Don’t look back till the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the daily VRA investing podcast. Hope you had a good day today. What a day. Yesterday was of course, third best day since World War II in the markets. Massive gains across the board. A bit of the inverse today.
Nothing, terribly bad. But Dow Jones did finish down over a thousand points. Still well at the lows though, but down a thousand points. That’s two and a half percent. S & P 500 down 3.4%. And it gets worse. Russ 2000 down 4.27. And our leader, Nasdaq, not what you want to see, down 4.31%.
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And it does get worse. The semis, which were up 17% yesterday, SMH today down 6.3%. So now, you know, we had, we had a couple of days where the semis were leading higher. Matter of fact, three days in a row. And that’s the sign you want to see. That’s, that’s this, that’s if you, if you follow us here closely, that’s a sign we’ve been talking about for a number of months where the semis were leading lower. And we know what that, what that, what that, that brought to us. So we want to see the semis on a consistent basis lead higher because they lead in both directions today.
It didn’t happen. Semi is down 6.3% again, up 17 yesterday, today down 6.3. Nasdaq down 4.3. So that’s, that’s the wrong leadership that we want to see. Not a good day today. Vix today was up 21%. Now back to 40.75. And we might have a minute to talk about this later, but 10 year yields, you know, after topping yesterday at 4.51%, which is what, that’s what got Trump’s attention.
We covered that yesterday and again this morning. This morning’s letter. Yeah, the. Maybe, maybe I should say it a different way, but I’m from Texas and we like to speak pretty bluntly and honestly. Yesterday Trump caved to the perma bears, that is, excuse me, to the bond market vigilantes. Perma bears now appear to be right, don’t they? Yeah, Trump caved to the bond market vigilantes yesterday, as confirmed last night in a Wall Street Journal piece, also in a New York Times piece with direct quotes from Treasury Secretary Scott Bissant. And he said, yeah, the bond market got their attention. Trump had also seen JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon on Fox where he said, yeah, we’re headed into Recession looks that way.
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This, this is, this is, this, this is, this is, this is not going well. I think that plus the pressure on the bond market when again yields, all yields have done in the face of this stock market calamity. Again loss of $11 trillion folks, in a very compressed period of time into official bear market status here because any, any time they say it’s 20%, I’ll just say this. Our view, mine and Tyler’s view has always been anytime the average stock loses more than 30% so we don’t. Instead of going off the indexes, anytime the average stock loses more than 30%, that’s a bear market because that’s what we invest in the average stock, okay. Not the indexes. Most of us don’t just invest in indexes, okay? And so yeah, the average stock now is down 37%. Okay? And so this is now the fourth bear market by our definition the fourth bear market since 2018.
Fourth bear market in seven years. It’s unprecedented. Okay? And so if you’re a trend follower that then you look at the charts and the trend will tell you we’re below the 200 day. Of course we of course well below the, the moving averages now are rolling over. So they’re not, they’re not trending higher anymore. And if you’re a trend follower, you, you have no choice but to be out of this market. That is, that is a requirement. Now we’ve, we’ve kept some individual stock positions.
Of course we kept gold and silver and our mining stocks, those served us very well and we kept our favorite VRA 10 baggers. But we have, you know, we have liquidated everything else for that reason. We look forward to the day that we’re back above the 200 day and the trend is now our friend again to the upside. That’s just not now. And so now is the time of caution. Now, now is the time to protect your portfolio and to be at things that are going up and again, that’s gold, Gold up another back to back days with a hundred dollar plus gains in gold. That’s never happened before. And again gold is a lot higher in price now.
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So we may have had higher percentage gains higher on back to back days but we’ve never had back to back $100 ounce days and we’ve had that. Now I’ll cover commodities more in a moment. But back to the point I was making about Trump caving to the bond market vigilantes. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that, okay? They are as My mentor at Oppenheimer, Michael Metz, said, they’re the mob enforces of Wall Street. That’s who these guys are. They are extremely powerful because they represent the most powerful cartel on the planet. Right. And that is the banking cartel, central banks.
