In today's episode, Tyler breaks down a good day of stock market action amid a flurry of global headlines. He covers the latest significant Trump trade developments and the major political and financial news driving historic levels of bearish sentiment amid record-high retail investor buying. Whether you’re feeling bullish, cautious, or just trying to keep up, this episode is packed with timely insights and analysis to help you stay ahead in today’s fast-moving markets.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there today.

Just wow, what a day today. Not only for our markets, which had a strong session here today, making back to back sessions of gains here now, but also on the news front today as well. We started out the day futures were looking good for the market. There was the Trump announced UK trade deal that was going to the press conference was going to start shortly after the open.

So the market was anticipating that there and it came out good news here. You know, no deal signed just yet, but a big step in the right direction. There were also some comments on China’s trade deal today as well. I might get to some of those a little bit, but some of those were reported by the Wall Street Journal. You never know what to trust out of there. But one of the reasons why I got a little bit of a late start on the podcast here today was, if you remember, just a few days ago, I believe Kips talked about this as well, that Trump teased a very, very big announcement, right. He said that it would not be on trade but going to be on something else. And the quote here was that it be truly earth shattering and a positive development for this country and the people of this country.

[00:01:39]:
So no update on what that is just yet here. You know, we’ll see if it turns out to be something big or a dud or not, but we’ll see. You know, obviously trade deals being announced like today with the UK is a step in the right direction. We’ve seen a lot of steps in the right direction over the last month as we are now 30 days away from the April 8 lows that we saw. Excuse me. Well, April 7 depending on where you looked. Right. But you get my point.

We’re one month away from those levels now. It’s been an incredible run up to this point and just today we had the NASDAQ 100 got back to its 200 day moving average, finished just below those levels, but we’re approaching the 200 day moving average for our major sectors and indexes here. So we’ll cover more of that today. And we are still at short term overbought level. So something to watch for there. And again, I’ll get to that with our market action. Final big one for the news stories on the day. I’m sure there are plenty more big ones that we’ll get to throughout the podcast today.

[00:02:49]:
But we also had the first American Pope just elected today as well. So again, a lot of news out there throughout the day. We’ve also got, you know, James o’ Keefe in a totally different direction, working on revealing some big stories. Had the first part of his Epstein files released yesterday. A lot of people looked at that as a dud, right, because it was information that we already knew, but from a new source. So not, you know, not inconsequential, but just not what everyone thought. But he just put out today as well that the second part is coming out today, so we’ll see what that means. Is it another profile on, you know, the same one from yesterday is a news person? You know, like I said, a lot of interesting stuff happening right now.

I didn’t want to get too into that one here today because it is still so early. But I know that we’ve got some other James O KE fans here, or at least fan, you know, fans of his work. He’s done some really. He’s broken some big stories over the years. All right, so back to our markets here. A lot of exciting stuff to cover today. Of course, we also had the FOMC meeting yesterday. Kip, cover that here.

[00:04:02]:
The Fed paused. You know, we’ll cover some of how the market reacted to that as well. Yields were higher on the day, so, you know, no doubt, big day today. What is one of the first things that we like to go to check on a big day like today is sentiment. Right? You look at the put call ratio, which was not excessively bearish today. You know, still above finished above a 0.8, which is bearish leaning, but not excessively so. One that caught my eye today is the Fear and Greed index. I mean, yes, as I just mentioned one month ago, we were hitting bear market lows, right? So it makes sense.

The Fear and Greed index was at a 3. But it might surprise you. Yes, it’s been a great run from those lows. We’re all the way back into greed territory here at A62 on the fear and Greed index. But, you know, we’re not seeing it line up across the board because AAII comes out with their weekly survey came out today still showing less than 30% bullish. Investors 29.4 bulls were up 8 and a half percent week over week. But this now makes 11 weeks in a row the longest on record that we’ve ever seen. According to Goldman, where we’ve had more than 50% percent of investors bearish from the AAII survey.

[00:05:24]:
Currently still 51 1/2% investors are bearish according to this poll now that that’s the lowest since February 19, but it’s still above 50% and February 19 was 40%. So we haven’t seen bulls get back above 30% since early February either. So it has been, you know, quite a stretch here. But it has been a phenomenal move from the lows for our markets. Again, I’ll catch catch on this a little bit more in our market watch.

But back to the sentiment aspect. You know, it’s not really the polls that matters as much as it is what people are doing with their money. And today we got more evidence as well that retail as Kip has been referring to so often as the the new Mrs. Watanabes, they continue to step up Here we’ve got individual investors have been net buyers of equities. This is according to bank of America for 21 consecutive streaks. Another longest streak on record despite AII bearish streak on longest bearish streak on record. But it’s more than double the previous record. While at the same time bank of America’s private clients again that’s over $2 billion worth of equities that we’ve purchased. But the hedge Funds have sold 1 1/2 billion B of A’s institutional clients have sold 2.7 billion, the second largest amount in history. So when you hear numbers like that and you know that retail is buying here, it’s the Miss Mrs. Watanabe story really gets that much more credibility here.

