In today's episode, Tyler dives in to another strong day for our markets, with the S&P 500 notching its 8th straight positive session. He also covers two very different market reactions to Q1 earnings reports from Magnificent 7 names. From there, he walks through today's market indications, sector performances, and gives an inside look into what the VRA is watching for next. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a great day out there today. First off, I’ll kick it off. It’s great to be back here with you for the podcast here today. Uh, as many of you know, I. I know we’ve got a lot of longtime listeners and.

And readers members here with us on the daily podcast. So, as you know, we run a pretty tight ship here around the vra, so we’re all wearing a lot of different hats at a lot of different times. So I’ve been working on a few other projects here, but I’ll be back in the swing of things here with you a little bit more here from time to time. And we’ll get back to some more video podcasts as well in the screen shares that I was doing previously. So there’s certainly some very interesting setups for this market right now. So hopefully I can get something together for you on that. You know, probably sometime next week, maybe around this time next week. And so, yeah, while I’m on that topic, I might as well take some requests.

So if you’ve got some charts specifically that you want to see, you know, whether that is a specific stock commodity crypto that you like or just one of the major indexes in general, you know, send some of those ideas my way. You can email me at Tyler T Y L E R at v r ainsider.com. yeah, let’s have some fun with it. Like I said, there’s a lot of interesting setups right now. I’d love to hear what you’re looking at here as well. So I’ll try to get to that sometime next week, and we’ll have some fun with it.

[00:01:52]:
Again, you can send them any ideas you want, or, you know, just some topics in general. But looking for some charts here, you don’t have to have looked at them yourself. You know, just if you want to see it, let me know. I’ll take a look at it. We’ll see how many we can get to for that podcast next week. Again, my email is Tyler T Y L E R at v r ainsider.com. all right, that said, let’s go ahead and we’ll cover some of the high notes here from today’s market action. I think you could consider this a high note that on the economic front, it was a relatively light day today.

It’s been a busy week this week. Of course, starting it off with jolts On Tuesday. ADP employment Yesterday along with Q1 GDP and Core PCE. Core PCE coming in better than expected. GDP as Kip covered yesterday, negative. You know, did a great job of covering that yesterday. So I won’t dive into it too much here today. But going forward, all eyes will be on tomorrow morning’s April’s jobs report believe expectations right now roughly 129,000 jobs created.

Unemployment unchanged at 4.2%. That’s the expectations right now. You know, we’ll see if we start to get some of the DOGE cuts affecting these employment numbers and the unemployment rate. As you know, government contractors are losing contracts, right? People who work for the governments. One of the largest if not the largest employer in the country. So that is going to affect not only employment but gdp. We think those will be temporary setbacks though, much like, you know, this current GDP print as well. Then on to earnings here.

[00:03:49]:
Kip covered this yesterday too. Microsoft and Meta beating and on top of that, what the market really like to see and alleviated the fears that companies were going to lower their capex for the year from those bold numbers that they were claiming as Trump was entering office.

You know, now that we’ve seen the reality of the tariff policies, will those companies change their capex for 2025? And for as far as Meta and Microsoft go, that does not look to be the case. Believe I just saw this kind of in passing today. Zuckerberg on the earnings call, you know, said that this was not a one off. This is an acceleration I believe was was his quote there. And then after the close today we got Amazon and Apple reporting here as well. And the initial reaction, you know, let me finish up here. Microsoft finished up on the day over seven and a half percent. Meta up over four percent.

[00:04:50]:
All right, back to Amazon and Apple. Both of these companies, you know, reporting beats Amazon during the session today, of course reported after the close, but during the session today was up over 3%. Apple’s been on a nice run from its lows as well. So excuse me, both Apple and Amazon beating here. Both stocks down in after hours. So not exactly what we want to see from this market. I was on the Charles Schwab network a couple weeks back and that was one of my main points there as well, that we want it and Kip’s been making this on the podcast a lot too, that we need to get back to an environment where bad news is treated as good news.

Or at the very least not terrible. We got to get out of this environment where Good news sees the market sell off. Not that we’ve had a ton of that because there has been plenty of the uncertainty kind of news as well. It’s all been mixed up so much, but with a beat. This one’s very clear. Specific beat from Amazon now down. It was down as much as 4%, now down about 2.6%. Apple beating, you know, top line estimates for earnings per share and revenue and then announced a $100 billion stock buyback.

Then it was really right from the report, Apple was down and the earnings call did not help. As Tim Cook said, they’re expecting, you know, a $900 million tariff impact for Q3 and the stock is now down over 4% in after hours trading. I believe Microsoft took over the top spot for largest company in the world from Apple today on that massive rally that they had as well. So you know, the Apple one might be a little bit more case specific. You know, I’ve made the comment before as well and I think that it will be true that Tesla has so much more potential right now than a company like Apple. And I love Apple products.

