In today's episode, Kip takes a deep dive into the latest market trends and investment opportunities. Kip breaks down the day's market action, including the strength in small caps and the performance of key sectors. He also provides insights on the current state of the innovation revolution, the potential of Bitcoin, and the exciting developments in the commodity markets.

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 good day today. Hope your weekend was fantastic as well.

Let’s get right to it. I was on Fox Business today. I might reference a couple of things we talked about with Charles Payne during this podcast today because he’s such a great guy.

He’s just one of the really class acts on Wall street and on television. I think it’s the best investing show on tv because Charles also has his own newsletter like we do. So he keeps his finger on the pulse. And that’s so incredibly important when you do this, you got to be plugged in. You got to live and breathe it, right. And that’s, for me at least, is how you develop a sense of timing. And I’m sorry, I don’t like buying stocks when the markets are all time highs and they’re about to fall out of bed. I don’t like to buy falling knives and I don’t like to sell at a bottom.

I mean, all these things that I guess I’ve learned over the, I’ve made these mistakes myself so many times. I have learned a few things over the years. And Charles Payne, I know, comes from the same school of hard knocks that I do. So anyway, thanks, Charles, again for having me on today. So we’re going to have him on one of our podcasts here before too long. Just a real class act and love the guy. Let’s talk some markets first here. I want to go over a few things.

[00:01:24]:
I did talk about this show today, and again, the macro set up here could hardly be better. Yeah, we are overbought. But running the charts this weekend, I was surprised that we aren’t extreme overbought on steroids. That’s our most overbought designation. We aren’t there. This market’s been doing a little rotational work underneath the surface, right? One day the Dow will be up and Nasdaq will be down and vice versa the next day. Value versus growth. You’re seeing kind of a jockeying back and forth as money’s flowing from group to group.

That’s textbook bull market action. That’s textbook rotational action, and that’s healthy. We want to see that continue. I expect that’s exactly what we’re going to see. But we saw a little weakness today. Internals weren’t great today. Let’s get right to it. Again, we’re coming off all time highs, folks, except for small caps.

[00:02:14]:
Again, we’ve been pounding the table in this group, as you know, since last October and served us well, small caps are up 27% from the October 20 eigth lows. That’s when this parabolic move higher of this bull market started. Small caps had outperformed the s and P 500 from those October 20 eigth lows. And again, that’s what we are, aggressive. As long as we talked about on the show today, we recommend TNA. Tom Nancy Alpha is the three time leverage rust 2000 ETF. And we’ve been pounding the table on this, folks. And as I said today on the show, look, if you have new money, if you have missed this move, we’ve all been there, right? Missed moves and you’re like, what do I do? Do I play catch up? What do I do? If you have yet to enter this market, the smart money play here is to start taking a position.

Go ahead and begin building a position, but kind of plowing to it slowly, right? Especially at these overbought levels. Again, not extreme overbought, but overbought. Let the markets come back to you a little bit, and then as you get a pullback, they aren’t lasting long, if you’ve noticed. Just keep adding to your position. We’re big believers in monthly dollar cost averaging. It’s worked really well over my career, and so that’s what we recommend. And small caps, again, have got a long way to go. Even though they’ve been red hot of late, they’re still 15% below all time highs.

As we keep saying, this is the market giving us a gift. If you’re a short term investor, maybe be patient, maybe use a little caution. If you’re a medium to long term, you really don’t have much to worry about because we’re in the early innings of this bull market, folks, and the evidence of that just continues to pile up. Today, though, again, a little weakness today. Nasdaq today was lent a little way lower. Not tech leaking lower is not what you want to see. However, semis don’t fret. Semis today were up another one and a half percent today, and those are our leaders when the semis are charging ahead again, that’s been the best market directional tell for the market since quantitative easing began in 2008 2009.

[00:04:25]:
It works like a charm. There is no better tell, and semis are still leading higher. We bought Soxel the three time leverage semi ETF the day after the lows. Matter of fact, it was the day up on our podcast, but it doesn’t matter. We bought Soxville at the October 13 2022 lows and Soxel is up 680%. And guess what’s in there? Nvidia and AMD and of course, all these super micro, all these others that have been red hot are all in there. And so again, that’s the tell. We beat that like a redheaded stepchild over the years.

So we’ll keep playing that. And again, it’s another reason that this market is in such great shape, medium to long term. But again today, Nasdaq gave some back, finishing down four tenths to 1%. That was illusional in the day. Right behind that was Dow Jones, down a quarter percent. Again, no big losses here. SBF hundred down one 10th percent. Rust 2000 has been our leader, of course, opened strong today, saw some weakness in today.

[00:05:31]:
If you’re wondering why did the markets pull back a little bit again, fed a big run, it’s perfectly normal to have a little give and take. Rubber band gets stretched a little bit. But there’s some other external events happening this week as well. Jay Powell. Yeah, wrong way. Jay is testifying for Congress tomorrow. Wednesday. When Jay Powell opens his mouth, bad things tend to come out.