[00:07:03]:
Think about how much worse the sell off could still currently be without retail at this point. Retail has been what has held this market up. So we’d love to see that continue. You know, we’ve talked about our 25% chance of retesting the lows. You know, we’re still right in that range right now. We don’t see that again, just 20 I say just 25% is not a small case scenario. But it’s not the pro majority probability here. It’s is my point.

So we are at overbought levels. We’ll go and get into a little bit bit of this now. So we were led by small caps today. Russ 2000 at 2002, 2026. Next up, the NASDAQ up 1.07% to 17,928. The semis tried to lead today finished just below those levels. But what we like to see in just about all of these charts of our major indexes we are we did today hit a new higher high. That’s constructive.

[00:08:05]:
We’ve seen higher highs and higher lows. Since those early April bear market lows, we want to see that continue from here, you know, but again, at these overbought levels, to get a pullback would not necessarily say we have to retest the lows, right? I mean, we’ve come. Let’s just run a quick, you know, eyeball estimate here. And the Nasdaq is up, you know, almost 20% from the lows. So correction of here, 5 to 8% from those levels, you know, again would not be concerning. It’d be about par for the course. If you go back and look at our most recent V shaped recovery, right, which is the COVID lows almost on a yearly basis, almost an identical chart because our markets hit all time highs in February and then bottomed in in late March, mid to late March. Right.

[00:08:59]:
It was like March 20, right around that time frame and now we bottomed it and we hit all time highs, depending on which major index you look at. You know, for the the Nasdaq it was December of last year, but the S and P February again bottomed in April. But point being, if you compare it to the COVID period, you know, we quickly got back to all time highs, but it was August before we got back to that level. And there were pullbacks along the way, especially in the semis of 5, 8% plus along the way. So again, that wouldn’t be overly concerning. It would be more par for the course and likely an opportunity to buy the dip. So stay tuned with us here. Of course, if something changes, you know, we’re still looking at that 25% probability is still it hasn’t gone away completely.

So again, stay tuned with us here. We have been a little bit more tactical in this environment, you know, just with a little bit of the, not to sound like Jay Powell, but the uncertainty in this market, if there’s one thing that the market hates, it’s uncertainty. And again, I don’t want to sound like Jay Powell because he’s one of the reasons why we have some of the uncertainty, the Fed uncertainty there. He’s not really in a position to be wishy washy. And we’ve seen it time and time again from Jay Powell. All right, so we’ve covered small caps in the nasdaq. Next up here, the Dow Jones was up just over six tenths of 1% on the day today to 41,368. You know, I just caught a brief clip from one of Kip’s podcast, you know, just a few years ago, and this was yesterday.

[00:10:39]:
Got done listening to his Podcast, if you are on Spotify, you know, it doesn’t always go to the next podcast down. It shuffled to one from like 2019 and we were talking about the Dow Jones or before that even, and it was a, you know, kid was talking about, oh, it was a, you know, really good day for our markets today. It might have been 2018, you know, really good day for, I can’t remember now, but you know, hey, really good day for our markets. Dow finished at 20,000 on the day today. You know, we’re double from where we were then. You know, just interesting to see how far we come in such a short period of time. Of course, inflation and money printing, coronavirus insanity, massive government expenditures have added a lot to that valuation. It’s a lot of.

It is devaluation of the dollar. Right. More than it is that these companies have really increased that much in value. Anyway, hopefully inflation is a rear view mirror problem from here. So we won’t get too much into it today. But, but back to the Fed, I said I would cover this earlier. You know, if you’re a regular listener here, you know that even without Trump saying it, we would agree with Trump that Jay Powell has waited too long to cut rates. It’s political.

[00:11:54]:
We saw the political cuts last year and as we’ve said here often, if Kamala was president right now, no doubt they would be cutting rates. So it’s hard to believe where we’ve come with the fed. So the 10 year was up today after J. Pal’s comments yesterday, up 2.3% roughly to a 4.37. So yes, you know, rates are up. We’ve talked about this often. We don’t see these as being, yes, they are overly restrictive, but not at a level that’s going to completely hamstring the economy. But what’s been interesting is to watch the CME’s fed watch tool.

You’ve heard me talk about this one here a lot as well. These probabilities do, do change rapidly in the CME’s tool, but these are really all over the place. And just again to the poor messaging of Jay Powell is the reason why these are all over the place. So one month ago there was a zero percent probability that the Fed would be still at four and a quarter to 450 after the June meeting. Right. This is the probability for after that day. Right. So going into yesterday it was like a 97% probability that they would stay paused.

