In today's episode, Kip breaks down the VRA's market optimism based on unexpected economic expansion from disruptive tech's role in innovation and the VRA's strategy on how to profit from this unprecedented period of time. He also covers the latest in the commodity market including another all-time high in the price of Gold.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good. Tuesday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the Daily VRA investing podcast.

Hope you had a great day today. We had a lot to talk about. And as much as the market is a little topsy turvy today, got some really good stuff for you, just more reasons to be extremely optimistic. You want to listen to this, take a few notes maybe, because I think we’ve got this thing dialed in, famous last words.

And I do know if you’re not already humble, the markets will make you humble. This is not me trying to be cocky for any reason. I just think we’ve got a playbook here. It’s been working. And why would we change it? Because I think we’ve got this dialed in. But first of all, tomorrow’s going to be an interesting day for us because for the first time, both myself and my partner and my oldest son Tyler are going to be on national television for the first time on the same day on different networks. I’m going to be on Charles Payne show tomorrow in the 02:00 p.m. Eastern hour.

Charles is making money show, which has been nice to have you on there a few times. And then Tyler tomorrow night is going to be on real America’s voice with Wayne root on his nightly radio and tv show. So we’ll share those details tomorrow in our morning fury letter. But I wanted to, we just found out that today, so wanted to pass that on. That’s a, you know, it’s a little surreal, but it’s also a lot of fun. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re just having fun with it. And look, our job is to make people money, you know, because guess what? We invest our money the way we tell others to.

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So it’s kind of a win win from that point of view. But we also, we take a lot of pride in what we do and we like getting things right. And one of the things, again, I will never, I’ll take this to my grave not understanding this, how people can be so wrong for so long and it doesn’t seem to affect them. I think there’s something a little sociopathic about that. Now, you can be bearish, bearish, bearish. Just because you don’t understand something, just because you don’t agree with something and you just think that there’s a crash, there’s a monster underneath every bed you see, right? I don’t understand. Look, you can, you know, have your own views and be pessimistic if you’re an optimist, whatever, fine. That’s your life, right? But if you do what we do, or if you manage money, your own money, or somebody else’s, and if you are nothing but wrong and you’re fighting the market, fight.

Don’t fight the tape, don’t fight the fed, and you just keep fighting it. Please help me understand. Why would you want to do that? I would, I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep at night, and I wouldn’t feel good about waking up in the morning because I have to go. Oh, my God, I got to face another day of being wrong. That’s really the thing, right? It’s the being wrong part. And if other people listen to you, then, oh, goodness, maybe I just don’t understand, you know, how people, some people operate and do that. But the point being, you know, we follow price action here. We’re trend followers, and it just makes it easy.

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We don’t have to guess what the market’s going to do. The market’s telling us what it wants to do, and we guess what it’s doing here today. So I’m going to talk about that a little bit. Our investment approach is really pretty simple. We like to go with what’s working. We like to find the hottest areas of what’s working. And we want to make sure that we’re not missing out on a trend change. Because again, price action tells you everything.

The market’s telling you what it wants to do. Individual stocks are telling you what they want to do. Individual sectors, right, for asset allocation, are telling you what they want to do. Our job is to be diversified and in the right sectors, you’re not going to get every move just right. Like, we’ve been super bullish on gold, silver, and the miners. Primarily, though, if I be honest, gold and the miners. Okay, I don’t understand silver. I’ve never been able to time silver get a much better feel for gold and for the miners, I believe.

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But again, we’ve been really bullish in this group. It’s not that gold hasn’t done well. Gold has done really well, and it has for a long time. Okay, first recommended gold at like 375. Well, for the first time today, gold just hit $2,300 an ounce. Little. A little golf clap for gold. Putting in another new all time high, $2,000 for the first time.

How about that? But I think the key is this. Our approach is we want to have great investments in sectors that we believe are about to take off. If we get the timing a little wrong, that’s okay. We have time to add to our positions, build those positions of, we’re position builders. So when the move does happen, it almost worked out better that way, right? Because we had time for a year or two to keep adding to these positions. So we’re really ready when the move does start. I think there’s some universal, there’s a cosmic justice to that, you know what I mean? And so that’s all. Again, that just works for me.

