In today's episode, Kip kicks off what promises to be a big week on Wall Street. With Q2 earnings season officially starting, Kip dives into why he believes the mainstream analysts have it all wrong once again. Kip will also discuss his economic expectations for the second half of 2025 and beyond, as well as his bullish outlook on Bitcoin's next moves. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

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. Hope your weekend was fantastic as well. Decent start to the week. It is a big week, by the way. A lot happening this week.

Second quarter earnings kick off tomorrow morning. A little bit different kind of a week for the quarterly earnings schedule. This time we’ll get not only normally we get bank earnings on a Thursday and Friday today, which starts, start tomorrow morning. And then also this week we get tech earnings, we get semi earnings and we get Netflix. And then, you know, it’s a, it’s a diverse week. Johnson and Johnson. It’s a small week, but it’s a diverse week. So I think it’ll be very interesting.

And as we’ve been telling you here, we think that the analysts imagine this, Wall Street’s got this wrong. The analysts have this wrong, you know, so it just, it is so funny to watch this happen because it’s the, it’s the, everyone’s, everyone started saying in unison, tariffs are going to hurt the market, tariffs are going to hurt the economy, tariffs are going to be inflationary. And then you hear no one on Wall street bidding, analyst reports, Bloomberg, cbc, even Fox Business, they’re all saying the same thing. They’re so afraid that they’ll be wrong if they step outside of the consensus.

Kip Herriage [00:01:31]:
And so it’s very, my inventors taught me this. It’s typically very easy to find what the real answer is going to be if you’re just a contrarian and you do exactly the opposite of what the majority and what the consensus is tells you is going to happen. So in this case, again, we think this is slam dunk. The earnings analysts have cut their earnings estimates down to below 5% for the second quarter. Now, remember, in the fourth quarter, we did 16%. Okay. That was Trump’s first quarter. He had been elected at that point. 16% for S&P 500 earnings in the fourth quarter.

First quarter came in at 12% and now they’re below 5%. All because of tariffs and because somebody started saying it’s going to be negative. And so now they all have to say it. So I think we’re very confident in saying that first quarter, the second quarter earnings are going to be very strong. I think better than 10%. I mean, that’s kind of where we are right now, 10% range. If it’s 8%, I’d be surprised.

[00:02:34]:
So I think better than 10% because we are in Trump 2.0. Animal spirits are back and as we’ve already seen, the tariffs are not inflationary. We’ve already had two, three months of this. Now, where’s the inflation? We don’t have it. We can have disinflation. And we really, we like using truflation for their inflationary research. They’re down to a 1.66% for their version of the CPI, which we’re going to get also this week. So it’s a big week.

Earnings. We got CPI data this week and then we got retail sales on Friday as well. But again, our view has been this is going to be a good quarter. This will likely be the worst quarter not only of the year, but of Trump’s presidency. So all you got to do is look through this. Okay? I know it’s a bold statement. Kip Hacking. You say that well, because we’re in the innovation revolution.

[00:03:28]:
Well, because we just got. Trump just got his BBV passed, which is so pro growth, it is insane. And very few people are talking about this. We’re going to be focused on that this weekend in our very letters. There is so much pro growth economic policy built into the bbb and the reason for that is Trump realized, okay, look, if we follow Elon Musk ideas for Doge, we’re going to have massive cuts in the government workforce. As good as that sounds. No, that’s not good for the economy. In the short run, that’s probably going to run us into a recession.

So what is the options? Let’s have reasonable cutbacks to begin with and let’s continue that over the next two, three years instead of doing it all at once, shocking the system. But let’s really focus on doing a couple other things. Let’s focus on getting as much pro growth economic policy out there as possible. That’s the bbb. And let’s focus on crashing the dollar.

[00:04:31]:
As bad as that may sound, it’s not. We have been taking advantage of Trump’s exactly right on this for so many years. For dec, we’ve been taking advantage of on currency, currency manipulation with other countries. We told you, I think it was the first podcast we did. The first letter that we wrote after Trump won, our first prediction was the dollar is going to crash and it’s going to be fantastic. Everybody’s like, what? That doesn’t sound good. No. What is not good is for the US Dollar to lose its role as the world’s reserve currency.

