In today's episode, Kip takes us through a volatile and eye-opening day on Wall Street, where big losses in the major indexes were led by sharp declines in semiconductors and tech. From Nvidia chip bans to a disappointing earnings report from ASML, today’s market action was driven by a perfect storm of bad news and mounting uncertainty over tariffs. Kip shares his take on recent comments by Jay Powell, his concerns about the economic outlook, and what the latest moves in gold, silver, and bitcoin might be telling us about where things are headed.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Wednesday after everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA investing podcast. Hope you had a good day today. Kind of a wild day today. Lots to talk about, but I don’t have a lot of time. This is going to be a short podcast. I think I’ve said that before and it just hasn’t happened.

But this time it has to be. So let’s get right to it. Big reversal lower today in the market. You may have seen just really quickly. Dow Jones down 1.7%. Nasdaq down just over 3%. S P 500 down 2.3%. Russ 2000 down 1%.

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And the worst of it was the semis again, this is not the action we want to see when the semis lead lower and then Nasdaq follows. That is exactly what we got today on the heels of some bad news on the Nvidia chips, if you’ve heard, not be able to sell these into China. And then we got ASML earnings today, which was a miss. And then AMD announced that I think they’re going to have, they’re going to book a charge of $800 million for their added cost of the tariffs. This is the issue that we’re going to see left and right with these tariffs. Okay. And it’ll be worse for some companies and better for others. Right.

But semis again, down 4% on the day. Nasdaq down 3%. And it was, it was really Jay Powell day. This is when the market went south. Okay, I want to read these quotes to you because as I watched this thing and I don’t even know where he was speaking. He was speaking to some, you know, event or something, had a guy interviewing him and I just happened to catch, you know, I caught like 80% of it. But I saw all of, all of his Q and A. And there’s some really interesting things here.

And they were all negative. Okay, here’s some direct quotes. Tariffs are even higher than we thought they would be, which, which means the effects will be higher too. That’s the first one I heard that got my attention. He’s saying right there, this is going to hurt. Okay? He said straight up unemployment and prices will go up. I mean, these weren’t, they may. Will.

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Right? We actually said this. We have to get through this. We have to get. Now, I think what he’s talking about there is 2025. I think he believes the Fed believes this is going to be like a one year thing. Well, that’s not just 2025, is it? Because you know, you got, we got, we got another quarter to go next year. But I think that’s what he’s referring to. But it sounded very strange for him to say it then.

He even mentioned in passing Smoot Hawley and the Great Depression. So he’s saying things that weren’t careful and weren’t crafted. He was just having a conversation. He looked very content to me. He looked happy, like decathlonate the canary. He looked very, very confident. I did not take this at all as good news for President Trump. Okay, look, we know there’s no love loss of these two.

This has been get Trump with J. Powell from the beginning. 2018, as one of our long term VRA members told me today, it exactly is 2018 all over again. But this time Trump has opened the door for them. We’ve talked about this a lot, okay. I was saying this three, four weeks ago. Trump has opened the door and made his enemies jobs easy for them. All right? And they’re taking advantage of it.

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That’s what I believe. That’s the best part of what is going on here. More quotes. They talked about stagflation. He didn’t say that’s what he expects, but it was pretty clear he was implying that maybe the environment we’re going into. I saw this as Jay Powell’s nightmare scenario. Rising rates, rising inflation, falling rising unemployment and slower growth. That’s what I got.

This quote, last quote, if I can read my writing. This may force our dual mandate goals intentional and that in meaning they may be. I’ve never heard it phrase quite like that. In other words, we’re going to have, we may have a struggle with our dual mandate goals of stable pricing and employment. Okay. That’s when the market was out. Right? And we did finish off the lows of the day, which is a good sign. I think that Trump has got something at the White House today.

Maybe there was some excitement about maybe Japan, I think is in town. Maybe he started announcing some of these deals. I don’t know. I hope he does. I don’t think the leverage is there. I think that Trump and his team have showed their hands. They’ve shown where they’ll bend, where they’re fold and the world saw it. And again, the mistake here, and I’m not beating up on Trump, but folks, I’ve been saying this now for several weeks, okay? I’ve been extremely consistent about this and you all know I’m a Trump supporter, but he didn’t put a coalition together.

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It’s us or Trump versus the world. And that just invites disaster. You know, when I’m in coalition, I didn’t mean, like Japan or something. I didn’t mean another country. I meant in this country. He needed to build a coalition with the Federal Reserve. He and Jay Powell should have gotten together, mentioned the defenses to go, hey, all right, Jay. Here’s what’s going on here, right? You like my buddy Scott Bessett here.

He is, too. Okay, I’m going to stop being an asshole. I’m not going to tell you to cut rates. I’m not going to. I’m not going to beat you up. The media. I’m not not going to do it anymore. You know why? Because I need you on my side, man.

