In today's episode, Tyler wraps up an exciting week for our markets and covers some of the key trends shaping the investing landscape for the second half of 2025. He also dives into how retail investors, dubbed the “Mrs. Watanabes” of the modern era, are driving the market’s resilience, outpacing institutional players who have been caught flat-footed during recent rallies.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Friday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a great end to your week out there. Hope you’ve got an exciting weekend ahead of you as well. It’s caused for at least a little bit of, of celebration here as we had a good week in the market this week. We’ve had a good run, you know, for from the April 7 lows. And really this has been one of the better weeks since then as well.

I’ll get into that a little bit more later, but exactly what we wanted to see not only on the session today, but we saw this quite a bit this week where we got not necessarily selling pressure out of the gate, but we did see that today, right where we were lower after this morning’s trading and finish exactly like you want to see at or near the highs of the day. And we saw that as a repeating pattern this week of the market making, maybe making taking a lull in the morning and finishing at the highs of the day, some version of that just about every day this week. So good week for our markets again and we’ve got a lot to cover here. Kind of gonna keep this one short and sweet here for you on a Friday as really, I mean, there’s not much more to say than it was a great week. And then of course, we’ll look forward here as well. But to quickly recap a little bit more on the week because Kip talked about this on Charles Payne yesterday and I think this is going to be a very important theme going forward as well. It’s been the reason why the market has done so well and will continue to be the reason why this market performs for the rest of this year and into the future as well. We’ll see what happens.

[00:02:05]:
There’s always the chance of, you know, some tariff calamity. But as as Kips talked about on the podcast this week, we think we’re back to a buy the dip type of environment. So get to all of that here. But the main point here that I wanted to make to start off is that professional investors, hedge funds, etcetera, have missed out on a large part of this move higher. Right. Not only did they sell their move, sell their positions, you know, panicking on the way lower of what, what the tariff impact is going to be, right? We went the, the, it’s been a wave, a wild ride for some of these institutional investors since Trump has been in office, right? It was, you know, he got Elected. It was going to be a golden age. And then he got into office and we started to sell off on the tariff news.

[00:02:59]:
Then it was going to be a recession, then it was going to be a great depression. You know, a lot of talk about that because of the tariffs. Smoot Hawley, right. And then now back recessions canceled everybody. And they just missed a lot of these moves where retail investors not only didn’t sell their positions, they bought the dip here, right? This is what Kip talked about. The Mrs. Watanabes of the modern era, the retail investors who have done so much for this market, it can’t be understated, really peaked a trough, declined for the NASDAQ from the December all time highs, and these include some intraday numbers, but roughly, you know, fell over 25% from the December all time highs, right. In just a matter of months, again, retail investors buying the dip.

[00:03:57]:
How much worse could this sell off have been without retail investors, without the Mrs. Watanabes, right. Without millennials who as Kip I talked about in Charles Payne yesterday, has become one of the largest generational buyers of stocks. I will say that a lot of people that I know in my generation that I’ve talked to, they weren’t too concerned about this pullback, right? Because so many of them saw what happened during COVID or what a great buying opportunity the bear market of 2022 was, right? Other than this pullback, you could have bought it any time in 2022 and you still feel great about holding that position today, right? So they look at this as an opportunity to create generational wealth. You know, a lot of people like to focus on, you know, the panic, Black Monday of 1987. And Kip could tell this story much, much better than I can. Obviously, I wasn’t there, but when you zoom out on that year, you know, the market finished higher on the year. So if you didn’t panic sell that day, you didn’t even have to buy, right? You still would have finished higher that very same year.

[00:05:09]:
You know, so it’s important to remember that here. But again, how much worse could this 25% NASDAQ pullback have been without retail investors buying the dip? You know, I talked about these numbers on my podcast last week. Kip has talked about them a lot as well. You know, the, the stats from bank of America last week were individual investors had been net buyers of equities for 21 consecutive weeks. You know, I wonder if this week will likely make another week in that as well, more than double the previous records. Incredible. While at the same time hedge funds have sold record levels, right. Institutional clients have dumped the second largest in history, over 2.7 billion, while the private clients have purchased over 2 billion of equities at the same time.