Everyone’s got their own style. I’m just telling you, this is what we do is what works for us. And so I think, folks, based on the evidence and just our belief system and what our research telling us, your investing system certainly is telling us that we are in the, we are on the right side of the market. This is a major bull market. We’re on the right side of that. The economy is in boom time. Okay? The evidence is now pointing to that. And again, a lot of the economic data the government puts out is just flawed.

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It’s just wrong. It hasn’t caught up with the, with what’s happening in today’s society. Things have changed. Not all of this income, not all these jobs are showing up. We’re in the gig economy. People have found very creative ways to make money off the books, if you will. So again, I think the economy is very strong. We’ve got a market that’s very, very strong.

We’re now at the birth of the innovation revolution. We’re starting to get snapshots of that. Now, of course, what’s happening in AI and these new tech companies that are becoming behemoths, you don’t become worth a billion, a trillion to $2 trillion, unless you’re doing something really right. And there’s going to be a lot more of those companies. Right now, there’s only a handful of them that are between worth a trillion to 2 trillion. Where would that be in ten years? Where will that be in ten years? That’s the future, folks, that we see coming and that we believe is coming and that we’re preparing for. Let’s get right to it. Today.

I will start with the markets here, because, again, we did have, for the second day in a row, although you remember yesterday, the semis were up 1.3%. Today the semis were down 1.4%. So in two days, all this topsy turbine action, people talking about, oh, my God, here comes inflation. Oh, my God. Racer spiky. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It’s hilarious.

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This is a textbook bull market. Pause is what this is. The semis are down one 10th of 1% in two days. Holy cow. What are we going to do? How are we going to survive? List. I don’t want to get too, I don’t want to make a joke about this, really, because who knows, there could be something behind this. Move lower. Maybe there is something, this geopolitical turmoil that we’re seeing again.

Israel attacked the iranian consulate in Syria. Maybe something more is going to come of that. Oil certainly showing that’s a possibility, right? Oil, $85 a barrel for the first time today since October, although it’s still down from 123 from a year and a half ago. Gold, 2300. Maybe these flight to safety trades are telling us there’s something bigger happening, so we don’t ever really know. Surprises always can catch us out of nowhere. But that’s, again, that’s the key to being diversified. That’s our approach.

And so regardless of what happens, we like to think we’re going to be insulated from a worst case scenario. Again, I think it helps when you own bitcoin, when you own gold, physical, by the way, when you own the miners, when you have investments in various sectors. So again, you’re insulated to kind of a worst case, not a worst case scenario, because nothing can insulate you from that, but from things turning and getting a little tricky. So the Dow Jones today, by the way, we finished well off the lows. I think we closed at least to the highs of the afternoon. How about that? Dow Jones today finishing down 396 at exactly 1% today. Rough 2000 was a loser on the day. Finished down 1.8%.

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Of course, it’s been pretty hot. S 500 down seven tenths of 1%. Nasdaq down nine tenths of 1%. Again, semi is down 1.36% today. Let’s start with. Let’s start with this. With this. With this subject.

I contend, and we continue to contend that we’re watching a textbook bull market unfold here. Because we never hit extremely bought on steroids, we never hit our most overbought designations. If we had we told you, we probably would have taken some profits. We just never did. This market has been so perfect. It continues to rotate. If one group gets too hot, guess what? It cools off for a few days and then another group starts to leave. That’s textbook right there.

That’s broad action. As a reminder, we’re in year two of this new bull market. We’re in year two. And so again, I’m only spending time on this because we’re hearing we’re getting questions and people are panicking. I’m sure Charles is going to ask you tomorrow these questions because they’re the ones he’s getting. Again, the ten year now, it spiked back up to a rate of 4.36%. So, Kip, does that concern you? It absolutely does not concern me. And the biggest reason is, I’ll tell you why.