We’re doing something big. We’re going to save this country, right? It’s going down the wrong. Our debt’s exploding, right? We don’t make anything anymore. Just we’re in bad shape. And we know if we don’t fix it in the next 10 years or something, something really bad is going to happen here. We’re going to lose America, and we’re going to lose to China and the rest of the world and then bring him into the fold. Maybe Trump did that, but do you think he did? I don’t. Because, again, Jay Powell looked very confident and very satisfied today.

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I think they. I think they got Trump. I’m telling you the truth. I think they got Trump here. I think that means we’re going to have to pay the price for it. And it really pisses me off because this never had to happen again. This is exactly what I’ve said now for over a month. None of this ever had to happen.

And I’m getting very tired from being very honest with you of the people who tell me trust the plan. If the plan involves losing $11 trillion in the stock market and causing me to only be able to sleep one or two hours a night for the last three weeks and watch email after email, phone call after phone call from people that are really worried about their retirement. That’s not the plan that I signed up for, okay? It’s just not. And again, I don’t know. I’ll leave it at that. I also tell you something else that’s interesting and this. Tyler and I just talked about this. Almost every single person I talk to or message with, okay, text, a lot of text, a lot of direct messages, a lot.

A lot of Twitter, a lot of phone calls. Almost every single person I talk to is trying to convince me why I should be bullish. It is Twilight Zone for me because I had to tell these people for years. I had to convince everybody under Biden administration why they should be bullish. Because nobody wanted to be. Because of Biden. Right? Is it, is the propaganda, the media, is it that overwhelming that you can’t see what’s happening right in front. I don’t know what’s going on.

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It’s so weird, right? It is so weird. It is again Twilight Zone for me, but everybody I talk to is bullish. They’re buying the dip. They’re confident this thing is going to come back. It’s maximum, I’m telling you folks, maximum complacency. And I really want to be wrong. I hope everybody is right and I’m wrong. I really do.

All right? I really do. I, I don’t, I don’t want to be right that bad. I want everybody else to make money. I, I’ll lose money. You can all make money. That’d be great. I hope you’re all right. This is not a good setup.

I wrote this morning that I do believe. You know, obviously we’re in a bear market. 200 day moving averages rolled over. Right. Death cross after death cross. I’ll cover that more in just a moment. If there’s, there’s nothing about this market looks good. Fundamentals starting to fall apart now.

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Again we’re seeing it announcement after announcement for these tariffs, what the damage is going to do. Jay Powell’s comments today, which I thought were very, I thought he was spot on. I didn’t agree with anything he said today. And again, I’m not trying to piss anybody off here, okay? I’m really not. I’m trying to be just, just straight up honest with you about what I see. That’s the only way I know how to operate, okay? I try not to be a phony. I just try to be honest and true about what I see. I worked really hard at this, Tyler and I both do, because we want to get this shit right.

It’s important to us. Right? But, but I have to have these debates all day with people trying to convince me I’m wrong. It is just bizarre. It’s just the opposite what it was when Biden’s office. I’m telling you, I’ll just tell you straight up. Wayne wouldn’t mind me telling you this. Wayne Allen wrote, of course we’re best friends. All during Biden’s administration, Wayne was telling me how wrong I was.

Every day he’d send me article after link, I mean text, I must have got 10 texts. This is no joke. 10 texts a day from Wayne. Why I was wrong and why Biden was going to crash the entire economy and the stock market. And I finally said, wayne, I don’t have the time to keep replying to you. I’m telling you the same thing over. Just look at my old text. It’s the same answer.

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Nothing’s going to change. This is how I feel. VRA system says this. All my years of doing. And he was just convinced. Convinced. Right. And it’s just the opposite now.

Now Wayne’s trying to convince me I should be bullish. It is. It is. Again, bizarre is the only word that I. Twilight Zone. This is something else. It really is something else. And again, I hope.

I hope I’m the one that’s wrong. And I hope that Wayne and everybody else is right. With Death crosses yesterday, S500. Well, we’ve also had death crosses in the home builders in the semis, small caps, Nasdaq and Nasdaq 100. And today we got one in the US dollar. Death crosses, you know, they’re not always reliable, but when you get a snowball like this. Tell you all these signs are pointing to bad news. I do think we’re going to retest the lows.

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I think those lows might hold. We might get a really good double. Double bottoms are healthy. Let’s get that. I think at that point, the fear of God will be put back into Trump. He’s. Look, the bond market vigilantes already convinced him to change course, so we know he’s got a breaking point. This is horribly thought out, and I want to be wrong.

I hope he’s. I hope this is 40 chess and he’s got this thing figured out. I really, really, really want to be wrong. I don’t see it. And I don’t think you do either. Right. The markets have figured out that he. He doesn’t know what he’s doing here.

