In today's episode, Tyler dives into a busy day for the markets, where fresh all-time highs gave way to a slight pullback, yet the broader bull market story remains unchanged. He covers why the VRA sees this as "The Pause That Refreshes" as we head into Q3 Earnings Season. He also breaks down major news from Tesla and explains why the VRA has been so focused on owning inflationary assets in this market environment. 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. While we did get some all time highs earlier in the session today, it was not quite the day that we would have liked to see from our markets. Not quite the finish that we would have liked to see from our markets. But hey, you know, nothing’s changed from my podcast yesterday. New highs beget new highs.

And we’ll dive into, you know, a few reasons really why we see this as really perfect setup for the next leg of this bull market as we head into year end in the most bullish time frame of the year for our markets. But I’ll give you a little hint first, it’s the pause that refreshes. That’s a theme that we’ve gone back to here often over the years. So quickly hear what else we’ll cover on the podcast today. You know, again, a couple of topics that we’ve covered for really the last three years and two months now. You know, hard to believe it’s been that long since Kip and I published our book, which is back there, the Big Bribe, which we published in August of 2022. I’ve got a few charts here for you today. Some might surprise you, some you might expect, but some incredible looks back to here since we’ve done that.

[00:01:49]:
So a little bit of a walk down memory lane with some really actionable insights on what they mean going forward for this market as well. And really some proof that we are in the early innings here of this bull market. As we’ve said, the innovation revolution meets roaring 2020s meets Trump economic miracle 2.0 meets the golden age. We’ll probably throw four or five more in there as the years roll on and this bull market continues here. So got a lot of exciting stuff to cover here today. We’ll cover a lot of ground, of course. We’ll cover the Tesla news that I mentioned yesterday as well. And you know, what it means for the company and what we expect going forward from Tesla as well.

And then of course, a little drum roll. Big action overnight and into this morning as gold crosses above $4,000 an ounce for the first time ever today, on its way to 5,000 on its way to our long term price target of 15,000 by 2032. So without much further ado, let’s go ahead and start off with our market action on the day today. I’ll cover it quickly here as I mentioned we did finish slightly lower on the day after. What did we it was a strong open from our major indexes today. We opened at all time highs from the Nasdaq from the S&P 500 but we weren’t able to hold on to those gains today. But again first and foremost here I covered this yesterday. While we weren’t at extreme overbought on steroids levels, we were right in the range of overbought territory and kind of banging on the door of those extreme overbought on steroids levels which we did see last week last week from this market.

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So you know if we were to get a little bit of a pause here and who knows with this market we could be right back off to the races tomorrow. But first and foremost we do expect it to be short lived and second we’ll absolutely be using it as a buying opportunity going forward. We’ll wait for the V Investing signals V Investing system signals here. But remember we’re big believers in monthly dollar cost averaging into your favorite positions. So as I said yesterday, we’re still in a buy the dip environment and we don’t think this is a sell the rip environment. This is an environment you want to hold on to those winners and continue two monthly dollar cost average into them for your longer term positions that is you know always. We’ll cover more detail about the VRA portfolio in our members area on VA letter.com so if you’re not already a member know come and join us. Why not? We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now.

We’ll get full access to everything that we offer there. So I’ll make a few more points about this market as this podcast goes on but quickly hear the action for today. The Dow Jones has been our laggard here but held up the best today down 210 of 1%. Also just right in the range of an all time high here down like I said 2/10 of 1% at 46,602 coming off of those all time highs from Friday. Then we had the S P snapping a seven day winning streak here again no big concerns for us down just under 4/10 of 1% at 6,714. Then we had the NASDAQ down just under 7/10 of 1% at 22,788. And what we don’t want to see from this group that we did see today were the semis leading lower down 1.8% on the day today. So again kind of a little bit of A warning sign there that maybe we get a little bit of a pause here.

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But again, we’ll look at this as a pause that refreshes for this market. I’ve got a great chart coming up here in a minute that really shows that for tech as a whole. Right. And you want to see tech leading the market in semis leading tech, which we think that we’ll get back to here in a short order then small caps were our laggards on the day today down just over 1% for the Russell 2000 at 2,458. But again, no major concerns for us into today’s action. Know when you have all of our major indexes at or near all time highs. You have gold, silver, Bitcoin, all at 52 week highs, all time high area and you’ve got the US Dollar just, you know, plummeting as you’ll see here in a second. This is the exact definition of when we want to buy the dip here.

And you know, first and foremost, really a theme that we can’t repeat enough. Behind monthly dollar cost averaging probably in front of because you must own inflationary assets. You know, you can’t monthly dollar cost average. I guess you could, but you don’t want to into the dollar. You must own inflationary assets in this environment. That does mean owning stocks. It means owning precious metals, gold and silver, owning real estate, which might be a bit of a contrarian play right now. Of course, that’s a really long term investment depending on how you’re playing it.

