In today's episode, Kip takes a deep dive into the long-term bullish trends we continue to see from this market. He also explores the impressive performances of major market indices and discusses why the VRA remains bullish on technology stocks, particularly semiconductors, and notable stocks like Tesla and Bitcoin. 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. Hope your week was fantastic as well. It’s my first podcast in a while. We took some time off of the holidays. Tyler kicked us off yesterday with the first podcast we’ve had in about a week.

So I hope you’ve all been doing great, hope you had a great Christmas and very happy New Year. Think it’s going to be a very special year. Folks, we’ve been kind of laying this out for you since the election and Trump 2.0 and what that means. Some things we’ll be talking about this year, the Trump mandate. That’s a global mandate that Trump is in effect putting in place for the rest of the world with the return of true free market capitalism. There are so many bullish macro trends, mega trends that we’ve laid out for you here through the big bribe. And now the Trumps are going to be reelected. So many reasons to be bullish.

I will repeat, I’ve never been this bullish in my 39 years of doing this. This is the most bullish I’ve been. This is a theme of course ours now for a couple of years. So it’s not anything new. You’ve been joining us here, but the pieces have fallen into place and I am stunned. And that’s the stunned or shocked use either adjective you like that more people don’t see what we see. Tyler covered this in detail yesterday about how sentiment has gotten so bad so quickly. A month ago we were at just one month ago we were at greed levels and all the sentiment indicators right now.

[00:01:43]:
Fast forward to now and we’re fear. We were one point away from extreme fear on the fear and greed index this morning before the big rally kicked in. And this is just not how Mark, again, if you didn’t listen to Tyler’s podcast yesterday, take 15 minutes today or tomorrow over the weekend, you have to listen to his podcast. He lays it out step by step, all the things that matter most, our approach to this, how we see things. And you know, Tyler’s gotten very skilled at these podcasts. He puts a lot of work and effort into them and he’s gotten very good. His information is rock solid. I listen to learn from his podcast now, but beginning on Monday, we’ll have begin rolling out our our themes and our forecast for the market and for the economy for this, for 2025.

Talk that a little bit. Talk about Mike Johnson became the New speaker of the House that’ll be under Trump. That was a very narrow vote, but actually came through on the first vote, as I understand. I’ve been pretty tired of the markets, but sounds like the very first vote had a couple of people that changed their mind. And so he made it through on the first vote. You know, whether you’re a fan of his or not, I think it’s good to see. Look, if we need to change speakers, let’s do that at the appropriate time. Right now, we got to get Trump in there, got to get all of his cabinets choices approved, and let’s get this party started.

[00:03:15]:
And I know that’s a fear a lot of people have, is that he’s going to be sabotaged. I cannot tell you the number of people that we speak with that this is their biggest fear. They’re going to sabotage him. And as Tyler said in our pre podcast meeting, can you fault anyone for feeling that way? Look at what we’ve gone through and just in the last few years with the plandemic, the impeachments of Trump, right, The lawfare against Trump once he left office. You’re probably naive if you don’t, if you are not a little afraid of what they might do to Trump. But I just have a feeling that we’re past that. And again, I am always surprised when I hear people that I think people have become addicted to being afraid. That’s really what I think.

And that is, look again, we had the worst two decades American history. I get it. It’s not that I don’t get it, but fear and I have a very unique relationship and is that I don’t subscribe to fear. False evidence appearing real. What I learned long ago is that 90% of the things that we’re afraid of never come to pass. And of that 10% that do come to pass, they’re 90% less bad than you feared they would be. And when I read that a long time ago, it just resonated with me. And it’s been my experience the things that I’m afraid of or fear, they just don’t happen.

[00:04:47]:
And if they do happen, they’re not nearly as bad as I was afraid they would be. And I think that really applies to the markets right now. And I think it also applies to Trump 2.0, because I’m very optimistic, as you know, Tyler, of course, as we spelled it out again yesterday, very extremely, urgently optimistic about what’s going to happen in the markets. And that’s one of the reasons that, you know, the, this December sell off that we had to start the new year. That’s one of the things that, you know, just didn’t make any sense to us because you know, again, again we’ve outlined this time and again the Trump economic miracle 2.0, the Trump mandate, the, the, the, the five megatrends that we’ve been laying out for you from the big bribe. These are all the return of animal spirits, the red pilling of America. These things are all coming full circle now. And I think that, I think it’s going to be another extraordinary year.

