In today's episode, Kip explores the aftermath of tariff volatility and one of the fastest moves from bull market to bear market in history. He shares his insights on the current market landscape, the state of the bond and equity markets, and the implications of tariffs and economic cycles. Kip also takes a candid look at the mistakes and successes of the Trump administration so far. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back. The market is closed. Good Friday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herridge here with the daily Very Investing Podcast. Hope you had a good day today. Hope your week turned out okay as well. What a week. What a week.What a week.

I think I want to get a shirt. It says, I survived the tariff bear market meltdown. Because that’s what we’ve just been through, folks. This has been one of the most volatile time frames ever in the stock market. As you may have heard us say over the last couple of days, we, we just had the fastest bear markets in history, two of them, both under President Trump. The first was the plandemic, and now this one. Quickest, quickest bear markets in history.

That’s not a good thing. It’s not the kind of thing you want to be known for. So. But listen, we’re entering the week on a good note. I’m keeping this podcast short and sweet today because I think we deserve somewhat of a long weekend, don’t we? I can promise you this. I’m doing absolutely nothing tonight but just relaxing because since Tuesday night, I think I’ve slept four hours. Truth, I don’t, I don’t require a lot of sleep, but this has been one of those weeks where just, you know, the mind won’t stop turning because so much is happening. And if you know us, if you know Tyler and me, couple things.

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Number one, we, we, we. We like to get things right. Because if you get things right, you know what, you’re on the right side of the market, you’re in the right stocks, you’re making money for your people, right? And number two, we call it like we say it, and it doesn’t matter who the president, it doesn’t matter who’s doing it, doesn’t matter who’s on what side of anything. We are going to call it like we see it based on the facts. We always go to where the facts are. They tell us what we need to know, right? And so that’s just who we are. So we’ve always been. So I’ve been my entire 40 years in this business.

I ain’t going to ever going to change that. So everybody upset at me because I dared to question Trump. Do me a favor, just keep it to yourself. I don’t care, because it ain’t going to change. I understand that Trump deserves. Okay, deserves our respect. I understand he deserves a loyal following. I’m not questioning any of that.

What I’m telling you, though, is big mistakes have been made here. Massive mistakes have been made Here, folks. Okay? The kind that someone as smart as Donald Trump with the talent that he has around him should never make. That’s just the reality of it. Okay? Now can this be salvaged? Absolutely. Is he on the right track? Of course he is. It’s execution and messaging, both of which have been pathetic. That’s just the way it is.

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We didn’t need to have a $11 trillion lost in this bear market so far, by the way. We’re not out of the, we are not out of the woods yet. Okay, Today was good. Let’s talk about that. We’ll come back to it. Dow Jones today finishing it to up 619 points. That’s one and a half percent. Basically same thing.

Rust 2000. One and a half percent. Of course, rust. Thousand been destroyed. Small caps, small businesses. A lot of concerns there, folks. Again, not out of the woods. There’s no way you can say at this point we’re not going to have a recession.

I’m still, I’m still, I’m still probably 60, 40 against. But there’s a lot of damage been done here, right. And it’s going to take time to work through this. The bears are still, I understand we were saying this after today, the bears are still in control. The bears are still in control. We saw it in the bond market action again today because the bond market vigilantes are back. Everybody would probably not rather them not be. But guess what? You open that door and now they’re here and they’re the big daddy, right? They run everything.

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The debt markets are far more important, credit markets, far more important than the equity markets. Right. And that’s what a lot of people just did not know until we went through this. You know, we have a, we, we have what, a probably generation of people that don’t know what, what economic, what economic, real economic theory is based on that doesn’t know what an economic cycle and a market cycle actually looks like when you go through hard times. Because we’ve always had the Federal Reserve to belt us out. It’s not supposed to work. You go, if you screw up economically, you’re supposed to pay the price for it. You’re supposed to take the year or two to cleanse the system.

That’s what gives us an honest system. We don’t have that. We wrote the big bribe for that reason, okay? And it is a completely manipulated system. And that’s something else that’s got to be cleaned out here. But you know, as you may have seen today, the Federal Reserve, the reason the market Rallied today again. We were down on the Dow at one point this morning, 400 points. It looked like it could get ugly. And here came the Federal Reserve.