[00:06:58]:
I’m not, you know, trying to say that it’s not an incredibly valuable company. I’m not trying to say that it doesn’t deserve its market cap, none of that, but that in the next shoot, this might be accelerating now, but in the next five to 10 years, Tesla could make Apple look like a toy company. And I don’t think that that’s an exaggeration.

Apple makes phones and computers. Tesla makes industrial level, you know, semi trucks that are electric.

That’s going to be a huge product for them. Autonomous semi trucks.

[00:07:38]:
I know we think about it as the cars that we see on the road every day, but this is not a car company, this is a tech company.

So again, I just listed one, there is kind of a minor one. Of course they still got the cars, the Cyber Truck, full self driving, the Cyber Cab, then the what they’re calling the Robovin Robo van. And then of course the Biggie is Optimus.

I mean that has the potential to be. I, I agree with Elon Musk on that one. Whoever figures it may not be Optimus even, it could be another robotics division, but whoever figures out, you know, that product, it will be the best selling product ever. Far better than the iPhone.

[00:08:22]:
Because it’d be an essential now for everyday life. Anyway, I’ll, I’ll get off of that one there. You know, of course that headline this morning was hilarious. The Wall Street Journal reporting or whoever it was, I believe is the Wall Street Journal reporting that insiders on the board were looking for a replacement for Elon Musk. You know, without even waiting for a comment from the board. You know, it’s always anonymous sources with these, you know, propaganda rags that masquerade as journalists. Of course. Anyway, we’ll get back to the market here, you know, because it has been a great run here for the market.

The S and P just wrapped up eight positive sessions in a row and it has been a hell of a rally from those lows of, you know, the April 8 lows for our market. So let’s cover a little bit of today’s action because we were good again today as well. And, and what you want to see the Nasdaq leading up 1 1/2% on the day to 17,710. I will point out the semis did not lead. They’ve showed some leadership recently, a little bit of outperformance. We want to see that continue. You didn’t get that today, but I got to point out here that now the Nasdaq and the S and P are both closed today above their 50 day moving average. The NASDAQ 100.

The Q’s now approaching the 200 day moving average. So we’d love to see those levels become support as opposed to potential resistance here. All right, next up, as I mentioned, S P8 positive sessions in a row up 0.6% on the day to 5604. After that we had the small caps which my screens just refresh on just right about six tenths of 1% on the day to 1975. And lastly here the Dow Jones up 210 of 1% to 40,752. Now again as Kip pointed out yesterday, we are at overbought levels on our short term VRA momentum oscillators. We do still have a ways to go on our other indicators. And you know, it’s tough here because obviously it’s hard not to feel pretty good about this nice bounce back in the markets, right? Especially after what we’ve seen from the February all time highs in the S&P 500.

[00:10:54]:
You know, if you look at the closing basis, I think the peak to trough it was like 18.9%. But if you look on an intraday basis, I mean it was a 21, almost 22% move lower peak to trough, you know, with the average stock losing 30 to 40%. Um, so yes, you know, bounce back, it’s going to Be tough not to feel really good about it. And especially here for us at the vra, because we are optimists, right? We want to see these, the Trump administration succeed. We, we want to see America succeed, right? Even when we were forced to live under a Biden administration, we were still rooting for America to succeed. We’re still optimists at the time. That’s when we published the Big Bribe. We had no way of knowing that Trump was going to get reelected at the time.

You know, we’re not perma bulls, certainly not the case, but we are optimists at the end of the day. And the market goes up roughly, what, 70% of the time on a year basis at least. So it’s tough not to be optimistic with those kind, that kind of history. But the problem here in this market, as you might have guessed, this is going to be followed by a but, right? And that is that bear market rallies can feel like the beginning of a new bull market, right? We saw it during 2022. We saw multiple rallies of 10 to 15%, you know, plus 10 to 15%, plus, sometimes bigger in our favorite sectors of the time that were then followed by new lows in the market. So now that we’ve seen the success that the Trump administration is starting to have, right, the pivot that the administration has made here, you know, that is huge. That can’t be understated here. You know, for as much as many market watchers try to remove politics and geopolitics from their systems, in this day and age when you especially something like this, we’ve seen how much headlines can move markets, right? So we see it as unlikely that this is just a bare market rally, again, given the pivots the administration made.

