In today's episode, Tyler discusses the strong start to the week for stocks and the market as a whole. Despite a history of tough Mondays so far in 2025, we saw textbook bull market action to kick off the week with tech stocks higher and the semiconductors leading. Major highlights today also included an impressive rebound for Tesla, tariff fears being alleviated, and the economic outlook for 2025. Tune into today's podcast to learn more

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 day out there today. Hope it was a great start to your week this week as well. For our markets, it was a good start to the week this week. Much needed after we finally got a week of positive action last week for the first time in four weeks for the S&P 500. You know, we highlighted a little bit here last week as well that we got our first back to back days of positive action in a long time last week.

And so good to get another pair of positive days here Friday and then today on Monday, which is really good to see because Mondays have been by far the worst day of the week this so far this year in the markets.

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I know we’re only three months into the year, just about to wrap up the third month of the year, but Monday, bar none, is, has been the worst day of the week for our markets. About double, almost double the next worst day of the week for stocks in 2025. Now that makes sense when you look back on the market action from, you know, really the last nine, 10 weeks or so, maybe eight weeks, really from the all time highs to today where we saw the Deep Seek Monday news, where we saw the big sell off, right. When deep sea China’s AI was going to eat the the US’s lunch.

Turns out not quite of a big, as big of a deal as we would have thought based off the original headlines from that story. And now US AI companies have come back and beat Deep seek in multiple other categories by now as well. Then of course, Tariff scares where we had tariff news coming out just about every weekend for weeks straight. And then Mondays we’d get that same sell off again. So one thing that did give us, well, we’ll get to that here in a second because one thing that it has done, which I’ll get to here in a second is the sentiment side of things was just absolutely destroyed sentiment here, which of course makes sense.

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We just had a correction in the S&P 500 that NASDAQ and semis sold off even more.

Not exactly confidence boosting type of stuff. So I’ll get to the sentiment here in a minute. But so while corrections never feel good while they’re happening, there’s something that you do have to get used to in a bull market, right? 10% corrections happen on average, you know, roughly every 16 to 18 months. That’s roughly Every year and a half. And sometimes in bull markets, it can be even more often about once a year where you get a 10% pullback.

It reminds us a lot and why we talk about it so much here of the 1995-2000.com melt up when the NASDAQ rallied 580%. There were five pullbacks of 10% or more during that time frame. So one a year.

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Including a 33% technical bear market during that time frame. And so what I see is probably Maybe the most two important points to take away from that chart from 1995 to 2000 and how it relates to today. So again, number one, they’re not fun when you’re going through them, never are. But number two, if you can keep your head about you. And not panic sell and do so much of what market watchers talk about not doing, of buying high and selling. Selling low.

You want to buy low and sell high. If you can keep your head in an environment like this, you’ll find incredible buying opportunities. Because usually when There is a 10% pullback in the market, it means the underlying stocks, most of them at least, are pulling back 20, maybe 30%. In the case of Tesla, you know, even more than that. What did I mean? What. At the lows of 50% pullback.

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But again, we’ll look at that as an incredible buying opportunity, whether that’s in the market or your favorite positions.

And this is what Kip discussed on Wayne Root show over the weekend. It came out on Saturday. He talked about it on his podcast though, on Friday as well, that we use this as an opportunity. We’ll give you a very specific one here because we talk about it all the time. And that is Tesla, which we have written this pullback through. You know, we’ve got a great buy price on it, so we remained above that. But so a couple of things here before. So again, back to Kip, you know, talked about it on Wayne’s show and the podcast.

Of adding to our Tesla position last week. And again, what’s so funny about this is the timing here really just about the same time. Tim Waltz, you might have seen the clip, but by now, you know, of him showing on his phone. Oh, look, on your phone you’ve got the stocks app on an Apple, right. And when I just need a little pick me up during the day, I look at Tesla stock because it’s down so much. And he thought it was like a gotcha kind of moment, you know, thought it was hilarious kind of Pandering to the base, you know, but if you look at it from any kind of rational perspective, you realize it’s an incredibly dumb comment.

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Number one, you know, the left is supposed to be the party of, you know, climate change and environmentalism, and yet they’re willing to burn down and destroy and root against the number one EV maker in the world right now.

