In today's episode, Kip wraps up an eventful year for our markets in the VRA's final podcast of 2024. We will dive into today's stock market action, and we will look ahead to 2025 with a sneak peek into our forecasts, focusing on expected trends in interest rates, inflation, and equity markets. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Monday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA Investing podcast. Hope you had a great day today and I tell you a pretty good day in the markets today as well. Got a lot to talk about. Gonna do it fairly quickly. Voice is kind of there, but also trying to fail on me here. Feeling great.

Otherwise, I hope you’re all doing fantastic. What a year it’s been. I will tell you, this will be our final podcast unless something interesting happens. I don’t. I actually think it’s going to be a good end of the year. I know Tyler agrees with me on this, but I think it’s going to be a more of a controlled move. Higher. No more insanity.

As brought to us by the Federal Reserve and one Jay Powell, the worst Fed chair of our times. We’ve said that for a number of years. He once again demonstrated that again to us last Wednesday, did he not? He’s now being called pretty horrible names by most people in the financial media. We’re glad to see them catch up with us on this. Because Jay Powell, Trump was right about this guy. Although Trump did put him in office. But Trump’s right about this guy. He shouldn’t have had the gig.

[00:01:01]:
I actually think that 2025 is going to bring a change in the Fed chairman. And I think it could get a little, little messy and a little ugly. Not permitted under the law. Remember, that’s what he said when he was asked about it at the previous Fed meeting. Will Trump fire him? Not permitted under the law. And he repeated it again. That’s just weak. That’s just weak.

Weak, weak. He’s. He’s a very nervous man. He has reason to be nervous and he’s lost the confidence to Wall Street. But the good news is that insanity is behind us now. We’re not going to have a repeat of the Christmas from hell of 2018 at the worst fourth quarter ever for the market, even worse than the Great Depression. Worst December ever for the market, even worse than the Great Depression. But that’s not going to happen this year, barring something unforeseen.

And again, we’ll be out. But this is our final podcast otherwise. Also, we’ve written our final letter for 2024 this morning. But again, if something comes up, look, as I share this morning, and if you know us at all, you know this about us. We have a family office. If we recommend something, that means that we’re buying it, too. That’s either in our equity VRE portfolio Or crypto or with our Parabolic Options program. Okay? Anything else would be hypocrisy.

[00:02:24]:
There are a lot of folks that don’t follow by that rule and by that kind of transparency, we’re not one of them. So if we recommend something, you should know this, we are buying it as well, number one. Number two, look, I’ve done this a long time. I covered this in my update this morning as well. There are a lot of hooligans. Is that the right word? Yeah, that’s probably the best word for it. I could get a little nastier, but hey, in the spirit of the season, a lot of hooligans in the financial publishing business. That’s what we do here after leaving Wall street in 99, retiring from Wall street just a few months before the dot com top started the VRA in 2003.

And we do believe in transparency. It should be the norm. In our VRA member site, we list every single trade that we’ve made in the VRA portfolio going back a full decade, all right? There with our losses, our returns, everything. Again, that’s the transparency that would kind of help right the ship. Because there are, again, there are a lot of flat out scams in the financial publishing industry. My guess is if you’re on this podcast, and again, you are regulars, you’re the smart money as we see it, because you are the smart money and that’s why you’re here. Then you’ve probably been snookered by another financial publishing company. I could name some names.

[00:03:44]:
Should I do that? Sure, why not? How about Agora Publishing, right? You’ve probably been scammed at some point by one of their 17,000 different newsletters. They have. Or a guy by the name of Jim Records. Yeah, the ex CIA guy, right? The guy’s lost more money than anybody except for Jerome Powell. Okay? There are a lot of these shenanigans out there. Something you may not know. I’ll tell you now, most of these letters are not written by people, by human beings, they’re written by AI programs. Now, this is the new thing.