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In the biggest bull market in this country’s history, 1995 to 2000, the ten year yield, average yield was better than 6%. We’re 4.3% now. So when the stock market was melting up from 95 to 2000, rates were considerably higher than they are now. Now, the question that most people ask at that point, because I’ve had this conversation with a few people is, hey, but Kevin, the last time, 95 to 2000, we didn’t have $34 trillion in debt. See, that’s the problem. That’s the problem. No, it’s not the problem. And it couldn’t be anywhere near a problem.

And I’ll tell you why. Because we have debt to GDP in the United States of 123%. Now, yes, that’s high. Yes, that’s world war two kind of era high. But does it matter? I mean, does it matter? I know that the, you know, the bears certainly want to think it matters. People that believe that debt is an illusion, people that believe that debt matters want us to think it’s a problem. But it’s all relative, is it not? It’s all relative because Japan’s debt to GDP is over 270%. China’s debt to GDP is over 300%.

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So at some point it is going to matter. But when is that point? When is that point? Because I’ve been hearing this exact story that our debt is going to crash the entire system. Since I became a broker in 1985, pretty much the first week on the job, the veterans were telling me this is what they were most worried about. Okay? And we just never had a debt based crash in this country where rates spiked, etcetera, took the whole thing down. We’ve had periods where rates spiked up and we’ve had a lot of consternation about it and a lot of problems associated with it, but we’ve never had a true debt based situation develop in this country. The financial crisis, of course, was around the housing crisis and individual debt. They’re talking about government debt here. So I think that’s, that’s been our approach.

It’s a much more nuanced approach that it’s just not, it’s just not, it’s just not a big deal. When it becomes a big deal, I think we’ll all know. And the place we’ll know is Japan. That’s always, that’s, that is the ultimate black swan. Uh, if Japan’s debt is, if Japan’s government yields, it yields on the government bond, JGB’s, it, Japan’s interest rate environment begins to change radically. Remember, they’re at 0% rates right now. They, they’re just, they just raised their, their, uh, their, their, their equivalent of their fed funds rate from -0.10% one, 0% to 0%. So they’re at 0%.

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So if that started spiking, we saw, we started seeing some liquidity problems with japanese debt. That’s our warning flag. We just don’t have that. So in the meantime, as we tell you, this is a textbook bull market is developing as such, and it’s led by the innovation revolution. And I think that’s the most important thing to remember because you have these short term trends in the US dollar. Remember, folks, the bears can’t have it both ways. The bears can’t tell you out of one side of their mouth that the dollar is going to crash and they’re going to be replaced by BRICS or whatever, a brick currency or the chinese yuan or whatever. The bears can’t tell you.

On one hand, they believe the dollar is going to be worthless and we’re going to have hyperinflation because of a crash in the dollar. At the same time, out of the other side of the mouth, they can’t warn you that everything’s going to crash because the dollar is rising. Because right now the dollar is rising. But again, if you use a little perspective and if you pull back a little bit, you’ll see that the dollar is in a decline. Just look at a two year chart, you’ll see we’re nowhere near the highs of two years ago. The same thing applies to oil price. Again, oil is 123, now it’s 85. Ten year yields.

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Again, the ten year last October, November was over 5%. Now we’re at 4.3%. And again. So, yeah, I can turn any conversation into a bullish one because that’s how locked in we are to this, to this fact that this is a new bull market as size and scope. It’s structural in nature, driven by a strong economy with a very strong corporate America, probably never stronger corporate America, individual consumers not, haven’t been this strong in decades. And again, I can make that argument from every point of view, from a debt point of view, from an asset point of view, from liquidity point of view. I can make it from every point of view. So the key to all of everything I’m saying right now is buy the dip.

That’s really what I’m saying. That’s been the smartest of smart money strategies from the bear market lows of October 13, 2022, when we called the bottom that day, the smartest strategy has been buying the diploma. So if we get a little more shakeout, it’ll be good news. I’ll give you, I’ll give you something else that happened. So we just had a fear. One thing that has concerned us a little bit is that these sentiment indicators are getting extreme greed. At least they were yesterday. The fear and greed index hit, I think, 77.

