In today's episode, Kip dives into the complexities and impacts of geopolitical tensions between Iran and Israel on the financial markets. You'll hear a detailed analysis of market movements and key investment opportunities. Kip discusses a major buy recommendation from Goldman Sachs on gold, the potential and pitfalls of the tech sector, and the importance of understanding flight-to-safety trades. Tune in for an in-depth look at current market dynamics, the influence of geopolitical events, and strategic investment advice, all through the expert lens of the VRA Investing System.

Don’t look back to the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily voting investing podcast. Hope you had a good day today. A lot happening today, right? We have the, what do we call this exactly between Iran and Israel. What is this exactly? Is it now a war? If you’ve seen the online images of the meme war of taxpayer funded United States, taxpayer funded weapons flying into each other from both countries, I mean, that is what’s happening here is it sounds like no one was hurt. That’s very good news. We’ll talk about that a little bit.

I have my own view on that. It may not be what you hear on tv, but I think it’s the right one. And I think it’s why the markets didn’t collapse today. By the way, talk about overbought markets. Talk about just what just happened for the first nine months of the year, which is the best start to the year in an election year ever. Not bad. S&P 500 so far up without today, before today, up 20.8% for the first nine months of the year, again for the S&P 500, but a very, very good year. What else here, let’s just get right to it.
[00:01:10]:
First of all, big, big buy wreck today from Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs has joined the VRA in aggressively recommending gold. Hey, better have them late to the party and not never to the party. Welcome aboard Goldman Sachs. They’ve got some decently big targets. Frankly they’re not that big. And they do. Didn’t even mention the mining stocks, which I don’t know.

But look, if I can be candid with you, we’ve been very accustomed to beating Goldman Sachs at their own game for a very long time. And that’s not bragging, it’s just reality we’re talking about. Goldman Sachs is one of the real scumbags of Wall street. You would know it, of course, because all the treasury secretaries that come from Goldman Sachs, all the bigwigs in DC that come from Goldman Sachs, but no, they are the, yeah, they’re among the worst and they’re one of the big reasons, by the way, that gold has been manipulated lower for so long. Matter of fact, the one of the, along with JP Morgan, the two reasons that gold has been manipulated lower over the, over the decades has been JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. But look, again, not to get off target here and off base, but it is good to see them aggressively recommending gold. I don’t know why they’re not recommending the miners. That’s the real play.

But, hey, we’ll take it. First of all, let’s get to the markets today. Again, we had missiles flying in one direction today with the Iron Dome doing its part in Israel. Again, taxpayers are funding both sides, us taxpayers funding both sides of this. From that point of view, you have to laugh, don’t you? You have to laugh because it’s too frustrating and makes you too angry to think of it any other way when the military industrial complex, which is global, of course, starts playing their games and of course, we’re paying for it. But the good news, again, as best we can tell, no one’s hurt. And I think the reason the markets didn’t fall today as much further, Nasdaq did finish down as our, the hardest hit of the major index is down 1.5% today. Dow Jones came rallying all the way back after being down right at 400 points.

[00:03:23]:
Dow Jones came within five points of being positive with about an hour to go before it heading the other direction and finishing four tenths of a percent lower. But I think the reason is that the world is finding out what anybody that’s been paying attention has known for a very long time. Iran cannot compete with the military might of the United States and Israel. And it is that order. It is that order. Of course, our military. How many military ships do we have over there? I think with complete fleets, I think you’re looking at 30 to 40 us ships in that region. So, yeah, we, of course, are taking a lead role.

Israel defending itself. And then we also had help from, apparently from middle eastern countries, Jordan’s name mentioned several times. And, of course, always know Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia is always going to side with the united states when it comes to us versus Iran. So what we’re finding is that Iran is grossly outmatched and they really have very, very little ability to do any significant harm unless something were to sneak through. But, you know, I, frankly, I think it’s a lot of mental masturbation. If I had to pick, I’ve had to pick two words. I say it’s mental masturbation watching this. And it just, it’s strange credulity that we’re paying for both sides of this insanity to take place, does it not? But again, that’s why the markets didn’t get hit more, frankly, here’s the deal with the markets.

