In today's episode, Tyler breaks down an action-packed day of stock market action that saw all of our major indexes hit all-time highs. He also dives into the latest moves from the Federal Reserve and what they mean going forward for investors. He also spotlights some of the big winners today, including an explosive rally from Intel. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing Podcast. Hope you all had a fantastic day out there today. It is great to be back here with you on the VRA Investing podcast. After a a few weeks here of not recording one, I was very excited to get back here today and thank you Kip for covering for me in there as well. And even better to be back here on a day with all time highs. So we’ve got a great podcast here for you today.

I’ll get to those all time highs here in a minute. And some big moves from a couple of our V positions I’ll talk about as well. But first, tomorrow I will be on the Charles Schwab Network for a one on one with nicole pedalides at 2:30pm Eastern Time, 1:30 Central Time. So hope you can join us there. We’ll be talking markets, talking some of our favorite VRA positions as well. So hope you can join us. You can watch and tune in from anywhere@schwabnetwork.com so hope you can join us there today or tomorrow. Excuse me, in 2:30 Eastern Time then, of course.

[00:01:25]:
Gotta cover the Fed. You know, Kip always says it. I’m the resident Fed watcher here. So thank you Kip, for covering for me yesterday after that Fed meeting. We we’ll get into all of that here in a minute, but it does feel good to be confirmed here. We’re in a, you know, don’t fight the Fed kind of way to the bullish side. Here we are again, but with Jay Powell at the helm of the Fed, you just never know what you’re going to get. And unpredictability is not, is not a characteristic you want in your Federal Reserve chairman.

Absolutely not. So we’ll also do a quick recap of our V Investing screens here and what they’re telling us in this market at all time highs here. And then briefly after our VRA commodity watch at the end of the podcast today, I would like to say a few words about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I wanted to lead with that today. I know that it was a little over a week ago now, but I’m not sure if I could be able to make it through the rest of the podcast after doing that. So we’ll save the best for last here today. So we do have a great podcast here for you today and we’ll jump right in to today’s action. We’ll go ahead and kick it off.

You know With a few Fed comments to echo Kip’s thoughts from yesterday, where the Fed did cut rates by 25 basis points as expected, many were hoping for a bigger cut than that. Yours truly as well, we didn’t expect it, but hey, we would have loved to have seen it. And first off with the Fed conversation here, and sorry if I’m getting a little glare on my, on my screen here, see if that’s a little better. You know, first off here, especially on this Fed conversation, you know, one of the goals here for us at the VRA is to simplify the markets because so many people out there over complicate things. And that’s why we have the VRA investing system to simplify market watching, to simply remove our emotion from the process as well and focus on the facts. Because they’re simply, simply put here, there’s no greater money making mechanism on the planet than the stock market. And that rings true here once again today. When you’re at all time highs, it means no one has loss, right? Blue sky territory.

[00:03:54]:
So when you have the greatest money making machine of all time right in front of you, you know, we have no choice. Especially as we’ve talked about and Kip and I wrote in the Big Bribe, where in this environment where inflation may not be running hot but the money printer is still on, you must own inflationary assets. And so I bring that up here because with the Federal Reserve, they love, love to use their Fed speak was as many people call it. And as you start to watch these FOMC meetings, read their updates, read the minutes, you start to understand exactly what they’re saying. And it’s just, you know, everyone kind of has that moment when you start diving into this where it’s like, wait a minute, that just means this, right? Quantitative easing means that in quantitative tightening means they’re rolling off the balance sheet, means they’re selling their assets. Quantitative easing means they’re buying assets. Could be all kinds of different assets, typically mortgage backed securities, which we can get into all of those. But there are simpler ways to, to say all of these things, which is why we spend so much time here breaking down, you know, these types of things and putting them in a simplistic fashion or hopefully as simple as we possibly can.

But as Kip talked about yesterday, Jay Powell did not appear enthusiastic to be up there. We’ve seen him in other, other situations. Even when, you know, things are rough, he kind of loves being out there and loves the limelight. Right. For somebody who’s such a poor public speaker he really does seem to love being in front of a camera, doesn’t he? He likes the celebrity status of being the Federal Reserve Chairman, which is why we’ve, we’ve got to end these, you know, regular FOMC meetings. Yes, it’s good for transparency to some extent. We’re not really getting a transparent Fed, though. We know they’re trading behind closed doors.

[00:05:46]:
There’s all types of controversies. There’s no shred of credibility left we with the Federal Reserve. And a lot of that is responsible. From Janet Yellen and then continued by J. Powell. It began long before that. I mean, really, at the end of the day, it’s an illegitimate institution. So it had no credibility to begin with.

