In today's episode, Tyler recaps exactly why today's stock market rally is important, and gives a preview of upcoming events this week, including earnings reports from the tech giants (Amazon, Apple, and AMD), J Powell's FOMC Press Conference Wednesday, and April's jobs report on Friday. Tune into today's podcast to see what the VRA Investing System is telling us to start the week.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Monday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Heritage here with you for today’s VRA investing podcast. I hope you all had a great start to your week out there. Hope you had a great weekend as well. And let me tell you, it was a good start to this week of what will be a very eventful week for our markets. This week we’ve got everything this week, really has everything in it. Coming up, we’ve got a Federal Reserve meeting on Wednesday, jobs report on Friday, and throughout the week, a number of earnings, likely the hottest week so far of Q one earnings.

And I’ll get into all the names and what we expect from this week later in the podcast. But first off here, very good to see our markets finishing higher across the board today. You know, not massive gains, no 1% gains, 2% gains, anything like that, at least from our major indexes. We did see it from some of our individual names, which I’ll cover here. But given all of what we have coming this week, we would call this a stellar rally to start off the week. Now, we don’t tune in to a whole lot of financial mainstream media. You know, we might leave it on in the background for breaking news purposes or for some great interviews. You know, some of our favorite market watchers out there also show up on Fox Business, CNBC, Bloomberg.

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So, you know, we like to keep our ear to the ground there and watch. But going into this week, you really, it was almost unwatchable, just the negativity around this market. I mean, we saw it last week in sentiment. We got the first reading with more bearish investors than bullish investors last week in the AaIII. Since last year, the first time all year, we’ve had more bears than bulls. So what did you see in the media? Despite a strong end to the week last week, despite the fact that the Nasdaq going into last week was down four weeks in a row, last week it broke that downtrend. The S P same thing, down three weeks in a row leading up to last week, finished positive. Same with the semis as well.

I was going to get to those later in the podcast, but going back to my Thursday podcast from last week still remains the case resilience from this market. So going into the week, there was a lot of hesitation. Almost no one out there was even talking about the fact that we have a massive earnings week come up. Yeah, they might have talked about Amazon or Apple earnings this week, but the big factors in the reporting that I saw over the weekend and early today, all eyes were on the FOMC meeting. All eyes were on the Jobs report and how Jay Powell is going to be hawkish and the jobs number is going to somehow, you know, cause more rate hikes right off the bat here. We don’t see that as the case here. We see it more as today’s action is telling us it’s going to be a good week for the market. Despite all those fears, we finished higher across the board.

And it’s just the perfect time here because the market likes to fool as many people as possible. Right. So when you’ve got everyone switching from bullish to bearish, which way do you think it’s about to fool people? To the upside or to the downside? Our bet is to the upside here. If we’ve been saying that for some time, have you been tuning in with us here? Or if you’re a VRA subscriber, you know that when we take positions, we like to make sure everyone knows about it. And last week we just went even longer on this bull market. So yes, we remain long and strong going into this eventful week. And this Monday to kick us off for the week really makes us that much more confident going into this week. All right, so let’s dive into a few of the things we have going on this week.

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We’ll start with the high notes because most people aren’t covering them, is that we’ll have really the biggest week so far of Q one earnings. We had a few minor names today. It really kicks into high gear. Tomorrow, ahead of the open, we’ll have PayPal, three M McDonald’s after the close, it really heats up Amazon and then AMD, the massive chip producer out there. Second to Nvidia, which doesn’t report until later in the month of May. And then on Wednesday, not as many tech names, but we will have Mastercard in the morning. Then after the close, you got more chip names, Qualcomm and then on Thursday, another really big one here. We’ve got Apple after the close, Coinbase after the close and more.

So stay tuned here. It’s going to be an exciting week of earnings after last week’s already exciting week of earnings. But that’s not where the hesitation comes from. So I wanted to kick it off on a high note there, but the hesitation comes from a few, a couple of things that I’ve mentioned here already. First off, all eyes on Jay Powell, even though we have big earnings coming up this week. Again, all I saw over the weekend and today was talk about the Fed and then after the Federal Reserve meeting, we have April’s jobs reports on Friday as well. So really, most people are economically focused here. With that in mind, though, as I mentioned a minute ago with bullish and bearish sentiment, because there’s so much hesitation, we think the probability here actually is set up for a big move to the upside, especially if Jay Powell happens to say anything remotely dovish at all.