If you’ve been joining us since Friday, we started telling in Friday’s podcast, Tyler’s excellent video cast on Friday that the markets are hitting extremely remote levels. I mean, that’s what’s happening here on the VR investing system. And as we say, this is when bad things tend to happen. This is when the easy money, the easy money’s been made. That’s just, that’s what’s happening now. Frankly, it wouldn’t have mattered. Matter of fact, the market may have fallen more today had there not been missiles flying towards Israel from Iran. I think the market would have fallen more today because you have a lot of people that invest on the adage, when the missiles fly, stocks are a buy.

[00:05:35]:
And so when everybody realize, okay, it’s not going to be, it’s not going to be a big thing, the markets came rolling back. But again, the bigger story here is that now we’re in October. October is the worst month of the year during the presidential election cycle, and everyone’s wondering about an October surprise. A lot of people were, the warmongers and the fear mongers were out today saying, this is it. World War Three started. No, it is not. Again, Iran is hopelessly outmatched. And if we ever wanted to, unless we’re talking about false flags that are allowed to take place, which, of course, happen all the time, if either Israel or the United States ever wanted to, Iran would be wiped off the map in about 30 minutes.

Let’s be very clear about this. So the risk to Israel, the risks to, certainly to the United States are very, very slim when it comes to Iran. And that’s the thing. We just don’t want to see this spread so that Russia then gets involved, because now we’re talking about something that’s far more serious because they know how to fight wars. They know how to win wars. Unless you’re talking about Afghanistan. So we always have to qualify these things, don’t we? But goddess the connections, right, that, that exist between countries all over the world, these war mongering countries, it’s, it is impossible for someone that’s not in that industry, not in that space, it’s impossible to know what’s really going on here, and you’re certainly not going to learn it from any of the media. It is.

I barely watch. I watched tv today just because of the video footage, watching the, the missiles, Flydeh and the Iron Dome take them down. But the coverage is just, you know, it’s complete absolute propaganda and cannot be believed. I live on Twitter during things like this. I have a select group of people that I follow, and that’s where I get the information that I know I can trust. I know I’m not alone in that. That again, thank God for Elon Musk, because at this point, if Musk had not taken over Twitter, we would have no social media that had not been commandeered right by the state. It would be all propaganda.

[00:07:48]:
So we’re big fans of Elon Musk here. But if you’re not, I understand that, too. I know there’s a flip side to some of the things he’s doing. But let’s face it, thanks to Twitter, even though there is a lot of censorship there, look, we all know it. There’s still a lot of censorship there. But at least I would say that 85% of what needs to get out is still getting out. And that’s happening on Twitter. It’s happening on X and it’s not happening anywhere else.

I watched a couple of minutes of Fox coverage today. It was so bad and the propaganda of the Warmongers was so overwhelming that I changed the channels of CNN. I mean, what, right. That’s how bad, that’s how bad fox is now. So, but anyway, that’s, I think that’s why the markets rallied back. The markets aren’t concerned about this. We are overbought. It is October.

That’s why we have, we paused our buying and we’re waiting now. We’re going to be patient. We’re not, we’re not taking profits. We haven’t, in our parabolic options, positions. We’ve been doing that pretty aggressively. But those are options. They expire. You don’t have the, you don’t have the ability to just wait with the time premiums dissipating, the slippage that takes place as they, as they get closer to expiration.

[00:09:01]:
But as far as the broad markets go, we are not taking profits because, folks, when this little October insanity or whatever it’s going to want to being is over with, and we’ll let you know when the bureau system is flashing buy signals again, we think the fourth quarter move higher is going to be rip roaring, especially if Trump wins. And that does remain our call that Trump will win. And by the way, also, what’s happening in the Middle east now, this does not help Kamala Harris at all, right? It’s just another reminder that the world’s exploding with these people holding office. So this is not a positive for her. Again, from that point of view, fine, let them, let them have them be more. Let them shoot the missiles that we’ve paid for back and forth as long as no one’s getting killed. I guess that’s the, I guess that’s where I come down on all this. If it helps Trump beat Kamala Harris, let him fire missiles all day long.