It’s kind of reminds me of that saying, you know, if they didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all. So I won’t dive too much into just how dumb of a comment that is, other than what I have and the fact that, well, when you’re rooting against an American company like Tesla that makes their cars in the US and is a worldwide leader in these things, in full self driving and AI, and now the robotics division as well, when you’re rooting against a company like that. And Elon Musk, probably the, you know, greatest innovator in recent history, right? You know, definitely in the last decade. Somebody made a great point this morning. The greatest thing I think it was Chamber said this probably on the all in podcast. You know, the greatest thing that’s come out of Silicon Valley in the last decade is AirPods. Elon Musk sends people to space in rockets.

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That’s a huge difference. So Silicon Valley has failed America and only really exported their extreme left wing ideas across their, their platforms.

These are all soft, mostly software companies that solve very minor problems, get huge valuations. You know, some of them are good, no doubt about it, but some of them anyway. So what’s funny about the Tim Waltz comment coming back to that again, he’s rooting against himself. His constituents own it in their retirement accounts. He, they own it in their pension funds.

So he’s rooting against his own people. But he also called the bottom here almost to the day because today Tesla just had its fifth best day in the company’s history. Let’s take a look at this chart here quickly. So again, up, you know, 11.9%. Is that the final closing price here? Because on, on some, you know, sometimes you get different quotes from different indexes. Rough. I mean, look at that, 11.9%. No one’s complaining here on the day like that.

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This right here is the day that Tim Waltz made his comments. We have rallied in Tesla over 20% since that level now. So pretty funny to see, you know, we got another wrong way Jim Cramer to look at here. But it really is funny that they’re trying to push this guy out onto the American public because he’s incredibly unpopular. And you look at the crowds, right? A lot of people, they panned the audience. You got to watch some of these things just to keep up with what they’re saying, right? The narratives, really. But then you look at the crowd, and it’s. It is almost humorous for the party that’s supposed to be the party of diversity and inclusion. Their crowd certainly lacks diversity and inclusion. It’s a bunch of very much older liberals, very few young people, mostly white, mostly wealthy.

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They’re. They’re what they’re fighting against, essentially, you know, and a lot of people that really don’t contribute much to society. I hate to say that about people, but, like, these are the people who don’t want to end US Aid because they’re the ones benefiting from it.

They don’t want to see the government be efficient because that takes away their grift from the government, whether it’s, you know, collecting unemployment checks or all the scams that we saw on loans from COVID Right. All kinds of different factors that they live off of the government’s paychecks from the government, essentially.

Of course, they don’t want to see these things fixed. But again, you know, these are people who actively root for our country to fail, where I know a lot of Trump supporters and a lot of Biden or Kamala supporters, right? And I will tell you the one thing. There are a lot of Kamala supporters that have this trait. Okay? But I would say I see it more in Trump supporters where even when Biden won after the rigged election, right. Even being able to acknowledge that it was rigged, Trump supporters were still rooting for Biden to succeed.

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We weren’t rooting for him to fail because that’s rooting for our country to fail. And it’s really hard for people on the left to take that same attitude towards Trump. It definitely is out there. I’ve got a lot of friends who are Dems who can still look at the Trump Vance administration and say, you know, I hope that they do well.

Because it means success for our country. I may not like the way they’re going about it, but let me tell you that it seems to be very few and far between. You know, I live here in Austin, Texas. Wonderful city, very liberal city, though. Start to bring up Trump in conversations, then you start to see eyes roll, you know. So again, it’s kind of few and far between of those people who really don’t mind rooting they don’t even have to root for Trump. You can still root for our country to succeed. So first and foremost, you don’t bet against America.

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And that’s exactly what Tim Waltz, you know, the incredibly unpopular VP pick for the Dems continues to do time and time again. It’s not a good look. But second, as contrarians, it continues to make sentiment worsen, whether they’re just skeptical about the market or actively rooting for it to fail. As contrarians, we look at that as an opportunity. You know, we just found out today here in a piece by Zero Hedge that the, the market is now at its highest market wide short interest since COVID Right. Remember how crazy we’ve had a bear market since then and there’s more short interest now than when we were in a bear market.

And then so the, the primary concern here for people, of course, has been just kind of the uncertainty of Trump’s policies.