Think about the roller coaster we’ve been on this this year so far with the mainstream media reporting on the Fed. Going into the year at the end of 2023, every market watcher said there’s going to be six rate cuts in 2024. There’s going to be eight rate cuts in 2024. Right. There couldn’t be enough rate cuts going into the year. We laid out the case at the time for three rate cuts. That was our case at the beginning of the year. And the main reason why we didn’t want to see six rate cuts is because we looked at history.

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When the Fed has to cut rates significantly and aggressively, it’s usually because something very bad has happened, and that usually means the market is doing very poorly as well. So you don’t want to see that. If you happen to get a coordinated and controlled rate cut, one to two rate cuts, you know, pre planned months in advance, telegraphed by the Fed, that’s okay for the market. It’s when you get a meeting. Let’s say it happened this week. I can give you an example of it. If you go into this week, everyone’s looking for a hawkish J. Powell and they cut rates, that would scare the shit out of the markets.

Right. But in this background, we don’t think that, first of all, that’s not going to be the case. But what we’re looking for here from Jay Powell again, we don’t think they’re going to cut rates in this meeting, especially not when it has, when it hasn’t been telegraphed like it is. But I was speaking with Kip about this in our calls today and what we’ve seen in the markets over the last few months, one, we have seen inflation start to come back a little bit. You know, we always said it was never going to be straight down, and we still don’t see this as a massive concern in an uptrend or a short term move higher in inflation. We also have said that the economy is functioning very well, but showing some softness around the edges and key in on that word softness. I used it for a reason. If Jay Powell can take some of that and acknowledge it in his press conference, then we think the market will interpret that as a dovish comment and will be off to the races.

We don’t want to see him say anything on market weakness. That’s where I come in and make the difference between softness and weakness there. But Kip said this on our call today and I think it’s spot on. Jay Powell, and this is the quote that Kip said. So, you know, take it up with him on this one. But I do completely agree. Jay Powell will say something in his meeting like the economy is strong, but we are seeing some softness around the edges. That is really about all that Jay Powell has to say for this market to go crazy.

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What happens next? If he says something like that? We’ll see yields move lower like we did today. We’ll see tech move a lot higher and the semis continuing to lead. That’s what we’re looking for this week. And I don’t see a whole lot of other people out there looking for that, which makes me feel even better about saying it here. So stay tuned. I’ll have the podcast on Wednesday as well. It seems like I always get the FOMC days, but that’s okay. I love, you know, piling on Jay Powell after those meetings, really taking apart what he has to say and see if it gives us any insight into what the next move will be.

Our view remains unchanged here. The next move from the Fed will be rate cuts. It’s just a timing issue of when it will be. All right, back to the positives here. Right, let’s get off of the Fed talk, get off of the negativity out there, and let’s jump into today’s market action because again, stellar day to day with all of this uncertainty and especially fear behind the Fed, finishing positive across the board is certainly a win here. And I’m going to start with the semis because our markets were positive across the board this morning, but semis sold off at the open and were negative for the better part up until about midday today. That is not a sign that you really want to see. But we erased those fears as the semis hung in there.

Just tried to rally again and again today and managed to rally to finish just at their highs of the day today. Again, not a big rally here. Let’s see, the semis finished up 0.34% on the day. So again, not a massive rally here, but with all the news out and hesitation in the market, we’ll call that a serious win there. And then for our markets, it was a good start to the week as well. And I pointed out here one more time going into the week last week, we had just wrapped up four down weeks in a row for the semis and the Nasdaq. We want to see this now. Making back to back weeks of gains here for the semis and the Nasdaq.

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And we started it off on a strong note. Nasdaq up 0.35% to 15,983. So semis didn’t lead, tech didn’t lead. But hey, we’ll take it on a day with a lot of fears. Our leader on the day was another one that we like to see. Small caps up big. Seven tenths of 1% to 2016. After that, we had the dow up 0.38% to 38,386.

We also HAD the transports finishing higher on the day today. And lastly here, the S and P up just over three tenths of 1% to 15,983. One last comment here on tech that I want to pause on, because it was very eventful today, was Tesla. If you’ve been with us here for a while, you know that we are big fans and we don’t keep that one a secret at all. Big fans of Tesla, big fans of Elon Musk here. And Tesla had a massive, massive update. 15% higher, over 15% higher on the day. And if you remember, if you tuned into the news at all over the weekend, it was all about Elon rearranging his travel plans to go to China at the last second.