But with this massive payroll that they have of economists that Kip talked about as well, to continue to get these major calls wrong time and time again just shows you the, the group think of this institution. And that’s true for most of our government institutions right now. But, you know, just a quick trip down memory lane, you know, we had the 2018, December from hell where Jay Powell continued to hike rates into what is the most illiquid time of the year for the market, which is in December, which led to the Christmas Eve massacre that day. I had the podcast that day. It was a half day of trading, but brutal day. It actually turned out to be a pretty good buying opportunity in hindsight, as we will see and I’ll discuss here more on the podcast today. Any pullbacks in this market in our view, I’ll give you a little hint. We’ll continue to use them as buying opportunities.

[00:06:59]:
But one thing I did kind of find funny or, or maybe just interesting from the Fed today. Well, let me, let me recap some more of the, the quick trip down memory lane, because that’s just one. Then of course, we, we had 2020 in his 60 Minutes interview where he basically told the government, go and go and spend as much as you want on these stimulus bills because we can just digitally create dollars. No one had ever said that before. Right. It’s not even a money printer. It’s just a digital few clicks of some buttons and boom, We’ve inflated our money supply by over 30%. You know, it’s come down a little bit.

At one point, actually it’s back up again. M2 money supplies, right. @ record highs. But at one point, just in 2020, we basically added between 35 and 40% to our money supply. And yet Jay Powell wonders where inflation is coming from. Say it’s supply chain or this or that those can have minor impacts on inflation. Absolutely. But inflation is a monetary issue.

When you’re printing money, what do you think is going to happen? Right. More dollars out there competing for the same amount of supply. Prices are going to rise. It’s that simple. You know, so I was going back through some of the Fed previous minutes. I went back a few years on this one because December of 2022, you know, they, they put their projections out there. And as Kip said yesterday, you know, Jay Powell basically said yesterday, well, forecasting’s hard, which I respect. It is hard.

[00:08:30]:
No, no doubt about it. That’s the one of the first honest things he’s probably said in a while. Unfortunately, it just about ended there. But in 2022, December of 2022, they said that GDP for 2025 would be below 1.8%. Well, as Kip covered as well, this week, the Atlanta Fed just up their target for GDP here for Q3. Let me get the exact numbers. Want to make sure I get it right. Update I know is at 3.1.

I believe we went to 3.4. Let me just double check that here. Here I can show you what I’m looking at. All of these are, you know, publicly available data. Don’t always agree with some of these. Right. But it’s what we got to go off of. So Here we go.

[00:09:17]:
GDP now from the Atlanta Fed again going up here 3.3% as of yesterday. Again, the Fed was looking at 1.8% not too long ago. When you go and look at their previous dot plots also all over the place from what we’ve seen in the last few years. And I’ll get to the dot plots here in a second, but I do want to focus on some comments here from Chris Waller before the last Fed meeting know in July went as far as to say that the Fed openly saying the Fed was not following the data, instead pausing their easing cycle on assumptions of tariffs. In his words, counter to economic theory. Right. These people aren’t even focusing on the data like they, they say, data dependent, data dependent. Now it’s just uncertainty.

Now it’s just opinion. Now it’s just political. It’s. Yeah, it’s never been more clear how political of an institution the Fed is than now. Thank you to James o’ Keefe for exposing a lot of that as well. So Waller did vote to cut rates today. But when I. We’ll look at the dot plot here in a second.

[00:10:32]:
You know, Trump’s new appointee Stephen Miller are. I’m blanking on his name now, Stephen Myon. Excuse me. There we go. Did vote for a bigger cut here, you know, especially after the jobs revisions. I was gone for that one. So, you know, it’s like I said, great to be back here with you. And so I jump around a little bit.

It’s. I haven’t covered these on the podcast yet. I know that Kip has covered them, but I like to, I like to tie up all the loose ends as we’re discussing these things. And as always, you know, feel free to send any questions in to support at VRA Insider. I’ll be back here with you tomorrow for the podcast as well. So any screen shares you want to see or any topics you want to you’d like me to cover, send them on in. You know, email me personally, Tyler vrainsider.com so you know, again, bad jobs data overcounted showing that the Fed was way behind because that’s a primary metric that they look at. Although you know, behind closed doors they have access to this data beforehand.

Right, But Kip said this and I’m gonna, I’m gonna butcher the quote. But you know, if you think about what the BLS is and probably even the Federal Reserve too, just imagine the dmv. But the same thing at these institutions. Poorly run, you know, apathetic people, you know, probably because it is not, it’s probably a thankless task, especially at the dmv. You know, at least at the Fed you’re a celebrity. But again, the revisions job numbers shows just how far behind the curve they are. Trueflation now again in the 2% range here, inflation, we’ve said it for some time, is a rear view mirror issue and the neutral rate is likely closer to 3%. Today we’re at four to four and a quarter.