You’re probably seeing your inbox fill up with these brand new pop up services, these great sounding names, right? And these and these commitments and promises of performance and a track record that all of a sudden, where did you. Where’d that track record come from? Never heard of you before. How you been doing this 10 years? Well, we’ve been doing this since 2003, right? We’re finishing our 21st year. This year we’ll make 18 out of 21 years that we have beaten the market. This is all completely, fully documented, triple timestamp, as we call it. We couldn’t fake it if we wanted to, and that’s why we have complete transparency. So, you know, again, my challenge to others in our industry, I’m no longer on Wall street, is to get your act together. Stop scamming people.

You know, if you, if you have a loss, report it. Don’t take credit for things that you didn’t do. And stop writing your letters, your daily updates, your weekly updates, monthly updates, Stop writing these. With AI programs. When you work with the vra, here’s what you know. It’s me and Tyler now, we got a great team around us, but when it comes to what we write and these podcasts, what have you noticed? We write every single word. We speak every single word in our podcast. If you see it written, we wrote it.

[00:05:31]:
And we’re pretty proud of that. And that’s the way it’s always going to be, because I know no other way to do it. And I like writing. You know, I’ve come to really enjoy. I look forward to getting up in the morning and writing, because I’ve done this for 39 years, and I know from how important it was for my mentors. Michael Metz and Ted Parsons. Rest in peace to both those amazing gentlemen that took a very confused East Texas redneck and taught him how the markets worked patiently in some cases. Ted Parsons, not so much.

Malcolm X had the patience of Job with me, Ted Parsons. No, we had a lot of. A lot of come to Jesus meetings with Ted telling me to get smarter, kid, get smarter. Uh, but anyway, I, I went up through osmosis, I guess I picked up a lot of what they. They were laying down, and hopefully that end result is now you’re benefited from it, you know, uh, and I know Tyler has. Tyler is smarter than I am in so many of these areas. You know this from listening to his podcast. Just knocking him out of the park with quality information.

[00:06:34]:
And that’s what we’re going to continue to bring you. And that’s why we appreciate you. Thank you for being with us. Uh, our commitment to you is more the same. We’re just going to keep doing what we do, which is making sure, number one, we’re on the right side of the market. That’s, that’s, that’s the first battle. If you’re on the right side of the market, the rest flows easier. And then picking, finding out what the trends are, what are the, what are the big Trends, what’s the macro? Okay, if you get the macro and if you can get the megatrends right.

And that’s what, of course, we wrote about the big bribe with our five megatrends. All five of those megatrends are fully playing out. Financial, engineering, corporate earnings expansion, housing boom, millennials, animal spirits, red pilling of America. We wrote all that two years ago. Every single one of those is taking place now. Before you say, Kip, you sounded awful cocky and arrogant, please know I don’t intend for that to be the case. But if you’ve done it, there’s nothing wrong with saying it. And we’ve done it and you deserve to know it.

[00:07:32]:
And so there you go. We’re going to keep doing the same thing. Be on the right side of the market, finding the big trends that matter most, then drilling down, being in the right sectors and the right stocks as much as possible. Now, for those that may be new here, what did we say coming into 2024? We’ll have our 2025 forecast out soon, probably right at the first of the year. We’re going, we’re having those meetings now. Here’s what we said to start 2024. See if these sound familiar and see, see how we did. We said there’d be two to three red cuts in 2024.

The Fed just cut rates for the third time. We got that. We said the market would finish with gains of 25% plus. We’re there now 27%. SBF 100. We said Bitcoin hit a hundred thousand. That was a, that was a big call. Bitcoin obviously broke a hundred thousand.

We said Tesla would break 300. Remember, it was 113 at the time. Tesla, of course, broke 400, almost broke 4, 500. And it may do it for the years out. And we said gold would break $2,500. And gold has broken. So those are some of our calls that we got, right? Those are big calls. Now, not everything came to fruition.

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We have some, some, some 10 baggers that haven’t played out yet. If we still own and recommend them, then guess what? We still have the confidence that they will. The miners have had starts and spurs that look like they’re ready to rock and roll to have their bull market of bull markets, but they certainly haven’t finished here that way. Look, ultimately this is going to be that bull market for this group. Full confidence in that again. We’ll have that as part of our 2025 write up. But for the rest of the market, I can tell you, I’ll tell you this without giving away too much of our forecast for 2025, let me just lay it out for you. There are a lot of people, there are a lot of gurus, if you will, that believe 2025 is going to bring higher rates and higher inflation along with lower stock prices.

