In today's episode, Tyler dives into the latest market movements, unpacks today's selloff, and shares why the VRA remains long-term bullish despite negative headlines. Fresh off the Tesla shareholder meeting, he also breaks down Elon Musk's presentation and the exciting advancements at Tesla. You won't want to miss this action-packed episode of the VRA Investing Podcast!

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday evening, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a fantastic day out there today. I’m getting to you a little bit late this evening, as you know. Just couldn’t resist watching the full Tesla shareholders meeting. So we’ll certainly be covering that here for you today. But if you saw the markets today, you might not have had as great of a day today.

I say that with a smile because you know our view. We remain long term bullish here. We’ll cover all of the reasons for that and some of the reasons, you know, for the selloff that we saw today, the chinks in the armor that Kip covered earlier this week as well, and much more here for the market, which of course means I’ll cover the jobs data that you just couldn’t escape from. Today’s action just everywhere in headlines today. You know, I’ll give you a little hint. From our point of view, it’s not as scary as the financial mainstream media wants to make it look. Then, of course, again, I will cover a little bit of the Tesla shareholder meeting. You know, usually I come here to you with a collared shirt on, but today, doing my best Elon Musk impersonation, you know, black shirt and a jacket on.

[00:01:34]:
Of course, I don’t have the Tesla jacket on, but for those VRA members here, you’ll recognize this one. I’ve got a lost soldier oil and gas jacket on here. So if you know, you, you know. But again, you know, doing my best Elon Musk impersonation here, because what an incredible job he has done, right? This is how he dresses on a daily basis. Jeans, T shirt, dark usually. So they say, you know, don’t dress for the job you got. Dress for the job you want. Well, I do have the job I want, thankfully, here.

You know, with my dad and my brother getting to work on something we’re passionate about every single day, now it’s just time to grow it into that trillion dollar pay package. You’re not just for us here at the vra, but for all of you watching as well. That’s our goal here every day, is to help the individual investor, the little guy out there, the retail trader. That’s who we’re here for day in and day out. So if I can provide value to all of you, why not? The sky’s the limit, right? Why couldn’t we have our own trillion dollar pay packages? So why not, huh? So, good news. Here from Tesla. We did, as shareholders, officially approve Elon Musk’s massive pay package, which he certainly deserves every single bit of, in our opinion. And I’ll get to more of that here in just a minute.

[00:03:00]:
But last thing that we’ll cover here today as well, briefly, just before recording this, I mean, literally right before I hit the start button on record, news broke from Politico that a deal is being reached here to potentially end the government shutdown. So by the time you see this, hey, the deal might have already been reached. We look at that as a bullish factor for the market. As much as we love the government being shut down, as our great friend Wayne Allen Root says, kiss, keep it shut, stupid. But hey, it’s about that time to get it back open, get all of them back to work. Absolutely. So, yeah, we’ll see. That could be nearing a close here very soon, as many speculated.

They’re just waiting to get these votes behind them to. To wrap this up, you know, keep the government shut. All the threats of ending benefits, that kind of stuff. Got their base, they got the lefts, but base all worked up to turn out for this election. I won’t cover that in too much detail here today. Kip did a great job of it this week already, but other than that, we’ll try and keep it short and sweet here for you. So where. Where to start here on today’s action.

Got a lot to cover. Mostly good stuff, though, as you know. I mean, we’re not perma bulls here. We’re not perma bears either. We like to stay away from being perma anything, but we are optimists. So I love hitting on the high notes. Don’t think that the high notes usually get the optimistic side of things. Doesn’t usually get enough love, especially in the financial mainstream media.

I mean, since I got started in this business, nothing has changed. If I only listened to them, you know, you’d end up like Jim Cramer, where the. The inverse Kramer portfolio this year has actually outperformed the insider trading Nancy Pelosi portfolio on the year. So if you just did the opposite of most of what you see in the financial mainstream media, that’s really the way to look at it. Do the opposite of what they say most of the time. But when someone asks you, you know, I got good news and I got bad news, you always start with the bad news, right? I at least do, right? You want to end on a good note. So let’s start with the bad news. The job cuts that you likely have already Seen coming in for the month of October totaling in over 150,000 jobs cut the highest, you know, depending on how much you trust this data, the highest since October of 2023 on the highest October level since 2003.