And so when the bond market, when the bond market vigilantes come at you, you really only have one decision to make here. You have to cave. So I honestly applaud Trump for doing that because they will sink you, they will sink anyone that gets in their way. Again, I learned all about this many, many years ago. Bill Clinton was, when I first found out about it, we thought this y. And when he was, he was told by James Carville, who walked him through what the bond market vigilantes were. He used the F word, dropped an F bomb, which I did yesterday. I won’t do it again today.
I need to get back in the. I need all the karma I can get, I think. So I’m going to try to be, try to be a little bit more of a Southern gentleman. But he said, who the f are the bond market vigilantes? Bill Clinton did, not knowing it, being a Southern boy from Arkansas, not in the financial business. So, yeah, that’s who they are. And they have shown up again. We saw that in the 10 year yield again from Liberation Day. Okay.
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Which is what I believe Trump really believed. And I think it, you would think it would this common sense, if the stock market, if you’ve fallen and you’re down over 20% and that’s happened in a span of just a few weeks, why are bond yields going up? That’s not supposed to happen. And I think Trump and Bessant were very proud of the fact and they bragged about it often, that as they got doge in and as they got into the administration, the interest rates were falling. And this is a big cornerstone of Trump’s presidency. This is what he wanted to see, rates to plummet. That’s why they worked so hard to cut waste and fraud. That’s why they brought Elon Musk in to cut all this debt so they can reduce the amount of debt we have. They could have a tax cut.
Right. And that they could see the Federal Reserve slash rates, that was a big, big, big part of their, of their economic goals for Trump’s second term. And so when rates after the, again after Liberation day, when the 10 year yield popped up from like 3.6% to 4.5%. Right. That is a monster move in a very compressed period of time. That’s what got Their so that resulted in Trump announcing the pause, the 90 day pause on tariffs for every country but China. Now they still have the 10% baseline tariff that’s still in place, but that’s what happened here. And I bring this up again today because Once again today, 10 year yields began to fall.
This morning we had a very successful 10 year auction, a government bond auction. And 10 year yields began to fall this morning and all of a sudden they started rising again. We closed today at 4.394% on the 10 year. Again, the high yesterday was right at 4, right, just, it ticked it 4.5%. Okay, so that is, that is not the direction as the market’s plummeting, it’s just not the direction you want to see. Race code, that’s a problem. And I think, I think the reason I’m spending time on this is because I believe they know what Trump’s weak spot is now. I believe they know his Achilles heel.
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By they, I mean his enemies, whoever they may be. And it’s obviously, we’re talking about China, we’re talking about other countries around the world. Again, this is part of the issue that I’ve had with this, with their, with their execution of their plan on terrorists, because there is no coalition. It’s a coalition of one. It’s Trump versus the world. And I know some people say, hey, that’s the way it had to be because you can’t build a coalition with these people, you can’t trust them. I understand that argument. But you have to also understand when it’s one man versus the world, they find your weak spots pretty quick.
And a targeted attack on your weak spots, in this case, rising interest rates, falling bond prices. In a bear market environment, we’ve lost $11 trillion in just a few weeks. That’s a big weak spot. And they know that now. So I believe, I think we can get it two ways, all right? Either we’re in trouble because they found Trump’s weak spot and now they know how to, specifically how to attack us. And by the way, if their ally, if our enemy’s ally happens to be the Federal Reserve, we know the Fed and Trump and Jay Powell do not like each other. This is well documented from 2018. And the.
We had the Christmas Eve from hell, the fourth quarter from hell, brought to us by Jay Powell because he got tired of Trump talking smack and he raised rates eight straight times to show him a lesson. And we had a complete collapse in the stock market. So this is not the first time this happened. I think It’s a safe, I think it’s a safe statement to say that the Federal Reserve is not in a hurry to do President Trump any favors. I think that’s a very, very safe statement. Now, if the Federal Reserve wants to join in teaching him a lesson, get Trump as we’ve outlined it here, then you can see how easy it would be to tip this whole thing over. So that’s why I’ve had a problem, the execution. We don’t have a coalition.
