In today's episode, Tyler wraps up an active end to the week on Wall Street. Despite the lower finish today for our major indexes, the VRA's outlook remains bullish. Tyler also discusses a few of the themes to watch for in the second half of 2025, namely lower yields and a weaker dollar. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Friday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Thank you for being here with us on this Friday, as always, but especially on, you know, a summer Friday, Friday afternoon where the market finished lower. We’ll have a bit of a quick podcast here for you today. Just quickly wrap up the week.

I just got off Charles Schwab’s network not long ago for an interview there with Nicole Petalides on the show the Watch List. So if you have a second want to give it a watch, you can find it on Twitter or directly on the Schwab Network website under their shows the Watch List.

[00:00:54]:
So thank you to all of the Schwab team for having me on and thank you to Nicole Petalides as well. Again here for a great conversation. Another great conversation today. We got to talk about, you know, the VRA’s current outlook for this market, for the bull market, laying out what we’ve seen so far in the V shaped recovery and what we want to continue to see and a little bit of what we’re looking for in the second half of 2025. If you’re a regular listener here, you know what, some of that is one theme we’ve been on two themes here that we’ve been on all year and that is lower yields and a lower US Dollar. Well, the US Dollar hit a three year low yesterday. Yields were up a little bit today. We’re still below four and a half here, though.

Remember, just before Trump was inaugurated, I mean, we were almost at the 5% level at that time. So yields certainly for all of you know, the jawboning from traditional financial mainstream media. I gotta say, there’s some great guests on Charles Schwab, though you really don’t hear as much of that there as you might somewhere like cnbc, where we have heard a ton this year freaking out about higher rates and inflation’s going to be back on the rise. And man, they’ve just continued to get call after call wrong. You know, I’m not going to call out anybody specifically there, but this market just continued to defy all logic of mainstream economists who are mostly really, I won’t even get into it here today, but most of these economists, you know, like to consider themselves doctors of economics. Right. A lot of them have PhDs as well. Unfortunately.

[00:02:41]:
It’s, I mean, it some of economics and I think some of the greats will admit this as well, there are elements of it that are more art than science because you’re trying to figure out sentiment from people. Right. And that’s not something you can easily quantify. And they think they can. They think that they’re the masters of the universe. They can tell the market what to do, and it’s just simply not the case. Right. So they think they can go back over textbooks and say, oh, well, tariffs are being implemented.

Inflation must increase. Well, we haven’t seen that yet. Right. So absolutely they’ve missed that call. And we just seen it time and time again from mainstream economists. Jay Powell being one of the worst perpetrators of that. You know, think back to the 2018 December from hell. You know, raising rates in an illiquid market.

You know, not a whole lot of people would have said that’s a good move. Then, of course, the unlimited money printing, digital creation of dollars during COVID and then following that, calling inflation transitory for the very problem that he created. Right. Because I can’t. I will Never forget that 60 Minutes interview where he essentially gave the government the permission to pass the biggest bill that they possibly could. They can just digitally create dollars. Anyway, thank you again to the Swab Network team. Is great, great conversation again about the VRA’s overall outlook for this bull market and some of our top positions right now.

[00:04:09]:
So if you’re a Tesla fan, you’ll certainly like this interview. If you, if you own some VRA positions, you’ll certainly like this interview. We actually covered. Well, we did cover more than Tesla, first of all, but on top of that, we covered a few more positions than I had originally planned going into it today. So it was a great conversation. Be on the lookout. We’ll have a link out soon as well. So let’s quickly jump into today’s market action to close out the week, because it was a rough end to the week this week for our major indexes that really took us pretty much into negative territory on the week because of today, not across the board.

Some were already kind of floating around that area. But earlier in the week, remember, we did hit, you know, the highest levels since the tariff. Trump’s tariff policies were implemented here. So last night was probably the. The biggest headline since Trump announced those tariff policies. And it was a conflict escalation between Iran and Israel. Futures were down big overnight. Oil was up massively overnight as well.

[00:05:22]:
But at the open this morning, we got more of that Teflon feel a bit. I talked about that a bit in the interview as well, because Nicole brought it up and I was watching the same thing. She was in the charts this morning that after the open the risk on names are major indexes tech. We’re rallying off the lows of the open while the risk on names that you might expect to be doing well. Energy sector for example, with oil up so big was selling off from its highs that it opened at now we couldn’t finish the market that way. It looked like the bulls might have left the office a little early on on a summer Friday here. So really though it did look like our market was was ready to shake off the bad news. It really did.