[00:12:22]:
We were just at 425 to 450 yesterday and should be far, far lower than we are right now. So still restrictive from the Fed. Fortunately for us, we’re in, in the middle of the innovation revolution meets Trump Economic Miracle 2.0 and GDP continues to be on the ride rise despite what the Federal Reserve is doing. So let’s take a quick look here at the dot plot for the Fed. You see just how kind of all over the place it is. That’s got to be Stephen Myron. All the way down here at the bottom I would imagine at the top it’s probably. I just guessing Lisa Cook, right? She shouldn’t even have been voting.

That’s the joke by the way. I don’t know anything about where she might have voted in this. But you know, she’s got some, a few grudges there I’m sure. And again, just all over the place though. And I was going back to look at some of those previous minutes, you know, you see some of this especially further out, the spread is wider but I mean just mixed views all over the place here. And so with that let’s take a look at what the CME’s fed watch tool is saying. Current target rate four four to four and a quarter. We’ve got a 92% chance for another 25 basis point cut coming here in October.

[00:13:42]:
You know, so we’ve got a little over a month before we get to that with one more expected here in December as well. An 83% probability, 84 probability of another cut there. And then that’s, that’s essentially where the market expects it to end. Three rate cuts. Although you know we’ll see where we get to by then. We’ll see what other Fed members we have by then as well. So a lot could change between now and then. This, you know we referenced this here a lot on the podcast but this, these probabilities are a guide really more than a tool because they change so quickly.

So with that said, you know, we’ll continue to watch from the Federal Reserve here. We’ll get a lot of Fed speakers over the next year know coming weeks until they enter their next blackout period before the next meeting. So the market reaction here, we did not get a buy the rumor, sell the news event which hey that’s great. We hit all time highs that across the board all four of our major indexes hitting all time highs. And even if we had gotten a buy the rumor, sell the news kind of event, nothing has changed from the VRA investing system. We would use that as an opportunity to buy the dip. So let’s go ahead and look at our market action on the day. Kicking it off here with some big headlines.

[00:15:05]:
We had you know, Tesla trying to wrap up was that like eight positive days in a row did hit a multi month high before pulling back. And then huge news from Nvidia here, you know, announcing today a collaboration with intel to develop custom data center and PC products. You know that intel has been you know, still for $150 billion company or so has been a dumpster fire today was up over what 22%. We’ll go ahead and share that one on here as well. 22.7%. Look at that. That’s the catapult that I’m Talking about catapulted to a 52E high. The, the highest level since what, November of last year.

Yep, there we go. November of last year or so. No, sorry, excuse me, July of last year, you know, huge move, absolutely massive move on the day and another win for President Trump here. As you know, the US Government just made an unprecedented investment into a company here, the 8.9 billion dollar investment. And so similar to Nvidia’s investment, this is through common stock. So it’s done great things for their, their share price as you can see. Good to see really as well, Nvidia higher on the day sometimes with these kind of, I wouldn’t say merger deal. This is a collaboration but sometimes with deals like this, you know, market watchers could see it as a negative for the company on the buying end.

[00:16:36]:
They overpay. Will it work out all of those things? So we’ll have to see what happens here for Intel. But getting the largest chip maker and largest company in the world on your side certainly does not hurt. So with that, you might have thought tech would have led the way today, but in fact it was small caps leading the way today, hitting an all time high. That’s where I got November from. This is the first all time high for small caps since November up two and a half percent. Great to see here even with yesterday yields higher. We’ve been bullish on this group for some time now.

We have a position here at, in the VRA portfolio. If you want to find out more, go and check us out@vraletter.com if you’re not a member already. We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now. You’ll get full access to all of our daily updates. You get access to our core portfolio, our special reports and much, much more in there as well. Next up we had the NASDAQ up N 0.94% on the daytoday. And exactly what you want to see though, semis leading tech semis up 3.8% on the day. Of course that, that, that intel news does help again all time high there.

[00:17:50]:
Nasdaq closing today though at 22,470. All time high S&P 500 was the next one up. You know, finishing slightly off the highs of the day really across the board up half a % though to 6,631. And finally the Dow Jones up just about 3/10 of 1% to 46, 142. And so Kip has talked about this as well. We’re either at or near overbought levels for just about all of our major indexes, some more so than others. And we’ve entered this period. We’re in the middle of a very weak period, seasonally speaking.