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This coalition should involve the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve and Jay Powell and Trump and Scott Bessant should be on the same page, speaking from the same playbook. That’s what happened in the financial crisis. You need the Federal Reserve, you need central banks on your side. Instead, what happens. We learned last night that Trump has asked the Supreme Court, through his Justice Department, to waive the restriction on firing agency heads. In other words, firing Jay Powell. That’s now been pushed to the Supreme Court. I’m seeing almost no one talk about it today.
Maybe I missed it, but that broke last night on Bloomberg and New York Times as well. So, yeah, that’s the downside risk. They know his weak spot, they know his Achilles heel. But the good part to that is Trump also knows what he must do to stop these collapses from happening. Like we were seeing before his pause yesterday, I believe, you know, he can keep this in his back pocket. And we need to announce a deal with South Korea or Japan, have those deals ready to go to stop any sharp declines. Right. And maybe announce a deal or two every day, you know, and that gets us kind of limping through this 90 day process until we can get China to bend the knee, which they’re never going to do.
This is going to have to be a, some kind of a. They have to get together, have a confab. They’re going to have to get there. It’s got to be a negotiated settlement of some kind. The Chinese are too proud. Remember, they shut their entire economy down for over a year for the pandemic, just absorbed it. And the people, they don’t, they don’t question the leadership. They go right along.
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We don’t have that set up here. Doing lot of strength in the Chinese economy and a lot of strength in the Chinese way of life because of that setup. So I think, you know, if you’re trying to be a bully, as Xi has accused Trump of being, or Xi is second in line, accused Trump of being, that just plays right into the Chinese public’s hands. Here comes America, here comes the Imperialists, here they come. Look how they’re attacking us. Look what they’re trying to force us to do. Look at these bullies, right? So forcing them isn’t going to work. I actually think Trump knows that he always had a pretty good relationship with Xi and I do think that wanted getting something done here.
I really do believe that. I think it’s part of Trump’s master plan to negotiate this. But it’s hard to defend that now because we have lost $11 trillion because we have entered a very difficult looking bear market because we are on the verge of the country going into recession. And again, that’s what Trump said last night. He understood that risk is a recession. He said, but I want to make sure it’s not a depression. Trump used the D word. So again, that’s the, that’s the setup.
Okay, let me just say this. It’s Thursday. That means tomorrow’s Friday. With these sharp losses today, again, investors open up their portfolio tonight and say, okay, the last Friday, Monday cycles have been really, really bad. So let me go ahead and liquidate before the weekend, if you follow what I’m saying here brought tomorrow. If that’s what happens. And the bears pile on Trump’s enemies, pile on the bond market, vigilantes get back in force yields to 4.5, 4.6, 4.75% of the 10 year. Now you’re talking about a market that is in panic mode.
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Like, like, like much like we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks. So if that were to happen, folks, I’m going to tell you I would not want to have a lot of exposure going into the weekend. If tomorrow’s bad, I would not want to have a lot of exposure because again, these are, now we’re talking about a true crash, crash environment for Monday. I’m not predicting it. Okay? Yesterday’s gains were fantastic, although they did appear to be a, it did appear to be a bear market rally, which, you know, history tells us those don’t, those don’t last long. They’re short covering and they’re dead cat bounces, if you will. But again, that’s the playbook for the enemies of Trump and that’s our playbook as being smart money investors as we go into tomorrow and go into the weekend. I think it’s very important if I’m on Team Trump, I think it’s very important that they do anything they can to make the markets go up tomorrow so investors don’t panic and sell.
So we have Jim Cramer predicted last Monday it’d be Black Monday. We don’t want that to come true this coming Monday, do we now? All right, I can’t. I know even Trump, as much as he says, he’s just not paying attention. I know even, even Trump understands the significance of a full on stock market crash. Okay, like 1987. All right, what did I miss here? All right, I think that’s, that’s enough of my yapping, right? Let’s get right into the, into the internals today. They were so good yesterday. Oh, here’s, here’s one to cover real quick.
Yes, yesterday was good news about the, the pause on, on the big tariffs, but here’s what we still have in place. And this is why this market’s not out of the woods. Because a confused market is a market that’s going lower. If enough smart money investors talking about the big hedge fund types, big, the big, the big New York investment advisors, you know, the Merrill Lynch’s of the world, et cetera, Goldman Sachs, et cetera, et cetera. If they believe we’re going to have a recession, the reason that’s important is because that, that, that’s their message that goes out to their sales force and they begin liquidating. Because if we’re going to have a recession, this decline has just begun. I’m sorry, just take that to the bank. That’s the truth of it.
