In today's episode, Kip discusses the resurgence of "animal spirits" in the markets and among entrepreneurs across various industries. He explores potential market shifts driven by innovation megatrends identified by Cathie Wood's Ark Invest, including AI and blockchain technologies. Lastly, Kip emphasizes the importance of capitalizing on market pullbacks, reinforcing his long-term bullish outlook. Tune in to today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Monday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA Investing Podcast. Hope you had a good Monday today. Back with you after we missed the last three days in these podcasts. Sorry about that. We missed being here, hope you missed us as well.

We attended the NAPE conference here in Houston. That’s the North American Prospect Expo, which is the largest oil and gas conference of its kind. And here in Houston and visiting with companies we work with, Lost Soldier Oil and Gas, a couple of others. And what was I think most enlightening for me, and I think I can speak for Tyler as well, is that it just spending this much time around entrepreneurs in this specific instance work in the oil and gas industry. But this is what we’re hearing from everybody, regardless of industry essentially is the true nature of animal spirits that have returned in this country. These are entrepreneurs that are red pilled that love Trump, love what he stands for, loves what he’s been through and now see a very bright future ahead for the United States of America. Golden age of America is what people are repeating now.

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And again. These are the truest entrepreneurs you ever be around. They’re blowing and going. They can’t wait to drill, baby, drill. And again, it’s not just oil and gas. We’re hearing this from every company and business owner that we work with in the United States. This is when animal spirits begin to kick in. And it’s been a while since we’ve had this.

I think this is what is being undersold, I think underestimated, if you will, as far as the impact is going to have on the markets and the economy. Because the last time we had this was the first time that Trump took office. But if you remember, right after that, all of a sudden things started changing. That wasn’t the Trump necessarily that we voted for because he surrounded himself with people that were RINOs, Republicans in name only. He didn’t really know the game, hadn’t figured it out yet. And then, then, then he got snookered by, by the pandemic. So this is a very focused Trump. I think we can all agree it’s a very, very different Trump.

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And you know, we’re seeing it now in the news. It’s this popping up. We’ll have to talk about today. Open AI Elon Musk Group is led by Xai. His AI company is now made a bid for OpenAI of $97.4 billion. Where does he find the time to do any of this? Of course, he’s just one of many big time names associated with this bid. It does look to me like it’s a low bid. We’ll see what what comes of it.

But interesting that Elon Musk has time to do anything else and he’s also working with Doge and he’s got I shared this morning this link this morning with our, with our viewer members, just an extraordinary article about the inner workings, how this happened with Doge and these four programmers working at the treasury, how they were able to get to the computer systems and then start downloading all the data initially with USAID. And now Trump’s given him permission to hire 45 more Doge agents and start turning up the pressure, checking out the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and the Biggie. He also said must said over the weekend that he’s considering adding Congressman Ron Paul. Yes, the great Congressman Ron Paul from Texas. Audit the Fed in the Fed that’s been Ron Paul to his team at Doge to head up an audit of the Federal Reserve. So this is about as big as it gets, folks. When you talk about taking down the swamp, taking down the deep state, cleaning up the swamp, uncovering all the fraud, waste and mismanagement and corruption, very likely are you now going to be able to find out with some certainty how are politicians that make 140, $150,000 a year, whatever is they’re paid as a congressman or a senator, how is exactly they’re able to build a net worth of over $300 million, which of course that’s Nancy Pelosi and a lot of her friends, matter of fact, on both sides of the aisle, they’ve now built massive net worths off a very regular sized salary. And so let’s again, these are dangerous waters, frankly, that Trump and Musk and their friends have waded into.

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You know, when I, when an animal is trapped, they tend to do desperate things. If you ask me what I think the biggest risk is to the market. At the beginning of the year we said that we thought it was the Federal Reserve. What would the relationship between Trump and Jay Powell and the Fed be like? Remember in the first term it was not good and it created a lot of controversy and a lot of risk for the markets. So now it’s now it’s widening. And so you know, as Tyler just reminded me, tomorrow and Tuesday morning, tomorrow and Wednesday morning, Jay Powell is going to be speaking at Congress one day between the hat for the House and the next day before the Senate for his regular testimony to Congress. So you have to know that These questions are going to come up. We’re going to find out very soon whether or not Jay Powell and the Fed are as committed to being apolitical as they have claimed to be for these many years.

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I think it’s going to be very telling. The reaction that we get from Mr. Powell tomorrow and Wednesday, again, lots to talk about. Today was interesting. I think over the weekend we learned that Trump was going to put 25% tariffs on all imports of steel and aluminum. My first thought when I saw that is probably the first thought you had. Let’s check the futures markets. Let’s see how they open on a Sunday night.