[00:05:46]:
Again on the surface, sounds very scary. Anytime you tuned into the media today, that’s all you saw. Right? And a big explanation as to why the market ended up where it is today. Now we try to stay away from rationalizing too much of one day’s trading. You know, Kip covered this yesterday as well. It’s really tough to be a day trader. You know, going back to. Oh man, blanking on the name now, the classic investing book reminiscence of a stock operator.

I’m forgetting who, who wrote it. You know what he says though is his money was made in the waiting. Charlie Munger, ex, you know, basically said the same thing as well. Or Warren Buffett. You know, no one wants to get rich slow, but there are very few traders that are in that upper echelon of wealth. Most of them when you look at it, are long term investors. So that’s a lot of what we try to do here at the vra. Of course we have the VRA investing system to use our market timing models which we use those trades which are longer term.

Right. They’re certainly not day trades. We use our profits from those positions to dollar cost average into what we call our VRA 10 baggers. Many of you already knows know what those are, but if you’re a new listener here, come and join us. We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now. @v letter.com you get full access completely risk free to you for full 14 days. So you have nothing to lose. Why not come give us a shot, send us an email.

[00:07:29]:
We’d love to hear from you. If you got any questions, this is what we love to do. Like I said in the beginning, this is who we’re here for, is for the individual investors out there. But hey, you know, if you’re in the financial profession and you’re looking to, to really boost your clients portfolios as well, come and join us. We’ve got a lot of actually, you know, we hear it from clients quite often. Hey, I actually turned my financial advisor on to reading the VRA because he was asking where I got these positions from. And we’ve got a lot of financial advisors. I won’t say any names out there, but hey, shout out to you for being here with us as well.

So on the jobs data, again, scary on the surface, right, highest level for October since 2003. But on the other hand, we got ADP payroll processing saw net job growth of 42,000 in the month of October. Following that’s from a decline of 29,000 in September, 6,000 in August. So you know where exactly to go with that data. You know, obviously we’ve talked about this here as well. The job market has been in decline. We don’t see it as anything in free fall mode. But yet another reason why the Federal Reserve is so offsides here.

And they’re higher for longer. Interest rate policy has been completely tone deaf to the Americans who need it the most. You know, keeping interest rates this high does not affect what we call the first America. The already wealthy, they’ve got plenty of other ways to get lower interest rate loans or really having a higher interest rate loan does not affect them. It affects, you know, the first time homebuyer out there. The person who wants to buy a used car to get to work but is having to pay an astronomical interest rate on a used vehicle or if somebody just needs to go out there and get a loan, you know, try to get through a tough period, that’s who this affects the most. So again, the Fed is absolutely tone deaf. I’ll touch a little bit on the Fed here.

Not too, too much here today. Try and keep it short and sweet for you. But of course again, if you turn it on Bloomberg, you turned on CNBC today, all you heard was this layoff data. You know, AI is killing the market. Jobs are falling apart. The Trump economic miracle is not a real thing, which it absolutely is, is economic miracle. 2.0 meets the innovation revolution, meets the roaring 2020s. We’ll really get into some of that here in a second.

[00:10:06]:
But the fear mongers were certainly out in full force today. So as you might guess, when you only see the negatives, markets are going to get hit a little bit. And we did finish, you know, at or near the lows of the day today. So I’ll cover that quickly here for you. We were led by the Dow Jones, if you want to call it leading down 8/10 of 1%. Next up there was the Russell 2000, excuse me, the S&P 500 down 1.1% on the day to day small caps down 1.8% on the session and the Nasdaq. So not what you want to see. The NASDAQ did lead the way lower.