[00:13:06]:
Right. Now again, it was at zero for June. Their June 18 meeting one month ago, it was a 50% probability that they would have cut 25 basis points by then and a 45% probability of a 50 basis points worth of cuts by then. So it’s either two cuts over two meetings or 150 basis points cut to get to that level. Again, a 45% probability, zero percent. They’d be at four and a quarter to 450 now, 83% probability that they’ll rem just a massive increase from zero to 83 in a month. Right. So again, I think that kind of speaks to the wishy washy messaging from Jay Powell once again here.

So the Fed should have cut rates by now. You know, stay tuned here. We could be looking at one by next me a lot can change between now and June 18th. All right, so looking at our internals on. Well, let me just kind of final points here on the market, we think the action has been good. We would have liked to have seen a smart, a better smart money hour in today’s action. But we can keep rolling with these good news like the UK trade deal today, keep stringing wins together. You know, I still, I think that it’s been understated how big the potential is for this Ukraine mineral deal.

[00:14:32]:
Right. Other world leaders have been in there this whole time. Trump’s been in office 100 days. That’s the first iota of success anyone’s had, right? Yes. It may not be a massive step towards peace already. Right. It’s just negotiations between us and Ukraine at this point. But it’s the first step towards progress, you know, so we can get more wins like that.

You know, this market definitely can continue higher from here into that V shaped recovery we talked about. But if you feel like you’ve missed out along the way, now’s not the time for FOMO here either. Right. Even if we are a big again tomorrow, like I said, along the way to all time highs in 2020, there were plenty of opportunities to buy the dip. So, you know, we’re not completely out of the clear yet. We are, you know, starting to add back to our positions here. Got back into Bitcoin here today. And so if you’re not familiar with all of our V positions, we’ve owned a lot of gold miners here as well, which have performed really well in this environment.

[00:15:33]:
Of course, gold itself, which has sold off today. I’ll get to that in a little bit. But if you’re not already here with us, why not come and join us? We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now. You find it on the same page, you’re probably listening to this podcast on VRA letter.com just go to the homepage. You’ll see our 14 day free trial there. So quickly here for our internals on the day. Good numbers, positive just about across the board here. Advanced decline coming in 2 to 1 positive just about for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq.

Little better than that on the NASDAQ. 52 week highs and lows positive on the NYSE, slightly negative on the Nasdaq. No concerns there. You know, there’s plenty of NASDAQ components or companies that are in the Nasdaq that are just aren’t quite prime time players to be totally honest. Looks like we got a, a refresh to the upside here in volume from the last time I ran this. Let me see. So NYSE volume about in the same boat, just about two and a half to one positive on the day. Good day there though.

[00:16:36]:
You know, big upside, volume over 70%. Not you know, the 80% plus you like to see, but good day, similar boat, about 73% upside here. Looks like for NASDAQ today, almost 3 to 1 positive there. So good day from our internals, looking at our sectors on the day, let me get a refresh of these here. We finished with seven of our 11 sectors higher on the day led by consumer discretionary industrials and energy. As oil had a good day today. Our laggards, healthcare, utilities and real estate, we’ve talked often here about wanting to get back to seeing, excuse me, the home builders leading again. They had a nice day today actually leading the semis up 1.74%.

All right, so to our VRA commodity watch on the day, gold actually now slightly higher. It was down. You know, this is probably a refresher from into futures trading here at $3,313 an ounce. So it is still down a little bit I believe from where it was this morning. Next up here, silver at $32.61 an ounce, copper $4.59 a pound and oil back above the $60 a barrel mark at $60.19 a barrel. Finally here for today. A lot of action in crypto today with bitcoin getting back above $100,000. A Bitcoin here today up big now by 5.5 and a half percent now to $102,000.

[00:18:14]:
A Bitcoin got as high almost up to 104 today. 103,885 was the high of it. As I said, we reinitiated a position here. We do Even as you know, we, we took profits right in our position earlier this year. But over that was a short term type of action. Right. We still remain extremely bullish on in the long term for Bitcoin, especially with a pro bitcoin president back in office here. You know, look at what happened.

One example of this is Galaxy Digital Canadian listed stock. And we’re having the conversation today. They just announced a new NASDAQ listing. You know, why wouldn’t they have done this sooner if they could, Right? Well, I mean, before November, if you were wondering if Kamala might be back in office and Gary Gensler might be reinstated as chairman of the sec, you didn’t really want to be a crypto company listed in the US because there was too much regulatory uncertainty. Now I think that Galaxy Digital is going to be the beginning of companies not just in cryptocurrency, but in other spaces as well that are looking to apply for US listing because we’re going to have, you know, the best market in the world to work within. Right? The most pro crypto, pro business, pro public companies, all of those things. You know, this might just be the beginning. And again, that adds fuel to the fire for this market as well.

So a lot of exciting things going on, folks, but that’s all 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@ 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.