Just quickly again, we’ll have our forecast beginning on Monday along with some very specific, we make very specific forecasts and predictions if you will. We did in 2024 to start the year. As a reminder, here’s some of those. When we started 2024, we said the SP 500. The market we said would be up more than 25%. Nasdaq was up 28%. We came in at VRA portfolio came in at 27.1%. That makes 18 to 21 years.

[00:06:14]:
We’ve beaten the market since I left Wall street and started the VRA in 2003. So that was that, that was the check mark. We predicted this was a big one that bitcoin would top 100,000. Now I was saying this in January a year ago that bitcoin would top 100,000. Not a lot of people making that call. And we laid out why we thought it was going to happen. Of course that happened. Laid out the reasons Tesla would top 300.

Of course that happened on spade and on steroids. Tesla had a high of 488 before falling 22% in just a few days really. And then the culminating. Tyler covered this again yesterday in great detail with the deliveries that came in that were disappointing. But that’s just disinformation to say that’s a big deal. It just isn’t. As Tyler said. These are analysts that come out with these forecasts and what do they know? They don’t know much.

Most of these analysts don’t even have a buy rec on Tesla, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. We reported this to you. I guess it was a couple of weeks ago. Now at 56% of the analysts that followed Tesla, Tesla either have a hold which neutral rating or a cell recommendation on Tesla. I, someone explained that to me because I, that that makes zero sense to me. How can you know this story? And it’s not about rearview mirror with Tesla. It’s not about deliveries for the fourth quarter, it’s not even about EVs anymore. You know, this is the case that we’ve been making now for a long time is that the future of Tesla has frankly very little to do with their current business line.

[00:07:57]:
Yeah, the EV is going to continue. I got my first Tesla over the holidays. It’s extraordinary as far as the design, the engineering, the performance. Wow. You know, 0 to 60 in 1.99 seconds, fastest car on the road. But it really, for me it’s the FSD full self driving I’ve had in the five days I’ve had the car. I’ve had about 80% of the time I’ve had the car on FSD and just fascinated with it. You know, I love driving this car but I really want to see how this works because if it works great and, and they’re only on version I think 13.2.

The belief as I understand it, is once they get to version 14, that’s it, it will be legal and it will be federally allowed. Full self driving without any adults, any driver supervision will then be in place. And that’s got to happen before, you know, they launch their, the Robotaxi that’s got of course be in place because there’ll be no driver, no steering wheel, no gas pedal to seat, taxi if you will. And that’s coming out soon. Like, I mean they’re obviously being tested already in the road. Now as I understand it, that’s first quarter of this year also. First quarter this year we’re going to have the, the new Q, that’s the code name. They’ve given forth a new $30,000 or less EV.

Basically going to, you know, anybody who wants to have an EV now in a Tesla, they’ll be able to get into that car. Right, because there’s not many cars, you know, that you can buy for less than 30,000 new anyway. But just so much more to this Tesla story than the classically classic EV story. You know, the things that just blow you away when you look at the numbers and the potential again, robotaxis, the way they’re going to completely revolutionize the auto industry. And you know, I think a great short frankly are insurance companies because when cyber, when these cyber taxis, Cybercasts, what are they going to call them when they’re on the road? And very few families will have more than one car within a certain number of years, one combustible engine car because you won’t need it, you won’t need the insurance costs, you won’t need the upkeep you won’t need all the things that come with owning a car that you hate. Why would you need any of that again, outside of maybe keeping one combustible engine car or one ev, when within a couple of minutes you can summon a robo taxi and it’s going to take you anywhere you want to go at a, at a fraction of the cost that an Uber or a Lyft costs. Right? And they’re going to be stationed everywhere, just millions and millions of minutes all over, all over the country. So insurance companies, I think, are really going to feel the pinch and that’s good because they’ve been ripping us off for far too long.