That would be horrible. That’s the kind of thing you go to war over. That’s the kind of thing I can prom. I can guarantee you this will not happen under a Trump presidency, folks. It’s not going to happen in our lifetimes. This is the kind of thing that, this is why you have a strong military, frankly, because you can’t afford to lose your role as a currency of the world. Once you lose that, you lose all kinds of power. And it’s a very quick trip downhill in a very bad way.

[00:05:39]:
We should actually do a podcast on all the disadvantages, all the advantages that we have as a country because the dollar is in rolls, reserve currency, so we got to keep that. But we want the dollar to really consistently go down. And that’s what we said would happen. That’s what has happened from Trump’s inauguration, from the day he swore took office, the US dollar has lost 12% of its value. And again, that’s right on track with what Trump wanted to do. Why is that? Because again, we’re now playing the same game that’s been played against us with global economies. We want our economy, our currency to be weaker against yours. And doesn’t matter what country we’re talking about, we want ours to be weaker than yours because that makes our exports so much more attractive.

And when you think about again this week, we get the S P 500 earnings. That’s what really matters here. And 40%. And they’re all multinationals. Every single company that’s in the SP 500 is a multinational.

[00:06:43]:
Which means about 40% of their business comes from exports. That’s why the weak dollar, weak greenback is so important. But that’s what I think. Analysts also have not paid attention to the gains that are going to come as a currency translation gain that are going to take place in this quarter and going forward. Because we think the dollars, we think you’ll be able to look back at the dollar in two, three years and see a consistent move lower. At some point, that’ll become inflationary. But at some point we may need it to be because we see disinflation continue to build here. Certainly innovation revolution is going to cause massive disinflation.

Now, you don’t want to get to deflation because that’s when bad things happen. But again, our strong point has been the mainstream economists have this exactly wrong, meaning everything pretty much. They certainly have Wall street analysts have earnings wrong. Mainstream economists have the inflation disinflation story wrong. And they certainly have the economic growth part wrong. And that’s where I think the real surprise is going to come again, starting tomorrow morning, right before the open tomorrow JP Morgan and Wells Fargo kick it off. So I think we’re going to get a really good, a really good snapshot early because a bank earnings should be very good. Now we typically don’t invest in, in, in financial services companies.

[00:08:06]:
We have our own reasons for that. But not to say we won’t going forward, but I think that bank earnings are going to be very, very good this quarter. And I think today’s, you know, we, we opened lower, futures are sharply lower and here came the buyers. Right, that’s, that’s been a repeating pattern we’ve seen. I think the smart money knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. The market certainly does that earnings are going to be very good this quarter. And again, this will be the worst quarter Trump has. This will be the worst quarter of Trump’s presidency and it’s still going to come in at at least 8% earnings growth.

Again, that’s, that’s our, that’s our view for the s and P500. But again, we had a good, good turnaround rally today. Good smart money hour. Nothing big here. Again, everybody’s kind of waiting on earnings reports, but Dow Jones today up 210 of a percent. Russ 2000 our leader up 7 10, 4%. Small caps have been doing much better. That’s very Good to see.

[00:08:59]:
S&P 500 up 1/10 of 1%. Nasdaq up $0.03. Again, very quiet on the downside today. Of course, you know, we track the semis very carefully. Tyler just reminded me that’s something we had to keep an eye on because the semis were lower today. They were lower by 7. 10 of a percent. But remember they had been leading, they’ve been leading now.

[00:09:18]:
But from the, from the April 7 bear market lows, the semis have been leading and again they’re just overbought. And that’s, that’s the takeaway. Frankly. As Tyler and I have been telling you, we are at extreme or bought. We’re not at our most overbought. Extreme steroids, we’re not there but man, we’re getting pretty close to it. This is when bad things happen. But in a melt up bull market, that’s what we’ve been calling this now for a couple of weeks.

That’s what it’s been in a melt up bull market market to get overbought. Tyler said in his podcast on Friday there’s nothing more bullish. Literally nothing. This is not just, you know, a statement I’m trying to make for effect. There’s literally nothing more bullish than a market or a Stock that gets extremely rebought and then stays extreme overbought. That tells you that strong relative strength is there for a reason. The buyers won’t go away and sellers don’t want to sell. And so you just get something stays overbought.

[00:10:16]:
Look at bitcoin right now is a good example. Look at the stock market as an example. That’s what’s happening right now across the market. So look, if we get a big shakeout, all we would do is add to positions. We have paused buying in these overbought positions that we have. But there are some that we’re still buying. You know again we here at the VRA we have a monthly dollar cost average program right for our 10 baggers, our top stocks. And then some of the ETFs we own right now are fantastic buy guys.