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Federal Reserve quotes. We’ll be there if we need to be there. They had not said that so far. Right. They not said that. It was just that say, okay, maybe they do have a coalition together. Maybe the Federal Reserve is going to be there to help the Trump administration. Today we got a little bit of that evidence.

Good. They probably should have said something. Right. Just to show you know what, it’s not us versus them that was more important than I think most people understand. But that again good to see. What else today? Nasdaq. This is good also. Nasdaq up 2% of the day and the semis I believe closed up even more.

Let me just quick last check here. Yeah, semis at 2.6%. Nasdaq up 2% again. That’s, that’s what you want to see. Semis leading Nasdaq, Nasdaq leading the market. Yesterday of course semis got smoked, you know, down over 7%. NASDAQ down 4 1/2 percent. Remember yesterday was hideous the day before, beautiful.

Today back to pretty good looking day in the market. By the way, the Vix today volatility index back down 8% today the 3756 again very good to see it. It spiked higher again today. Finally the 10 year yield. This is the, this is the most important story. The tariff story is number one because it’s controlled by one man. But right behind that and probably forcing that act, not probably is forced, forcing all of Trump’s action. Now know this is the bond market today 10 year yield hit a high of almost 4.6% today.

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Right. It did close below 4.5 now 4.49 at the. That’s very good to see because what you don’t want to see and I wrote this up earlier, if the 10 year yield gets to 5%, take this to the bank, this market’s in trouble. All the selling pressure we saw the last couple of weeks is going to be right back and there’s no guarantee that ain’t going to happen. Okay, so we’ll watch it closely. It shouldn’t happen. There should be plenty of reasons for it not to happen. But again, the bond market vigilantes have been woken up and that’s something that the Trump administration is now being forced to pay attention to.

Scott Bessen, of course Treasury Secretary knows this all too well. I’m not so sure. Peter Navarro and others in the administration know this. They’ve been reminded this week because. And that’s the other thing. You know, we need to see a whole lot less of Peter Navarro and a whole lot less of pretty much everybody else administration. We just want to see Trump, of course, president. We want to see a lot more of Scott Bessant because he knows what he’s doing.

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He knows Wall street, he’s respected. When he speaks, people listen and take him seriously. And he had a calming effect this week and it paid huge dividends for all of us here. Assuming that you’re bullish, what else? Today, again, bitcoin. Bitcoin’s proving that something’s changed here because this is the first time we’ve had again, we’ve now had four bear markets in seven years. Four bear markets since 2018. That’s unprecedented. Right? That’s not normal.

Okay. And again, it tells you how leveraged and screwed up our entire system is. Okay. Because the first time we have turmoil and trouble, the markets meltdown and that’s not the way it’s supposed to happen. But that bitcoin in these past declines in these past bear markets has almost always melted down 50%. That didn’t happen this time. That’s a pattern change. It’s an important one and it’s showing more and more.

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Yeah, you know what? Bitcoin is becoming a better store of value now. It did get hit hard, right? We’ve seen it from 110,000 down to what, 72. So it has been hit hard from the top. And it was hit, you know, during this tariff insanity, but now it’s back to almost hit. It hit a high today of 84,000. Right now it’s 83600. And very, very good to see that. We’ll be back in bitcoin before long at all.

Again, I wrote that up this morning or this afternoon for, for our very very members here. All right, I’m gonna keep it short. Short and sweet. Didn’t I say that? All right, let’s move on. Let’s take a look under the hood today again. There we go. Okay, so advanced decline 2 to 1. Keep it simple. 2 to 1, advance. Decline positive. Both NYC and NASDAQ. We’ll take that up. Down volume, very good today. 79.7% today for NYC. Up volume, not down. That’s good to see.

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And a volume of 62.2 in NASDAQ. Good, but not great. This one then gets your attention. We had 418 stocks to week low to just 42. Hitting a new 52 week high. So there’s been, again, there’s been real technical damage here. Just, you have to know that we are in a bear market. That, that is just what it is.

We’re below the 200 day moving averages and everything. And what’s maybe most important now, we’re trend followers. So you know, when the trend, the trend, your friend. And when the trend turns negative as it has now with the moving averages rolling over, that’s just gotta be respected. All right? It’s not the case of death. It doesn’t mean we have to have a six month or one year bear market. Nothing like that. This could be, as we’ve been telling you, this could very much be like the pandemic bear market of five weeks.