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Of course there was the deep seek blowout news and then tariffs. Tariffs were a huge concern here. And then finally over the weekend, they started to take control of some of this narrative here. And so again, go back to the sentiment point really quick before we get to tariffs. We still got the fear and greed index finally exiting extreme fear mode. Still firmly in fear Mode at about a 28 here. So again, whether it’s on the stock side or on the economic side of things.

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Just months ago, we saw roughly 90% of economists calling for a recession. We’d love to take the other side of that bet. It’s just like in 2021, you know, coming off of the stimulus highs of COVID And now a new administration with Biden came into office.

100% of economists polled going into 2021 were looking for a recession. We had an incredible year at the VRA here that year. Now, they were right. We did have technically back to back quarters of negative gdp, but it was really the shortest recession ever, I guess you would say. But that wasn’t until 2022. So when we see economists all getting on one side of the same bet, we love to take the other side. And we’re seeing that time and time again in sentiment. And you can see the reasons.

We have talked about this here as well. Back to the tariffs topic, it wasn’t even the tariffs that were the issue. It was the messaging and the uncertainty. But we said here from the very beginning, you know, that a lot of the talk was negotiating tools and that the market was overreacting to it, just like they did in Trump’s first term.

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The fears of tariffs were way overblown compared to the reality once they were implemented.

A lot of these are negotiating tactics. So last week on the podcast ahead of the Fed meeting, this is exactly what we talked about looking for, you know, two main things for this market, a flip, a pivot, a dovish pivot from the Federal Reserve. We got that JP From J. Powell last week. And they were looking for Trump to start, start getting control of the messaging, start highlighting some of the victories. This is why I talked about on Thursday’s podcast, whether it’s the border or the flow of fentanyl.

And highlight the fact that, hey, if you’re making progress here, you know, we can delay some of these things and we’re not going to increase tariffs too much. They’ll be reciprocal though.

And we can talk about them. So already just from one weekend’s different, one weekend, just a couple of days of different messaging, it’s already seeing seeming like the tariff threat was way overblown. And that’s a big reason why the market rallied so much here today.

So remember this, the Atlanta Fed over the last few weeks on the tariff news has lowered their GDP forecast for Q1 from 2.1% growth and at the lows got all the way down to negative 2.8% over 4% swing in the matter of weeks all over tariff concerns. But now that tariff concerns are looking like they were overblown Q1 GDP, and we’ve said this from the beginning, might come in a little slower, but it’s going to be just fine. And we do continue to look for a positive number here. And what the Atlanta Fed has done, I think it has served us in some ways because it has forced Jay Powell’s hand and to be more doge so worked out for us, but this is going to create a major credibility problem from the Atlanta Fed and really could send ripples through the Federal Reserve as a whole. The trust of the Federal Reserve is already incredibly low.

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This is a huge miss, though. And we’ll get now we’re approaching the end of Q1 here, so we’ll get those GDP numbers, you know, over the next month or so and we’ll see just how wrong they were. But depending on how bad it is, again, the recovery from this mistake should be in our opinion, we think it should be a big deal, especially if it does come in positive, what fear they sent through the market. They should be held accountable for those kinds of things and again, should take them years to recover from really. So now that we are entering the end of a quarter, that is going to look better because tariff fears were overblown. Same thing with earnings. In Q4 earnings we saw companies crush, right? Estimates were for 8% coming in closer to 12 to 13%. Now that we’re almost through it here.

Still got a few more earnings coming up this week actually. But point being, these companies also lowered their estimates for future quarters so we could see some big beats coming in this quarter. So again, as contrarians, we look for this market to continue head higher. Corrections are never fun, bottoms are messy, no doubt about it. But we do think that the lows are in here, right? Doesn’t mean it’s going to be straight up, right? They always say stairs up, escalate or yeah, stairs up, elevator down, right. That means going to be straight up along the way. But as we continue to set a series here, we know you want to see those lows hold. We expect them to.

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Like I said, as we continue to get series of higher highs and higher lows, you’ll want to continue the smart money remain smart money move remains to buy the dip in this market here. So that being said, let’s take a look at our market action here quickly. We’re led by the small caps today, up over two and a half percent. 2,109 on the Russell 2000. So but for the big three, we don’t always include the small caps in the three really major indexes. We’ll call them the four majors. But most people kind of look at the Dow, S, P and NASDAQ as the real majors. So for the majors, the Nasdaq led the way.