We saw, you know, a few companies in there that really got hit hard as far as tech goes today and on the consumer discretionary side as well, which really these are a lot of tech companies. But also what we don’t want to see on the day is the semis leading lower and smh, the semiconductor ETF did lead lower compared to the Nasdaq day. Again the NASDAQ down 1.8%, semis down 2.3%. Let me run one more chart here for you today. See where the, you know, biggest contributors to the semi losses were. SMCI was a big one down on the day to day AMD as well now down nearly 7% from today. Yeah, it’s 7.27. So it’s up a little bit actually in after hours trading after releasing good earnings yesterday.

[00:11:37]:
And that really is a key point here is that earnings have been phenomenal once again this quarter. The quarter over quarter growth, the year over year growth. We’re now at roughly 70% of the S P500 having reported here and it looks like we’re going to exceed our estimates of a 12 to 15% growth in this quarter which was our call, you know, before we got in to this earnings season. So it’s really hard to see a, not only just a major correction in the stock market but to see, you know, a recession when you have earnings growth like we’re seeing right now. So what we’re seeing in the market again Kip covered this yesterday is we think this is a setup for a fantastic opportunity to buy the dip. It’s been an incredible run from the April tariff mania lows and we’re just, I mean I think the NASDAQ is now what, below 4% away from an all time high because it was down 1.9% today. I think we were below 2% yesterday. So still below 4% from an all time high.

And yet we’ve got. I’ll quickly show this here. Let me share my screen. Well, I’ll get to that here in a second. Get to these here in a second. But we’ve got the fear and greed index at a 24 again. We’ve been in fear mode for weeks now. Last week we’re in fear.

One month ago we briefly got into green mode. That was not a long period that we were in greed mode at all 24. You know, if we were in the witnessing a top in this market, you’d see a pullback like this in the market and we’d still be at extreme greed levels. Now the AAI sentiment survey, yes, came in with a good amount of bulls last week. The highest that we’ve seen in months. But this week saw a big drop once again. Bears didn’t actually saw a decrease. Neutral investors though.

Again, if we were seeing this right now, bulls were still in the 50 to 60% range. We start to be worried about this market over the longer term. This is just not the signs that you see at a market top. But we are seeing, you know, a few chinks in the armor. One of them looks like it might be resolved tonight that I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast is the government shutdown. You know, again, we love see it shut down, but it is having an impact. You know, missed paychecks, this airline news that they’re going to shut down like 10% of flights. You know, the massive number of Americans that are on, you know, food stamps snap plans, the 42 million Americans.

Something else has to be done about that problem than food stamps. You know, whether it’s making it tougher to enroll for these things. But it does seem there is a large percentage of that 42 million that never plan to get off. These are able bodied Americans who are able to work. You know, have they done everything they can to get into the job market? I’m sure there’s plenty of scenarios of people who have been unable to find work and our deepest sympathies certainly go out to that percentage of people. But it is the percentage of people that are able bodied that could go find work that aren’t that really makes this program inoperable in its current way. You know, we’ve already seen from RFK working on getting junk foods off of these plans as well. That’s fantastic.

[00:15:15]:
Right? These are meant to be supplemental and nutritional programs. If you want to go be able to buy junk food, you need to be having a job. Right? These benefits and food stamps really should only go toward healthy foods at the end of the day. I won’t dive in to all of that here, but there is, you know, multiple other angles to look into the government being closed. Kip talked about this yesterday as well. But it is liquidity being limited from the market as well. So once we get the government open, that eliminates a lot of it. Couple other chinks in the armor, of course, is this Supreme Court ruling against Trump tariffs.

A lot of fear out about that as well. We think that’s mostly what it is, fear. There’s multiple other ways that Trump could go about this to work around the SCOTUS decision if that’s what they decide to do. I had one other point I wanted to make there as well. Oh, that Kip brought up yesterday as well. If they, if the Trump administration has to return this money to the companies, these are US Companies, so more liquidity for these companies. They’ll likely spend it on share buybacks, honestly. Of course, there is the large amount of fear from New York City electing a Communist mayor.