I’m just telling you, he’s off base here. I don’t know how that happened. He had four years to plan this. And again, last time. I want to be wrong. I promise you, I do. Um, but every part of my DNA is telling me this. And so I think we’re going to retest the lows.

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It doesn’t mean we’re going to go straight there, you know, and again, there’ll be great trading opportunities. This could be a great trading environment. It has been. I think we’ll continue to be. But I think. I think retest the lows. Will be healthy and look, I don’t know, we’ll play by, by day by day like we’ve been doing. Okay.

Foreign. Let’s move on here again. Great day again for gold. Up another hundred dollar, over a hundred dollars now. It’s again, that is three days in the last, what three out of the last five or six days trading days, the goal’s been up more than a hundred dollars an ounce. Gold’s been telling us all along something’s wrong here. Right. And, and I think we know what it is.

I, I do think we got a stagflationary buy. This is the first time I’ve said this because I never wanted to admit it. I do think we have a stagflationary environment of a slowing economy with rising prices and inflation which may mean rising rates. I think that’s what then that’s, that’s. The markets do not like that. Okay, the good news today by the way, the ten year did fall. The yield fell. It’s very good to see this.

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Okay, this is what we need to see a lot more of 10 years now closed just below a 4.3% yield. 4.279 actually. And you know, remember last week it had a high of over 4.5. So that’s good news. We want to see more of that and then we can start talking about, all right, maybe the Fed can cut rates. Right? But you know, as Powell said today, that’s not, that’s not, that’s not in the cards. Right. That’s not going to happen.

It just can’t right now because the, the markets fully expect these tariffs to be inflationary and I don’t know, I don’t think they’re wrong. I think that’s exactly right. I think we’re seeing the proof of it already. Right. And that’s looking forward. And again it doesn’t mean it’s got it. It can only last a few months or a year and then we can look through it. But we should be ready for, for these tariffs to produce higher prices and higher inflation.

I think that’s what the markets are telling us now. All right, all right, let’s look under the hood today. Internals actually weren’t very horrible at all today. We had a 2 to 1 negative advanced decline for NY. NYSE 3 to 1 negative. NASDAQ 75% down volume day for NYSE 77.9% down. Now these aren’t good readings. 77.9% down volume day for NASDAQ.

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And we had about a hundred more stocks in a 52 week high and 52 week low again. That’s, that’s nothing there at all. Sector watch today had oh, 10 of 11 sectors finished lower. Led to the downside of course by Technology down 4%. Consumer Discretionary down 2.7%. What is this 3 sec. 3 sectors down 2 and a half percent or more and then a whole slew of them down 1% or better. The only thing it closed higher, the energy was up today, up 8/10 of 1%.

And a commodity watch today again, the story of the day is gold. And boy, the junior miners are starting to go. But there’s magic’s about to take place in these stocks, right? And I think we own the two. That’s gonna. I really, really feel very confident we own the two and our view portfolio where it’s going to happen to both of them. Vista and Snowline. By the way, I’m going to be on Charles Payne show tomorrow. Tyler’s going to be on Charles Schwab tomorrow morning and I’m going to be on Charles Payne.

I think it’s the first time we. No, maybe one of the time we’ve both been on in the same day. But my guess is Charles is going to ask you about the miners because they asked for my today’s, you know, V letter and I sent it to him and I know he knows that we’ve been pitching, talking about the miners for a long time. So I guess that, that I would guess that’ll come up. I also hope that he brings up Mrs. Watanabe and are the millennials today’s Mrs. Watanabe of Japan? I think, I think he might because no one else has told this story. And if retail investors, millennials, if they wind up saving this market and they just buy so much that it just can’t go down, that’s entirely possible.

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It’s a reason we’re not lower now. Right. I wrote it up yesterday this morning. We talked about yesterday in the podcast did I think it’s going to be one of the stories of this bull market. I really do. So I hope we could talk about it too. Gold today again, up 117, up 3.6%. All time high, of course 3357.

It is trading extreme overbought and it does not care. By the way, that’s the most bullish sign you ever see. We have paused our buying there. Silver up 1.4%. Silver should be running here. 33,276. Silver’s got a lot of catching up to do. I think it probably is going to do that maybe Gold takes a breather here.

Get silver up toward 40 which is where it should be right now anyway if not at all time high which is close to 50. Right again. Silver up 1.4% today. 3276. Copper today also up 1% just better 1% at $4.67 a pound. Crude oil today up what is that 2% on the day 6260 again it’s been beaten down pretty bad. It should not be this cheap here but a decent bounce back day at least. And finally bitcoin today again acting like a champ.

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84,300 that is up just slightly on the last 24 hours but it is up and it has held up incredibly well. I take that as a great sign over the medium to long term. All right folks that’s it for the day. Hope you had a great day maybe tonight. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow at to a close.