In today’s episode, Kip dives into the evolving dynamics of the stock market as confidence begins to return and new sectors and special situation stocks start to shine even amid global tariff threats and shaky open markets. He covers the latest moves from the White House impacting nuclear power, spotlights the explosive performance of companies like GameStop under Ryan Cohen’s bold leadership, and shares valuable insights on how you might piggyback on these trends. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Friday afternoon everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA investing podcast. Hope you had a good day today. Got a big three day weekend coming up. Having great to Memorial Day weekend this weekend as well. We’re back with you. Tuesday of course after the close.

This market is beginning to evolve. Can you feel it? It’s broadening now we’re getting special situation stocks and sectors that are really starting to get legs. These are groups frankly that were too cheap to begin with. But now confidence is returning back to the market. Even though the market was down today, we’re starting to see life. I think there’s an internal confidence that even as this morning Trump threatened Apple with 25% tariffs. They announced of course they’re not going to produce their iPhones in China but in India and we said at the time, I’m not really sure what that does for America first because that’s still not the U.S. but so Trump said that this morning.

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You know what, it doesn’t do us any good if you move iPhone production to India. I want you to move it to China, I to the US or talking to Tim Cook Tim Apple and saying, you know what, you’re going to pay a 25% tariff. So the markets got hit hard this morning, the futures and of course then we also learned that he’s talking about a 50% tariff on Europe because they’re just not going anywhere with the EU and their negotiations on tariffs there. Yeah, this, this was never going to be a short battle, was it? This is always going to be something that took years to really change the So I think the markets frankly have looked past this. I think the markets know that Trump is not good. We’re not going to go back. I just don’t think we’re going to go back into another a tariff turmoil where we see the markets drop, you know, 10, 15%. You will have some shakeouts.

We are a bar right now but just don’t see anything big happening again. Confidence is the return of this market based on retail investors, the Mrs. Watanabes of our era just backing up the truck every chance they get to add to their positions through a lot of money in money market accounts. Lottie money still on the sideline lines and of course institutional investors are on the wrong side of the market. So I think these dips will continue to be very short lived. That’s what happened today. Futures were down 600 points in the Dow Jones before the open. Nasdaq was down 400 points.

Well, we still finished lower only because really it was a weak last 30, 45 minutes. But Dow Jones finished down 256 points, Nasdaq down 188. Not the UN in the week, but again, we’ve had a very good run here. And again, I think confidence returning, special situations. Okay, if you’re here with us at the vra, did you know we have a couple of these stocks that have been on fire? Today Trump signed executive orders for the nuclear power business. Now no longer will companies have to wait years to find out if they can get approval to start a new nuclear plant. Now Trump has given the NRC no more than 18 months to get these approved. And these smart small modular nuclear reactors like smr, which is new scale power that we own, is up 18% today, was up 14% yesterday.

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Stocks on fire. And again, these are the special situation stocks. And now money is flowing into with more confidence. Also here at the VRA, GameStop, we’ve been big fans of GameStop. We’ve traded meme stock. Well over the years. We made better than 400% profits in AMC 20, a combination of both the stock equity and options. We made exactly 100% profits in Trump Media, DJT and, and then we moved into a GameStop.

And I’m writing up this piece right now. Hope to have it out in Tuesday’s letter. What, what, what Ryan Cohen is doing with GameStop has the potential to be brilliant. All right. The guy’s basically operating what is. Now, again, the stock was up big again today, up another 7% today at 33. It was up 11% yesterday. GameStop, if you believe it or not, now has a market cap of almost $15 billion.

That makes it a $15 billion hedge fund. Ryan Cohen wants to basically take a page out of Warren Buffett’s book, Berkshire Hathaway. And he wants to build essentially his own holding company is Minnie Berkshire. But he’s not just doing with undervalued equities and companies that are turnaround companies. That’s what he’s looking for. Of course, GameStop’s the only one that he owns right now. Most people can’t figure out why you’d want to own that. But you know, he’s a value investor again in the Warren Buffett mode.