I’ll save my points there for another day. I could do a whole podcast on that one. But again, as I mentioned earlier as well, the Fed restrictive interest rates, not overly restrictive to the point where it’s going to hamstring this economy, but it is certainly affecting this economy. Now, we’ve seen these declines in the labor market. We’ve talked about it here for months. Right. Get out of the sensationalism of today’s number. And it certainly has been declining.

Okay. Inflation has been low. In our view, it’s a rearview mirror problem. Stephen Myon, you know, Trump’s appointee, the most recent voting member on the Fed, said, you know, we should be going by 50 basis points until we get to the neutral to neutral rate Instead of this 25 basis basis point increments. These effects often times aren’t felt by the market for 8 to 12 months anyway. Right. It’s the sentiment aspect of it that really helps here, though. So let’s get to that level and then keep it there.

[00:17:31]:
Right. He’s not advocating to go back to zero percent. That’s not what he said. If you look at the dot plots, right, going out to where he sees rates and the rest of the Fed sees rates at the end of 2026, they’re almost on the same page, really. It’s fractionally off. You know, a quarter basis point or 25 basis points off. Okay. So why not rush to get to those levels now? It really, you know, they’d be out of a job if it was really, if they could make it look that easy.

Most Americans should know the Fed really has a job because they obscure their language so much, they make it difficult for anyone who’s not a financial professional to understand what they’re saying. It’s gatekeeping. At the end of the day, we have words for these things. Right. Why do we have to use all this complicated language? But also, you know, the, the Trump deportations, that is a lot of people who have either voluntarily left our country or, you know, have been deported and not, I agree that it’s the right thing to do, but it does have an impact on the economy. Right. It’s less consumer spending, all kinds of different areas. Right.

But that’s an effect. We knew what was going to happen. Now let’s look to some of the bullish factors out there. Again that are being underplayed here. Okay? Remember earlier this year the Atlanta Fed during tariff mania said that GDP was going to be negative by like 2.9% in the second quarter. Well, they’ve gone completely the other way here now as we got back. Excuse me. The latest from the Atlanta fed looking at Q3 GDP of 4%.

Just wow. You know, the, our call for 5% GDP might come even sooner than we thought. Just absolutely incredible again to the strength of the consumer out there. While consumer sentiment remains low. Look at this household debt as a percentage of, of gdp. The ratio here just hit the a record low. This metric only goes back to 2006, a record low here. We talk about all of these factors so much here.

[00:19:41]:
When you have roughly 40% of homeowners own their home outright over 30, I think it’s $37 trillion in home equity in the market right now is that could be tapped by homeowners. I mean just absolutely incredible numbers. Credit scores at all time highs for companies, you know, debt, corporate debt to their market cap that roughly 50 year lows. The list just goes on and on and on. There are so many fundamental factors that are bullish for this market under the surface Here again, reasons why we see this, this bull run continuing. All right, so I know I’m at 20 minutes now, but I do want to quickly cover this Tesla shareholder meeting today because I just couldn’t tune away from was how Elon said it in the beginning. How many people even watch shareholder meetings really? He said maybe before you go to bed. Okay.

[00:20:43]:
But it was just so good, it reminded me. I’ve talked about this before. You know, I grew up in the Steve Jobs era for Apple and even at the time, you know, from middle school and high school, I didn’t even own an Apple product at the time. And I would watch Steve Jobs keynote speeches because they were captivating. You know, he told an incredible story. He spoke the future into existence, really. And they, if you go back and watch some of those today, you’ll, you’ll be inspired. If you’re a business owner out there and you’re looking for a little motivation, go watch some of those old Steve Jobs keynote speeches and think to yourself, how can I apply this, this rhetoric, this enthusiasm, this optimism to my own business? Because it is, it’s contagious too.

It’s really incredible. And that’s what we saw today from Elon Musk. So Tesla shareholders officially approved the CEO performance plan. So great. Now that we know we’ve got Elon Musk on board here at Tesla, that was the big fear. And you saw a lot of that today too, of, you know, shareholders or these institutional people who are like, oh, well, we’ll just get a different CEO in place. Who else could have done this? You know, Kip talked about this a lot as well on the last earnings call. Tesla was started as a company with zero core competencies, because I believe they got a question about how you see these core competencies going forward or, you know, analysts saying this is outside of their core competencies.