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That’s very, that’s extreme greed. It absolutely is. Well, guess what? All it took was a day and a half shakeout, and we were back in the fifties today. Yeah. This thing moderates very quickly back into the fifties. Now, the AAI investor sentiment survey, which I voted in since 1980, 719 88, for this. It’s a weekly survey. It’s over 50%.

Bulls. Again, that is elevated. I’ve seen a lot higher, but that is elevated. So the one thing that’s concerned us is people got a little too bullish. But when you see these sentiment surveys change so quickly on a simple shakeout, a simple pause. Again, that’s not normal. And that tells you people are still in fear. All it takes is a day and a half of some downside action, and people are already starting to go, should I get out? Is it time to sell? Oh, my God.

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Here we go. No, it’s not. It’s no, that’s that matter of fact. The fact that we’re having this conversation should tell you just how bullish this setup is. Because, listen, we’ll know when there’s a real top in place. We’ll know because we’ll tell you all the signs. And again, we’re not seeing them. We’ll know because on every shakeout people go, don’t worry about it, by the dip, everyone will be saying what we’re saying.

When everyone’s saying what we’re saying, then we’ll be concerned. But when the sentiment surveys fall out of bed on a simple one and a half day pause, that is a significantly bullish sign. Significantly bullish. And the other thing is, people, again, people have short memories. The doubt, one point was down 500 today. Okay. If that had happened last year, gold would be sharply lower, right? Everything would be lower. It’d be a, it’d be almost essentially a liquidity event, a liquidity sell off.

We saw that for a couple of years. Look at this today, not happening, is it? Today, gold just says, hold my beer. I’m going to keep going higher again. Now, as I look at it now, trading live, $2,301 an ounce, all time high. Gold is certainly not telling you that it’s involved in a liquidity event. Right. So again, we’re just not seeing the signs that would tell us that this is something we need to be concerned about. Instead, we’re seeing a textbook broadening bull market that just says, get ready to buy me aggressively again.

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And who knows? Maybe today was the last. We may open up 500 points higher tomorrow. Who knows? But I think we’re more likely to see a near term bottom than we are to see a sustained move lower. We did get some strong economic data. These manufacturers is manufacturing. Data from yesterday pointed to an economy that is. Guess what? It’s growing. Now, I don’t know why that’s bad news.

Someone please explain to me why it’s bad news. The flip side is, well, it’s inflationary. And see that rate spiked up? That confirms our concern. Here comes inflation again. And I’ll tell you why that’s not happening. We are in a disinflationary environment. You look at all the data again, zoom back out a little bit. Look at all the data.

Over the last two years, all inflation has done has gone lower. Now, as to what’s going to happen, go forward, we think we have the answer as to why you should not be concerned about inflation making a sustained comeback. Because the innovation revolution, what is, what, what’s its primary driver? It’s disruptive technology. It’s new tech. It’s new inventions. What do new inventions, what do, what does disruptive technology do? It brings down the cost of things. Now, this will be just one example. I had to buy a new computer system yesterday, and I get very attached to things that I own, so I tend not to get rid of them.

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Applies my vehicles, apparently, applies to my computer systems, etcetera. Got a new desktop, and I got all the bells and whistles. I spent less than $3,000. This thing would have cost me ten grand five years ago. So I know that’s just technology, but I think it’s more broad than that, because that’s what the innovation revolution in this disruptive era that we’re in is going as these, as these inventions come on from. Again, I started them. I’ll be talking about for 30 minutes. There’s so many exciting things happening.

But all that does is it makes old tech irrelevant and the new tech that replaces it makes our lives better. And it does so less expensively. So China also, by the way, is exporting deflation like crazy. They’re trying to revive their economy, which is again, it’s only growing at a 5% rate. Okay, so yeah, they’re nowhere near a recession or anything, maybe for them, but still 5% gdp growth, that’s kind of been their baseline, but they want to get it growing a little faster again, apparently. And so what they’re doing is they’re exporting their products more aggressively and they’re doing it well. Those cheap products are coming to our shores, right. We still import so much from China and other asian economies, things that we can’t make in this country for that price.