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And then of course the newest kid on the block will which is bitcoin. We just hit an all time high just yesterday. So really quickly here, I want to show you a chart of what we’ve seen from the US Dollar going into this year. We said there was going to be a repeat of Trump’s first term after he was inaugurated in 2017. We saw the dollar peak and continued to head lower, especially in that first year of his presidency there. And it’s exactly. Take a look what we’ve seen so far in 2025 here. So, so where we began the year just before the inauguration, once again, that’s when the dollar peaked.

This is where we are today. You know, dollar up slightly here. It was funny to hear some commentators out there today. The dollar’s ripping right now. Doesn’t look like much of a rip when you look at it from this kind of a chart. One of our other big calls for the year to the downside was yields as well. Look at where yields started just before the inauguration and look where we are today. So we do expect yields to continue moving lower.

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If it weren’t for the Federal Reserve standing in the way, it likely be a whole lot lower. You know, Trump’s newest Fed appointee said this last week on Bloomberg. I believe we talked about it on the podcast as well, this, that if you looked at the Fed’s dot plot, you know, it seems like he was way out of line with where the rest of the Fed voting for the FOMC was. But then you look on a longer term scale and you notice that they’re right. All in the same range of where yield should be just about a year from now. So it’s not that he thought that, you know, yields should be vastly different from the rest of the committee in many ways. Really what he was saying is that, no, we need to be there now. We need to be there already and keep them stable after that.

It’s exactly what we’ve been talking about here. And we do expect to see yields continue lower. As you can see here, they did also head lower today. Now, what’s interesting here, let’s get even a little bit more perspective, because in the big bribe where we talked about and owning inflationary assets, take a look at this chart of the US Dollar. That’s where we were when we published the book. Look at what the dollar has done since then. Right. And in regards to this, David Malpass, you know, a Trump confidant, you know, someone really in the know here, this is a theme we’ve talked about a lot as well, is that the Trump administration doesn’t necessarily want or need a strong or weak dollar policy.

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They want a stable dollar policy. And if that means weakness in the dollar to make up for years and years of our adversaries using currency manipulation against us, then this is part of, you know, just setting things right here. It doesn’t necessarily mean, and certainly in our view, doesn’t mean that it’s the end of, you know, the US Dollar being the world’s reserve currency. No, a stable dollar encourages that going forward. And we think there’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant as to why exactly this will happen. We saw it in the stable coin announcement just two weeks ago. Right. Well, I, this could be a back door for future administrations, possibly a dim administration, to try to usher in some type of a central bank digital currency or, you know, some version of that.

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They’ll probably name it something else because that has such a taboo around it now. And Especially with what you see happening with digital ID in Europe and of course the social credit score in China. We know we want to stay away from any form of central bank digital currency. So stable coins aren’t exactly that. Though what this does usher in, at least in the short term is, is the potential for massive, massive demand for U.S. treasuries backed by stablecoins. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant has already said that this is potentially a $3.7 trillion market that’s in the making here. Imagine what $3.7 trillion in liquidity would mean for bonds.

It mean much lower yields in a way for the treasury to get around a stubborn Federal Reserve under J. Powell. So again, not about losing world reserve currency status, but actually strengthening it, strengthening it from many different ways. And then we won’t get into all of it today about, you know, monetizing the US Balance sheet, which he’s talked about as well. But on that note, you know, we’ve got gold on the US Balance sheet at an astronomically low price compared to where it is today. As I mentioned earlier, we got above $4,000 an ounce. That’s been a long term call of ours. And so one more here for you take or I got two more here for you.

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Take a look at where gold was when we published the Big Bribe and we talked about owning gold and inflationary assets. That’s where we were at the time. And it’s been basically a straight up move since then as the money printer stays on, M2 money supply continues to hit all, all time high after all time high here. And then one final one for you here to really put this in perspective. Now I’m going to take the screen off for a second because I want to say this. You know, you’ve heard us talk a lot about the innovation revolution meets the roaring2020s and us comparing this time period to the dot com melt up where the NASDAQ rallied over 580% during that five year period. Well, we’ve said that this bull market has the potential to exceed that not only in size but in length as well. So let’s take a little look at where we are today.

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Let me zoom out on this chart before I pull it up. All right. So going back to when we published the big bribe once again during that year. We published it in August. We called the October lows to the day. These October lows here. Now the NASDAQ just above 10,000 right now up to 22,788 is where we closed today. That’s a hundred and twenty five percent move.