Exactly what you want to see. And we got some participation from the Mag 7 today. You know, big updates there. You know, obviously Tesla being up nearly 12% helps a lot, but it’s time for the Generals to start to make their moves as well. So NASDAQ led up two and a quarter and just what you want to see. Semis leading tech semis up 2.6% for SMH today. Good day. Exactly what you want to see.

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I’m going to show a chart here in a second, so I’m going to jump around. We’ll go with the Dow which was still up 1.4%. So great day today, but also textbook action of what you want to see from this group. The Transports leading transports up 2.17%. And it’s time for the Transports to make some moves here. Then finally here, the S&P 500.

I do have a chart Here, just a quick one. Getting back above the 200 day moving average today. 5767 is where we closed up 1.76%. Look here, 200 day moving average below where we closed today. So we want to see that hold there. Your dips below this don’t concern us as much as long, you know, medium, even short term that we’re right kind of at the edge here. We want to see this hold above the 200 day moving average. We do expect it to. All right, let’s just see here and one other bullish factor for our major indexes given this correction. And we have just back to back days of nice moves.

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But we did have a good week last week, right? First positive week in four and we’re nowhere near overbought levels here. So exactly what you want to see. Next up, looking at our internals on the day to day, good numbers here, almost 3 to 1 positive. Advanced decline on the NYSE just shy of that. Over 2 to 1 positive on the NASDAQ. 52E highs, lows, light numbers but did come in positive on the nyse. Slightly negative on the nasdaq. As you might expect when we’re coming out of corrections like this new 52E highs and lows is typically a lagging indicator.

Finally here, volume. You know I ran these numbers just before I got on the podcast. These looks like they might have gotten even better. But check this out. Not quite the bullish breath thrust days that we wanted to see especially on a big update like today, but 76.4% upside volume on the NYSE. We’ll take it. 77.8% upside volume on the NASDAQ. Good day from the internals and again we want to see follow through tomorrow. Doesn’t mean that we have to.

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It’s not saying that it would negate our bullish views if we didn’t, but it would be really good. Now that we’ve had a couple of days with back to back gains. Let’s see if we can string three in a row here. And we, and we do remain extremely bullish going forward. Like I said, a lot of the, the, the factors in our wall of worry, the fears are being alleviated here and as we know, bull markets love to climb a wall of worry. All right, looking at our sectors here on the day today, consumer discretionary leading the way in a big way today up over 4%. After that we had communication services followed by industrials and financials. Our one laggard on the day was utilities.

As you might expect. We did have this 10 year yield up 1.86% on the day today to a now a 4.33. So it was a big pop there. You know, once again kind of confirms our view on tariffs though, right? Economic strength is going to be better than expected. You know, tariffs are going to be not as bad as expected. Also we’ll get pce the that is what they say the Fed says is their favorite gauge of inflation data. We get that at Friday. We’re seeing improvement and disinflationary factors in both CPI and PPI as well.

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Same thing out of China. And we have said for some time they’re going to export that deflation here to the US So we do expect yields to move lower a pop on a day like today where we expect now better economic growth with the again alleviation of tariff fears. We think that’s all this is in yields there. And again really anywhere in the 4 range is not a concern for us right during the 1995-2000 melt up that I’ve talked so much about already today Yields average between 6 and 7% plus so no concerns for us at these levels. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch got a little bit of red on the screen from gold really pretty much flat on the day at $3,045 an ounce if this is correct. Let me just get a little bit of a refresh here, make sure we got the latest numbers. Then we’ve got silver last trade here, 33.52 an ounce. That high that Kip was talking about of just at 34.86 would be a 52 week high.

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So we remain right in the range of that right now as well for silver copper at $5 and 8 cents a pound. Sorry, I’m running some of these charts here as well so make sure I didn’t miss anything for you here today because during the day that was looks like just shy of its 52 week high there. And finally here for today. Oh sorry, oil a little all over the place for the commodity watch here. Oil has seen a little bit of a rally here at $69.16 a barrel. And finally here for today we saw a nice pop earlier in bitcoin and really the altcoins here as well. We just recommend bitcoin for the portfolio. We know a lot of you own other cryptocurrencies here as well.

So good day. A lot of green on the screen in the world of crypto today. But bitcoin now up over four and a half percent at $88,031 a Bitcoin. Another group that we do remain 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 podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up@vletter.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.