share this morning, because I’ve talked about it before, is where we are in this. And this is kind of going full circle with Trump and how I’ve made my peace with his this flaws. Because we are in the roaring 2020s, and it’s so much deeper than that because we have this innovation revolution happening. So this is.compart2. And I believe this is going to be much bigger. We said this for years, by the way.

[00:08:42]:
This is not new from Tyler and I. For three, four years we’ve been saying this is going to be bigger than dot com, this is going to be longer, stronger than dot com, more powerful, and certainly longer lasting because you have a structural bull market that is coming together. At the same time. We have all this unbelievable. It’s like Star Trek. Every day technological change is taking place that’s unfathomable. It’s what we don’t know. It’s what we don’t even know that’s about to come.

Can’t you sense that? We know about the autonomous cars. We know about robots coming. We know about space exploration, what’s happening there. We can understand that Pict. But folks, there are things coming that right now we have no clue about. Of course, genetic research. I mean, in 20 years, there’ll be no disease. The people won’t die from disease.

[00:09:36]:
In 20 years, this is where we’re going. And again, we put all this in a good bribe. So imagine what we don’t know. That’s what gets me going, okay? But the bottom line is this innovation is going to do two things. First of all, it’s going to do the obvious thing. GDP growth is going to absolutely soar right Absolutely sore. Cathie Wood’s team, they believe we’re going to see GDP growth of 10% a year for over a decade. I think she said two decades, maybe.

I mean, I don’t have to tell you, with that kind of GDP growth, what the stock market’s going to do. I think our 100,000 Dow Jones target is going to be on the low side, but just a little bit. Just a little bit outside. So that’s what we’re focused on, right? Because I think everything in my career, everything I’ve done in my 40 years of doing this has put me in a place to be prepared for this. That’s how I feel about it. I have Tyler now working with me. He never. He was never going to work with me.

[00:10:38]:
I remember. I remember, like, yesterday driving to school. It was a high school, and I used to take him to school the morning, him and his friends. And I think we’re on the way back, I dropped off and said. And I said something that worked. I’m never going to work with you. I go, what? Because he’d heard all my Wall street stories of the criminality, the evil and that kind of thing, you know, I was not very smart to tell him. I was just being honest, trying to prepare my kids for the future, you know, and we’re not to work.

Don’t work on Wall street unless you have to. Well, Todd was a good listener, really smart kid, always much smarter than I am. And he just said, I’m never working that with you. I’ll never work in that environment. That’s just a bunch of criminals. I don’t want to do that. I want to do something positive. I want to do something I can feel good about.

And, man, that just shut me up right away. And I never brought it up again. I was like, you know what? I know he’s going to work with me. Sammy. I’ve always had this plan, like the Trump family, you know, that both our boys are going to work with us in the vra. And, Sammy, Bo’s getting close. We may have some news for you along those line here in short order. But Tyler’s been here, of course, now I think it’s six, seven years now.

[00:11:48]:
But first he started part time, but I think five years full time now. Of course, partner. And as I always say, he wears 10 hats, he wears 20 hats every day. Poor guy. He does all the things that I don’t know how to do, don’t want to do, not going to do. And Tyler does them and doesn’t Bitch a second. It’s crazy. He’s never ever once complained to me about all the boring ass shit he’s got to do to run this business.

And I love him to death for it, so. And I push him like, I push him like I would any, probably harder than I would, wouldn’t, Would an employee. Because he’s my son. I want to see him succeed. If Sam comes here, it’s going to be the same thing. I think that’s probably why it hasn’t happened to date. But anyway, back to, back to the story about this coming full circle, and I really believe that’s here. I think that I’m here for a reason.

I don’t mean to sound weird about that, but I get this sense more and more all the time because I see the angles. I’ve done this long enough where I’ve made every mistake and now I see this, this, this storyboard coming together, you know, and I love the fact that there’s so many people that are still so bearish. I mean, you know, it is, it is a, is a textbook setup for a massive bull market to last beyond 2030. And, and again with the innovation revolution taking place, it’s not only going to be an opportunity to make a lot of money, help a lot of people, but to live a really fun life. I mean, this is going to be, this is exciting. This is, this is amazing. There’s never been a better time to be an optimist. I say that fairly often.