[00:10:51]:
And then our hope is that the same thing happens to the mortgage industry and to housing with, with their insurance cost. Again, just not to get the story too confused here, but, you know, to the people that keep saying inflation is going to come roaring back, what are you smoking? Inflation has been a dead story now for a year and a half. And no, it’s not coming back. China is exporting deflation. Europe is exporting deflation. If it weren’t for just two things in the cpi, if it weren’t for insurance cost and if it weren’t for shelter or housing, we would have had less than 2% CPI now for six months plus. And no, that’s not going to get worse under Trump. It’s going to keep getting better under Trump.

But again, with insurance companies, I think some of these, the ones that do a lot of auto insurance, I think that there’s some great shorts here. So that’s just kind of things we’re looking at on the back end. But then you’ve got Optimus and robotics for Tesla, their energy storage and their battery and solar, as Tyler covered yesterday, their AI. This is, this is the, the Tesla that everyone should be looking at. If you’re, if you’re, if you’re evaluating buying Tesla based on deliveries of evs, you don’t, you just don’t know this story. So yesterday the stock got smoked 6% on the delivery news. And, well, today it’s up 8%. You know, today the stock is up $31 a share and it’s still about.

[00:12:26]:
What is this about $78 a share, I’m sorry, $68 a share below its high in December, late December. But I don’t think it’s going to take long to get back there. So it’s a story we’re very excited about, very passionate about, and it’s really the one stock we recommend. If you’re only going to own one stock, it should be Tesla. That’s really been our approach here. Of course, we never recommend a single stock portfolio. Diversification is important. We never recommend more than about 15 stocks.

They should all be owned. That’s how we beat the market 18, 21 years by owning all those stocks. And so that’s a little different conversation. But other forecasts that we made for 2024 go through really quickly here again, Bitcoin top 100,000, Tesla top 300. Gold would break 2500. Of course that happened. 2800 and change. The Federal Reserve would cut rates two to three times.

Of course that happened. And the US economy would not go into recession. Remember, there were, at one point, not long ago, 100% of economists said we’d have a recession. Last year obviously didn’t happen. It’s one of the big reasons we were so bullish and excited about things, because whenever 100% economists say anything, take your life savings, sell your children and take the flip side of that trade, because you will, you will. It’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a recipe to print money. If you can go against 100% of the economists, that’s how bad it’s really. As a contrarian, though, that’s how powerful being a contrarian is.

[00:13:57]:
Especially the case if you can do it to going against a Wall street economist. A groupthink has just destroyed success in so many industries, financially speaking, and that’s certainly one of them. So we’ll come out with our forecast on Monday. Of course, we’ve been working on that over the last two, three, four weeks. And now that things are coming together again, Speaker Johnson, getting him, and that’s going to remove some of the concerns I think, that are out there if they couldn’t. Believe it or not, folks, there are people that were saying this publicly that if we didn’t get Johnson elected Speaker, Trump could not be inaugurated. There are people that were making this their base case for being bearish and being negative. I mean, that’s just not how things work.

And so, yeah, Trump’s going to be inaugurated. You know, God forbid something horrible happened, but again, people will become addicted to being afraid. It’s the truth. It just is. It’s not a harsh criticism. It’s a, it’s just, it’s a recognition of reality. And this is why so many people continue to be so, so bearish. And it’s just a horrible call.

So what else? One of the points we started making, salary made yesterday and we’ve been writing up is and this is I think very important about it. When we came out with the big bribe one of, one of our keys was it was of course the innovation revolution and AI and that tech companies we’re reinvesting capex or reinvesting so much money back into the business. I think the first time I mentioned that on Charles Payne show I said there’s, there’s 100 to $150 billion being reinvested in tech companies, cap capex capital expenditures. Guess what that total is now? This is inside of 18 months. That total instead of being $150 billion is now $2 trillion. That’s going to be reinvested into tech companies. This is their own money. They’re reinvesting it to revolutionize what they’re building because again AI etc and that’s happening inside of three years and that that number is only going to continue to grow.