Now, it doesn’t mean we won’t have a correction, but these people are saying it’s going to be a bad year to to those saying this and there’s now a lot of you, which we love. Right? We needed more bears. We got them real quick. All it took was Jay Powell and a one bad Wednesday and 10 straight days of down action in the Dow Jones. That’s all it took for people to flip from bullish to bearish. How bullish is that? It’s incredibly bullish. But for those that are saying that, you have no idea just how wrong you’re going to be. And again, we love the fact there’s so many now saying it.

[00:10:05]:
So we did pretty good in 2024. Again, we’re going to beat the markets again this year. We have final numbers out and returns for you at the end of the year. But I would just give you a sneak preview. Rates are going to crumble lower, inflation is going to crumble lower and equity and bitcoin prices are going to take off. Again, these are high confidence calls. We have more specifics out in the very near term. But again, thank you so much for being with us for the whole year.

You know, we love doing what we do and we really appreciate you and we love your feedback. Please keep it coming. Hey, good, bad, indifferent, ugly, whatever it is, right? We got thick skin. We can take it. We are Texas gentlemen. We’d rather you not call us names if possible. But at the same time, we have no problem with the complete honesty because we do strive to be transparent and responsible to the folks that listen to us. So again, we appreciate you very much for doing that, Marcus.

[00:11:03]:
Today. You know, we started off didn’t look good, did it? Dow Jones today at one point was down 300 points in our loaded this morning. Well, I’ll tell you what I said first. I just talked about Jay Powell a little bit again, what a disaster this guy’s been. I do think he’ll be gone in 2025. We’ll be better for it. Todd and I have been pretty vocal about this being that bull market right. That we are.

Again, these megatrends are lining up. We’re in the roaring 2000s. We had the innovation Revolution, as we’ve called it. And folks, the most important thing know that there is. We’re just getting started. We’ve been buyers all week from the J PAL disaster and we are remain aggressively along this market. We also told you that we were backing up the truck and buying the semis. Today they’re up 9%.

The semi ETF we’re buying was up 9%. The semis SMH is up 3.1%. Nvidia bottomed on the day of the Fed presser and and rose and close higher. That was the tell. The semis did the same. And so now we’re looking at. Okay, now we got juice, right? It’s because the semis do lead. And now they went through a spurt this year where they did not lead but somehow the market, the rotations were very healthy and they kept the market from falling.

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That’s the way bull markets, healthy bull markets, big bull markets. That’s how they work. That’s exactly what we see. We’ve seen textbook bull markets all year where even if the semis weren’t leaning higher, the rotations into value led the way for a long period of time. And again, that supported the market. That’s the way again, a healthy bull market should work. And that is what we’ve seen. Just a couple of trading notes.

The Santa Claus rally kicks off tomorrow and runs through the second day of 2025. That’s January 3rd. If you have a strong Santa Claus rally, it tends very high probability tends to lead to a strong January. Remember, December is the strongest month of the year. This is we’re now in the strongest stretch of the year. And if that plays out into next year with a strong January, again, very high odds that the rest of your follow. So we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out. But again, I’ll repeat, it’s not that we’re not going to have corrections.

Those are healthy. Those are natural. Those are supposed to happen. You get your biggest downdrafts when they don’t happen. But a reasonable 10, 12, 14 correction. No, we have no problem with that. So ever. Those are buying opportunities.

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And if you remember us for the entirety of this two years of this bull market, we’re now in year three. What have we done? We said the smart money play is to buy the dips. That is what we intend to keep doing again unless something were to change. And I’ll stress one more thing before I move to the markets and our internals and let you good fine gentlemen and women get on with Your business last week. And we covered this on our podcast Thursday and Friday and Wednesday. Last Wednesday, when the markets cratered, Dow Jones over. Down over a thousand points. When the markets created after Powell’s ridiculous presser.