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But also now, of course, he’s fallen in love with Bitcoin. And they have a total now of $6.3 billion in cash. What is that, 40, 40% of the entire market cap of the company. And again, we’re all waiting now for News of when do you have they started buying Bitcoin? Why? Question is why haven’t they already? Okay, a lot of us have asked this question now for last couple of years when he had a chance to buy it at 50,000, 60,000, you know here we go right now it’s 109. Hopefully at least on this last pullback he started putting some of that cash to work. But I think it’s the long term game plan that we’re most interested in because he hasn’t. He has a financial engineering trading approach to this, an investing approach. Again I write this up over the weekend.

I think there’s a way to piggyback with what what Ryan Cohen is doing the Gamestop and make a lot of money. Because if you’ve noticed one thing and I’ll have all this outlined for you in our report on Tuesday, if you’ve noticed one thing over the last couple three years, whenever GameStop has a big move higher, what does he do? He doesn’t at the money Equity offering right to to pad his coffers for cash look for, for a new investor coming in. Cat kind of sucks because all of a sudden the stock gets it. But if you understand what his trading approach, investing approaches and trading strategy is with respect to at the money offerings then you can piggyback on this with, with an options approach and then you can, you’ll know kind pretty much when to pause your buying of the common stock. We’re not going to be trading the common stock but pause our buying. And then when they make these announcements of equity offerings either convertible note as they just did with bitcoin 1.35 billion or with the equity you’ll then when to time your purchases because again we’ve got mstr, you know Michael Saylor’s company strategy. We’ve got that to go off of. But, but GameStop’s taking it to the next level.

Ryan Cohen’s taking the next level. So again stock was up big today, up big yesterday. Really now is starting to break out here and I think, I think the next move on this is going to be the 50. So what else is moving? Look at these miners. I shared this chart with our folks on, on I think it was Wednesday. The junior miners now have broken out of an 11 year rounded bottom. Right? That’s GDXJ if you want to pull up the ETF for it. It broke it out an 11 year rounded bottom.

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When gold did this, gold went on to soar. Working off memory here, 80 something percent over the next 17 months. All right, Gold had his own decade long plus rounded bottom. And now GDXJ has done it. These stocks are very cheap. Again, we’re, as you know, we’re also, we’re big fans of gold here. It’s treated us very well over the years. Continue to recommend it.

Better than 2% today. The miners today up better than 3% today. This is a group that has broken out now. The miners are breaking out. This is, this is an anatomy right of the, of the birth of a massive bull market for this group. Folks, in all modesty, I can tell you there aren’t many people that traded this group better than we have over the years. It was our second recommendation. The VRA in 2003 was gold, silver and the miners, we destroyed this group for a decade.

And the 2003-2011 bull market made some very, very, very good returns in this group. And I believe this bull market is going to be larger than that one. I think gold is going past $5,000 an ounce. I think that’s going to happen in a couple of years. This is that move, this is that momentum. There are a lot of reasons for it. But again these are special situation things that are happening at the same time. We’ve got a bull market ongoing and this is, this is really when the, the, the, the, the phrase a rising tide lifts all boats.

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These other boats now are starting to. Because investors have cash and they have confidence. So now people are searching what’s cheap, what has momentum. And there are a lot of traders, a lot of smart money traders in this market right now that are pouncing on these positions. And then with social media and the Internet, you know, they’re spreading the words from very large investing groups that are trading this very well. So it’s also something else you can piggyback along. But again, all of that combines to make this a bull market that really is gathering steam even on a day like this. Again, we had a big comeback again today.

That’s been the repeating pattern from the April 7 lows. These lower opens simply are not holding. They’ve all been buying opportunities. And again that’s, that’s a, that’s textbook bull market action. All right, what else Today we also saw, by the way, the put call ratio elevated. We need this to be elevated. And it was today. We actually closed today with a poke call ratio of 0.95.