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Again, we still think that because of yesterday we can avoid a recession as long as swift action is taken to get all of this stuff removed. Here’s what I’m talking about. Even without the massive tariffs that Trump was going to put in place yesterday, here’s what we still have in place. 10% baseline tariffs, all countries globally. That’s still there. 25% tariffs on all automobile imports to the U.S. 20 big 25% on all steel and aluminum tariffs. 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and China, Mexico and Canada and not 125% tariffs on China.
That was a mistake. I’m not sure how you make that mistake, but the administration did is actually 145% tariffs on all imports from China. These are all still in place. Trademark is very, very, very much alive, folks. And yesterday was a nice one day respite. But it’s, this doesn’t change anything. And that’s why I believe to prevent a recession, action must be taken quickly. I don’t think we have the 90 days to, to try to apply pressure to China.
I would think that we have more like nine days. My concern is this is going to snowball like it really already has. And today could be a sneak preview of tomorrow and Monday. That could be rough. Unless something is done. I urge the administration to take action tomorrow, tonight, before the open tomorrow. Get this market rocking and rolling again tomorrow. Give, Give the market some hopium.
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And so we don’t have to worry about a Monday crash. I actually think they’re probably going to do that. Why? Because that’s absolutely what I would do if I was in their shoes. No doubt about it whatsoever. They have to do it, folks. Have to. Can’t have a Monday crash, right? Cannot have it. All right, let’s take a look under the hood today.
Again, not good internals, but yesterday’s were fantastic. Here’s what we got here today. 10 to 1 negatives on advanced decline. Excuse me, advanced decline, 10 to 1 negative. NYSE, NASDAQ. Four and a half to one negative volume. Remember yesterday, 98.2% up volume day. But fantastic, right? Today, 87.5% down volume day.
That doesn’t give you a lot of confidence. Today’s NASDAQ down volume was 68.1%. And we did have today because again, we bounced so much yesterday we didn’t have as many stocks hitting 252 low. Today we did have 291 stocks at 50 week low to just 42, hitting a new 52 week high. And our sector watch today, hey, we had a sector finish higher. How about that? Gotta laugh at something, right? Consumer staples up a whole 1/10 of 1%. Everything else was lower, led by energy. All right.
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Down 6.4%. This is another very serious topic. Another very serious topic because oil prices low 55 means companies stop producing oil. This is very bad news for oil patch. And there’s a lot of angst, a lot of anxiety and angst and anger building the oil patch. I know this firsthand. They’re asking the questions, many of us are, why are we doing this without a real game plan? Why put everything at risk, the entire system at risk for a grandiose attack against China? Build alliances, build coalitions, then surround China. Right? That makes sense.
This does not make sense, folks, at all. Energy. So if we get, if we get the oil patch shutting down, you know, you get an oil spike lower, right? We’re also seeing farm farmers are freaking out and they should. We have a lot of clients here. I’m thinking about one in particular right now, Shane. A big farmer on the west coast. And you know, they export a lot, a lot of their crops to, to, to China. And you know, it’s going to be tough again.
China has done reciprocal tariffs at 84%. It’s going to make his business very tough. Yeah he could be believes it could be a tough run here. We got to get this resolved. But that’s why energy stocks collapse today because of what I’m just talking about right here. This has to be reversed. This trend must be reversed quickly. Again Energy down 6.4%.
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Technology down 4 and a half percent. Communicate. You get the drift, right? Five sectors down 4%. Three sectors down 3%. The again across the board except for consumer staples up 1/10 of 1% in a commodity watch here. Well again gold back to back days of better than $100 ounce gains all time high of course 3190 on for futures. All right. Futures the all time high was just over 3200.
But really right there spot prices 3190. The last trade highway day was excuse me 3194 again that’s $110 up today. And that’s 3.6%. Gold is in Fuego. Silver up 2.3% today as well. I actually think that’s a bright spot. It does that. That does not tell us recession.