Let’s see exactly how bad the damage is going to be. Because remember, that was the shakeout last Monday. Of course, the Monday before that was the deep sea shakeout. So we had back to back, not Black Mondays, but back to back, pretty, pretty dark Mondays. Of course, both of those were buying opportunity. Maybe the markets are starting to figure this out because futures opened solidly higher. And we had a good day in the markets today. Finished a little bit off the highs of the day, but still had a very good day with also very good internals today.

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Again, what we’re finding out now from groups like one of our favorite, which is Cathie woods, ark, as far as arc research and the job that they’re doing, they’re doing a very, very deep dive, as they’ve done for the last several years, into what we call the innovation revolution. And they, they believe that as we do, that the combination of, of several megatrends are going to drive both the economy and the stock market sharply higher. According to ark, the combination of public blockchains, folks, that’s, that’s bitcoin, that’s financial engineering. That’s everything to do with the cryptocurrencies, the combination of public blockchains, AI, such as what’s happening with autonomous vehicles, et cetera, multi omics, that’s basically genetic scientific research about our health, energy storage and robotics. That’s also a Tesla theme, by the way. But the combination of these five megatrends, according to Arkai, has the potential to take real GDP growth. That’s, that’s GDP growth factoring in inflation to better than 7%, meaning GDP growth of a hard number of 10% beginning in the next few years with invested markets soaring for two, three decades. Very exciting theme.

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Again, this has been one of our big reasons to be bullish over the last two and a half years is this innovation revolution. And it’s now absolutely picking up speed and we see that essentially every day with news that we see brought out before us. Also today, the semis today again led the way. Higher semis were up 2% today. Also had a big move higher in precious metals and miners. I’ll cover that more in just a moment as well. First of all the broad markets again good day today. Dow Jones today finishing up 4/10 of 1%.

S&P 500 up 1%. Small caps again, all four indexes higher small caps today 4/10 1%. Very constructive looking. Chart pattern taking taking shape in small caps. I believe they’re going to really go on a serious run here in Trump 2.0. Finally today, what you want to see. Nasdaq up 1% of the day, up 190 points with the semis up better than 2% today. As Tyler’s reminded me again, this was a textbook day.

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The semis led tech and the Dow Jones the transports led the Dow Jones transports today up just over 1%. So very good textbook day all around. Also had great internals. I’ll cover that more in just a moment. Tyler also reminded me, Tyler is just a, he’s an encyclopedia of knowledge and information. I got to tell you in our pre podcast meeting that I want to take you more and more notes every day. Tyler reminded me last week what we’re seeing in Cinnamon, it continues to be very indicative of early, not late, not medium stage, early bull market territory folks. When you have the markets that are just off all time highs, right? But you have, for example the AAI investor sentiment survey came in with the highest percentage of bears since November of 2022.

Again, this is not, in case you’re wondering, is this normal? No, this is not normal. This is not normal behavior in investor sentiment. People are still afraid. They’re still concerned, they’re still scared. Now you might say, well Kip, they got a lot of reasons to be afraid. Maybe that’s true. But the nature of the way markets trade versus counter to sentiment. You can draw a direct line in a direct parallel to stock market performance to where investor sentiment is.

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We’ve just never gotten to a point where investor sentiment has reached extreme greed, where we would be taking profits. We’re not seeing any of those indications that this is the time to do that. Instead we’re seeing a market that continues to move higher. Again, it’s been choppy, no question about that since Trump’s elected, had the big move higher and then downdraft and now a lot of chop here. But when you have again AAII the biggest percentage of bears is November 2022. Just today the Fear Ingredient Index just made it back to neutral again. That’s been also in fear territory. That is not normal and is also very indicative of a bull market that is in early innings.

What will happen over time. And you’ll, you’ll, you’ll hear as the turn comes, you’ll hear us and see us write about this making the turn. When the turn comes and when the markets start to decline, we say we have a 2, 3, 4, 5% decline but investor sentiment does not budge. It stays bullish. That will be a worrying sign. We are not anywhere near that. And again, that is, that tells us we are very early in this bull market. There are a lot of indications for that, but that’s certainly one of them, one of the key ones if you’re certainly, if you’re a contrarian today, under hood today, again, it’s a good day today.

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It could have been very different with the news that came out about tariffs again delivered to us by Trump yet over a weekend. Once again the internals today were solid across the board. We had advanced decline today. Quick refresh here, 1.5 to 1 positive advanced decline for Nasdaq NYSE just short of 1, just short of 2 to 1 positive volume also extraordinarily good today. Nasdaq let me do a quick refresh on this because there’s a late update every day around this time. Make sure I get this right because it’s a good reading but I want to make sure it’s accurate. Yeah, this is A good reading. NASDAQ 74.2% up volume on the day.

