In today’s episode, Kip breaks down the latest market action following heightened geopolitical tensions between Iran and Israel. Kip explores how historical patterns play out when global conflicts arise, explaining why bullets often create unexpected buying opportunities in the stock market. He highlights the remarkable comeback of major indices after Friday’s drop, the dominant leadership of semiconductors, and why he believes we’re seeing the start of a powerful bull run reminiscent of previous market rallies.

Don’t Look back because the market is closed. Good Monday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the Daily VRA Investing podcast. Hope you had a good day today. You know, we told you after on Friday’s trading day, of course, was the, the attack, I guess counter attacks, right? The war that’s happening between Iran and Israel that when the bullets fly, stocks were a buy and that typically is the way it works. History pretty much held up. We had, you know, one, both the S P 500, NASDAQ were both down 1.2% on Friday. Oil, gold and the Vix bike tire.

But those gains did not hold. And so I think the experts that said this probably is going to get resolved and probably not going to end up in World War Three. I know that’s the, I know that’s the popular thing now predicting this is going to be World War Three. And you know, God, I hope it’s not. I don’t think it is. But Iran didn’t have a lot of friends today. Who’s coming to Iran’s defense in the Middle East? I didn’t see anybody coming to their matter of fact, I see Israelis flying and sorties and flying missiles over other Middle Eastern countries. And no one’s saying anything.

[00:01:08]:
So I think Iran has probably dug himself a hole here. It’s way too radical. You’ve seen the images of Iran from 30, 40 years ago. It was just a normal society, girls walking around in little sundresses and shorts and going to the beach and bathing suits. And now look at them. They’re religious fanatics. And so, you know, that’s just, that’s crazyville. Let’s be honest.

That, that the most of the world looks at that as being crazyville. And most of us don’t want to be a member of Crazyville. So I think Iran’s dug their own grave here. Let’s hope that Trump is right and that this is going to get resolved peacefully from here because let’s face it, Iran’s got the ability to do some real harm. They got a couple thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles left to fire if they wanted to and you know, we don’t want to see anybody else die, okay, from this. So let’s hope this gets resolved. Let’s hope the lower prices of oil today and gold today and energy stocks, let’s hope those are all a tell, which we think that is going to be the case. And of course, the semis today lead again today.

Semi, stay on the day. Up two point. Get this right. SMA to Semi ETF. Up two point. Four, six percent today. NASDAQ up 1.5% today. Once again, semi has led Nasdaq.

[00:02:26]:
NASDAQ led the broad market. This has been the repeating pattern basically every day. Wasn’t Friday, but basically every day. This had been the repeating pattern from, from the April 7th bear market lows. This is not that much different folks from what we saw at the bottom of the bear Market in 2022, October 13, 2022. All of a sudden we had a bottom. All of a sudden the semi started leading every day, leading Nasdaq every day. NAS of the market.

We saw that in 2020. We saw it at the end of the pandemic. We saw it in 2022 and now we’re seeing it again. And as we’ve said here so many times, you know, from the birth of quantities, it’s so important, I think that I don’t hear people say this. I don’t. Maybe people are keeping like it’s a little secret. People think they have. No, this is the, this is the best directional tell that we have for the market.

From the birth of quantitative easing in 2008, the semiconductors SMH have led in both directions, up and down. If we had paid, if I had paid better attention to the semis when they started going down in February of this year, we wouldn’t have gotten smoked so bad as the, is the, as the tariff tantrum kicked in. Okay, but you know what, I still make a lot of mistakes and that was one of them. But the bottom line is now we’re on the right side of this market. Semis are leading. As we said, there is a magnet on this market. Back to all time highs and then some. We do think it’s going to be a parallel story to 2022 that we get back to all time highs and then we just keep going.

[00:04:00]:
But again, the short term things we can’t control is what’s happening in the Middle east because there’s not that much out there. The tariff thing has been dealt with. People just don’t really care anymore about the tariff thing. Tariff news comes out, it doesn’t hit the market. And if it does, it’s very, very brief. Like pre open, right? Futures are lower, then we open and there’s a rally that’s again been another repeating pattern. The only other thing I think that can hurt this market is the Federal Reserve. Now I think their hands are kind of tied here.