It should be that, it shouldn’t be more than that. And a lot of that now depends on how this, this tariff stuff is handled. Okay? But again, we, we are in the bear market. That is what it is. And we’re just going to continue to look for, you know, solid trades while we hold our long term core positions. Gold has been fantastic for us. Silver as well. The miners have been great for us.

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It was some really good bear market trades. Bear market positions we have here. Tesla is just a phenomenal buy here at 250. It’s acting better. And so again, we feel good about our portfolio. It’s downsized a lot. We sold nine positions beginning eight days ago and we have a lot of cash now and that’s good. Cash is king.

Thank you, Ted Parsons, who would walk around, my first mentor, walk around the office all day long saying cash is king. This guy was just. I got a lot of my Wall street sayings from Ted Parsons and I learned a lot from the guy too. But right now, cash is king for us. We got a lot of cash and again, we look at gold and silver as real cash. Of course it is. So we’ve got real, we got fiat cash and we get the real stuff. And I feel very good, very, very good about how we’re positioned here.

We’re going to come out of this stronger than ever. I believe, I believe that we’re positioned to beat the again this year, as rocky as this last month has been. But, you know, we’re fighters and we don’t stop because we have an objective to crush this market. Why we do that? Because the market wants to crush us and because we’ve got a whole lot of subscribers here that, you know what, you pay us good money. You listen to our podcast, you read our work you’re loyal, you stay with us. And we will never, ever, ever forget that. Because you know what? Our money, we manage our money the way we tell you to manage yours. Why do we take it seriously? Because it’s our money, too.

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And we’re all on the same side of this. And so that’s always going to be our approach. And we tend to get really locked into times like this. This is, I think, when we do our best work, we get locked in, we figure out what’s going on in the market before the market really can tell us. And I’ll just tell you one more thing before I move on here. You know, something happened here that is, it could be very scummy, okay. And it involves the Trump administration. I was going to wait to talk about this next week, but I’m going to talk about it briefly here because we’re going to research.

I’m going to put a time in this, this weekend because it looks terrible. Before Trump came out and put on the 90 day pause, there’s multiple videos apparently of this. And again, I’m gonna spend the time this weekend. I watched one very quickly today. It’s kind of breathtaking. There’s video of him talking about doing this pause and about the amount of money people are going to make when the market makes the turn. How many of the people that hurt that were in his orbit, that heard him say that, then went and acted on illegal inside information to make money. Now, if you’re an elected official like Congress, that’s legal.

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We, we’ve seen that from Nancy Pelosi and these other dirtbags. Dan, Dan, Dan. He’s a Texas guy. Dan. He’s a, he was a Marine. God damn it. I can’t remember his name now. You know, you know what I’m talking.

Get the patch, right? Long week, like I say. So look, we’re used to these people trading on inside information because it’s not illegal for them to do it. If you can believe that that’s the case somehow, somewhere. But it ain’t legal for other people to do it that just happened to be working in the Trump administration. And again, if I heard this was about Biden doing it, and I’m sure you know, they did, but I just didn’t hear, I didn’t see a video where they’re admitting it. This was apparently on multiple videos. And again, I’m going to spend time on this, this weekend because that, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say what’s good for the goose is Good for the gander.

No, no, no, we don’t, we don’t play that in Texas. Right. That’s called bullshit. And we’re going to call you on it if you do it. I hope, I hope that no one now for Trump, he can do what he wants to, but I hope nobody in his administration and some of these, I’m sorry to say, hangers on coattail riders, I really hope that they didn’t do it because they are, they’re in line to be prosecuted for this. Okay. Not that anyone in the Trump administration would do that, of course. And I don’t, I don’t want to see that happen.

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But right is right and wrong is wrong. That’s just the way it is. Right. Just the way it is. So we’ll spend some time with this weekend. We’ll be back with you next week and let you know what we found out. Okay. Under the hood today again, this is good action today here.

First of all, the pull call ratio, this is a little troubling. It probably says we’re not out of the woods yet. Pull call ratio today opened at a 0.95. Didn’t, didn’t. Was not above 1 all day and closed. Let me do a quick refresh here. I’ve got 0.78 as the final trade. So a lot of people buying calls today.

We never, we’ve yet to see the retail investors capitulate. That’s kind of why we thought that we might not be out of the woods this week because that’s yet to happen. So we’ll keep an eye on that too. But we really want to see put call ratios that are well above one. Even when the market’s going up, you want people believing that it’s not going to go up. You want them buying puts. That’s how you actually get a change in the market, personality of the market. So far that’s just not happened.