[00:16:13]:
So you know it’s gonna now everyone’s looking at second and third derivatives. How’s that money gonna be spent? What other industries are going to benefit from that? When the software is, the nuclear is, utilities, you’ve got all of these industries that are being again the innovation is, is run, is running wild. And so it’s a great time to be an investor. This is why we’ve continued to say this is the most similar period is the dot com melt up. And I remember anytime I talk about.com People are always real quick to go. But what happened at the end? But whoa, there’s they, they think they got me. You know what happened at the end? It was a, it was a dot bomb, wasn’t it Kip? Yeah, it was. So I’m saying that understand we’re not at 1999 or 2000, we’re 1995 still.

That’s how early this is. And it’s not going to just last just five years. We’re talking about something that’s going to go on for more than a decade. This is a going to be a massive bull market. Massive economic expansion, GDP of better than 5% a year for a long time. Cathie woods is saying better than 10%. So we’ll take half our number and be happy with it. Great macro work there.

[00:17:27]:
So I think that this bull market is going to shame the dot com bull market and that was an extraordinary time to be an investor. So you know we take the sleeves and the arrows and we have for a couple of years because we were the first to say that we were in the roaring 2020s and a meltable market. We were the first to say that, and it’s exactly what’s happened. But this is still just the beginning. That’s the key. So the key is going to be the smartest one. Strategies has been buying the debt. Well, look what we saw today.

Big, big move higher. And again, Trump, perfect president for it. Animal spirits coming roaring back, and we ain’t seen nothing yet. So this is going to be fun. But again, I recommend over this weekend, you listen to Tyler’s podcast from yesterday. Just, I think it’s the best one. He’s done a lot of good podcasts. I think that’s my favorite one because he just very succinctly laid out how we see things and the way things are going to transpire over the course of this year and through Trump’s term.

[00:18:29]:
And then if we’re right and if Republicans hold the presidency for maybe like three elections, I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to extrapolate that out and what it could mean along with the innovation revolution and what having Trump or then, you know, J.D. vance or Ron DeSantis or whoever follow in his footsteps. Who knows, maybe someone’s going to propose that Trump gets another term since he was robbed of one. So I doubt that’s going to happen, but I’d vote for it. Wouldn’t you? Sure you would. But anyway, I think they’re going to. They’ve got a great role model to follow in Trump’s footsteps as being a warrior for America, and that is really what he is. So didn’t get everything right.

But, you know, right now we’re focused on the things that the American needs to accomplish. And because, again, we have two Americas. Right. We also get, you know, hit pretty hard for saying that things have never been better for the consumer. And they haven’t. Things have never been better for the consumer. There is not a close second. I will debate anybody, anywhere, anytime, and I will blow you away with the facts.

The key, though, is that that’s for the first America. The second America no longer matters to the markets. The markets, remember, that’s the key there. But the first America never been stronger even, frankly, the second America is doing much better than the media portrays. And so, again, all of this is just going to propel every. Led by housing. Most important leading economic. Leading economic indicator.

[00:20:10]:
There is housing. There is no more important asset class as big as investment we ever make, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, 40% of Americans own their home without a mortgage. It’s just it’s insane. Again, very few people talking about this. The strength of the millennial generation, what that means. Largest, you know, segment of the population now inheriting $70 trillion, 72 million people strong. Again, these are things you just not hear in the mainstream media.

But we’ve been talking about these for a couple of years and, and they’ve been right and we think they’re, we feel very confident that they’re going to continue to be right again today. You know, we, look, we had the Santa Claus rally. It just petered out here at the end. If, if the S500 had gained just another half a percent that it finished up one and a quarter percent. If it gained just another half percent today, we would have had a positive Santa Claus rally. Final five days of the previous year, first two days of the new year. As it stands though, we did finish negative. And I shared this this morning.

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a somewhat reliable indicator, doesn’t have that high correlation to the outcome. But again, last year the Santa Claus rally indicator was negative as well. It was down more than now, was down 1% over that seven day period. But you know, it did stop the market and SB 500 was up 23% last year. So. And again, I think the more important indicator is January, the January barometer. As goes January, so goes rest of the year. If that comes in negative, you know, we might take a fresh look at some positions.