Okay that now Russ 2000 down another 4.3% today. That screaming recession. Look at the chart of the R2K of IWM you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Domestic businesses are getting slaughtered, right. Stock prices are their discounting mechanism. They’re telling you what’s coming. But again silver today was up 2.2% as an industrial metal. We want to see if it’s also coarse precious metal.
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I think that’s what overrode the industrial side today because there’s so much demand for gold and silver. Record levels of demand specifically for gold. It’s again it’s physical now. It’s everything physical taking delivery. That is a telltale sign. It’s a big tell of a market that’s going higher. It’s funny because just last week so many people turned bearish on gold and we told you that gold might get hit because again in a liquidation event everything does. But look at the way this sucker is bounced back.
That tells you what’s really going on here folks. I’ll tell you part of it. What’s going on. China is buying gold hand over fist. Why would they be doing that? Well they love gold, always have. But what what they can do because they, they have a dollar shortage, right? That’s look at their yuan, the currency. It’s in collapse mode. They need all the US Dollars they can get.
Well guess what they do by buying gold. That’s what they get. They get gold backed by dollars. They can sell it, they can use it as collateral. They can use it to support their currency. China is buying gold hand over fist, but everybody else is too. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a perfect world. All the stores aligned.
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It doesn’t matter if it’s overbought. Folks, I think this is the move that takes. Well again $4,000 is our target this year. I think this is the move if, if the worst case scenario plays out. This goal is going to $10,000 on this move. Right? And it should because it’s been manipulated lower for so, so long, literally decades. This is proof, right? This is, we, we have proof of this in court that they manipulated it low. The Goldman Sachs, the JP Morgan’s of the world.
Lehman’s back in the day did it a lot. Absolutely rock hard proof. Prove it in court. And it changed nothing. Right? Because again they own the system. But anyway, this, this could be that big move in precious metals, specifically in gold. Copper today again very good. Sign here.
Up 4.4%, 437 a pound. Crude oil today again hit hard back down to 60 bucks a barrel. That’s down three and a half percent today. Let me just get, what was the low today? Yeah, it did. The low today was actually 5877. Okay. It had a little bit of rally at the close. The 52 week low from, from just what a few days ago.
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Now 55 bucks an arrow. That’s the level folks. That’s the level.55 is a crucial letter. Lettable again the administration, Chris Wright, of course, you know, just the, the, the Energy Secretary obviously knows this as well as anybody as the founder CEO of Liberty Energy. Hope he’s hope, hope he’s, hope he’s speaking in Trump’s ear about this. Right? Got to get this resolved soon. What else today? Bitcoin. So many screens open here.
Bitcoin again, I’m impressed. I am impressed. It’s 79,754. Yes, it was down 4% but it’s held up so incredibly well. I would have thought in this kind of a bear market decline. $11 trillion lost. One of the fastest moves to bear market in history. Second fastest only to the plan Dimmick.
Okay. I would have thought bitcoin would get absolutely smoked if you told me that we were going to drop 20% in our market. Plus, you know, 20% in a matter of a couple, three weeks, I would have told you that bitcoin would fall to 60,000 or less. It’s 79,000. It’s, it’s starting to become a store of value along with gold. That’s a very interesting development. It has us wanting to buy it back as soon as we possibly can, as soon as we think a real floor, final floor is in place for this market. All right, folks, hey, that’s it for the day, number one.
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Hey, I appreciate your feedback list. Thanks for listening. Thank you for your feedback. And I know that we’ve got so many emails. I reply, I try to reply to every email I get, but there are so many I have not replied to. I will, but it be this weekend probably. If I miss your email and you want to make sure I see it, please send it again. You’re not going to offend me.
All right. I really appreciate it and thank you for sending them. Some of the messages I’m getting, they’re heartbreaking. Not just financial losses. Not, you know, hey, my man, I was retiring next month and now, guess what, I’m not. My wife hates me for this. That was one message. A lot of messages from retirees.