A lot of people thinking this moves come too far, too fast. We’re going to have a shakeout either because of rates spiking, which we don’t see or because here comes the tariff trouble again. And so people are trying to hedge or sell positions, take some profits to get in front of it. Look, I think, I think that’s going to be, that’s going to be a minor move. All right. I think the primary move, not the counter, the counter trend move, the, the primary trend move now continues to be higher and I think shakeouts are going to be very short lived. I think this second half of this year is going to be extraordinarily good. But again today was almost all day long into the 90s, closed at a 0.95.

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Remember two days ago before we had our big shakeout on Wednesday, just the day before the call ratio was down in the 50s. Right. And that’s almost always when bad things happen. So we’re not, again we’re not saying we’re trading this day in, day out, we don’t do that. But I’m saying it gives you a good idea of what to be prepared for when deposit you’re buying and if you want to put some hedges on then you know you have the ability to do that as well. Okay, what else under the hood today? It’s not a great day today. The internals today were negative but not, not bad really. Tell you the truth, we opened up sharply lower advanced decline today for NYSE was just slightly negative.

Nasdaq was 1.5 to 1 negative. Volume today, what is 1.3 to 1 negative? Nasdaq, NYSE just a fraction of a bit on the downside volume new 50 highs lows also came in pretty much flat today in our sector watch. Not as good sector watch today. Well a little, a little late rally here. What is this? Yeah, we had four, four sectors finished higher, seven finished lower. Not a lot either side. Tech was down 1.3% to the upside, utilities up 1.1% and a commodity watch again this is where we think a lot of money seem made here again, gold. A lot of people, a lot of top callers out there.

We’ve talked about this a lot, haven’t we? All these top callers say that’s it, Gold’s putting the top. It’s too far ahead the 200 day moving average. Too many people bullish on it. Everybody owns it. No they don’t. Right. That bank of America study that referenced that, that didn’t indicate. If you saw that people were saying look, everybody’s pulled up.

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No, what it said was that fund managers believe that gold is the most over backed play. It didn’t mean that is so again, we think for multiple reasons the gold is in a massive long term bull market. And yeah, that’s a bit of a warning sign. But look at the debt we continue to pile up. Look at the fiat money that’s going to have to keep getting printed. And look what’s taking place globally with de dollarization. And by the way, Trump wants a much lower dollar. I think people get Trump confused with having a strong dollar policy, meaning the world’s reserve currency, which of course he does.

We have to maintain that that won’t, the US will not lose its role as the world’s reserve currency in our lifetimes. Take that to the bank. The US won’t let that happen. Right. We go to wars over things like that. But at the same time Trump understands that if you can weaken the dollar even more than he already has, you can do away with our trade deficit. Right. This is what other countries had done to us.

This is that non tariff, non tariff trade policy he’s talking about. It’s our time to have a weaker currency to help our trade. And so that’s what he’s very committed to. He won’t quite state it like that, but look around, look at what Scott Bessant says all the time. Look at his top economic advisors. They’re all giving you very strong hints that that’s what they want. Again, extraordinarily bullish for gold. We got about five major reasons gold will keep going higher.

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And not to mention this will be the fourth year in a row that central banks and governments have bought record amounts of gold. And of course it’s being moved into physical. Right. People don’t want that counterparty risk. They want to own the gold themselves. And so it happened to Russia. They don’t want to let it happen to them. People are taking ownership of their gold.

Gold today again up by 1.9% to 3357. Silver up 1.3% to 3364. Copper today, up a big 4% today at 486 a pound. Global economy is in good shape. Dr. Copper sending that signal. Crude oil today I think, I think this is a really good trade coming in. Crude oil.

Todd and I are looking at a few things there but right now it’s still kind of in the dumps here. It was up 50 seconds of barrel today at last trade 6176. And finally the day bitcoin. I think we think the move to 150,000 is going to happen pretty quick after this breakout today. Down a little bit. Down 2.3% in the last 24 hours. Last trade here, 108,250. All right.

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That’s all we have to do for the day, folks. Hope you had a great day and even better, long weekend. We’ll see you back here again Tuesday after the close.