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So that’s importing deflation. So no, not concerned about inflation, no, not concerned about rising rates for a lot of reasons. But we are focused on the areas we can make the most money and that remains semis and tech, that remains precious metals and miners, specifically gold and silver, that remains bitcoin and it remains energy stocks. Because again, with a global economy that is now getting stronger, Doctor copper has been telling us, has he not? Doctor Copper, that move higher, he’s had, has been telling us a global economy, a global recovery is underway. We’re seeing global stock markets hitting all time high after all time high. Again, those are discounting mechanisms. So all of this is pointing to a stronger global economy, certainly a stronger us economy, which is why the dollar has been strong. That’s a good thing.

Again, it’s not great for our largest exporters, our us multinationals, but for everything else, it’s fantastic. Again, in the extreme, any of these things can be bad, but we’re talking about just really trending moves back and forth, back and forth with the primary trend of the dollar, that’s lower. The primary trend of rates, that’s lower. With the primary trend of inflation that’s lower. So that’s what we tend to look at here, and that’s how we structure our investment approach. And that’s what the VRA investing system is based off of. Eleven to twelve screens in the VR investing system are bullish. That’s never happened before.

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So that’s not going away. It’ll stay at eleven to twelve unless something radical happens. These are long term buy signals and that’s how we’re treating this classic broadening actions taking place. We’re not seeing liquidity events everything we’re seeing is bullish, especially. Let’s talk about the things we really like now. Gold. Okay. We’ve been pounding the table on gold.

And the miners. You’ve been joining us. You know this to be true. We were, again, we were early, but I’d rather be early than late because we’ve now been building positions in this. Okay, check this out. Gold just had its best two quarter stretch in more than eight years. Five straight months of gains as well. This is this shock.

Some people, I put this out this morning. Since early 2022, February 2022, gold is up more than 20%, while the S 500 is only up 14%. So for what? Is this better than two years? Better than two years, gold has outperformed the S and P 500. I think most people would be surprised to hear that. Well, here’s why. Central banks have been buying the you know what out of gold back to back years of record purchases. This will be number three. Make this right.

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Put that down. They’re buying hand over fist. Why do you think they’re doing that? Because we’re also living in an inflationary environment. I’m not talking about hyperinflation, but when things just cost more, because we probably have to get accustomed to inflation being a little higher than it used to be. These are inflationary times. A stronger economy is only going to make that more so the case. So again, I know I have to offset that with my deflationary comment. That is China.

But the point being, if rates are going to stay a little higher, if inflation is going to stay a little higher, maybe we should buy assets that benefit from that. What would those assets be? What are inflation assets? Gold stocks, real estate, housing and bitcoin. Well, we happen to like all energy. We have to like all those. So the old saying is, you can’t beat them, join them. That’s what we want to do. If we can’t find a way to get inflation down to the levels that we would rather see it at, let’s invest in the things that are going to benefit from economic growth and engine that’s really strong and inflation that’s likely going to stay a little higher than it used to be. And so again, that’s the common sense approach that we use to investing.

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A very simple minded east Texas boy, this works for me. And so I think, though, again, I think that’s the playbook for the market, and I think that’s what it’s going to keep working. So gold breaking out as a reminder, okay, our minimum target for gold this year has been, remains 2400. Not a new target. We’re only $100 away now from our minimum target being hit. But I think it’s going a lot higher. I think. I think whether or not it hits 3000oz this year, it will next year.

And. But it’s the miners, okay, again, we love to keep our assets, our savings in gold, because it can’t be printed away, can’t be inflated away, as they love to do with our fiat currency. Gold is not fiat. Gold is God’s currency. Right? Bitcoin is man’s currency. Fiat currency is the devil’s currency. That’s. Someone tweeted that to me today, and it just stuck.