[00:06:01]:
So as we see it, the retail investor looks to be in a fantastic position here while institutions will be looking to play catch up, right? That’s fuel for the fire going forward. And that’s a big reason why I said at the beginning of this podcast, we think that we’re back to a buy the dip environment. The pullbacks along the way we see as being short and sweet, right? But they will happen. There will be pullbacks along the way. So before you get, you know, fear of missing out, before you get FOMO and rush to make some trades, remember, if this is a V shaped recovery, when all is said and done and it’s looking like it will be like 2020, right? That’s the most recent real V shaped recovery from a momentous event. And this is, you know, nothing like Covid, right? Especially now in the aftermath being a month and a half away from that period. Again, there could be more shocks to the system not ruling that out and it could be tariff related even, right? But it’s already looking like the negotiations are going to keep moving forward in a predictable manner and at least the uncertainty, right? That’s what we’ve talked about so much about. The market hates that uncertainty.

[00:07:16]:
So again, before you get FOMO here, if it is a V shaped recovery like we saw in 2020, there were multiple pullbacks along the way to all time highs, back to all time highs, you know, from March to roughly August, when we got back to all time highs, you know, the March lows to August or some cases July maybe, there were, during that time frame There were multiple 4 to 7% pullbacks and the. But the pauses were very short, very sweet and you know, if you blinked, you missed it. Really. So again, not to get to FOMO here, because even I just ran these numbers today, even if you bought the NASDAQ the day it got back to all time highs in 2020, over the next six, seven months you would have made 40%. Over the next 18 months, the NASDAQ was up over 65% before the peak ahead of the 2022 bear market. Incredible. The semis did even better if you had bought the smh, the non leveraged semi etf. You know, we like the leveraged ones here.

[00:08:29]:
Well, when it got back to its pre Covid all time high, as we talk about here, often you know, the, that’s blue sky territory. When you get back to all time highs, the party is just beginning. So if you had just gotten in at the pre Covid all time highs, SMH was up over 100% before the 2022 bear market began. Even if you just catch a fraction of that move in smh, you would have been very happy with your position. You have 100% returns in less than 18 months. Right. You know, obviously you could buy individual company options however you want to play it. There’s so many ways to make even more than that.

Right? So that’s the point being that’s when we get back to all time highs, we’re not even there yet, right? So there will be pullbacks along the way. If you’re not positioned exactly the way you would like to be. Point is you’ve still got time, right? You know, I’m not saying take forever, but we aren’t back to all time highs now in some cases we are back to all time highs. I’ll get to a few of those in a minute. Not our favorite sectors to own here, but that’s a great thing to see as well because new highs beget new highs, right? So we aren’t too far away from new all time highs. But you do have some time. There will be pullbacks along the way, but once we get to those all time highs, that’s when the party really starts. So even then you don’t feel like you’re too late.

[00:09:57]:
That’s the party’s just beginning. We are also at overbought levels. We’ve talked about this here really for the last few weeks. So we’re at short term overbought levels, you know, getting closer to extreme overbought levels on our other indicators. Not quite there yet though really, you know, and one key sign here of a bull market is a market that gets overbought and stays overbought. I know that sounds like a little bit of kind of a catch 22 because we sometimes we use it as a sell signal, but that’s when technical analysis and your other signals become that much more important, right? No, there’s no. What’s the word I’m looking for? You know, a lot of people would say holy grail of investing, you know, no silver, silver bullet, you know, one indicator that means everything at all times, right? That’s when it is. Can be more art than science.

[00:10:53]:
And you have to have a robust system to look at your other indicators as well. You, we could do whole podcasts on that as well. But just trying to avoid a little bit of any confusion there. All right, so that being said, let’s take a look at our market action here because we will talk more about these overbought levels and some are more overbought than others here. Right. Again, doesn’t mean that we have to get our pullback right now, especially when we have that money coming off of the sidelines. Right. Institutional money coming back into the market, potentially even unwinding short positions.

Right. That’s the short squeeze potential that Kip has talked a lot about. Likely what we’ve seen a lot of here. And we still have a record or near record levels of money market funds still to come off the sidelines. Right. Another one. I’m going to get to this a little bit more later. But M2 money supply, we talk about this here often when money supply is increasing.

[00:11:50]:
We wrote about this in the Big Bribe. You just want to be long stocks. You want to be long inflationary assets, right? Stocks, real estate, Bitcoin now and of course, you know, the, the oldest one in the book, gold. Right. And the gold miners, you always want to be involved with the picks and shovels. But when money supply is increasing like this, you want to, to be long stocks. I think that’s a big part of, of this rally here as well now. Right.