NYSE a volume of 67.4%. And we had, it was pretty much essentially split of stocks hitting a new 52 week high. Dating a new 52 week low. But this was without question a good day from the eternals. Good to see that it’s all the same thing in our sector. Watch 9 of 11 SBF 100 sectors finished high on the day. There really was very little to the downside to today folks. Broad based move, higher energy today up better than 2%.

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Technology of 1 1/2% and about three other groups also right at 1%. To the downside financials they’ve been on pretty good tear. Financials were just a bit lower today, lower by 8/10 of 1% with the 10 year yield stuck now below 4.5%. If you’ve been listening to us and I’ll just, I’ll just repeat this again, one of our big themes has been for some time is that the nature of what’s happening with innovation, the fact that disruptive technologies are deflationary, not inflationary. Folks, this is not being talked about nearly enough. The combination of that, that innovation breeds deflation, disinflationary and deflationary action, the fact that China is continuing to export deflation to get out of their economic funk. We buy a lot of Chinese goods here. It keeps our costs lower.

That is the upside. And the fact that again, as we’ve called it, the gravity of higher US yields. When you have again a 10 year yield in the US of below 4.5%, that yield is more than double what you get in a German ten year bond and it’s more than triple what you get in Japanese and Chinese equivalent 10 year debts. That means global money flows are going to continue to flow into US Debt that will act as gravity and to drag rates lower. So we’ve got a strong and we just don’t hear this. I’m going to be on Fox Business again this week and I hope to be able to talk to Charles Payne about this again because I don’t think this is talked about nearly enough. The mainstream media, the combination, the confluence of reasons for US Rates to move lower and of course that means inflation, of course moving lower as well, very sets up for a very good, very bullish backdrop for US equities, global equities as well, by the way. We think the, we think we basically have a global market developing here.

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That’s the power of the innovation revolution. That’s the power of what it could mean for the United States to have GDP of 5 to 10% per year. Very few market strategists are factoring that into their investment equation, what they believe the markets can do. I will tell you, we’re very confident in this call. We have 10 of 12 VRA investing system screens that remain bullish. That is back at the truck territory. And what I would just tell everybody, again, this is what our theme has been. If you understand the big picture, if you understand the macro trends that are taking place, the fact that now we have Doge basically putting the bad guys on defense, they simply can’t keep up.

But all of this, all of these megatrends happening at the same time has massive ramifications, not for just our freedom, not just the future of the United States, but what we’re seeing with animal spirits, economic growth and then the bottom line is forward returns in the stock market. This all combines for extraordinarily big reasons to Be bullish. We will continue to buy the dip. Frankly, I think the dips are going to be pretty light because there’s just too much money on the sidelines still looking to get in. Remember, there’s still close to $7 trillion sitting in money markets with animal spirits returning. And again, you’re hearing this all throughout the economy, all throughout the country. It’s not that there aren’t some fears and concerns, but people have an extra step, pep in their step, do they not? People are more optimistic, that is animal spirits. And that means more people are going to be buying stocks on pullbacks, which will keep these, we believe, keep these pauses extraordinarily light.

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I got to tell you again, for the markets, the futures open higher last night on the heels of this news about tariffs on the steel aluminum industry. That, that got my attention. That was a pattern change and I think that the bears must be noticing this as well. What else today in our commodity watch? Again, very, very good day today. Very gold. Gold’s been on serious tear. Look, we’ve been, we’ve been bullish on gold for a very, very long time. Since the $375 announced for gold and $5 an ounce for silver going back to 2003, we have never once advised taking profits.

We believe that gold should be your savings account. Now, it’s not possible to keep all your money saving gold, you know what I’m saying? But that’s the approach we’ve taken here. It’s paid off very well for us. I will tell you, I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. Run the numbers. We’ve run these numbers. If you invested $100,000 in gold in 2003, again, that’s when we first recommended it. That’s our, that’s our bogey.

If you invest $100,000 in gold in 2003 today, that would be worth more than $700,000. Matter of fact, this, that’s that, this, this, this, this, this computation is about two months old. So it’s certainly well over $200,000 now. So you turned 100,000 into 700,000 from 2003. What is that, 21 years? Right, 22 years. Conversely, if you take that same $100,000 and just left it left in cash, even left it in a money market account because of the, the dangers of inflation and the way it robs us of our money. And just again, the US dollar has lost 97% of its value since the Fed was created in 1913. That same hundred thousand dollars is worth more than 700,000 in gold.