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Well, he said we had zero to begin with and look where we are today. I mean, that’s just what this guy does. If he finds a problem, he figures it out. It’s just incredible to watch the way that he has worked at Tesla and proved, you know, the haters wrong time and time again. So look at just some of the few bullet points that I took here. This might be a little bit all over the place, but all of the exciting things here on the horizon for full self driving, he said within the next one to two months. So at least probably before January of 2026, you’ll be able to text and drive. Wow.

I mean, that’s basically full autonomy then because you don’t have to look at the road right now. It’ll ding you for looking at your phone or looking away. Right. So this is essentially full autonomy here for the Cyber Cab. Full production or not full production, but production will begin in April right here where I am in Austin, Texas. So when I get my first ride in one, I’ll be sure to film it and share it with you here. It’s going to be weird to get into a car, you know, no mirrors on the side, no steering wheel at all. Full autonomy.

Right. As many people have now noticed. And I think, honestly, I gotta give credit to my dad on this one from years ago. He was one of the f. The first person that I saw saying it. This is not a car company, this is a tech company right now, Elon saying, you know, these are not cars, they’re robots. This is the proof of that here. Even getting into a Tesla now on the current level of full self driving, it’s like riding a roller coaster at a theme park.

And not a scary one either. You, you feel very safe and you can set the speed settings. We were, we were in Houston, you know, one of some of the biggest highways in the world. Five, six lanes of traffic. And if you’ve been to Texas. You know, we don’t drive slow here either, but you can set the, the speed settings well above the speed limit. You know, we set it to like 80, you know, for any, any police watching, you know, tune out maybe for this part, but we set the speed settings to about 80 and a 65. And this thing was weaving in and out of traffic and it was crazy because we were just having a conversation.

It felt completely safe already. And this was a while back too. So you know how close they are to getting full self driving and really getting it right. But what might even be more impressive here is this will truly be the first fully autonomous car in more ways than one. The assembly line in the future will be fully autonomous as well. Elon’s quote from today is that in the next few years it could be a sub or right at a five second cycle time, you could roll these cars out of the factory in five seconds, assembled, good to go out the door. That’s incredible. And I remember watching one of his videos showing just how quickly these autonomous machines work.

And basically he said we have to take into account the atmosphere into building these things. We could actually go faster if we were in a vacuum, because air resistance is one of the limiting factors here. How incredible is that? Right? If they were to do it in a vacuum, they can move even faster. Just incredible technology here. And what’s so incredible about that is that they, this technology will apply to Optimus as well. I’ll get to that here in just a second. But essentially, if they can get to the point of a five second cycle time for these cars, they could produce possibly up to 5 million cyber cabs in a single year. Just absolutely incredible.

[00:26:08]:
That’s how you get to the point where these things are everywhere. You go from basically overnight having no self driving vehicles, to having self driving vehicles in every major city in America. You know, if somebody were to go into a coma today, the likely and they woke up two years from now, they would not recognize the way our roads work now. I will say for myself, I like driving right? I’m sure a lot of you do as well. And I like the idea at least of having an internal combustion engine as a backup. But man, it’s going to be exciting when we can all have some of these vehicles around. The next exciting item here, the Tesla semi, goes into production next year as well. That’s going to be a major game changer, especially we’ve seen already with illegal immigrants or people who can’t speak English getting their CDLs what is going on? Right, Think about autonomous to that level.

The safety factors there where essentially you can do not away with trains because it’s such an efficient way of moving things to specific locations, but it’s essentially a train on the road. Then think about the devalue or deflation we’ll see in shipping costs. All of these things we’re talking about here are deflationary factors. Innovation inherently is deflationary. That’s how we see inflation staying so low while they continue to print money here. So three massive product rollouts expected here in 2026. Optimus, the robot, the Cyber Cab and the Tesla Semi. And we haven’t even talked about battery packs yet.