I went a little below the lows there. 125 move. Again, the NASDAQ over the dot com era rallied over five hundred and eighty percent. So again, we’re still in the early innings. 125 compared to where we’re going to be. You know, our price target from then on The NASDAQ was 50,000. Dow Jones 100,000. By 2030, we think we could even be on the low side of what we expect to see from this market.

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So low perspective there. For anyone who says this is a blowoff top for the market coming in here, we’ve just gone absolutely parabolic. Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Based off of our work and kind of going back to what we said in 2022, we couldn’t believe that there were so many people out there calling for a recession where we were in the market. You know, we began writing and researching that book about a year before that. You know, we just kept finding these fundamental factors under the surface. You know, the amount of homeowners who own their home outright. Over one third of homeowners own their home outright.

Well, it makes it really hard to have a housing crisis in that kind of environment. Even now we’re seeing home equity, equity loan, home equity line of credit, HELOCs. You’re nowhere near what we saw in the financial crisis. People have a recency bias. The most impactful bear market of many lifetimes. Know, a lot of people who’ve been in the market for a long time was the 2008 financial crisis. So a lot of people have that recency bias that it has to be the same thing again. Well, one, we don’t even see a massive, you know, recessionary great recession, potentially really depressionary type of move like we saw in 2008.

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We don’t see that here. You know, we got credit scores at all time highs and all the factors I just mentioned in the housing market as well know people’s 401ks at all time highs. There are so many factors under the surface, it’s really tough to dive into all of them. Even into one podcast from a company point of view. You know, you’ve got companies, you know, especially outside of the tech sector where their debt to market cap ratio, you know, at incredible lows, debt levels for consumers at 15 year lows. But really corporate America is a wash in liquidity and of course over what, $7.7 trillion in money market funds. That’s so much money just sitting on the sidelines. That as yields come down, they’re going to have to find an alternative to just keep up with inflation.

Right now we do see this as a deflationary environment that we’re heading into. At the very least, disinflationary. But monetary policy and, and deflation are two different topics, right? Costs can come down while they keep printing money. Two totally different things that I think a lot of the financial mainstream media intentionally neglects talking about that. So again, this is where you must own inflationary assets here. Now, I said earlier we’re seeing one really bullish aspect to this slight pullback in the market. Again, we just hit all time highs yesterday. We could be right back off to the races tomorrow.

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But we have Q3 earnings kicking off next week with the big banks. You know, we’ll be shocked if Q3 earnings aren’t plus 13 to 15% growth in this quarter. And if we could get just a little bit of a pause before we start diving into the real meat of the earnings schedule, that means we won’t be at overbought levels. We won’t be at extreme overbought levels at, at that time, which is really a perfect setup heading into those earnings. If you’re at overbought conditions, you know, there’s nothing more bullish than a market that gets overbought and stays overbought. But you know, if we got a little over our skis and you know, expectations were just way too big for earnings, then that could limit the upside a little bit. So we’re fine with a few days of, a little bit of sideways to downside action here. You know, get the bears really worked up and then we’ll be right back off to the races again.

And here’s already a quick example of that here. My final chart here for the day, the Fear and Greed Index. We spent one day in greed, now we’re back all the ready to neutral. Another day like today, another couple days like today, you might as well be in fear mode. We could very well be there. So we’ll get the AII survey back on Thursday and then one more here, not to share a chart on it, but the put call ratio, you know, yesterday we saw it was a little bit of low. We saw it last week, you know, we saw some readings in the 0.6es. Well, we opened today at a 0.6.

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Anything below a 0.7 is seen as, you know, a little bit excessively bullish calls. There tends to always be more calls than puts being bought. So 0.7 is the average. But wow, we’re from a 0.6 in the first reading of the day today, all the way up 30 minutes later, jumped up to a 0.94 and it never went back below a 0.9 again for the rest of the day. So not excessively bearish there, right? Anything above a one is kind of really seen as excessively bearish. So not quite at those levels. But man, the oxygen just got sucked out of the room for call buyers after the open today. So already we’re seeing those hints of, of bearishness.

You know, really investors wanting to lean bearish in this market right now. So some really interesting factors. Again, we look at this as a pause that refreshes if we even get one here. But we would like to see it again. So we’re not at extreme overbought on steroids heading in to this earnings season. That could kind of limit the upside for this market. All right, so really quickly here, I’ll cover this. Tesla news as really two big announcements today, but one was expected with Full self driving version 14 rolling out today.

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The first major update for full self driving in just over a year. Just about a year. And really some pretty incredible reviews already coming out here. If you haven’t seen some of the demonstrations, go check them out. You know, look up Tesla Full Self Driving on Twitter or X. Some really impressive stuff here. I’ll let Kit comment on this a little bit more. I’m sure he’ll write it up a little bit more in tomorrow’s update as he did today.