But we only have eight trading days left for Q3. You know what that means. New quarter fund flows, retirement fund flows, and another round of what should be very good earnings from this market. So we’re not out of the woods yet. But again, with 9 out of 12 VRA investing screens bullish right now, GDP growth into at least anticipated to be much higher than was expected not too long ago. This is when we’re still looking for opportunities. You know, we’ll wait, we’ll be patient. We love monthly dollar cost averaging.

[00:19:07]:
If you’re a new listener here, big fans of monthly dollar cost averaging. So we’ll continue to look to dollar cost average into our favorite positions on pullbacks as they come up. Pullbacks right now continue to be buying opportunities. Absolutely. You know, we saw a big jump in sentiment this week for AI still more bears than bulls where we had 42.4% bears, now 41.7% bulls. That’s a big nearly 13, 13.7% swing in bulls. We’re at 28% polls just last week. I guess the Bulls were just waiting for that rate cut and hey, they got it.

They flipped. You know, again going into the quarter as well and getting more bullish sentiment into the market. This is liquidity and will continue to fuel this move higher, especially in Q4 because so many man money managers, hedge fund managers out there have been on the wrong side of this market or if not on the wrong side of this market, underexposed in so many ways. So again, fuel to the fire going forward. Next up here, let’s take a look at our internals on the day. You know, we’ve not seen the best internals as of late, you know, but not bad numbers here today. Just about just shy of 2 to 1 positive advanced decline for the NYSE better than 2 to 1 positive on the NASDAQ. 52 week highs to lows coming in positive and strongly positive for the NASDAQ.437 stocks hitting 52EKAIs to just 61 hitting 52E lows.

[00:20:46]:
And lastly here, volume coming in with nearly 75%, 74.7% upside volume for the Nasdaq. Very good to see. Now of course, as Kip has talked about as well, I’ve talked about it here on the podcast. A lot of that, you know, in the nasdaq, you have some not so prime time players. You got some traders on penny stocks out there as well. So that data can be a little skewed. But I’m not going to rationalize the data. That’s a good number and not quite as strong on the NYSE.

You know, just shy of 2 to 1 positive though there as well. Next up, looking at our sectors on the day today we had at least three of our sectors hitting all time highs as well. As we say here, often new highs beget new highs. So very good to see. Of course as you might expect, tech led the way hitting an all time high. Followed there by industrials and then communication services. The that was an all time high and the final all time high was actually, excuse me, the financials on the day. Now we did see yields higher today and if you’re wondering that just came out of left field, you’ll see why here in a second.

[00:21:56]:
But look at this chart. I mean this isn’t like a scary pop or anything in yields, right? Yes, we’re back above a 4, but we dipped below it here briefly. We’d love to see this low getting taken out. Regardless, our long term view remains intact that yields will continue to move lower. And I say that now because utilities finished higher on the day to day one of our positive sectors, not significantly, but utilities are the biggest borrowers in the country. And as a forward looking mechanism, if there are buyers on utilities, that means people are expecting yields to head lower as well. Maybe not people is in retail, maybe retail didn’t talk about this quite as much. But again that exposure there is very interesting to watch for then for our laggards on the day, consumer staples, consumer discretionary energy and materials.

All right, next up here let’s take a look at our VRA commodity watch on the day today. Let me get a quick refresh here. Gold is lower on the day to day. Really pretty much flat at 3675. And exactly what you want to see from the group today is exactly what we got. And that’s the miners leading the metal. Just like you want to see semis leading tech. You want to see the gold miners leaning gold and GDX today not up big.

[00:23:21]:
Nothing crazy, but did finish higher by 2/10 of 1%. Not far away from from that all time high. Trying to work off some of those extreme overbought on steroids readings there because it’s just been a parabolic move higher really for the miners. And our favorite junior miner as well, Snowline gold. You know it’s been on a Great run in 2025 so far. You know, a little bit of pullback recently from the peak again buying opportunity. Just got back from that trip. I Kip covered it and I might cover this some more tomorrow.

But just an amazing trip to go out to the Yukon to meet the Berndhal family as well. Scott and Ron, thank you for having us out there and the whole Snowline family. I mean what this is a special company folks. You know, I’ll continue to discuss that here more and more as well. Let’s look now to have one more point for the miners. Well, again just that we’re at extreme overbought levels here but as you’ve heard Kip say, our new price target on gold of $15,000 an ounce. You know, of course we’ll get to 5,000 on the way. That’s about a seven year timeline, 2030 to 2032 for that fifteen thousand dollar price target on gold.