Okay. Where he didn’t have the balls. And that’s what it is. The guy doesn’t have balls. He didn’t have the balls to say, we’re reducing the number of cuts we’re going to have for 2025. Our estimates because of Trump, the Trump effect. If he had said that, I all would have been forgiven. Because you know what? The markets would have recognized that’s honesty coming from you.

But he couldn’t do that. Why couldn’t Jay Powell say that? Because that would imply that the incoming president is better than the outgoing president. That would imply that he has more confidence in the incoming president than the one that’s leaving us. And praise God for that. Right? We just got to get to January 20th. But Powell didn’t have the courage to say that, did he? No, no. That’s why he was. That’s why so many people were scratching their heads that day.

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And that’s why so many financial mainstream journalists now are saying, this guy has lost his way. He looks lost. That was Bloomberg. Because he couldn’t come out and tell the truth. But what happened after that with the way the markets collapsed? Remember last Monday week from today, we were at greed readings in the Fear greed index. Within two to three days, that dropped to extreme fear. The the Vix soared 74 in a single day. It’s the second biggest move ever, all because of one Jerome Powell.

But that’s not what bothered us or it got our attention. What got our attention was that it’s movements like this. It’s when sentiment goes from frothy to panicky in a matter of three days, what does that tell us? It tells us just how young this bull market is. Please understand me on this. This is how important investor sentiment is. When we get to the where this bull market’s long in the tooth, maybe three, four, five years, maybe longer, you know, we’re going to have again some volatile trading in between. But when we get to the point that this bull market, that sentiment doesn’t begin to fall as the markets drop, that investors start saying, hey, Mark is down, market’s down 3%, we got to put more money in. People aren’t doing that right now.

No. People are panicking instead. So that’s what telling us this, this. That’s how important investor psychology is. But we know what to look for and now you do as well. When we get to a market that’s tired, long in the tooth, we’ll see the investor sentiment, the psychology of investors will begin to change radically. We just ain’t there yet. Very, very bullish.

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And it’s good to know that. I believe as we go into 2025, because so many people have gotten bearish so, so quickly. Rookie mistake, folks. That is a rookie, rookie mistake. Okay, let’s take a look at the markets today again. Dow Jones at one point down to 300, finished higher up 66 points on the day. It’s only up 1/10 of 1%, but it’s better than down 300s 500 up a big 7/10 of 1% today. NASDAQ up 9, 10 to 1%.

Most 2000 small caps did finish down 2/10, but again, this is not. We’re now entering the most bullish time of the year for small caps. I would expect them to close the year strong and to have a very good January. We are long small caps recommending small caps here. 10 year yield 4.6%. Just, just a smidge underneath 4.6%. So right now, those that are calling for, you know, higher rates in 2025, they look like they’re right. They won’t look this way very long.

Let me explain this, if I may. We finally found a money manager today that agrees with our viewpoints. Interest rates. Louis Navalier. This is an interesting story. I know Louis Navalier, big time money manager. I’m sure you’ve seen him on TV or you’ve heard his name. He’s been in the business as long as I have.

[00:18:01]:
This guy is rocket. He truly is rocket. Scientist, smart, okay. Got his was a semester away, as I remember it, from getting his MIT to get his PhD at MIT. But he didn’t want to publish his work for his thesis, PhD and all that, so he stopped. He just dropped out of college. You imagine that. And this guy’s genius, okay, because he didn’t want to give away his, his trading secrets and how he traded growth stocks.

Instead, he became a money manager. And that’s when I met him. I met him just after that. He only been a money manager for a couple of years. When I met Louis Navalier, he managed less than $10 million. And I had, I had clients that would come in the office, have lunch, listen to Louis speak. Was a very odd guy, by the way. He had an eye problem.

I don’t know if he still does. Louie had an eye problem and his eyes would flutter like the lights bothered him. He’s always blinky, blinking, blinking. It was very distracting. But his numbers were like, who cares? We don’t care if he’s blind. Don’t give me Stevie Wonder. Look at the numbers these guys putting up. And he’s putting up big numbers like Peter lynch kind of numbers, like 28% a year.