But I don’t believe that this pause is going to last long. And again, I think today was an example of that. But again, all of the flight to safety trades that we track for things like this, bonds, gold, oil and the US dollar, they told you pretty early on that this was not going to be a big thing. Gold was up today, but only eight tenths of a percent. It backed off the highs pretty quickly. Oil had a decent move higher, but it’s so oversold, so cheap, that’s really just shorts covering, frankly. US dollar was slightly higher and bonds, there was a little bit of a flight to safety trade, but bonds are going lower in yield because that’s what they’re going to keep doing because inflation is gone and that’s no longer a story. Now we’re in an aggressive rate cutting cycle and rates are just going to keep going lower.

So we saw no signs today, the markets at all, from any of the things that we track that tell us that we’ve got something bad coming our way again. You never know. Knock on wood. You know, you never know about a black swan surprise. Of course, that’s always the case. But I think this October pause is going to be short lived. I’ll tell you the primary reason why. Because in about a week, guess what starts? You got it.

[00:11:18]:
Third quarter earnings. Third quarter earnings are going to be very, very good. And they’re really going to be interesting for tech. Tech is the group semis have been, still been very good. Semis are still 15% below their all time highs. Remember, they got slaughtered 28% in that three week bear market of 28% for the semis. I almost don’t want to talk about this anymore. Three week 28% bear market in the semis.

The market leader from the late July, from the July highs to the August 5 bottom, and they still haven’t rallied back as the broad market has rallied back to all time highs. The semis have not. A lot of tech stocks still remain below their all time highs as well. So I think that’s what the markets are really going to be focused on. I think that’s where the opportunity is. We are going to be aggressively buying the semis and tech stocks both in the Bre portfolio and in parabolic options. The chart, take a look at the charts setting up just fantastically for a great fourth quarter trade. So again, we get bank earnings first coming out in what about a week? I guess that’ll be next Thursday, right? So what, ten days or so.

And then from there, you know, it’s tech earning. Shortly thereafter, video, of course, is going to be one closely, closely watch Tesla, of course, all the Magnuson seven. And I think these stocks are just cheap because there’s so much money coming in. We already had record levels of liquidity. We already had a structural market. We already had consumers in the strongest position they’ve been in. It’s ever. It is.

[00:12:52]:
Consumers have never been this strong. Corporate America has never been this strong. And this is the story that’s not being told that we’ve been telling you for two years. This is the reason we call this a structural market of size and scope, because that’s why the market’s going higher, which means corporate earnings will continue to move higher. And now we have liquidity with the Fed cutting rates with China now, and they’re big. $500 billion us dollar, $500 billion stimulus bomb. That’s likely phase one for them. So the world again, is getting, is getting a wash in liquidity at a time.

It doesn’t need it. It just doesn’t need it. I think they’re melting this market up. And I think this, I think this short, this pause in October is going to be very short lived. And I think they’re going to try their best to get Kamala elected by melting the market up. And the signs certainly point to it. And you can call me conspiracy theorist if you want to, but I’ll say the truth. I like being right if it’s conspiracy theory, but I could be right.

You call me that every day for a thousand times. I got no problem with that. I just like being right because that means we’re making money for ourselves and for our subscribers and clients. And so I think they’re going to melt this market up. I think this pause is going to be short lived. And again, the internals today confirm that. Again, bonds, gold, oil, uS dollar confirmed that. The fact is, get so many, again, fear mongers out there saying, okay, here we go, here’s World War three means it’s not because they’re always wrong.

[00:14:18]:
And so, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s my view. I’m pretty sure I speak for Tyler, too. So, yeah, we’re just on the sideline because it’s overbought. That is the only reason. If the VRA system wasn’t overbought, you wouldn’t hear me saying anything I’m saying except pay attention to seasonality. But I don’t, I just don’t see it as being a big deal. Not in this kind of a bull market, remember, for the market to do what we believe is going to do, we’ve been a broken record on this for two years. Dow’s going to 100,000, Nasdaq’s going to 40,000.

And that may be just the beginning. That may not be a top. Okay. This is that bull market. This is a generational bull market that is going to make people a lot of money that are paying attention, that are locked in. For that to happen, you got to have a lot of years where the markets of 2025, 30% plus and we’re up 20% now. So we’re kind of right on track. But again, the fund flows the liquidity now, again, China and the United States fed rate cutting cycle.