That doesn’t mean they have to cut rates and they’re probably not because we know this is get Trump. This is political. Jay Powell is on record of not liking Powell. We know this from a 60 Minutes interview where a guy that worked with Jay Powell said on an undercover video, oh yeah, Powell hates Trump. Okay. And it’s just, you can tell by the reaction when he’s asked about Trump. You know, it’s never anything positive, snide remarks. So I think, you know, look, they, they, they got Trump in 2018 with seven straight rate hikes, sent the market crashing in the fourth quarter of 2018.

We know he’s done it before. I don’t think it’s any secret he does not care for Trump. This is the way they can keep the economy held down a bit because all it would take is interest rates to start going lower, some of the fed funds rate, and the housing market is waiting to explode. There’s so many people that are on the sidelines because they just can’t afford or choose not to buy a home with a 7% mortgage. Okay. I am surprised they’re not being. We are in the age of financial engineering. I am very surprised by the way that there’s, there aren’t other ways to buy homes.

[00:05:37]:
And there are, okay? There are inside secrets. I’m surprised that other financing hasn’t become available, especially because folks to buy homes. Because look, in Texas here we have a illegal Hispanic community here just north of Houston. These people are not citizens. They are not citizens. They are illegal aliens. And they’re buying homes with a mortgage from US Banks and they don’t even have citizenship. So how is that possible? But people that are maybe young professionals that have really good credit but just don’t want to pay 7% mortgage, they can’t get a mortgage.

So again, I’m surprised if I had more free time, I think this is something, we actually talked to a company about this, about using tokenization and creative financing for mortgages, trying to find a way to crack into this banking system that controls this because it makes no sense whatsoever. But anyway, the bottom line is Powell should be cutting rates. Even if he doesn’t, I don’t think he can raise rates. So that’s not the risk. The other risk is going to be as far as the market looks at this, the bigger risk now frankly is coming up is going to be Q2 earnings because analyst Wall street has downgraded earnings for the second quarter because of, they believed, damage from tariffs. Well, I think anyone here with common sense knows that so far tariffs haven’t done no damage to US economy. Right. Inflation’s going nowhere.

We still have disinflation And I can tell you just take this to the bank. I don’t say it very often takes the bank. Second quarter earnings are going to be outstanding just like first quarter earnings, just like fourth quarter earnings were. And so now, now we’re really getting to Trump 2.0. The innovation revolution’s continuing to pick up speed. This is a very special market, folks. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. This is the most bullish I’ve been in my career ever.

[00:07:30]:
In my 41 years of doing this, I’ve never been this bullish on the market. So I think when you get this kind of opportunity we had on the tariff shakeout, you know, to, to really get repositioned, to go long and stay long. So I think these, these shakeouts we have pauses are going to be very, very short lived again. We just don’t want to see something stupid happen with, you know, with war and these megalomaniacs that, you know, they think they’re here, they’re put on earth to lead us to some big military battle. Let’s, let’s hope that those folks are nowhere near leadership in this country. We’ve been down that road after the, after the, you know, after the, after 911 and with Afghanistan and Iraq. We want nothing to do with that again. We had the worst two decades in American history after 9 11.

There is no, there’s not a period close look at everything happened in that 20 year period. Two decades after 911 and you won’t find another period worse in American history. We’ve taken our lumps, we’ve been through the worst. Right. We need two decades of great things happening now. And I really do. I think that’s where we’re headed. It’s one of the reasons that Todd and I are so bullish.

And you know, I think that, I think the bulls are going to be well rewarded in the stock market for a long time to come. And you think about the other five mega trends that we’re bullish about. Innovation revolution, financial engineering is taking place. Corporate earning expansion absolutely is taking place again, last two quarters. There’s your evidence. So far, millennials are running everything, folks, and they still don’t get talked about nearly enough. But now everyone’s realized, Millennial, that retail investors save the day. Retail investors are the reason the market bottomed when it did in April.

[00:09:17]:
And now every dip is bought like in about an hour. But that’s millennials, right? 72 million strong. Largest segment of the population now inheriting latent stat we have is millennials are in the process already of inheriting $90 trillion. And what do we know about millennials? Well, we know they love cryptocurrencies, they love the stock market, they love housing. They’re born entrepreneurs, understand technology, right? And so there’s a lot of money coming off the sidelines, folks. It’s just going to keep happening. And I think that, again, I think this is going to pay us off very, very well to be well positioned in the right stocks and right sectors. And that’s where we spend our time doing most of our due diligence.