But you’ve heard him talk about what Full Self driving looked like already, right? Full self driving version 13. And I’ve been in the car with him and used it, and it’s hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t used it just how impressive it is. You know, it almost feels like. And not to undersell it in any way, but you know, if you’re on a roller coaster, you know, you’re doing what feels like dangerous maneuvers in and out, but you feel safe. It’s tested. It runs all day, every day, you know, so at least to some extent, you feel safe in it. This is exactly what it felt like. It felt like you’re on a roller coaster, but you’ve got a computer driving you.

[00:21:09]:
With human drivers everywhere, especially in Houston when you’ve got six lanes of traffic, and if you’ve driven in Houston, you know what Houston drivers are like. And this Tesla just going in and out, weaving through traffic flawlessly and it feels very safe. So Elon’s already talked about you know, we’re getting close to the point where it feels sentient. So it’s going to be exciting to see that roll out and get behind the wheel while it’s, while it’s running as well. So some, sure some people might have been let down by the news because the big news today, the second big announcement was the rollout of their low priced vehicle. The model Y standard rear wheel drive just under four $40,000. 39,990 for a vehicle, 329 miles. 321 miles of range, zero to 60 in 6.8 seconds.

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A Model 3 standard real world drive, just under $37,000 for a brand new vehicle. Ev, right. Zero to 60 in 5.8 seconds. So great news there, absolutely addressing a different side of the market here. So again not be the exciting news that we kind of speculated on yesterday. But that’s good news really. That means Tesla has more up their sleeve here and potential massive, massive announcements coming up as well. You know, really wouldn’t hold anything or wouldn’t put anything past Elon Musk, what he’s waiting on potentially to release.

All right, so quickly here, let’s cover the rest of the market. Our internals on the day not exactly what you want to see coming in roughly 2 to 1 negative for advanced decline. So more declining stocks than advancing on both the Nyse and the NASDAQ. 52 week highs to lows coming in positive though our bright spot on the day for both the NYSE and the NASDAQ. Then volume coming in roughly 2 to 1 negative on the NYSE but just below even on the NASDAQ. So not a terrible day. Certainly not. Next up, our sectors on the day today we finished with five out of our 11 sectors higher on the day today led by consumer staples, followed once again here by utilities.

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This is one we’ve talked about here a lot that is an all time high there from the utilities. And then some more defensive sectors, energy, financials and healthcare. While our laggards on the day were communications, excuse me, consumer discretionary followed by communication services and the industrials. All right, finally here for today. Again exciting to see gold get back above or do get for the first time ever above $4,000 an ounce. Now at $4,010 an ounce. Not what you want to see today from the miners though is GDX did finish down 2%. But what an incredible run it’s been as I covered yesterday, you know, if not the, then one of the best performing sectors on the year.

I can’t think of one off the top of my head that’s done better than gdx. And of course, you know, we own some junior miners here that have done even better. Next up, silver now slightly higher on the day at 47.72 an ounce. Still, you know, below that all time high, we did get to 48.77 an ounce yesterday. Then copper now at $5 and 8 cents a pound. Oil continuing to tick higher here, 62.20 a barrel today. And finally here, bitcoin after the all time high of yesterday, a little bit of consolidation here today at $122,000 a Bitcoin folks. That is all that we have time for here today.

[00:24:52]:
Please be sure to subscribe with one more point here for gold for our Newer listeners here. Kip first recommended gold at $350 an ounce in 2003. This is an incredible stat though, you know, $100,000 invested in gold, which so many money managers would have said it’s impo, you know, really irresponsible, right? Put it in a money market fund, it’s much safer there. Well, 100k even invested in a money market account after inflation worth roughly $67,000 today, you know, after with your purchasing power of that, right? Perhaps even less. But depending on what metrics you go on, we all know inflation is much higher than the reported levels. But $100,000 invested in gold to that date is now worth more than $1 million. And again, we see gold heading a whole lot higher from here after years of manipulation by these big banks. I won’t get into all of that today, but there’s some incredible sources out there and the felonies that have been brought against these big banks for manipulating current commodity prices, just, you know, I won’t.

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We can do a whole podcast on that alone. So with that said, folks, 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@vra letter.com please be sure to like share and subscribe and of course leave comments on the videos. Anything that you want to see me sharing for charts here on these video podcasts. I’d be happy to take a look at them as well. And as always, thank you for your feedback. So again, join us@ VRAletter.com click that podcast link at the top top to receive these every day in your inbox at the market close.

And until next time, hope you have a great rest of your evening. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.