In today's episode, Tyler breaks down another day of all-time highs, despite some early concerns in futures trading about Trump's new tariffs. Tyler covers the importance of owning inflationary assets and discusses why we're still bullish on the market's future, particularly with recent regulatory shifts. We'll also touch on recent consumer confidence surveys and what they might signal for the housing market. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there today. Hope your Thanksgiving week is going great here as well. We got another day of all time highs here leading up to the holiday shortened week. So, you know, no complaints on that end. Not quite as many all time highs as yesterday.

But hey, we’ll take it. You know, a little reminder here, I’m sure we all already know Thursday the market will be closed and on Friday we’ll have a half day as well for the market. But again, nice to get back to back days here at least for some of our bigger all time highs today. So a good day overall though. We finished with three out of our four major indexes positive on the day today, with just the Russell 2000 finishing lower on the day today after hitting its first all time high in a couple of years just yesterday. But overnight there were some worries out there. Our markets futures were lower on a new proposal from Trump for tariffs on Mexico and Canada for two main things, to stop all illegal aliens from coming into the US and to stop the flow of drugs into the US as well. And some proposed tariffs for China for the same thing to stop fentanyl from coming across our borders here.

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But good to see. What we’ve seen a lot since Trump was elected is the market futures pointing to a lower open in our major indexes finishing at or near the highs of the day that day, or at least getting back to positive territory here. As Kip talked about yesterday though, the Perma bears here are getting more and more adamant about thinking that this market is just going to collapse. You see them doing really mental circles around this problem of all of the reasons why the markets are going to collapse. You know, Kip and I talked about this a little bit on our joint podcast last week as well, that there are so many smart sounding reasons to be bearish. You know, it makes it really easy for a bear to come across as smart because they’ve got all these incredible facts right, obscure facts that most people don’t even look at, which again makes them sound very smart. And that’s not to say that these facts don’t have credibility, but it is to say that these facts don’t always lead to the outcome that the Perma bears think that they will. And as CIB said yesterday as well, you know, these Perma bears are really list builders.

They’re, they’re engagement farmers, right? They want the clickbait type of articles to get people to subscribe to their platforms or follow them on various social media channels. And what they’re really catering to is a lot of people who may not be invested in this market. And they want a reason to feel good about not being invested in this market. Right. And that’s the opposite of what we want to do here, because the stock market is the greatest wealth generation tool that’s really ever existed here on our planet. Right. We’ve talked about this so much over the last few years. We even wrote a book about it called the Big Bribe, that inflation is effectively a tax on your US Dollar.

Correct. So when you think about it from that point of view, you have to own inflationary assets to protect your wealth. If inflation continues, stocks continue to go higher, gold continues to go higher, bitcoin continues to go higher, real estate continues to go higher. And you need to own these assets to protect your wealth against inflation. Now, I do think that inflation is back under control. I don’t know if the Fed is quite ready to do the victory lap that they’ve done. Right. But especially getting Trump back into office, getting rid of these regulations that lead to much higher costs.

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Yes, I understand that tariffs can be inflationary. But what we’re seeing right now, going back to the tariff talk topic of what we’re seeing in Mexico and Canada, what I think a lot of people miss, which I’m sure you here in our audience haven’t missed this, we’ve got a very smart money audience here. I’ve heard this for a lot of you already, that you understand tariffs are a negotiating tool. If you saw the video of Justin Trudeau today talking about the conversation that he had with Trump, it’s very similar to the conversations he had with Trump while he was in office where, you know, he just sits there and smiles, stutters over his words a little bit. It’s not the, the confident Trudeau of, you know, he can get away with just about anything that he wants. No, this is somebody who’s realizing, oh, I’ve got to go to work now, is what it seemed like, especially the interview that you saw with him today. And he said, you know, we’re ready to get to work with the new administration, which was very surprising to hear, you know, from the, this very liberal Canadian, Justin Trudeau. So they’re negotiating tactic in many ways.