[00:13:25]:
And I have people look at me like I’m like a, like what, what are you, what are you, what are you on? What are you taking, Are you smoking? Are you doing your lines? Kip, what are you doing? No, it’s how I feel because I see this, I see the playbook rolling out right in front of me. Hey, if something changes, we’ll tell you. Okay? But, but right now this is a great market to be in. It’s going a lot higher. Yeah, we’re overbought. We’re extremely robot. This is when shakeouts happen. It tried to happen today.

Dow Jones fell what, 350 points when the news that the Trump was maybe about to fire Jay Powell. And then, you know, when that was like when he denied it, then we rallied back up again. Again, good finish today. So look, 22 year anniversary. Wouldn’t be here without all of you. Both Tyler and I and the whole team, we love what we do and it’s an opportunity we don’t take lightly and we take our work seriously, but we try and Take ourselves too seriously because we know people depend on us getting calls.

[00:14:27]:
And so that’s why we put the time in, and that’s why we just try to be as honest as humanly possible about what we know and what we see happening. There’s no hype here. This is how we see things. And it’s been how we see things since riding the big bribe. But thank you again for being here with us. Thank you for the opportunity to be able to do this podcast. Thank you for listening and your feedback and all that. Yeah, we’re overbought.

We are short term overbought. We are extreme overbought. On steroids, on Nvidia and the semis. I think the semis got there yesterday, although they finished down some today. That doesn’t mean, you know, they have to go down. It just means that’s when bad things tend to happen.

And. But, you know, longer term, I’ll just. I’ll share this and I’ll move on. As far as this overbought market, we’re not concerned. We’re not concerned. We would use. We have paused our buying in some things, but we would use any kind of a shakeout to add two positions or put new ones on. Okay.

[00:15:27]:
And there are a lot of positions that we really like here. You know, if you. If you’re with us, you know that we were big fans of $SMR.

[00:15:34]:
New Scale Power. I actually couldn’t remember the name of it yesterday. New Scale Power. Simple. SMR is a small, small modular nuclear power. Okay. Which is just red hot. This is the one.

This is the leader. Tyler found this at like 98. He told me about it. I think it was like 15 bucks a share. I bought it like a 16, 17. Because that’s what I do if I find some interesting. I buy a position small, so I track it, right? That’s. Your wallet’s in it, your heart’s in it.

Buy a small position, then you’re forced to track it. That’s what I do. It’s always worked for me. Do what works for you. Well, then we recommended it. 19 and change. It’s 47 today. That was.

Folks, that was like seven, eight months ago. Tyler found this. This is Tyler’s find. It was up another 9% today. And so there. And by the way, the chart looks fantastic. Not overbought. Matter of fact, it was oversold two days ago.

So there. It’s a stock picker’s market, and there are a lot of great opportunities just because you’re overbought. As far as the broad market doesn’t mean we have to have a big shakeout. This is now a rotational theme that’s taking place. This is what extends bull markets. This is what makes this.com like, like dot com.

[00:16:42]:
And, and again, more powerful than. And no, this is not 2000.

This is not, this is like 1996. We are just getting started. Know that. All right, so stay locked in, folks. This is that, this is that bull market. And again, we’ll be with you every step of the way. I’ve got some notes on Tesla. I’ll write this up for tomorrow morning’s letter.

But Tesla also had a good day today, up 11 bucks a share. This thing is ready to go. And Cathie Wood, just Cathie Wood’s team in the last three weeks has bought $100 million worth of Tesla across her funds. If you think she didn’t know what’s coming, she knows the Tesla’s story as well as anyone. And again, on the macros side of things, her call’s been right. Their individual recommendations, stock bias they’ve made have not been great, but it feels like they’re getting that together. But they, they’ve been, they’ve been taken to the woodshed by a lot of people, but their macro work has been sensationally and they’ve been as good as anybody on the macro side of what’s happening with the economy, innovation, et cetera, et cetera. So we’re going to have deflation.