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Is. It’s perfect, right? But if gold is going to do what we think it’s going to do, so far it has, then the miners are really the place to be. And they’ve been going parabolic. The miners now are outperforming. And we love relative strength charts here. We share this morning with our folks. For the last month now, the miners have been going parabolic, essentially, versus gold in my career. That’s the buy signal from a short term trading point of view, that’s the buy signal.

It’s very similar to the semis leading the market. If the semis are going higher, you want to own stocks. If the miners are going higher, you want to own gold. If energy stocks are going higher, you want to own oil. Again, that’s just a very. Again, that just works. That’s just for some reason, that’s how they lead. That’s how, that’s why it works, because the equities lead the metal or the underlying asset class.

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And so that’s why we expect these miners just to keep going. As a reminder, we’ve been talking about this now for probably over a month. Over the last three rate cutting cycles, the average move higher in GDX, the gold miner ETF has been 180%. Some of those are compressed moves. Some of these took place in a year, year and a half. Others are longer term. I suspect, again, because we look for this to be a long term bull market of bull markets for precious metals and miners, I suspect that this movement in the miners is going to be one for the record books. Okay, one for the record books.

Again today, for example, again, gold up right now, almost 2% today. That’s a rare move for gold. Again, 2301 an ounce. The miners today only up 1.5%. So today, they didn’t outperform because they’re equities. And at the end of the day, they are impacted by stock market movement because these are stocks after all. Right? So that’s how you make sense of it on a day to day basis. I would expect if the market doesn’t go down big tomorrow and gold at least stays flat, these miners will catch up tomorrow.

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They’ll make up this difference. But again, they still had a good day. GDX was still up one and a half percent, just not as much today as goal was. But that’s the relationship on kind of a day to day basis. Okay. At the end of the day, they are equities. Right? A lot of us come out the hard way. For the first time, frankly, in my career, in 2008, when the market crashed and the miners crashed with it even as gold was going higher, that was a sobering reality.

And it was painful because we couldn’t make sense of what’s going on here, right? And you and someone just, you know, you do, you do know you own a stock, right? You do know that GDX is a, is a mining stock ETF. It is equity. And so then it was like, oh, my God, of course, that’s right. So, yeah, there are spurts where you have this disconnect, but. But this is not that, right? We’re not entering another financial crisis because home prices are an all time high. The consumers never been healthier. Never, never, ever been healthier. This is the healthiest the consumer has been, certainly in my lifetime.

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And again, we have all the data. We’ve been sharing that with you here religiously over the last year. Plus, it’s in our book, the Big Bribe. This is not our first rodeo. Not the first time we’ve had this conversation. So this is not 2000. Anyone that tells you this is 2007, 2008, they’re idiots. They’re just idiots.

There is no one. They are financial idiots, and they’re fear mongering you, and you should shut them out of your life just on that topic. I’m not telling you to, you know, you can’t have people in your life. I’m just saying, you know, they’re not the ones to listen to. We’ll know when that happens, and it won’t be what’s happening now. You won’t have a net income consumer net worth at all time high. You won’t have home prices at all time high. You want to have credit scores at all time high.

You want to have one third of homeowners having no mortgage in their home because they paid it off. Again, these are all records. This is not 2007 2008. This is the exact opposite. This is the beginning. This is the beginning of economic expansion. That’s the key point. This is the beginning of an economic expansion period unlike anything that’s happened in my lifetime.

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That’s what’s happening now. Look, if something happens to disrupt it and cause it to stop working, I’ll be the first to admit it. We are seeing signs of economic boom time that is unfolding here on the back of really strong consumer and corporate America. Corporate. Corporate debt to GDP, to income. Corporate, excuse me. Corporate debt to market cap is what I meant to say. Is it 50 year lows? 50 year lows.

So it’s pretty much the same thing is taking place for the consumer. So you got, the ability to lever up is so significant. I’m sure it’s something that both Todd and I will talk about in our interviews tomorrow. The ability for both the consumer and for corporate America to lever up is just unbelievably significant. And that hasn’t even started yet. It will. You know, there’ll be a point. Companies start adding debt.