And what does this mean for Tesla? And is China taking over Tesla’s gigafactory in China? All of these fears to get positive news out of that. JUSt how wrong can these people be over and over again? So instead of it being an emergency meeting, turns out Tesla just got approval for their full self. Driving to make its WaY into china is now been approved. So really good news here to kick off the week for one of our favorite names. And keep in mind, Tesla is not exactly a small company here to be up 15% on the day today. This is a 600 billion dollar company. That’s a massive, massive move there. So really good to see.

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Next up here, let’s take a look at our internals on the day to day. Also, good numbers here and have been, were positive across the board all day today. So we had more advancing stocks than declining stocks on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Coming in well over two to one. Positive on the NYSE was a little bit better going into the close, but finished just shy of two to one positive on the Nasdaq. Next up, 52 week highs, lows coming in positive for both the NYSE and the Nasdaq. Not exactly very high numbers here, but good to see after a few weeks of negative readings from 52 week highs and lows, good to see both coming in positive today. And lastly here, volume coming in strong here as well.

Almost two and a half to one positive on the NYSE and almost two to one positive. Just shy of two to one positive on the Nasdaq. Next up here, taking a look at our sectors on the day today. We finish with nine out of our eleven s and p 500 sectors higher on the day. Consumer discretionary leading the way. Some research firm in Texas has been saying for some time that the consumer remains strong. Gotta be sure and show them this one today. After that, we did have utilities make sense as the biggest borrowers in the nation.

And yields the ten year was down over 1% today at a 4.6. And remember, we talk about this here often, but it bears reiterating that if you think yields at these levels can derail this market, let me disabuse you of that notion, because if we go back to the time period we’ve compared this mostly to, which is the 1995 to 2000 dot melt up, where the Nasdaq rallied 575%. We saw yields well above these levels, above 6% during that time, and it wasn’t enough to derail the market. So no yields in the 4% range do not concern us here. After utilities, we had real estate, materials and industrials. Then our two laggards on the day. Makes sense here. Communication services, we call this a proxy for tech a lot, and that’s the case.

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But the weightings here have always astounded me because it’s so heavily weighted to two names, Meta and Google, both of which were down on the day to day. So they make up like 40% of the communication services sector. So no surprises there, although we would like to see those stocks start anticipating a little bit more. Both have had tremendous rallies. If you look back over the last year, right? So a little bit of a pullback here. Even if in Meta’s case, where they had a 10% down day last week, they’re still up over 100% from 52 weeks ago. So, no, no big concerns there for us either. All right, finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch.

Let me get a refresh of my screens here, because we got a little bit of green on the screen. Gold’s pretty much flat now, up slightly to 23, $47 an ounce. But what we have talked a lot here about is the gold miners. You want to continue to see the miners outperforming the commodity. We got it here again today. GDX, the gold miner. ETf up over half a percent on the day. Today, again approaching a 52 week high here.

Looking at the chart here as well, we just had an outside day which finished to the upside. That is, you’re not a high probability signal there, but the probabilities are in your favor on an outside day to the upside like this, where you finish higher. So a good technical signal there. I won’t read too much into it as of today, but something I’m certainly taking in my notes here. And also one other fact about the gold miners, they do really well in rate cut cycles. If you look at the 2008 financial crisis when they started, the Fed really started cutting rates in a low interest rate environment. Gold miners were one of the best stocks to be in at the time. We think this is a similar setup in regards to rates there.

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Next up here, silver now lower on the day by three tenths of 1% to $27.44 an ounce. After that, we had copper up on the day by 2.3%. Big day for copper. And this is another 52 week high here from copper. If I’m not mistaken, that is a multi year high. Love making sure while we’re on this podcast, that is the highest level in copper since at least April or May of 2022. So almost a two year high here from copper. We’re almost at that level now.

Doctor. Copper acting strong. Next up, oil down on the day, 1.3% to $82.73 a barrel. You know, this is another area we’ve talked about for some time. We have been very bullish on this group. And today we had the energy sector outperforming the commodity also. What you want to see there as well, but there is one plus side to lower oil prices, especially in this environment, is that it tells us that the Middle east conflicts, hopefully lower willing, will not turn into something bigger. You know, we’ve seen, well, I won’t dive too deep into it today, but if we start to see oil ripping and getting a lot of headlines out of that area, you know, you just hate to see it.

But again, we do remain bullish on that group over the medium to long term as well. And finally for today, bitcoin having a little bit of pullback over the weekend. Down 1.2% now to 62,885. This is another group where we continue to say buy the pullbacks buy the dip. We remain extremely bullish on bitcoin in the short, medium and long term here, folks. That is all that 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 at VRA Letter, click the podcast link at the top and we’d love to have you with us.

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Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.