So we’ll continue to keep a close eye on this. But one day’s action is not enough to derail our bullish sentiment here. It’s been an incredible run from the April lows and one thing that I did fail to mention comparing this time period to the COVID V shaped recovery was that there were multiple pullbacks whether you’re looking at the S P500 or really especially in the semis which lead to both the upside and the downside. We had multiple pullbacks between 5 to 7% in some of these cases on the way back to all time highs. So it’s been a phenomenal run. You know, two months again, an incredible May. Right. Great start to the month of June.

[00:06:50]:
We are at overbought levels. Wouldn’t say we’re quite at extreme overbought on steroids or anything. So it doesn’t mean we have to move lower from here. But point being, it’s been a great run and any dips we do get we’ll use as buying opportunities here. All right, so for our markets, small caps did lead to the downside today down 1.85%. Followed there by the Dow Jones down 1.8%, just over 750 points lower on the date of 421 97. The S&P 500 down 1.13% back below 6,000 here. You want to see it get back above 6,000 and quickly because that’s an important psychological level we’ve talked about here.

But that would be good to see next week certainly. And who knows what’s going to happen over the weekend. This could de escalate. That’s what we certainly would hope to see over the weekend. But the SB closed 5976. And lastly here the NASDAQ down 1.3% to 19 406. And then as I did finish lower on the week. But I have to point out here, the semis continue to lead.

[00:08:03]:
They finished up, you know, even after being down on the daytoday by 2.3%. Semis were still up 1.69% on the week this week. So again keeping an eye on this action closely. Next up here, looking at our internals on the daytoday about what you expect. Not pretty numbers right about 4 to 1 negative advanced decline for both the NYSE and the NASDAQ. 52e highs lows with we talk about this here often but it is a lagging indicator. So you’re not really going to learn too much from this today because it’s been an incredible run. Maybe not across the board for, for every name within these indexes, but just slightly negative 452 week highs to lows today.

Then volume just right about 72% downside volume on the NYSE and the Nasdaq. So again not, not great numbers obviously, but certainly could have been worse on a day like today and on a Friday for that matter, a summer Friday, you know, notoriously illiquid times of the year specifically for the bulls. This is, you know, that was, this is a chance for the Bears. I, I guess you could say looking at our sectors on the day, just one sector higher. As I mentioned earlier, energy opened higher on the day sold off. That’s what we wanted to see continue. I was kind of hoping to see that into the close selfishly with my interview this afternoon for energy and to finish lower even though we are long energy. So not I don’t want to see it long term moving lower but mostly in the reaction to this news.

[00:09:43]:
You know, if we could have finished not even positive on the day for our major indexes but off the lows would have been nice. And we did finish near the lows of the day again though one day’s action, not enough to derail here. Our laggards on the day today, financials, tech and materials. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. This is something I talked about on the Charles Schwab network as well that we are we’re big fans of gold. That’s no secret if you’re a regular listener here either. But gold having a big day today. Let’s get a quick refresh of my screens here.

Sorry I am on the road so a little different setup for me. Gold now up over $50 an ounce today. About one and a half percent in just let’s see, $54 away or so from its all time high at 3453. The all time high I believe is 1-357. Next up here, silver also slightly higher on the day at 36.37. Did want to run a quick chart there of that. Kip talked about this on a podcast earlier this week as well. But it is time for Silver to play a little catch up.

[00:11:00]:
After hitting that, you know, your long term new high there earlier this week, we have seen some sideways action next up here, oil as I mentioned or sorry, copper now at 4.75 cents a pound. Let’s look at that chart here as well. So I usually do have these pulled up for you, but I am on the road today. Yeah, this has been, you know, we’ll go through the the chart of copper here again soon but did close lower by 2% on the day at 4.74 a pounds. Still, it’s been a great run from copper in 2025. Absolutely. Oil. Wow, what a day.

Got as high as 7,758 a barrel here. You know, started the day in the 60s yesterday. You know, we were in the 60s earlier this week. Low 60s now closing today up 7.5% at $73.18 a barrel. And and finally here for today, bitcoin. As this was one of the fun ones on the show today that I had not planned to talk about in the last second, Nicole asked me about it. I wish I had a little bit more for there because we have owned bitcoin, you know, since officially in the vra portfolio since $2,000 of Bitcoin we’ve traded it, right? It’s not just one long term hold in there. So we’ve traded it since $2,000 of Bitcoin and Kip and I started getting involved just being curious about it in 2014.

[00:12:35]:
So we’ve been long time interested in bitcoin and as you know, long term bullish now as well. Closing today did finish higher in the last seven days here at 105 $553 a Bitcoin.

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@ 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, have a great weekend.cWe’ll see you back here on Monday for the close.