You know, there really is no company quite like Tesla out there. We called it the number one stock to own for the innovation revolution for some time because these are all. It’s like owning a group of startups, each one of these, whether it’s, you know, robotic cars basically, but full self driving vehicles. Cyber Cab, Optimus, right, the semis, semiconductors, excuse me, the battery power and many more subunits of this as well, the manufacturing aspects, the charging stations that other companies are now going to as well because it’s the best on the market out there. All of these, all of these should be looked at when you’re doing your valuation models for Tesla. Each one of these should be looked at as their own startup. Each one of those could carry a trillion, if not a multi trillion dollar market cap by themselves. And so that’s how we’ve said Tesla gets to a 10 trillion dollar market cap and beyond.

[00:28:56]:
Kip said yesterday that I was going to cover a bit about the, the Tesla chips as well. And so I’ll try and do that briefly here. I know I’m going well over my time here, but essentially they’re on the A4 chips now developing the A, excuse me, the AI4 chips now developing. The AI5 chips here, which Elon described on the earnings call, will be 40 times better. The AI 5 will be 40 times better than the AI Fortune. Not 40% better, 40 times better. With 8 times more compute power, 9 times more memory and 5 times more bandwidth than its predecessors as well. And what cannot be understated about this, and I’ll try to describe this as quickly and as simply as possible, this Tesla is really the only company out there with the capability to do this first of all, but also, you know, the incentive to do this, which is integrating the hardware and the software stack together.

And essentially it’s essential that they do this as well, because I can get into all of that later. But these chips will be tailored specifically to, to Tesla’s work case use cases to Tesla workloads. So they’re working again, the software and hardware integrations here. This helps get rid of a lot of inefficient emulation of operations within these chips. Because Nvidia, fantastic company, right. But Elon said this today in the shareholder meeting as well, that Nvidia has to produce a chip that works for all of the companies that they sell these things to and has to work on their old models as well as anticipate future needs. So it’s like building a highway in a lot of ways. You’ve got to connect this dot to that dot and people are going to need to go from this city to that city to this small town.

You’re going to need an exit ramp here. Right. Every company is different and so companies that use Nvidia chips have to write their software to work within Nvidia’s framework. Okay. That’s why, you know, with the GPUs as well, you know, Nvidia was looked at as, oh, it’s a graphics card maker. Video gamers use it. And then, oh, wait, no, Bitcoin miners use it as well. And then fast forward today, oh, AI is using it as well.

So they cater to all of these different needs from hundreds of different companies and hundreds of different use cases. So the software is built to work within the hardware and they have to make all these patches to make the hardware work for it. So this hardware that Nvidia makes is really operating in the future. This is like 2030, 2040 technology compared to using, you know, Windows from 2005, which was already not a great processing system. Right. But you’re talking about, really, you’re using software built for two decades ago on today’s ships that’s not optimized for efficiency. There’s a lot of loss in there, whether it’s, you know, the way that it draws too much power from this area or that. So not only are these AI 5 chips incredibly powerful, AI 4 chips even incredibly powerful, but having the software integrations that are specifically tailored to Tesla’s use cases is an absolute game changer.

[00:32:30]:
So again, that’s not to say Nvidia chips aren’t incredibly powerful. Okay. But again, it’s hard for a company to fully harness the raw compute power of these Nvidia chips because they aren’t built for them specifically. So I hope that gives a really high level overview of exactly what this means. But Tesla designing their own chips gives them the ability to bypass all of these issues, you know, eliminate these inefficiencies that I’m talking about and allows these chips to be used in multiple products. So, you know, the AIs that are going to go into the full self driving aspects do help with Optimus as well. They’ll go into this, the semiconductors, you know, the. So many different areas.

It’s specifically what Tesla needs, nothing more, nothing less. So Elon had a few other comments about it that I. Let me check through my notes here briefly. Probably nothing relevant for this podcast at a high level here, but if y’ all want me to break this down a little bit more, send us some emails. I’d be happy to dive into this a little bit more when we have some more time on the podcast. But what’s also impressive is that basically they said, Elon said within a year of the AI5 chip rolling out, they’ll transition to the AI6. But what’s great about that, they’re trying to over produce these because if they’re not going into cars, they can go into their data centers. There’s multiple use cases for these chips.