[00:19:09]:
So I went up putting clients with him that wanted outside money management for pensions, retirement plans, etc. And it did very, very well. I only stopped doing that because I left Wall Street. And now this is what we do, right? But anyway, I’ve known Louis a long time. Louis Navalier today put out a piece where he said, and this again, this is the first. I can’t believe this. I don’t know why, why more aren’t saying this. Louis said US rates are going lower because global rates are going blue.

Believes global rates are going to sink like a stone. Getting back to negative rates, okay, remember we were just there in Japan, just there in Europe. Louis said that compared to the US the global economy, global markets are going to be so weak they’re going to have to have easy money policies. And again, America has been red pilled. Trump won. We ain’t going back. We’re going the other direction. Usually bullish for us Free market capitalism, laissez faire system of governance, that’s where we’re going.

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Everyone’s picked up on this, right? So why aren’t more people saying what we’ve been saying? That with the US tenure now at almost 4.6% and the equivalent German bun 10 year is at 2% and going lower. You see the disparity there? Why would serious money, by serious money I mean hedge funds, I mean central banks, I mean cyber wealth funds. Big time money like BlackRock. Why would they buy a less than 2% 10 year yield or in in China all time low yields or Japan below 1%? Why would they buy that when they can invest in the safety and security of United States? 10 year debt at almost 4.6% as Louis explained it didn’t quite say it like this, but this is what he means. The allure of our debt, Safety, security, yield, powerful combination. The allure of our debt is going to bring a world of money into US markets. US debt markets that will serve as gravity for our rates and continue to push them lower. Folks, this is what’s going to happen as we see it in 2025.

I’ve just given away some of our playbook for 2025, but it was. I just Saw Louis letter today for it just came out this morning. I’ve been kind of celebrating all day because why aren’t other people making this most obvious of all points now? Maybe others are. I’ve not heard them. Have you? Rates are going lower because of demand for US Debt. That demand will swap supply and send rates lower. And if the rest of the world’s in trouble, as Louis believes it will. I don’t think it’ll be in trouble, but compared to us, it will be.

Again, the US Is a shit, right? We are the place to be, especially with Trump 2.0. We’re attracting all the money, right? So global governments will have to keep printing it to. To stimulate their economies. Okay. I just don’t know why anybody would buy foreign debt compared to us with this higher yield and the safety and security. So there you go. There’s part of our analysis actually for 2025, but is applicable today because the Louis letter. Louie, great seeing you again in the news.

I know you’re busy behind the scenes, you know, managing money and making money for people, but you’re one of the good guys and I really enjoyed knowing you over 30 years ago. Thanks for publishing that letter today, by the way. You don’t need me to tell you this, but, sir, you were exactly right. Okay, what else in the markets today? Let’s see. Oh, most importantly. Here we go. I told you. NASDAQ was up just right at 1% today.

[00:22:47]:
A big 192 points. Guess what? Beat that. You got it. The semis. Let’s give it. Let’s give the semis a hand. Semis up better than 3% today again. Our ETF up 9% today.

Semis are leaning again. Pull up a relative streak chart. I published it on Twitter today. Actually, over the last. Whatever. It’s been a couple weeks now. After leading lower, the semis now are leading higher. When the semis lead higher, you must be long equities.

When the semis leading higher, you must be long tech. When the semi is looking high, you cannot be short the market. You will get stomped. You’ll get curb stomped. And that’s the 2025 we’re going into with the semis leading. That is very good news. We’re aggressively long this group, just as we are with Tesla, as we are with Bitcoin, as you’re with a lot of tech, small caps, GameStop, we got some great positions now. We’ve added energy back to the portfolio.