Shell shock. People in shell shock because we don’t know where this ends. It’s a big gamble Trump’s taken and he’s doing it with our money and with our livelihoods. I hope he understands the significance instead of just ego. Understand what your actions actually represent. I believe he does because I know he’s got America’s best interests and hearts. I know this. I think we all feel that.
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Right? But look at the mistakes he made in the plandemic. So it’s, you know, you say he did it before. What if it’s again? And this time he’s got the enemies of the world lined up against him. They’d be so easy to tip the US system over. Have you seen the credit card delinquency rates? All right. Hitting the highest levels ever now for people that are making interest payments only. I’m going to write this up tomorrow morning as depressing as hell. I don’t want to have to even talk about it because the consumer have been so strong.
That is gone. This is shocking. When I read this, I had no idea. So the consumer, not only are animal spirits gone, not only is the wealth effect rolling over and now negative, the consumer now is really starting to feel it. That was quick, wasn’t it? Imagine people aren’t prepared for a recession, not at all this country is so ill prepared for a true recession where the Federal Reserve doesn’t bail us out, where the government doesn’t come with stimulus money. Okay? I’m talking about an actual cleansing of the system. This country is not ready for that. The world’s not ready for it.
Certainly the United States is not ready for it. I know American citizens aren’t ready for this. This could be that. This, this has the makings. This has the makings of the depression. Trump used the word last night. We need to start talking honestly about this, folks. Trump needs to hear it from us, man.
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Do whatever you can do, within reason. Do not crash the thing and put us all into another depression with these debt levels. Or as Tyler reminded me, wasn’t. Isn’t that always been their game? Hasn’t that always been the states, right? The deep states game. Crash the market to such a degree, crash the. That people have to be able to still feed their kids and put a roof over their head. So they’re desperate. And when people, that many people, we’re talking about 100 million people are desperate, they’ll do anything to feed their kids, anything.
Oh, you want to rule over me? You want me, you want to force me to be a communist? No problem. Can I get some food? I know I would do anything for my kids and my family. And they know this. They know they had this on us. This has always been their big picture game plan. President Trump, you’re a super smart guy. You have to know this point does raise a lot of questions, very uncomfortable questions, I might add. We got to protect ourselves, folks.
In a worst case. Don’t, don’t think that someone’s got our back here. Protect yourselves. There are a lot of ways to do that. One of the ways is not to have too much exposure to the stock market. And unfortunately, we’ve not yet had capitulation from the public. The public thinks this is all going to be okay, that Trump’s got a master plan. He may.
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But MAGA is sitting there not capitulating. They’re adding money, money, money in back into the market, thinking this is a great buying opportunity. What if it’s not? I don’t know that it is anymore. I don’t know that we’ve liquidated a lot of our positions because the trend has changed. This is when bad things happen. This is when Black swan events happened. Raise up, raise your voice. Speak up.
Don’t let this MAGA crowd and they will shout you down, man. They will call you every name in the book. What’s wrong with these people? What is wrong with these people? You can’t say a negative thing about their president or you’re just your turncoat. What is wrong with you? Snap out of it. Understand what the downside risk are. There are no guarantees this is going to work out. Protect yourself. Do what you have to do to make sure you are liquid in the event the worst case scenario happens.
You can always get back in the market, folks, right? You can always get back in and everything I just said. All right, so if you were here, most of you would ask me, okay, you’ve laid out the word. You scare the shit out of me. Now you left the worst case scenario. That’s not the worst case scenario. But you’ve laid out a worst case scenario. Now tell me, what are the odds? All right, 30%. That, that’s big for me, right? Because any normal day, I’d say It was like 2 1/2 percent.
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Just a black swan event, you know, Japan goes into whatever and the whole system falls apart. It’s a lot higher than that now. This could happen. Protect yourself, right? That’s what we’re doing with our money. That’s what we’re writing about every day. We’re looking to get short here and to make money on the downside Again, we’re gonna have an active trading situation here. That’s what we’ve been doing. We had a really good trade yesterday.
25% in one day. That’s the kind of thing we want to do. Parabolic options. We plan to get invested tomorrow in the event that it looks like we could have that Friday, Monday experience. So I’ll communicate that to you tomorrow. All right, folks, again, hope you had a great day, an even better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close.