Again specifically for Tesla. All right, so incredible meeting today. If you didn’t get a chance to watch it, you know, fast forward to when Elon starts speaking and then tune in from there. It’s just incredibly, what’s the word for it really? It is inspiring to watch somebody like that. And he absolutely deserves this pay package. He’s one of the only ultra wealthy people out there who’s trying to still do something good for society. Okay? I mean, think about what he did after PayPal with his exit money. He could have left, put that money in a money market account and live the rest of his life for.

[00:34:43]:
That’s not what he off of that money. That’s not what he did. He immediately put it into two companies, Tesla and SpaceX. How many other billionaires do we have out there that are taking these kinds of risks? You know, Warren Buffett, all credit to the incredible job that he’s done, but all he’s done is create money. Okay? He’s not out there building new companies or at least, you know, building public infrastructure. Okay, maybe there’s a library in his name out there. One, okay? But you can do that in every major city, right? Think about, you know, the ultra wealthy from long ago. Go look at, you know, if you want to go super far back, go back to Rome.

All of those buildings and artwork that was paid for by the Ultra wealthy because they wanted to give back to their societies. Right. Of course it has their name on it as well. I’m sure it’s bragging rights. The only other one out there that’s even close is Bezos. At least he’s doing Blue Origin, trying to get into the space race. Right? But then you look at Bill Gates, I mean, the, the Gates foundation finds a way to make money off of every single deal that he does. Really, you know, trying to think of some other billionaires out there and what they’ve done with their money.

You know, if there are some out there, name them for me. Right? Who else do you see out there taking risk like Elon does? And I guarantee you, if he were to get. And Tesla takes off and he gets it, really, it’s like a, I think it’s like a $878 billion pay package, but everybody’s calling it the trillion dollar pay package. All of that money, I bet would go in then to working on getting humans to Mars. Right? Working on the boring company and creating more efficient systems. What he’s talked about as well is this sustainable abundance. Getting robots that can perform medical surgeries that basically everybody in the world then could have their own robot and get low cost health care. Right? That’s the kind of vision that this guy has.

And I haven’t seen anything to say that he wouldn’t do those things because he’s proved it time and time again that he does truly seem to care. Now, is it, I won’t get into any conspiracy theories or anything, but I mean, there’s really no one else out there like him and we want him at the helm of Tesla and we want to be invested in the companies that he’s in as well. All right, quickly here, getting close to 40 minutes. I’ll try to wrap this up for our markets today. Again, we did finish lower across the board. Yields were also down today by 1 1/2% though. Not bad to see. And the internals today, you know, despite big losses and finishing at the lows of the day to day, they’re better than you might expect.

[00:37:21]:
They advanced decline. Let me pull this up here. Advanced Decline, better than 2 to 1 negative. On the NYSE, better than we’ve seen in previous sessions. Slightly worse on the NASDAQ, roughly two and a half, just over two and a half to one negative there. 52e highs of lows, pretty close to even really on the nyse, just about, just under three to one negative. Excuse me. On the NASDAQ though, today Volume also negative here, but no big 2 to 1 beats or anything.

No. 70, 80% downside volume on the day for. I’m just kind of realizing here how quickly I probably talked during some of that Tesla commentary there. So sorry if you had to slow it down a little bit. I’m excited. I don’t know if you can tell, but the future for us here is so exciting. We have a narrow window to really get through here that could lead us down a few different roads. Okay? The narrow window is the optimistic route where we do have the innovation revolution that leads to deflation in a true golden age, not just for the United States, but for the entire world, for humanity as a whole.

And we had these other windows, like Commie Momdani, okay, where you have the government wanting to regulate every area of your life. You saw a speech, you know, there’s no problem too big that the government can’t solve and no problem too small that the government doesn’t care about. What a radical shift we’ve gone from. From Ronald Reagan, you know, the. The mo. The seven most dangerous words in the English language. I’m from the government and I’m here to help. We don’t want the government in our lives like this.