And my guess is the Federal Reserve wouldn’t mind seeing this market cool off a little bit. I would not be surprised to hear JPOW say something, in effect of, look, economy is stronger than we thought it was going to be. In other words, implying maybe higher for longer as far as rates go. And the ten year showed that today, didn’t it? Ten year yield today bumped up 39 basis points to a yield of 4.21%. Not a big deal. Remember, we’re still down from over 5% yields last year in the fourth quarter of last year. So the ten year has come back a lot. And also remember, during the 95 to 2000 meltup, which we believe, as we’ve said for a long time, this is the most common time frame to that.

[00:06:38]:
As I told Charleston, I think we’re in about 1996, we’re really at the infancy of this move. But during that entire period, the average tenure yield was well over 5%. It’s been a lot of time. Over 6% again, we’re at 4.2% now. So I think perspective helps. And it certainly helps, I believe, with rates and will, depending on what JPAL has to say. And then we got on Friday, we get the jobs report. So if we get a hawkish sounding JPOW, and if we do get a hot jobs report, entirely possible because the labor market has been so strong, then you can see a little weakness here.

But I’m just going to repeat again for the 1,000,000th time from the birth of this bull market, the smartest smart money strategies from that low has been buying the dip. That’s what we’re going to continue to be here. That’s the overriding theme. Again. We just like to make sure and paint a full picture of what could happen in the short term. But look, we’re long and strong. We’re fully invested. We intend to stay that way.

[00:07:41]:
We’ll maybe put some hedges on from time to time, but that’s how we’re going to play this. Because this is a structural bull market of size and scope. They don’t come along often, and when they do, you’ve got to be along for the ride. That means you’ve got to be in the market and you’ve got to keep a little cash to buy dips. That’s the way we’re going to keep playing it here. I talked about this on the show again with Charles. The roaring 2020 folks, because this is again the macro theme that matters most, the innovation revolution. We talk about this a lot here, don’t we? It’s an inning one.

Everything that happened from 95 to 2000 has come full circle. Now, most of those companies were scam related. They put.com on their name so their stock price would go up. Nine or ten of those companies went out of business within just a few years. This is different. These companies are fundamentally strong. They have real earnings, real cash flow, soaring revenues. This is the real deal, folks.

[00:08:39]:
This is the real deal that we’re in right now and it’s happening throughout society. Just think for a second. I know the negativity in the media makes it hard to do sometimes, but just think about what’s happening around us. Space exploration, autonomous vehicles are coming, flying taxis are coming. Obviously what’s happening, cryptocurrency craze. But I think people are missing what that means because it’s not really about bitcoin. So much is it’s about the blockchain, about coming. Utility uses of cryptocurrencies, tokenization, fractional ownership, all these things are being built in the background and they’re coming.

We talk about this here a lot with respect to uses for the blockchain and for fractional ownership, real estate and stock market. As I understand it, Coinbase. I’m sorry, not Coinbase. Robinhood is the only brokerage firm that you can invest twenty four seven. Now, I don’t recommend that, by the way, because you get some bad feels. What’s the point the prices adjust very quickly. Anyway, I think people get hurt more than investing after hours than just doing it when there’s liquidity during regular hours. But what if that changes? What if all of a sudden we go to a global market powered by the blockchain, where we have tick by tick Live trades 24/7 on everything, including homes? Every home that wants to be part of a blockchain can be part of it.

[00:10:13]:
So instead of going to get a home equity loan, you say, I’m going to put 5% or 10% on a home up in the blockchain. That way other investors can own a piece of your home. They won’t have any leverage over you. You still have ownership. They won’t have ownership of the home necessarily, but they’ll be able to participate in the growth of. Again, I’m just giving a few examples of what’s coming. And of course, as I said, space exploration was happening in the medical area, biomedical research, genetic research. I could go on and on, but the innovation revolution is very deep and it’s going to be very exciting as we’re already getting a sneak peek of and we’re just in one.

And then again, we’ve talked to this often here about the strength of the consumer, the strength of corporate America. We’re talking about multiple decade long cycle strengths here that we’ve just not seen before, most of us in our lifetime. And I know that flies in the face of what you hear on tv and what you see in print. But we’re here to tell you the truth, and that is the reality of it. Consumer net worth all time high. Home prices all time high. Net equity to homes all time high. Stocks all time high.

[00:11:21]:
One third of homeowners have no mortgage on their home. These things had never happened before, certainly not the same time. And then the biggie for me really is leverage and the ability for the consumer and for corporate America to lever up, because both american companies and the consumer have cut their debt over the last 15 years by 25% and corporate debt to market cap sits at 50 year lows. That tells us that everybody has the ability to lever up, and these are the things you see at the beginning of economic expansion, not the end. So yeah, with short term overbought, pretty much everybody has turned bullish. That’s a little worry. Okay, but again, this is such a powerful bull market, we are early on in it. We’ll continue to recommend buying the dip.