And overall, we don’t see them as being something that’s going to reignite inflation here in the US but back to the perma bears here. You know, they love to get in. Especially when the market’s at all time highs. They love to say stuff like this is going to be a blow, blow off top here. Right? But folks, as we see it, we are still in the early innings of this bull market here for a few examples here. Where is the irrational exuberance that you see at the end of bull markets? We’re not seeing it here yet. You know, I, I hear a lot of comparisons to Bitcoin, to Tulip mania, if that is even the case. I think we’re still in the early innings of that as well.

You know, where is the red hot IPO market like we saw leading up to 2020 when the previous bull market ended? Remember that was a 10 year bull market, was our most recent bull market. We just entered into year three of this bull market, just wrapped up two full years. Have you ever take it as we do from the October lows of 2022. So again this bull market is only just over two years old. Bull markets on average run five to six years. And again our previous bull market ran for 10 years. That’s the kind of move that we continue to look for here. And as we see it, this has been our tune for some time now and it remains the case that buying the dip remains the smart money move here.

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So in the short term, Kim talked about this yesterday as well. We remain in one of the most bullish times of the year for the market. And very specifically from today, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving into the second day of the new year is a very bullish time here as well. The S P 500 averaging gains over this time period of over two and a half percent. The Russell 2000 averaging gains of over 3.3%. That’s going back to 1950 and 1979. Now those might not sound like incredible gains, right? But if you annualize that, you realize that would be an incredible year for the market. But here’s what’s even more impressive than that.

The average win rate here, you know, we’re looking at for the S and P going back to 1950, the market has been higher. 59 out of. What is that? 74 times, only 15 instances lower. So, but roughly an 80% win rate. And the Russell 2000 is right there in the same camp as well. So we remain extremely bullish going into year end and then over the medium to long term, as you may know, we’re even more bullish here. Yes, that remains the case. It’s been tough to find anyone out there more bullish than we have been.

Our Call remains for the Dow Jones to reach 100,000 by 2030. NASDAQ to 40,000. And. And we could be to the low side there, you know, pretty astonishing to think about it. From there. That’s over a double from here for both of those. And we could be on the low side. Trump’s been talking about this a lot, that we’re about to enter a new golden age.

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And I think a lot of people underestimate, actually what that might look like. You’re releasing animal spirits here in the U.S. along with, you know, our theme has been the roaring 2020s in the innovation revolution, getting rid of regulation. We were just having a call today with a gold mining CEO and talking about, you know, their technology in the gold mining sector really hasn’t evolved at the same pace as most other sectors. Right. You know, and a big part of that is this permitting period where it takes years and years to get mine develops, similar in oil and gas, where it becomes very hard for smaller startups to get into the industry even with a type of new technology because of the regulations in these spaces. So we can get rid of these regulations, get back to innovating in some of the more traditional areas as well. You know, that makes energy prices cheaper and these companies become just money printing machines at that point for commodities specifically.

But really across the board, you know, getting rid of regulation allows new companies to come in, exciting new technology that previously investors wouldn’t have risked their money on for. Right. Because so much of that money would go in to legal fees, getting around red tape, all of these headaches out there that are again just barriers to entry. Getting rid of those and unleashing animal spirits here in the US Is exactly what we see going forward. And we do expect the golden age that Trump is talking about to I, we expect him to execute on those promises there. All right, so kind of changing gears here. We did get some interesting surveys back today. The consumer confidence survey hitting a 16 month.

Hi. No, no coincidence there that it’s coming after the election with a lot of optimism now for 2025. But another survey that I really found interesting was that right now, 82% of Americans say it is a bad time to buy a house. Right now. That’s the highest it’s ever been, higher than it was from 2006 to 2010. You have to go all the way back to the 70s, I believe, to find a print even close to as high as this. You know, as a contrarian here, we look at this as a potential buy signal for Housing. Now we have sold our position here one of our favorite leverage ETFs for housing.