And Kip covered this yesterday, really, until the zweig Beth, breath thrust that we got last Thursday. It was like 50, 50. If the market could see a retest of those April 8 lows now, we’d put the odds little lower here, probably about 25%. And hey, you know, some of that is certainly credit to the Trump administration. They got us into this mess, right, with the tariff uncertainty and chaos. But I think that if it pays off in the end, you know, we’ll look on back on this as a painful period. But hey, we got our country moving back in the right direction. Hopefully that’s the hope, right? And again, as an optimist here, we continue to see that as the case.

[00:13:54]:
And as Kip said yesterday as well, we’ll start looking back it for an environment to buy the Dip here.

Until we get a little bit more confirmation of that, you know, it’s probably tough to say that we’ll go ultra aggressively long like we have been. You know, not in the too distant past right before we get back to that level. But we’ll keep spotting opportunities along the way. And again, you know, big credit to this one here. The Ukraine deal from yesterday, this mineral deal from the Trump admin, I mean to, I haven’t seen a whole lot on it as far as what the talking heads are saying about it. But I mean what a, what a potential, huge first step for potential peace talks, right? At least it’s a positive step in the right direction. No other country can claim any level of success and Trump’s been in office now for a hundred days, so you gotta give credit where credit is due. Now if they can announce a few trade deals, market would not look back from here.

All right, we’ll cover the rest of that. Today’s action pretty quickly here. The internals good. Wouldn’t say great, but certainly, you know, hey, we don’t necessarily need great days. Let’s keep stringing good days together here. Positive advanced decline, no two to one beats or anything but positive for both the NYSE and the NASDAQ. 52 week highs lows just barely managing to finish positive on the nyse, a little better on the nasdaq, but hey, again positive volume Also solid readings here. Positive for both the NYSE and the nasdaq.

I will point out here on a sentiment level, the fear and greed index is actually back to neutral territory. But the AAII Investor sentiment survey man, back to, you know, about a month long highs and bears here, bulls declined by 1% on the week, just at 20%, 59% bears there really interesting action, you know. So a couple other quick highlights of factors we were looking at from the Trump administration that we continue to see. Despite concerns about yields, yields are still down significantly. Think they peaked at 4.8 above a 4.8 before Trump was inaugurated. We’re at a 4.2 today, slightly higher on the session, no big deal. US dollar also still down big from where we were pre inauguration, you know, just like we saw in Trump’s first term. So other than the tariff aspect, the other areas we were looking for in this market, you know, inflation continues to look better.

[00:16:31]:
Now we do need the Fed to get on board, as many have pointed out. Now with the PCE number from yesterday, I mean they’re overly restrictive is now probably an understatement, right? I, I, I’VE said before they’re o overly restrictive, but you know, and still I don’t think it’s anything that’s going to hamstring our economy being so overly restrictive. But it certainly is at the point now where the Fed is running the risk of slowing down the economy.

This is a historically tight monetary policy stance here. We’ve got the Fed funds rate at almost 200 basis points above the rate of inflation according to their favored metric in PCE right now. We’ll see tomorrow morning if employment is slowing or not. If it is, then there’s no doubt that the Fed has to start talking about cutting rates for sure, or else run the risk of looking extremely political as they already do.

The Fed has already lost so much credibility. Onto the next topic though, here to kind of wrap up the day for our sectors. We finished with 7 out of our 11 sectors higher on the day. We were led by tech and communication services, our laggards, healthcare, consumer staples and materials. You know, one other financials really almost flat on the day, but those are the bottom three there. Defensive sector, so not too bad. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. I’ll get a quick refresh of my screens here, but I will say, you know, gold’s obviously been on a hell of a run here.

[00:18:11]:
You know, pulled back now somewhat significantly from its all time high today. Now almost unchanged at $3,245 an ounce. You know, after a huge run like this, not just for gold but a lot of asset classes, you get a consolidation phase.

So what we want to see from gold here, building new support levels. We’re not at, you know, extreme oversold levels here or anything. So tough to say, you know, that the lows are in for gold in the short term, especially if we can get some life back in this market. A big part of gold is of course, you know, just global uncertainty. Trade deals, how are they, how are we going to settle international debts? Right. So you had other countries and central banks buying gold, all kinds of things. If you can clear up some of that uncertainty, it alleviates some of the stress for gold then.

Although again, we look for it to be building a new base. All of that can happen and all of those things can be true at the same time is what I’m trying to say. We can find a new base for gold. While central banks around the world, you know, start to slow down, gold transfers start to slow down as the uncertainty eases and hopefully get a few deals done. Next up, silver at $32.20 an ounce. Copper now at $4.63 a pound. Oil back below $60 a barrel here, $58.77 a barrel. Finally here for today, Bitcoin got as high as 97,394 at the highs of the day today now at 96.

[00:19:53]:
$613 a Bitcoin, folks. That’s 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. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.