How many times am I going to say that in this podcast, right? I got to spend a minute on bitcoin we’ve talked about it so much. We write it up pretty much every day now because it’s been so incredibly red hot and it’s going so much higher. In our view, bitcoin right now is trading right at 67,000, just off all time highs. Now it’s very close all time highs. Pretty much every second is hitting a new 52 week high. But again, the story here really, of course, is the approval of these etfs and the fact that it’s supply demand. The list of firms that are still blocking the purchase of these etfs for their clients is stunning. Vanguard is the biggest example.

[00:12:47]:
$7 trillion assets under management trolling. Only Blackrock do not allow the purchase of bitcoin etfs. JPMorgan, Citi, bank of America, Wells Fargo, UBS, Edward Jones, Goldman Sachs, now Bank of America and Wells Fargo did just announce late last week that they’re going to start allowing it. I think they have in some cases. But anyways, basically 80% of brokerages and advisors are not able to purchase or recommend bitcoin etfs to their clients. This demand surge is only going to continue, folks, from tens of trillions of dollars of global liquidity in these firms, the size of these firms that have yet to allow bitcoin ETF purchases. With the having coming up now in what, 44, 45 days? Yeah, you can see the potential here is amazing. Also covered on the show today, Google searches.

Tracking Google Searches is a pretty remarkable way to invest. It’s a very powerful way to invest. And this chart that we shared this morning in our letter, Charles featured on the show today too. The interest in bitcoin as far as Google searches, it’s more towards the all time low than it is the high. It’s like lower 20th percentile. People aren’t interested. They haven’t come back yet. They got burned.

[00:14:11]:
Everybody seemed to buy at the 21 peak, right? But now we have everything they wanted then has happened. Now, SEC approval etfs are here. The fourth having is coming up. And again, the purchase of these bitcoins. 346,000 bitcoin as of yesterday’s close, have been purchased since January the 10th, while only 45,000 had been mined. You see how this can get really crazy and see how this parabolic move higher could really pick up speed. I repeat, I expect bitcoin will be over 100,000 by the having. I think it’s going to be that kind of a move.

And then we may look to take a few profits short term, but frankly, the having is the time to buy it that’s been the history of it. We’ll just keep tracking it every day. We’ll let you know exactly what we see because we’re telling you what we’re doing with our money, right? That’s the VRA portfolio is our money. Our bitcoin trading. We only have one trade in, essentially one buy, one sell. Now we bought again. We are back in, of course, fully at 28,800. And we’ll always report to you what we’re doing with our own money, and that’s how we’re positioned right now.

[00:15:23]:
Okay, let’s go over the. Again, the internals weren’t great today, but they’ve been so much better. There were some areas of strength. I’m going to do it quickly here because it was actually, I’m going to round down a little bit here. We had essentially just a slightly negative day. Advanced decline for both NYC and Nasdaq. Volume today. Slightly negative both for NYC and Nasdaq.

A little bit worse readings for Nasdaq. Of course, it did lead to the downside today, but here’s one that stands out. Tyler covered this on Friday. On Friday, we had more than 600 stocks hit a new 52 week high. We had that again today. 654 stocks hitting 50 week high. First time we’ve had back to back 600 new 52 high days in a long time. We only had 151 stocks in new 50 week lows.

[00:16:10]:
So the market’s broadening. That’s clearly taking place, and we believe that will continue. A little softness today. And our sector watch, we had eleven sectors, S 500. We had seven finish higher, four finish lower to the upside. Utilities up 1.6%. Interesting. With rates up today, they are a creature of their own real estate.

Up 1% today. Materials up 17% to 1% to the downside. Communication services down one and a half percent. Again, these stocks have been red hot. And consumer discretionary is down 1.2% as well. In our commodity watch today, just when everybody stops talking about gold, just when people start saying, sell your gold to buy bitcoin, of course, here comes gold again. Tyler covered this in depth on Friday. Gold today closing in another all time closing high.

Not a closing high price yet, but all time closing high. We’re only $60 away from an all time high period, but we are trading right now at 21 24 an ounce. It’s a big $28 announced today, or 1.3% silver, up 3.2% when silver is leading and the miners leading gold. These are buy signals. We’re starting to see these take place now. Hallelujah. We knew it was going to come. It’s going to come exactly when nobody expects it and no one’s talking about it.

[00:17:30]:
But again, long and strong, this group love the miners here. When they get going, they’re going to be a house on fire. I think that’s going to happen this year. Again, our target for gold this year is a minimum $2,400 an ounce. I think we’re going to get a move well through that this year. We’re about $280 away now from that. Right now, our minimum target, crude oil today down a dollar 22 a barrel at 78 75. Very constructive.

OPEC is going to keep with their cuts, should keep prices high. Energy stocks look very attractive here. And finally, again, bitcoin. You just talked about that last trade here is 67,157, just a house of fire. These little dips are not lasting long, are they? And why would they? It’s just too much demand. All right, folks.

Hey, always appreciate your, listen, hope you had a great day and even better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close.