Because if you get the direction right, you know what, it’s not that hard to get the right sectors and stocks because they’re your leaders. And if you use some basic macro research, then you have some common sense, right? Like common sense tells us own gold and own Bitcoin, because they’re just not going to stop printing money if you got money, because what, what are the alternatives? They just have to keep doing it. They’re never going to reduce our debt levels. That is not going to happen. Maybe manage it, but they’re just going to keep printing, they’re going to keep issuing debt, the dollar is going to keep rising, so is Bitcoin. For the same reason the miners by extension are going to soar, because they always do. So just some basic common sense things like that, and find the right young junior miners, which we’ve done here. And, you know, now you’re positioned for the next five years, you go, wow, okay, I can see this.

You know, I can see Tesla where they’re going, I want to own that stock. I can see Nvidia, where they’re going, I want to own that stock. Especially if Kip and Tyler are right about the innovation revolution. Holy shit. You know, we’re going to, we’re going to 10% GDP growth and that can happen for a long time, you know, again, as long as we keep the stupidity and the idiots out of office that try to take us in a different direction. But hey, I’m an optimist. What can I say? I think it’s all going to happen happen, and I think we’re going to make a lot of money, be in a position to help a lot of people. And we just got to keep, you know, we got to stay sharp, Right? We can’t take our, our eyes off the prize here.

[00:11:21]:
Okay, let’s take a look under the hood today again. Markets up solid today. We lost some of our earlier gains, but still very good day today, especially with the geopolitical political risks that do that do remain. Dow Jones today up seven tenths of one percent. That was our loser. SB 500 was in second up 910 of one percent. Russ 2000 came in third. I guess I’m going reverse order up 1.1%.

NASDAQ again up one and a half percent again semis leading up better than two and a half percent today. This is a textbook day all the way around. And our internals also really, really strong today. Two to one advanced decline for both NYC and Nasdaq. And when it came to volume, check this out. 82% of volume day for Nasdaq. That’s what you want to see. Nasdaq leading and again with the volume being this, this positive.

NYC also fantastic in 2 to 1 advanced decline. Upside volume 69%. These are very, very good days. We also had about 100 more stocks hit a 52 week high than a 52 week low. And our sector watch also very strong here. Seven sectors higher, four finished lower. To the downside, there’s really nothing at all. These are minor losses but the upside textbook what you want to see.

[00:12:31]:
Both communication services and technology up 1 1/2% down the board. And we had five sectors up better than 1%. Also interesting, as Tyler pointed out, the put call ratio, put call ratio is elevated. It opens A over A1 I guess again concerns about, you know, Israel and Iran and it closed at a point nine. Spent the entire day above a zero point nine. That’s elevated. It’s not highly elevated but on a big update like this, that’s what you want to see. I think the stage is set here for a continued move again.

We’re looking for a move back to all time highs and then, and then a breakthrough on second quarter earnings which are going to be dynamite. Second quarter earnings again take that to the bank. In our commodity watch today, again just profit taking again. Just the kind of the inverse of what we saw on Friday. And that’s good. Again we don’t want to go to war. Gold today down $48 an ounce. Down 1.4% at $3,404 an ounce.

That puts it what 104 bucks away from all time high. It’s on the way. I remember our year end price target is $4,000 an ounce. Our year in price target for 2026 is like $5,000 an ounce. It’s just going to keep going. And the miners again, the junior miners in particular are going to put on a just, they’re going parabolic. That’s happening. They are going to go parabolic own this group.

[00:13:48]:
Silver today basically flat on the day. 36, 37 an ounce. Copper today flat as well at 481 a pound. Copper had a pretty strong run there here though it’s because the global economy is in good shape. Crude oil today giving up again, giving back some of those what 7% gains on Friday today down 1.8% at $74 cents a barrel. And finally the day bitcoin, you know, it’s just, it kind of loads you to sleep bitcoin does, you know, because we had these consolidation periods like it is now. 108,600. Got to hit a little bit on the war risk.

And now right back again folks, we’re just what, a couple thousand away from all time high. I fully expect that breakout to happen. And then before we know you’ll look up, it’s 130,000, 150,000. Our year end price target is 200,000 for Bitcoin. And no, we’re not even considering reducing that at all. If only, we’d probably only take it higher. There is no better supply demand story of all time. It is bitcoin.

It is the play. All right folks, hey, always appreciate you listen, thanks again for your feedback. We love your emails and phone calls. Thank you for all that. And look, let’s make it a kick ass week everybody. Have a great night. We’ll see back here tomorrow after the close.