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It’s worth less than $67,000 today. That’s the power of investing in, in real currencies. And that’s also of course the attraction to bitcoin. Gold today up all time high up a big of $49 now it’s up 1.7% to 2,936. This is, we believe our forecast is that gold will put up another year of 20% gains and that this is the move, this is the longer term trend that will take gold past $5,000 now. So this likely will be the move that catapults gold even well past $5,000 an ounce. That’s not that far from here. It’s a couple thousand dollars now from here.

And the way it’s moving now, it could happen pretty fast. Silver and I believe it’s going to. Central banks are buying gold hand over fist. Back to back to back years of record levels of purchases by central banks. The sovereign wealth funds are doing the same thing. What do they know? The so called smartest money in the world without question is it’s the insider money. What do they know that the rest of the world doesn’t know? Because I’ll tell you, the public owns very little gold. The public has fallen in love with bitcoin.

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I get it. We are too. But that means gold has just been put on the back burner. It’s just an afterthought. People have sold their gold to buy bitcoin. And so again it’s a perfect setup for gold to have another, a monster move higher. Gold was up 26% last year. Still silver at 27%.

The miners only up 10% last year. They’re off to a rip roaring start this year. You’re looking at gains in the miners this year better than 20% just in, just in, just from the beginning of January our forecast is the miners will put up gains better than 100% a year. I think this is going to be that. Well, this is going to be that run. I believe it’s underway. I believe gold miners, they’re already exhibiting a fantastic relative strength to the market. I think that continues.

I think the real money, I’m talking the serious money is going to be made in some of these junior miners that like the ones we have recommended here in the VRA. Come and join us at vrainsider.com or vraletto.com come and check it out and see what we have here. We’ve got two junior miners. We have a buy recommendation on I know these companies well, maybe not as well as anybody but pretty close to it and we know them very well and they both got extraordinary upside potential being 10 baggers plus. And again we think this is going to be that move for, for the entire group. This is the, this is the bull market of bull markets for precious metals and miners. And wouldn’t it be would, isn’t it just perfect that it’s happening when nobody is talking about it? That’s exactly this textbook. This is how it works folks.

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Copper today, excuse me, Silver today also higher by about 6 cents an ounce. Only 2/10 1%. But silver’s been been on a decent run too. Also now trading at 3250 an ounce. Copper has been on a good run. Copper up 2.3% 470 a pound now good looking move here from copper again. The global economy is coming back. Copper goes in everything like silver.

And I think copper is going to have a big run here. Crude oil today also bouncing back up 2% today up $1.47 a barrel to 7247. And finally on the day, Bitcoin. Bitcoin up 2% right now at 97,194. Look, Bitcoin. I’ve yet to find a way to forecast Bitcoin’s movement on a short term basis. So I’ve given up trying. Doesn’t matter to me.

I will tell you this. It’s the same thing I say about Tesla which also has been soft. Tesla’s down to 350 now, down about 26% from its December highs. All time highs. I say the same thing about a bitcoin that I say about Tesla. Pullbacks are a gift. Forget about the short term. The short term does not matter.

[00:21:41]:
This is, I think this, the, the, the, the success mindset when it comes to investing in investments like this. This was a Peter lynch staple. He would only look at pullbacks as a gift. I think he called them a blue light special at Kmart. I’m not sure they still have those but that’s what Peter lynch would call it. And he’s looked. If your favorite, if something you own goes on sale, how could that be anything other than good news? Because you can buy more of it cheaply folks. And it’s not always, it’s always, it’s easy to say that.

It’s not always easy to, to practice that. Because wouldn’t we all like to see our investments go up every day? Who wouldn’t, right? But think of, look at the law this is when longer term charts do matter. Take a look at the longer term chart of bitcoin. We recommended big, like, like gold, right? We recommended bitcoin initially at $2,000 an ounce. We took profits at 58,000. We, we bought it back at 28,800 and we’ve been long ever since again right at 97,000 now. So yeah, it’s been a little weak in the short term as Tesla has been. But this is when you take a look at your portfolio, this is when you take a look at your assets, at your balance sheet and you start thinking about what can I reallocate here? Because these stocks are on sale, Bitcoin’s on sale, Tesla’s on sale, some others as well.

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And this is when you take action, when you add to them. Because the long term theme, again our cycle high for Bitcoin remains 350,000. We raised it from 250 to 350 this year. That is a two to four year timeline and cycle high. And our about the equivalent, call it a four year cycle high for Tesla is $2,000. For Tesla right now again it’s 350. So think, think like long term investors. You’ll look back and be very glad that you did.

That’s not, that’s not individual financial advice for me, but it certainly is the best advice I know how to give to anybody asking me that question. All right folks, hey, always appreciate you listening. Hope you had a great day and even better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close.