When you look at things like the SNAP benefits, I hope people are waking up to the fact. Or things like section 8 housing. When you give the government the ability to feed you, that means they have the ability to take it away. If you give the government the ability to house you, it means they can evict you. We’ve seen it in other countries all over the world that when you give governments this kind of power, one, they’re not going to give it up. Number two, they’re going to abuse it. You know, look at the trucker convoy in Canada. A peaceful protest, okay? No violence.

Yes, they stopped shipping and stuff like that, but no violence. And they shut down these people bank accounts, okay? They jailed them, they seized their assets, including crypto assets as well. These are kind of the two paths that we have to go towards here. Whether it’s just absolute chaos, government, way too much in our lives, or again, the narrow optimistic window here that we have to create a world that’s not by force, right? Communism, socialism is done by force, right? You have to give up your assets under the threat of law, under the threat of imprisonment or worse, bodily harm, okay? Because not everybody’s on board with that. So how do they get the wealth? They do it by force. These aren’t peaceful types of things. It’s why Capitalism in that regard. Maybe not in its current form, which we don’t really have true free market capitalism anyway, but at least we get to operate with choice in that way, which I, I wish more people realized.

[00:40:44]:
You do vote with your dollar. If you keep shopping at the places that hate you, you’re, you’re just empowering them anyway. Again, I’ll kind of get off of that here, but I think we do have a narrow window in a short period of time to get there as well. But we’re optimists here. That’s the future that we see. That’s the future that we want to see. You know, what you think about, you bring about. So work with us here on it, right? There’s so many great things happening in the world.

There’s really never been a better time to be alive than right now. I say this often, but I mean, a king 150 years ago doesn’t live like most Americans do today. You couldn’t just have any product you want from all over the world delivered to your doorstep in two days. A king couldn’t have done that. Of course, now a big part of that is, you know, airlines and obviously Amazon. Right. But what, what really out there, I mean, it’s incredible. I mean, I could get on my phone right now and have ice cream at my doorstep before I get done publishing this podcast.

Right. Kings didn’t live like that. So it really is. There’s been no better time to be alive. So if you’re still here with me, I’ll quickly recap here. Sectors. We did finish with 9 out of our 11s and P500 sectors. Lower on the day.

Our leaders were energy and healthcare laggards here. Consumer Discretionary, which is a lot of tech names, so not necessarily great. But then tech after that and communication services, also a lot of tech names. So not what you want to see. But we’re looking at this once again as an opportunity to buy the dip. And a government reopening as far as sentiment goes, at least would be a bullish factor for this market. All right, finally here for today, our VRA Commodity watch. Gold Almost right at $4,000 an ounce.

[00:42:32]:
Again, still below it at $3,998 an ounce. We saw the miners finish up slightly today as well. You know, really getting close to extreme oversold levels. Not quite there. We are at oversold levels on our shorter term indicators. A group that we do remain bullish on here. Silver now at $48.30 an ounce. Copper below $5 a pound at $498 and oil below $60 a barrel at 59, 69 a barrel.

And finally here for today, bitcoin, which has been hit hard but is back above $100,000 of Bitcoin right now at $101,318 a Bitcoin. All right, folks, I know that was a little longer than anticipated. I had to keep up with Kip’s 43 minute podcast yesterday, so I did it to you here today again. But I hope you enjoyed it. Any questions you have or if I talk too fast through any of that, so let me know. I’d be happy to dive more in depth to, you know, this semiconductor story. I think it’s fascinating what we’re seeing in that space, especially with Tesla. So hope you enjoyed it.

[00:43:40]:
I hope you have a great into your week and a fantastic weekend as well. Kip will see you back here tomorrow for the close. But if you’re ready to receive everything the VRA has to offer, we have our 14 day free trial going on right now vraletter.com we also have all of our podcasts there as well.

So if you want to receive them every day at the closing and sign up for our email list@vra letter.com Click that podcast link at the top. You’ll also find our transcript and notes there as well. So thanks again for tuning in. Until next time, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.