[00:29:27]:
Consumers start taking on more debt, maybe buying second and third homes. That’s all going to happen, right? That’s part of the roaring 2020s we’re in now. People will start getting stupid with their money. That’s a process, and we. Have you started that yet? That’s the key. Know that. Okay? And I know I’m preaching to a very friendly crowd here. I know you all know us, least most of you, to our new people.

Thanks for joining us. I know most of you have been hearing me say this and Tyler say this now for close to two years. You’re probably getting tired of hearing it. But, you know, again, I like. We like to repeat truths. These are economic truths based in hardcore research that we do here every single day at the VRA. Let’s see here. All right.

[00:30:12]:
Let’s get to the internals today, and then we’ll talk about some various things toward the end. Again, not a pretty day today. Matter of fact, the internals, they were not good. This is the first day that I can remember in a while that the internals were negative across the board. No, I don’t like seeing that. Could it be a harbinger or something worse? Could be. If this becomes a pattern, then we’ll tell you. We’ll probably start taking some steps to prepare for it.

Just don’t think that’s the case. Not whatsoever. Here are the internals we can round up for simple math. Uh uh. Both? Yeah. Why not? We’ll do three to one negative advanced decline three to one negative is decline both NYC and NAsdaq volume today. Uh, what is this? Uh, two to one. Yeah, right at two to one negative for, for both the NYC and a little bit worse.

[00:31:00]:
Worse for Nasdaq. Uh, Nyse. Right at two to one negative. And we did have slightly more stocks hitting in 52 week low today than 52 week high. But, but nothing, you know, nothing, nothing earth shattering, but be by like 15 issues. So, no, we don’t want this to become a pattern. But again, people get very worked up very quickly, very fearful very quickly. And because humans program these AI systems that do the training.

There you go. There’s. There’s the end result right. There’s the end result right there. Human error, I think is probably how this best sums us up and our commodity in our sector watch today. Got a lot of screens open here. Sector watch today, not pretty here either. Eight sectors finished lower, three finished higher.

Led the downside by healthcare. Tom told me Unitedhealth is now the largest component. It was down 8% today. Unitedhealth is the largest component in the Dow Jones and it was down 8% today. So there’s your 380 96 point loss in the Dow Jones. And what does it say about our society that a healthcare company is, makes up the largest, compose the largest component of the Dow Jones? I don’t think it says anything good. Healthcare today down 1.6%. Consumer discretionary, down 1.2%.

[00:32:15]:
A lot of sectors down in the half percent to 1% range. The upside, energy, of course, energy hot again. Energy stock. We’ve been pounding the table on these, you know, we have been. Energy stocks up 1.3% today. And that’s really it. Nothing else has picked up, really. And our commodity watch again, gold.

Just love seeing it. Right. 2301 right now, $44 an ounce today, 1.95%. Silver, up 4.71%. Plenty of catch up, you think? 26.25. Wow. Copper today, eight tenths, 1%. $4.08 a pound.

And crude oil. Finally, a final commodity today we tracked for you, up a dollar. 75 a barrel is better than 2%. 85, 46 again. First time crude oil has been here since October of last year. Where would we concern? 110, 120, you start getting over 100. And it does have some troubling signals for the US economy as far as impacting its growth. So here, inflation adjusted, what is oil? I don’t know.

[00:33:27]:
Dollar, 15 a barrel. What is it? Over the last 20 years, probably 15 a barrel with all the inflation we’ve had in this country. So, no, I’m not concerned about oil being $85 a barrel. However, I do like the idea I can profit from it. And energy stocks have been hot, so that’s, that’s, that’s where we’re going to continue to stay invested. Gives us great diversification, great exposure to risk assets via inflationary assets. It’s a win win win all the way around. That’s what that is.

Big win win. And we think energy stocks will keep going higher. Finally, bitcoin. Bitcoin’s been weak. It’s just, you know, who knows?