[00:21:47]:
In other words, not changing our, our views and our macro story. It’s all intact, the megatrends, but maybe how we’re positioned. Right. So, but I, I actually think the January is going to be very good year for all the reasons we’ve been talking about here. Animal spirits are back $7 trillion in money market. People are waking up and going, okay, I got to be in this market. You know, tired of being afraid, tired of living in fear. I got my guy back in office.

Look at his cabinet, right? Most pro business administration in history in America. And that’s just going to bring so much again, animal spirits and goodwill to the markets. And I think that’s what we saw today with the reversal. You know, we had a decent open today and then, and then a pullback and then boom, off to the races. Dow Jones today finished up eight tenths of one percent, was our loser on the day. S&P 500 again up one and a quarter percent. Russ 2000 up a big 1.6%. Small caps.

[00:22:42]:
This really should be the year small caps start to broaden out. But man, what a yo yo they’ve been right but the real play is Ben Tech and we think that’s probably it will continue to be the case. We saw today NASDAQ up 1.8% SMH the semi ETF. Let me get a fresh quote on this because this textbook again folks. Yesterday Tyler covered yesterday semis led big time yesterday even in a bad market again today semi is up 2.8% on the day again Nasdaq of 1.8 Text semislead Tech Tech leads the broad market. That’s textbook action on back to back days and so this is what we want to see more. We think we will again Tyler cup is just a powerful piece of analytics and in the post election year trading of the year we’re in now semis up over 30% for the year in post election years they’ve been coiling. Look at the chart.

They’ve been frustrated, they’ve been coiling but the market still didn’t tank, did it? Right. And so now it’s time for the semis to leave and we think we’re already seeing early signs of the happen. We are seeing early signs of that happening. Now another point. Rich Ross, the quant extraordinaire at at Evercore just out this morning with his first update for the year. He’s his forecast is that the SPF 100 will be up 22% and that the semis will lead tech and tech will lead the market. He takes the same view that we do. And so again very bullish on the semis as as are we and tech as are we loves Tesla etc but he thinks it’s going to be a tech story and I think we need to see it broaden out in a healthy fashion.

[00:24:24]:
I actually think we’re going to see that this year. I think we saw a lot of broadening over the last couple of years. It’s not nearly as narrow a market as the perma bears and the talking heads would have you believe at all. NYSE breadth hitting all time high this year But I think you’re going to see even more broadening this year to get spreading to the small caps. There are a lot of it’s going to be a volatile year maybe I think what we’re already seeing we’ll have some swings here but there’ll be the swings lower will be buying opportunities and I think there’ll be some great trading opportunities on both sides. We intend to be active in our ETF trading program and I doubt that we’ll be taking profits in Tesla. You know it’s one of our core positions, of course. Tesla today again up $31 a share.

Back to 4:10, 4:11 a share. I think Tesla’s going to $650 a share this year and that, that may be on the low side. This is going to be a monster year for Tesla. We will have all those final numbers out for you starting on Monday. Right. Same thing of course. Very, very bullish for bitcoin as well. Again our forecast was a hundred thousand this year that happened or last year.

And now we think. Well again I’m going to save it for our, for, for our letter starting next week. What we’re going to actual numbers forecast for bitcoin for the economy, gdp, the various sectors, how they’re going to grow energy, nuclear. That’s going to be a big area we’ll be focused on this year, next year, following year. This is a long term bull market in this group. A lot of money going to be made in this, in the nuclear area. You know, again, no one talks about gold anymore, right? Bitcoin’s changed all that. I understand that.

[00:26:14]:
But Gold was up 26% last year. Gold beat the S&P 500. That’s two of the first four. Excuse me, 2020 and 2023. I’m sorry, I want to double check this. I think goals outperformed the S500 two years. 2020, 2021, 2024. It did last year.

Gold was up 26%. Again SP 500 only up 20, only up 23.1%. And no one talks about it. But you know, the thing with gold and this is what’s really key to the story, again, gold’s been on monster tear. We all know this. But again, compared to bitcoin it feels like it’s, it done nothing. I guess, relatively speaking. I guess that’s true.