[00:17:52]:
Jay Powell must know this at some level. Again, this is all get Trump and that’s how they control him. So, yeah, it’s going to bring, you know, who knows it’s going to bring. So probably added volatility if he inspired. I don’t see him resigning to you, but they need to find some dirt on him. I think that’s what Trump’s really trying to do. You can see that’s what they’re trying to find, something to make him choose to step aside, to make him step down with leverage. And that’s what they’re looking for.

That’s the Trump style, as you probably already know. I can’t imagine working in that world. Why? I mean, obviously these are people who see themselves as true alphas and they are megalomaniacs and so that’s the world they want to live in. But, man, I think life’s too short for that. How about you

But it’s fascinating to watch this, this world happen. It just fascinating. These are the true masters of the universe. If you read Bonfire, the vanities folks, these are the real true masters, certainly financial masters of the universe and they live for this. It is fascinating to watch, is it not? Okay under the hood today. Again good comeback today in the market. Higher across the board. Rust 2000 today led up 1%.

[00:19:04]:
As I mentioned the semis were down today. Let me get a. Yeah semi steady finishing down 6, 10%. They, they were down over 2% at one point. They, they made a good comeback again too. Let’s take a look under the hood. Internals today were solid. I’m Gonna Round up 2 to 1 positive advanced decline for NYC and NASDAQ.

62% up volume for NYSE. 76% up volume for NASDAQ. Again that is what you want to see. We also had 168 stocks at a new 50 week high to just 114 hitting a new 52 week low in our sector watch today. Eight sectors finished higher, three finished lower. Upside was the healthcare. Real estate up. Both up better than 1%.

To the downside really nothing to speak of. Energy down eight tenths of a percentage. But again this market we go through periods where it’s not, it’s, it does. The internals don’t look right but by and large the broadening action has been extraordinary. And people that like to pick this apart are looking at, they’re, they want to be negative, they want to find something in the short term. Oh look at, look how bad the internals were today. I saw somebody that I really respect saying that today. I’m like you’re better than that.

[00:20:16]:
You know, stop reporting one day. Look at the trend, look at the last six months to a year of this market broadening. This is like broadening action. This all time high. You’ve never seen it before. It was telling us in advance what was going to happen right in our commodity watch today. Kind of quiet today. Gold did rally on the heels of Powell maybe being fired or resigning.

Gold up 17 bucks announced 3354 again this is the most bullish six month period of the year for gold. There is some short term negativity here with seasonality. That’s with the broad market. We’re frankly kind of ignoring that right now. Silver, we’re in melt up mode right now. Silver today was flat on the day. 3813 an ounce. Copper today down, down a percent.

551 a pound. Crude oil today. I’m going to call it flat. I’m not. That looks like a late quote. 66, 62 a barrel. And finally the bitcoin. What, what, what a move.

[00:21:12]:
You know you hit all time highs at 123, right? Was it yesterday? Time flies, doesn’t it? Monday or Tuesday, Bitcoin hit 123,000. Then yesterday had that big shakeout down to 116 and change. And so you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it can be a little scary. But you get to rare air up here at all time highs where no one that owns it has a loss. You start to get increased volatility and then if you get a big seller that comes in, you know, then the people get scared. Oh this. They pumped it up so they could just sell into it, right? And those fears come out. But that’s not the cycle we’re in here folks.

This is the cycle for bitcoin where the just keeps going up these dips revive bitcoin right now. 119,200 again. We think this is going to 130, 140. Short term. By short term I mean it could be pretty soon. And but longer term, you’re in again. Our target remains 200,000. Our cycle high is 350,000.

[00:22:05]:
Because it’s a very simple story. There’s never been a better supply demand story than bitcoin. That’s our story. We’ve been saying it for years and we’ll keep sticking to it until it changes. Okay folks, that’s it for today. Hope you had a good day and even better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close.