This is a recipe for a melt up. It just is. It looks much more like that than anything else that I see. And we don’t call for melt up. Moves very higher except when we see them. And this is, this is what that looks like. So I think the dips here are going to be short lived and we are looking to, I don’t know, in a week or so, get back into buying pretty much every day. I’m going to tear some news tomorrow on bitcoin and I think it’s acting like crap here.

[00:15:55]:
Okay. Let’s be honest. It not trading well and that’s because of the shorts that are in it. That’s because of the, the futures traders that have found a way to short this without when they know the demand is not there on the buy side, but that’ll blow up on them. And so I’ll share some information tomorrow that tells you how what we’re looking at because we just looked for a dramatic move higher. It’s already had the best post having in history. This is the best post having that bitcoin’s ever had. I think that might surprise some people.

I’ll share that information with you yesterday in tomorrow’s letter and what we’re looking at, because again, we’re looking at now that that’s an area that I’m getting very interested in. Again, bitcoin is back down to run six, just over 60,000. So bitcoin is not a flight to safety trade. We’re seeing this, aren’t we? Right. Gold up, bitcoin down big. Yeah, there’s, that’s, that, that whole. Everybody that said bitcoin is the new gold. No, this is what we’ve always said.

Diversify. Why can’t you own both? And the bitcoin hodlers out there that put everything in bitcoin. That’s the only reason I could be negative here. We might get one last blush to get some real weekends out, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think we’re setting up a really good move higher. That’s another one of these we want to buy on the dip. As I mentioned earlier at the beginning of the podcast, Goldman out to now with the aggressive by recommendation on gold. I did like the reasons.

[00:17:21]:
Basically the move lower. These are all things that are bullish for gold. Lower rates. Us dollar resuming its bear market. Unbelievable levels of demand from central banks all over the world. This will be the third year in a row central banks have bought record levels of gold. Russia is buying every bit of gold they can get because they to some degree been shut out of the global financial system. So now they’re stockpiling even more gold.

And they do hold more gold than anywhere on the planet, by the way. That’s Russia. And you have again, it’s just a great hedge for geopolitical financial risk, recessionary risk, although I think those are slim. Again, just we’re not, we’re nowhere near a recession. Okay. But again, the reasons to own gold are extraordinary. Even though it’s overbought now, it is trading extremely bought. I got to point that out.

But the miners, and again, they’ve also reached overbought levels. But this is where folks, take this to the bank. Take this to the bank. This is where the real money is going to be made. As gold continues to move higher past 3000, past 3500, past 4000oz. This is our call. And the miners are going to catch fire and stay on fire for years. And so I think being able to buy these junior miners now is just a steal because no one is paying attention to them.

[00:18:44]:
The volume is just non existent in these junior miners. And even like the gold miner ETF, GDX, let me tell you what it did today. Again, just, it was up 1.6% today. Pretty good, right? In a market that was down pretty, pretty sizably. GDX was up 1.6% today and the total volume of the ETF was 21 million. 21 million shares. That’s it. Now maybe that, maybe I’m yelling and you’re like, why are you yelling? What does that mean? Put that in context, kip.

Okay? I guess I’ve talked about it for so long that just as everybody knows what I’m talking about here, look, I’ve traded this group for forever. And when gold and the miners really get going. This ETF trades consistently over 50 million shares a day. And then it has periods, again consistently where it trades 80 to 100 to 120 million shares a day. Again, the ten day moving average of this on volume is 24 million shares. It is pathetically timing, but, well, here’s what that means. That’s a tell. That’s a tell.

That’s a tell that when this market gets going, but we’ll see volume come in, that’s how we’ll know the bull markets really started. When the junior miners finally get going, that’s. We’ll know this bull market’s finally gotten going. And remember, it really has gotten going. Right. I see so many people online and going, what is going on? Am I ever going to make money in the miners? Okay, what are you smoking? GDX is up 58% from February 28. No sector done better. GDX is leading from the February.

[00:20:17]:
From February 28. Right. 58% NDGT, which, of course, is the two time leverage minus the one we own, and recommend up 125% from the end of February. Right there. You can’t find a sector that’s done better than the miners. So it’s already. It’s been a scalpel market. And again, that’s the other reason, because once this group gets going, there’ll be nothing stealthy about it.

Everyone will be talking about it. Everyone will be buying it. And so, again, this is an opportunity to really buy low. That is, we’re supposed to do. Right. It is buy low. So high. I don’t know if I’m watching a lot of people where they brag about investing online.