[00:24:41]:
But that’s how bullish we are on this group and what that will do for the miners. That’s where you really to be to play this move higher. Next up here. Silver was essentially flat on the day as well. Not far off from its high of 4297 now at 4208. Copper now at $4.60 a pound. And quickly run that one there. Oil see down 1/10 of 1% today at 63.57 a barrel.

Working on some interesting, you know, price targets there for oil. Nothing crazy to the upside. We know that President Trump wants to keep oil prices lower. But the question does remain, you know, just kind of an industry. I don’t know if adage is the right word, but most people looked previously prior to 2020 as you know, 40 to $45 a barrel is like that’s the point where people are really, you know, you’re not breaking even. They’re going to start shutting down rigs. Where’s that price floor now after inflation? Everything we’ve seen over the last six years, is it $50 a barrel? Is it $55 a barrel? What’s the lowest that we can go there? You know, just, just, just a thought. If you all have any thoughts, please feel free to send them in our way as well.

[00:26:06]:
We know we’ve got some great oil and gas insiders here as listeners and as members. So thank you for being here with us as always, we value your opinion and keep them coming. We absolutely love it. Finally here, bitcoin looking good today as well. And a reminder, Q4 is not only the strongest period of the year for stocks, it’s been one of the strongest periods of the year for bitcoin here as well. So we’re right now at $117,000 of Bitcoin, the all time high. What is it? 124. 124.5 for Bitcoin. So we’ll see if bitcoin can hit our year end price target of $200,000 a bitcoin. You know, we’ve talked about this here at length. There’s no greater supply and demand story. And really the rest of crypto, you know, just as a whole, some of these smaller coins that, that are valuable, not the altcoins or you know, shitcoins as they, a lot of people call them. There’s, these are, there’s some quality products out there and they’re acting like it now as well. All right, folks, well, kind of final thoughts here for the day before I close the podcast, just something, you know, it’s been weighing on my heart. Obviously.

[00:27:17]:
It’s been over a week now since Charlie Kirk was assassinated. I was traveling back at the time and you know, I really just quickly here wanted to say how saddened I was by it, as I know many of you are. Thank you for your emails and for your messages. I know what an impact he has had on so many people. It’s just so tough to lose somebody like that. To echo, you know, one of his main missions, I want to quote him on this because, you know, just an incredible mission that this was, was to have an open dialogue and to quote him, you know, when discourse ends, violence begins. And I, I, you know, I think that’s incredibly relevant right now. And while I didn’t know Charlie Kirk, we all know how impactful he was.

I do know people who knew him and, you know, just speak so highly of him. And I know some of the younger generation, how influenced they were by him as well in such a positive way that made it acceptable to be a Christian. Right? Maybe not acceptable. It’s always, you know, right. But to be more outspoken about it, to be bolder about their faith. And when you lose someone with that big of a voice, when that impactful of a voice, when someone like that is gone, the silence that gets left behind makes you feel like something’s missing in the world even if you don’t know that person. You know, he was a husband, he was a father, he’s a man of God who believed in serving a higher purpose and, you know, not going to try and speak for anybody. But I do think that he, rather than be angry about us about this, he would want us to continue that mission and to honor that legacy by continuing the dialogue, by continuing the conversation and not resorting to violence.

[00:29:21]:
I think that’s what he would have wanted and I want to honor that legacy. To quickly quote a passage, one of my favorites that’s had a huge impact on my life is just The Romans, chapter 12, the entire chapter as a whole. The final verse in there, I won’t, I won’t quote the entire Romans 12 right now, but the final verse, you know, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. I think that’s exactly what he would want now is to continue to go and continue conversations in a rational, logical, calm, level headed manner rather than resorting to any form of violence. You know, as hard as it is to hold that anger in, to use it rather than, and anger towards violence for kind of a lack of a better term that I can think of right now, but to get, again, use it to fuel the fire, to continue those conversations, you know, so rest in peace, Charlie. And you know, I pray that we can pick it up where you left off. You know, of course our thoughts and prayers go out to his family as well. And Charlie, thank you for your boldness.

Thank you for your mission and most importantly, thank you for being an example of what unwavering faith looks like. So thank you all again. Sorry I’m getting a little emotional here. That’s why I did it at the end of the podcast. But yeah, just been weighing on me here. So thank you for being here with us again. Thank you, Charlie. And our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

[00:30:55]:
Thank you for being here with us today. I. I’ll be on the Charles Schwab network tomorrow. I’ll be back here with you at the close as well tomorrow for our daily VRA Investing podcast. Again, so grateful to be back here with you and incredibly be back on a day with all time highs like today. So have a great night everyone. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.