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If you want to find out more about it, you can join at vraletter.com with our 14 day free trial. We don’t have a position in it right now, but this one stat alone has me very interested in it here. It reminds me of the economist in I believe it was 2020 where 100% of economists polled predicted a major recession that made us want to go even longer the market at the time despite you know, everything surrounding the 2020 election. Right. So again I believe it was around that time going that there was going to be a recession in 2021 and again 100% of economists predicted a major recession. Yes, we had a bear market in 2022 and we had two back to back quarters of negative GDP. But where was this massive recession really? It has been almost four years now with economists and the majority at the end of every year calling for a recession in the following year. Once that starts to change and economists are predicting massive GDP growth and it’s 70, 80, 90% of economists predicting this, then we’ll start to take another look at hey, maybe it’s time to take some profits here.

But again 82% of Americans saying it’s a bad time to buy a house right now. And I get it, home prices are expensive. But come coming from just a survey point of view as a contrarian, you know we like to see numbers like that. All right, so let’s take a look here at our market action on the day to day. We were led by the Nasdaq today up just over six tenths of 1%. You know just shy here of an all time high though as well. After that we’ll get into the all time highs. The S P500 up just under 610 of 1% at 6021 hitting an all time high today.

Dow Jones also hitting an all time high and exactly what you want to see finishing near its highs of the day as well at 44,860. And lastly here the R2000 as I mentioned earlier did finish lower on the day today by 710 of 1%. Looking at our internals on the day today, you know yesterday we had pretty decent numbers here. Not so much today we did come in negative almost but not quite 2 to 1 negative on the NYSE with more declining than advancing stocks Closer to even though on the Nasdaq 52e highs and lows were our bright spot coming in positive for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. And volume here did come in negative for both the NYSE and the nasdaq. But no two to one beats there or anything like that just yet. But we do want to continue to see the internals improve. You know, it’s been a good run.

[00:15:00]:
We’ve continued to see broadening action from these internals as of late, you know, so we’ve probably hit on some of the smaller names which make up especially in the Nasdaq. You’re starting to hit some overbought levels. If we were to get a little bit of a pause again, our view remains unchanged. We would use that as a buying opportunity. Looking at our sectors on the day to day, we finished with nine out of our 11s P500 sectors higher on the day to day, led by utilities, which was interesting. Yields were down big yesterday, but we’re up a little bit today. But I think we’ve, we’ve run into resistance here on yields. We’re at a 4.3% on the 10 year now.

But utilities hitting an all time high confirms our view that yields are going to continue heading lower. I talk about this here often, but as a forward looking mechanism which the market is. Utilities hitting an all time high tells us that yields are likely to continue lower because utilities are the largest borrowers of debt in the country. So they’re very interest rate sensitive. Next up we had Consumer Discretionary, which I believe is also just shy. See where it finished. Just shy of an all time high. Might have been an all time closing high though there after that.

Communication services did hit an all time high and so did the financials today as well. Our two laggards were materials and energy. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Let me get a quick refresh of my screens here. Gold now higher on the day by 6/10 of 1% to 2,658. Silver higher by 8/10 of 1% to $30.92 an ounce. Copper down on the day now about just over six tenths of 1% to $4 and 13 cents a pound. And oil essentially flat on the day today at $68.96 a barrel.

[00:17:05]:
And finally here for today, Bitcoin has taken a little bit of a pullback here from 100,000 after getting within, you know, within $400 of hitting 100,000 here. You know, this is something that Kip and I have talked about a lot. Those round numbers. When you cross a big round number, it can add some fuel to the fire here, I think this pullback here in bitcoin will lead to when we break through 100,000, you know, we could see 105, 110, 115 in really short order after that because of this pullback here, you know, getting out of some of these overbought readings, you know. So again, we look at this as an opportunity to buy the dip for bitcoin as we now are out of extreme overbought on steroids, which we’ve seen since the election for bitcoin in this massive move higher that it’s had now. Bitcoin down two and a half percent on the day, almost exactly at $92,000 a bitcoin. But again, you know, we’ll use this any pullbacks to add two positions. We, we remain extremely bullish on bitcoin going forward.

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 at 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.