I don’t know that that’s the case for some people, but that actually is how it works. Let’s buy low and sell high, and that’s what we think we’re doing here with the miners. I also got to remind, I put this out this morning. For two decades, I’ve told people what I do and what I recommend. I had videos going back to the, actually, before 2003 with this. I used to do videos. I had my gold coins on desk. Right.

[00:21:18]:
You can still find them online. And, like, this is what we save in. We don’t save in fiat currency. We saving gold. Well, here’s what gold has done from that timeframe to 2003. When I started the VRA, if you’d invested $100,000 and, say, just kept it in a bank money market account, super safe, right? Wow. You know, people think that’s safe. No, it’s not.

Inflation destroys it. Right? That’s even if you’re making 3%. And you haven’t been able to do that in the money market until recently, okay. For a long time. But it’s safe. Since 2003, if you had $100,000 in a money market account earning 3% after inflation, that’s only worth $64,000 today, you’ve lost $36,000 by being safe and conservative. Inflation, okay? That’s the silent killer. That’s the real silent killer of our, of our, of our.

Of our net worth. Instead, if you take that 100,000 in 2003 and put it into gold, it’d be worth over $700,000, saving gold. Folks, I cannot tell you the number of financial planner types and so called smart money people that it just used to beat us up and beat me up online for saying, how dare you recommend people, don’t you know how risky that that is? What if? What if, what if, what if, what if? You know, and like, no physical gold, not paper physical gold, and use it as your savings, and look at that difference right there. And that’s just in 20 years, and it’s only with $100,000. So anyway, that’s. That’s remains. That remains my recommendation. I’m not saying don’t have some liquidity, because again, to sell, if you need to sell, you got to find a dealer.

[00:22:57]:
Again, that’s what we’re talking about. One day process, 1 hour process. But storage, of course, is important. But those are. Those are. Those are other things we can talk about another time. Bottom line is, though, this bull market has just started. This is the bull market of bull markets for precious metals and miners.

And miners. That’s where the real opportunity is. Okay, let’s take a look under the hood today. 1 second here. Quick refresh. All right. The internals today, again, were not. Not bad at all.

Again, Nasdaq led the way lower, and that was down 1.5%. That’s a decent move lower right for Nasdaq. Also, the semis down 2.7%. So this is telling us right now, semis are leading tech lower and the techs leading the market lower. That. That tells us that, yeah, this is a time. This is, again, it’s a time to pause your buying. This is not a time to step up and be hero buying anything.

[00:23:59]:
There’s more downside risk than there is upside risk. But again, I think it may be just for this week, but the internals held up really well today. NYSE advanced decline only negative by 500 issues. Nasdaq not even two to one negative again, down 1.5%, not even two to one negative. Advanced decline. Nasdaq volume again, 1.7 to one, negative. Not even close to two to one, really. And then NYSE volume was almost positive, only negative about $300 million worth of trading.

We also had more 52 week highs today than we had 52 week lows. A sector watch was not as good today. But again, there was not a lot of damage here, frankly. Technology led the way lower, down 2.6%. Nothing else, down more than six tenths 1%. The upside again, energy stocks up 2.2%. And that’s about all happening there. Commodities again, gold today up a solid 24, but not, not a harbinger.

Here comes bad thing. Gold is moving up for all the reasons we’ve been talking about, not because the military conflict, although today probably had some juice with it. We had again, final trading. Gold, 26 84, just, just off the high all time highs. But what is this? $20 an ounce up nine tenths 1% today. Silver, up seven tenths 1%. 3167. Copper, up six, 1% at 458 a pound.

[00:25:23]:
Crude oil again, good day today of 257 a barrel at 7074. And finally, bitcoin again. This is the one that we’re going to get into tomorrow in our very letter. 60,700. Bitcoin is not a flight to safety trade. We’re seeing this now, right? Not a flight to safety trade doesn’t mean we don’t like it and love it. We like it for different reasons, because there is no better supply, demand, trade or investment on the planet. And that’s why we lick our chops when we see these moves.

Lower bitcoin lasts 60,784. That’s down 4.7% on the day. All right, folks, that’s it for today. Hope you had a great day. New been a night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close. Bye.