[00:27:04]:
But the thing that, that tells me extremely confidently that this bull market is only getting started is that the miners have yet to go. And every bull market in this group and I, we’ve traded, I’ve traded this group, you know, going back to 2003. And my dad was a big gold bug. So I know this group pretty well. These, these move. The biggest moves always come with the miners going crazy at the end. That, that, that’s kind of a peak, right? And we just haven’t seen even the bull market really going in the miners that tells, that’s how early we are in the bull market for gold and for silver. So there’ll be a lot of ways to make money, I think.

You’re gonna hear a lot of people say throughout the year, is it everything bull market? I fully expect that to be said. I’ll probably say it on tv. All right. Because it will be. But again, we want to make the most amount of money possible. We don’t want to just make money. We want to beat the markets and be in the highest growth areas possible. Again, as long as they’re, you know, that’s where we should be, a smart money play.

Right. Without taking undue risk. So I think you have an opportunity to make a lot of money this year and we’re going to focus on the areas that give us the highest returns again with the highest probability outcome as well. Let’s take a look under the hood today. Good day all around, Tyler again, Tyler. Greg podcast yesterday. Tyler, we’ve been talking about the internals, how they’ve improved over the last week because they were not good in the month of December. And all of a sudden, even on down days, here came some positive internals.

[00:28:41]:
And so that was yesterday. Positive across the board in the down market. I saw it again today. Much better market, of course today. But NASDAQ 3 to 1 positive on advanced decline. NYSE 2 and a half to 1 positive. Good readings here. Volume.

What was the final read on volume? Let me, let me do this real quick. This looks like a good number here. Yep, Tyler nailed it. 77% up volume day for Nasdaq, it’s a very good reading. And then for NYSE, we had was around 62% of volume. Again, another very good reading. And we had more fit through highs and 50 close again, back to back days now of positives across the board from the internals sector also just banging today. All 11 sectors high on the day led to the upside by.

[00:29:40]:
There we go. Consumer discretionary 2.4%. It’s a good sign for the economy. Technology of 1.6, real estate of 1.3. We had six sectors up at least 1%. Very strong day here in our commodity watch. Gold was a big yesterday, as were the miners. 4% yesterday on GDX today gave a little bit back.

Gold today, down 16 bucks an ounce at 26.52. Silver up on the day, up 20 cents an ounce at $30.09 an ounce. Copper today, up one and a quarter percent at $4.07 a pound. Crude oil, another good day today, up 1.2% at 7407. The story for crude oil I think this year because we’re going to be drill, baby, drill. And that’s going to put pressure on oil prices. But the story is going to be China because if China makes a comeback that we think they’re going to make and it flies in the face, what most people are telling you, sentiment is horrible about China. And we like Chinese tech stocks.

[00:30:40]:
We’re long this group through an etf, of course. But if China comes roaring back with the strength of the US economy, of the global economy again, Trump 2.0, the oil prices could get a real big boost. And we do. We’re very bullish on energy stocks and especially a little company called Lost Soldier Oil and Gas, which by the way, it’s going to have a conference call next Tuesday. Mark your calendar. Some very big news to announce there and they’re looking forward to telling you about it. Regarding pipeline drilling, the schedule for this year again, very exciting and looking forward to that. We’ll announce that Monday morning in our bureau letter.

Finally on the day, bitcoin again. We’ll have our forecast out for the year on Monday. For bitcoin, it’s put a good rally together here towards the end of the week. Right now 94,400. That’s a four and a half percent of the day. And there is no better. Our story hasn’t changed and it won’t change. Bitcoin is the best supply demand story of our times, likely the best supply demand story of all time.

[00:31:46]:
There’s nothing like it. Now that it’s been approved, SEC approved, ETFs, etc, and now that institutions are starting to pile into this asset, the move is going to be insane. So you have to own it or these ETFs. It’s your call. But listen, I’ll leave, I’ll depart with this. If you don’t own it, you have to change that now. Start small. That’s fine, but you have to have exposure to bitcoin.

We’re not recommending any other cryptocurrency, but bitcoin belongs in every investor’s portfolio. Start small and then build from there. I think you’ll be very glad that you did. All right, folks. Hey, appreciate you listening. I always appreciate that. Hope you have a great weekend and we’ll see you back here again Monday after the close.