[00:23:40]:
We’ve added housing back to the portfolio again. Dad, you got too cheap and that’s the way our viewer investing system works. We like to make those transitions as the these investment opportunities give us the ability to do so. If you listen to the markets, they’re going to tell you what they want to do and that’s what we try to do here. So again we’re very excited about, about the new year and again we’ll publish everything as soon as we can with our forecast, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the markets today, the internals, not great internals again. This continues a run of pretty, pretty internals. Nothing to write home about on the downside either though.

But we did have some good news today for the NASDAQ today. Just slightly negative, advanced decline by a couple hundred issues. NYSE slightly positive by only eight issues but it was still positive volume today much better. 80 excuse me, 64% up volume on NASDAQ, 57% up volume on NYSE. We did have a couple hundred more stocks declined in advance. That is not a big deal. Now sector watch. This is very good.

We had eight sectors finish higher, three lower. Led to the downside by consumer staples and half percent. Nothing else anywhere to the upside. Here we go. 1.3% communication services technology, 1.2% healthcare 1% strong day as represented here right there in our sector. Watch now. Commodity watch today again gold right now down 15 at 26:29 catching its breath. For those that believe again higher inflation, higher rates, that means you believe a higher dollar.

[00:25:18]:
Now that is that can be a headwind for gold. Just know that the correlation between the dollar and gold is not what it used to be at all. It’s like 51%. It’s barely a statistical edge. So I’m not that concerned at all. And as our, as our beliefs play out into 2025, lower rates, lower inflation. Watch gold. Because folks, if foreign countries are in the kind of trouble we expect, they’re going to be performance wise compared to the US Printing money like crazy.

What does that sound like the recipe for, right? That’s recipe for buying gold, right. Central banks will continue to plow into it. This little lull here pause is a buying opportunity. Gold last trade 2629 an ounce. Silver actually up today 910 1% of 26 cents announced at 30. 22 an ounce. We look for silver to have a good year as well. I don’t think the global economy is going to be in trouble compared to the US it will be, but they won’t have any real financial trouble.

[00:26:18]:
Copper today essentially flat on the day at $4.09 a pound. Crude oil also up 9 cents a barrel today at 69.55. Again, not a big fan of crude oil here. The commodity itself, like natural gas, has been on a tear. But energy stocks look very attractive here to us. That’s a trading comment. That’s VRA’s investing system trading analogy commentary. But we do like energy stocks here.

And finally today, bitcoin. Look, bitcoin jumped at 107,000. Then we had some selling pressure come in. Just know this, it’s about to get stupid. With bitcoin, it’s about to get crazy. Not that it hadn’t been already. It’s been amazing, right? Bitcoin will soon reach 20 million coins mined. It’s going to be only going to 21.

I believe once it hits 20 million, we’ll have a, an exact date. That should happen for you soon. I think it’s going to act like, like a, like, like a, like a magic water when people go, wait a minute, you mean if somebody buys a million bitcoin they’ll control the market from here though, That’ll be it? Well, they’ll, they have to keep mining, you know, for 100 years. But it could, you know, after the havings, it’s more and more difficult, more and more expensive to mine. But I think hitting 20 million bitcoin mined is going to act like a magic buy signal for bitcoin. That’s going to happen sooner than later. Just, you know, keep using these dips to add to positions. That’s what we’re doing here.

Bitcoin right now. 94415, on behalf of Tyler and our entire Josh and our Danielle, our entire team here, and all of us, all our associates we work with that help us in so many areas where you never see their names mentioned. We have a lot of surprises come during 2025. We have a couple that we think you can really be excited about. We look forward to bringing them to you and we look forward to another great year. In the meantime, folks, please have a fantastic Christmas. Be safe when you travel. Enjoy spending time with family.

[00:28:15]:
That’s what it’s all about, right? Sometimes it’s not always easy. But you know what? Take the high road. We’ll all feel better for it, don’t we? When we take the high road for certain family members, it may not be easy to be around. And then just make it a great new year. Be safe and sound. And let’s get ready to kick some serious market ass as we start 2025. Just like we’re doing. We’ve done so far in 2024.

Thanks again, folks. We’ll see you again as we enter the New year, barring a market surprise. Thank you, everybody. See you soon. Bye.