So there is still plenty of fuel for this fire. You know, we’re in the early innings here. We haven’t seen, you know, any. I mean, I know that we’re just talking about coming back from a V shaped recovery here. But the bull, the secular bull market is fully intact here. Fully intact. We have not seen any kind of a red hot IPO market. No signs of anything blow off top.

[00:12:46]:
Right. This, the things we talk about here so often, you know, credit scores near all time highs, you know, a third or more of homeowners own their homes outright. All of those stats, we come back to here so often for a reason. Right. The fundamentals remain strong. All right. So I said I’d keep it short and sweet. Let’s, let’s do that here.

We did have the Russell 2000. Let’s get into our market action. The Russell 2000 led the way today. We were followed there by the Dow and we’ll kind of climb the ladder here. Dow up 3.4% on the week, up another 3/4 of 1% today to 42,654. Then we had the S&P up 7/10 of 1% on the day, up 5.27% on the week. Nasdaq though, taking, bringing home the cake up 3.7.15% on the week. And of course exactly what we want to see.

[00:13:42]:
What we’ve seen since the April 7 lows. Semis leading. Kip has talked about this a lot. Talked about it on Charles Payne. I talked about this on the podcast and on Charles Schwab network. You know, that was right around the lows at the time that we wanted to see semis starting to lead. It’s exactly what we’re seeing here. As Kip said yesterday, textbook looking at our internals on the day today, I might not have said this.

Semis up over 10% on the week. That’s for SMH, the semi ETF internals. Oh, I forgot to mention this. And I can kind of blanket this one because across the board here just about we finished also at or near the highs of the day. I think I said that at the beginning but great to see once again. Internals did the same, finishing near their highest levels of the day. 2 to 1 positive NYSE advanced decline slightly, slightly below that level on the Nasdaq but still good numbers. 52 week highs and lows.

[00:14:36]:
Nothing impressive but positive for both. And then volume, we had 75% upside volume on the NYSE, 71% upside on the NASDAQ. So good day, good week. Sectors. We finished with 10 out of our 11s and P 500 sectors higher on the day and believe it or not we got our some of our first sectors. Returning to all time highs since the tariff calamity began. We had today industrials hit an all time high. Let’s see here because this one surprised me actually when I saw it and I got to run it again because utilities, you know, with yields a little bit higher have been unloved but they’ve really been on kind of a sleeper run.

Higher here. Hit an all time high today as well. Financials aren’t far away, right? You know, again, these aren’t our favorite sectors to own. Point is though, new highs beget new highs. Exactly what we want to see. We did have one lagging sector on the day. Let me get back to that. Energy was our one laggard despite energy prices, oil prices.

[00:15:47]:
We’ll go ahead and get into our VRA commodity watch here now. We’ll start with oil. Crude was a 1.4% on the day to 62.49 a barrel. That’s, you know, I, we’ve made some, some good calls here on oil and gas. Still big believers in energy companies right now. But man the chart of oil does not look too appealing right now. That doesn’t mean that these companies can’t continue to make money in this environment. But you know, I mean that’s, that was exactly what Trump ran on, right? Drill, baby, drill.

Let’s bring down prices of oil. All right, so for the rest of our commodities here, gold down a little bit on the day by 1.2% at $3,187 an ounce. Similar move from the miners, but exactly what you want to see. Just like you want to see the miners outperforming when gold is on the rise, you want to see the miners outperforming the commodity. You also want to see them holding up better on the pullbacks. Right? In the GDX, the gold miner ETF only down 3/10 of 1% on the day. The chart looks, you know, still looks very attractive here. Right? And again, with money supply back on the rise, this is an environment where you have to own inflationary assets.

[00:17:09]:
And we think that gold will continue to rally and the miners will continue to lead that rally as well. We also like silver which was down today 1% at $32.35 an ounce. 20 copper now down 1.9% at $4.59 a pound. And finally here for today, bitcoin to close out the week at right now 13, 5, 50. I want to look at a chart of this one here. Wish I was sharing it here with you because this is a good looking one. A nice consolidation after the move higher, you know, really incredible move from its April lows as well. You know, obviously next move would be to take out its all time highs as well.

We continue to like bitcoin also folks. That is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up@vraletter.com, click the podcast link at the top and we’d love to have you with us. Hope you have a great fun, restful weekend out there. I will see you back here on Monday for the close.