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We did have, of course, multiple days with very high put call ratios, but we yet see anything that would I say indicates true capitulation. Not that we have to have it, but we just haven’t seen it yet in our sector. Watch today, all 11 sectors finished higher again, very good. Day to day Materials led the way up 3%. Tech up 2 and a half percent. All the way down to consumer discretionary, which is what you want to see as well. That’s, you know, spending money on things that cost a lot that you probably don’t need. Also up 1% today.

They’ve been hit very hard here. Again, concerns about A recession are still very real. That’s why this tariff thing has got to get resolved. Listen, we’ve got a broken record on this. The target here is China. Make a mistake. There’s, there’s no other real target. You can say it’s the eu.

They’re taking advantage of it, sure, but nothing like just China. This is where almost all of our trade is, is done with this really. Well, you know, the most egregious taking advantage of this. Right, but get all these, get all these resolved and then target China. But don’t make it US versus the world. Don’t make it Trump versus the world. That’s not a coalition, that’s not a winning coalition. And that’s why the markets just went through what they went through because it was so poorly thought out.

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The execution was, as I said earlier, horrible. But again, look, Trump’s got a lot on his plate, you know, look, no one’s perfect. And I think this week was a wake up call for him. And so I think, I think they’ve got their footing. I really, I think they have to have their footing again. Great to see the Federal Reserve statement today. And I think that now they understand, like, let’s just go, let’s get China. Everybody else is going to fall in line.

Let’s close all these other deals. Let’s make it about us versus China and this market turmoil can be put to bed. Right? And it’s what we all want to see and still accomplish your goals, right, of re industrializing America. You can do all of that and not crash the markets and not sending us into a recession at the same time. That’s the only thing we’ve been saying all along. All right, in the commodity watch here, gold. Gold came very close today, very close to having three straight days with gold above $100 an ounce. Number one, until yesterday it never happened.

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Back to back days, very close to 3. Still gold up today $75. Now it’s up another 2.3%. Just what, what a stud gold has been. It’s been phenomenal for us here. A gold now at 3252. Remember our target year end is 4000. We think we’re just getting started here.

Silver today up even more 4.5%. That’s very good to see at 3214. Copper up 5% today. That should be happening that way. Copper just a week ago was at 5. A week and a half ago was it $5.40 a pound. Got all the way down like to 4. Okay, now it’s back to 455 a pound.

Again at 5% today, crude oil was really going in the wrong direction as well. Again, these are important correlations here that we’re breaking down. Okay. Where, you know, rates are going up, gold’s going up, silver’s going up and stocks going down, dollars going down, oil going down. These all. That’s not, that’s not the relationship between these assets that you want to see. That’s telling you recession or worse. And so you got to, you got to turn those tables.

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That’s look to be starting now. Crude oil today of A$40 a barrel, 61, 49. You start getting debt below 55 and you got, you got trouble. You got companies that can’t make money drilling oil wells. Right? And so we don’t want to get in that situation because now you’re talking about a likelihood that we’re going to have a recession. Can’t toy with that. We don’t want to get back to qe. We don’t want to get back to the Federal Reserve having to bail us out.

We don’t have to get back to the US Government issuing trillions of dollars like Trump and Biden did during the pandemic. We don’t need any of that. Let’s clean the system up. Let’s let it work as it’s supposed to so we can all trust what we have in place. That’s why we voted for the guy. Let’s do that. How about let’s do that? Which means don’t crash everything. So these ballots have to happen, right? Come on, guys, let’s be a little smarter here.

Come on. What else today? Bitcoin. We’ll wrap it up with bitcoin again. I just said earlier, it’s been a real beast here. Back to a now right last trade, 83,937 is a 5% on the day again, we will be back in this position before you. Before you know it. All right, folks, I said to keep it short and sweet. There you go.

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Hey, I hope you had a good week. As it turned out, this is all gonna be behind us soon. There’ll be some great bargains here. We’re gonna get rocking and rolling on the right side of the market, get all our positions reestablished because the second half this year is going to be a mofo. The second half this year is going to be sensational. Okay, Stay locked in. We will as well. Have a great weekend.

We’ll see Back here again Monday after the close.