We just, we just got back into housing. We love that group here. Energy represents I think great value here and these companies are still making a lot of money. As long as oil stays above 60 bucks a barrel and you know, gap natural gas is strong, the market is always a discounting mechanism. That’s what we’ve been focused on over the last week. And so that’s what’s going to keep happening here. Money fly, money supply and fund flows into equities continue to be huge. Again, retail investors just had this right, exactly right from the bear market lows.

[00:11:18]:
Q2 earnings again going to be very good. And also again, this is a, this is a repeat of what we saw in 2020. It really is V shaped bottom we’ve already had now a 26 move higher from the April 7 bear market lows. That’s a again, look back at what happened in 2020 after the pandemic and you see a near identical snapshot of what we’re living through today. Bitcoin again, this is of course, as you know one of our, one of our favorite positions here because we’ve done very well in Bitcoin since 2017. Thank you very much. Bitcoin. Today bitcoin backed off a little bit but it’s had a great run here with123,000 overnight.

The chart looks fantastic. Once we got the breakout of 110,000, it was, it’s been, it’s been a classic looking breakout of a tightly compressed triangle. And but you know, now again look at the chart. We are an extreme overbought on bitcoin but it’s a big week. We’ll write this up for tomorrow morning. It’s crypto week. And so there’s still a lot, a lot of juice left in this tank. A lot of fuel left in this tank.

[00:12:19]:
For a bitcoin move higher we see a minimum move to 130I think 140000 on this move. That’s really been our target. And then our year end target remains 200000 and our cycle high is 350 000. That’s a like a 2027, 2028 figure right there. Although we’ll tell you it could happen a lot faster. Why is that? This is really stunning. And when you tell people this they’re like that can’t be right Kip that Tyler. That that can’t be right.

It is. 50% of all investment firms have yet to approve the purchase of bitcoin or bitcoin ETFs. That’s in the US 50% globally it’s 70 to 80%. So there’s so much pent up demand that’s going to come in. It’s just continuous for one firm after another. Continue proof through the compliance department.

[00:13:08]:
They have a process they have to go through. They’re going through it but this takes them many months up to a year plus. So that steady demand will continue to come into bitcoin here. And then we shared this this morning as well. Have you not if you, if you like using Google search trends which again be very very handy.

[00:13:28]:
There’s just no excitement. Where’s the public? There’s no, the volume’s not coming into bitcoin. There’s very little excitement showing up on the Google search trends. You know we’re, we’re a good 40% below the highest level of curiosity in Google searches for bitcoin from last. What was that like last November? So we have a long ways to go before we. Even though we are of a bot technically we think we have a long way to go before we got getting to that frothy kind of a feeling. It’s just not there now. And so again it’s still a great setup to be long Bitcoin in our eternals today.

Again kind of a quiet day today but internals were fine. Gave you a real quick snapshot here. One second advanced decline slightly positive for NYSE and positive by about 800 issues for NASDAQ. NASDAQ was solid today. We had 62.9 up volume for NASDAQ, 58.8 of volume for NYSE and we had 126 more stocks hitting a 52 week high than hitting a 52 week low in our commodity watch today. Gold. Gold opened this morning with solid gains and just kind of. Kind of continue to.

[00:14:38]:
To. To. To fade away. Actually finished down 13 an ounce on gold again. This is. This is. This is a consolidation period. This is a major move higher again.

Our target for gold this year is 4,000 by year. That’s been our beginning of your target. Right now we’re at 3350. Puts us right at $155 an ounce below all time highs. Silver got a very interesting looking pattern that people are talking about over the weekend as the next cup and handle formation was down 1 1/2% today or 57 cents. Announced an ounce at 38.38. But good looking chart. It looks similar to bitcoin’s chart.

And that’s what bitcoin just broke out from. Was a almost a near perfect coupled handle formation. Crude oil today was also down sharply down $2. Excuse me. Two point. What is that? Yeah. 2.26% today. Down a dollar 55 a barrel at 66.90.

[00:15:33]:
And finally the day Bitcoin again pulling back from today’s all time highs of 123,000. What a move. Last trade here. 120,223. We remain long and strong. Bitcoin, gold, silver and the miners. All right folks. That’s it for today.

Hope you had a great day and you have a better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow after the close.