In today's episode, Tyler takes a deep dive into the market’s ongoing strength, despite mixed headlines and bearish sentiment. The conversation covers the broadening effect fueling all-time highs across sectors and international markets, the latest updates on GDP growth, and strong moves from the homebuilders. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon everyone, Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing Podcast. Hope you all had a fantastic day out there today. It was a bit of a mixed day from the headline numbers on this market today. But if you’ve been tuning in to many of our recent podcasts, you know this theme that we’ve been covering here a lot is the strength under the hood of this market, this broadening effect that we’re seeing taking place. We’re still getting more and more all-time highs, 52-week highs from a number of international markets, and even here in the U.S., the Dow Jones hitting an all-time high for the third day in a row. We’ll certainly cover a lot of that here today. We’ll also take a look under the hood again to this broadening effect that we’re seeing in this market, seeing it in our internals from our sectors, and yes, in our commodities as well.

So, uh, got a lot to cover here today. We’ll jump right into it, but we’ll also, as I mentioned, cover a lot of Man, a lot of all-time highs, more than you would probably expect on a day like today where we had the Nasdaq down half a percent, finishing, you know, near the lows of the day, which is not what you want to see from tech. We want to see semis leading tech and tech leading the market. But again, this broadening action that we’re seeing, and at the same time sentiment continuing to move in a bearish direction for this market. As contrarians, you know that we right now are really, uh, licking our lips at some opportunities. I talked about this last week as well. We’re getting our shopping list ready. We were at the time.

[00:02:00]:
Now we’re getting back to the point of putting money to work. So we’ll talk about all of that and more here today. But kicking it off here, you know, I saw this one just before getting on the podcast and it caught me— I won’t say that it caught me off guard, But I certainly wanted to, wanted to bring it to your attention. Kip and I talked about this as well. Uh, we’ve been talking so much about GDP growth and where we expect to see it going from here. You know, our long-term view has been that we’re going to get 5% GDP growth in 2026. It started out we were looking at, uh, you know, the first half of 2026. We updated it to the first quarter of this year.

We still think that that remains to be the case. And for a little while there, even government sources were reporting the same, even ahead of where we were. The Atlanta Fed was saying we were going to see 5% plus GDP growth in Q4 of last year, meaning that we had already seen it. I believe the high there was 5.4% from the Atlanta Fed. But we just got an update here today I wanted to share with you. Now look at this, it was recently updated down to, I believe, 4.2%. Here you can see the above 5 readings. Let me check to see if you can see that.

I know it’s a little zoomed in there. Um, the above 5% readings that we saw for Q4 from the Atlanta Fed dropping down to about a 4.2. Today they updated again, 3.7%. You know, no concerns for us here. You know, really any of these government data sources we take with a grain of salt. Just as many of these we use as tools, not as crystal balls for our system. They’re great indicators to look at, but not always the most reliable, much like the CME’s FedWatch tool, right? The probabilities change so drastically. Another one would be inflation data.

[00:04:05]:
Where as opposed to the official headline numbers, we prefer Truflation. Uh, and the same applies here for GDP. We continue to look for 5% GDP growth, uh, for Q1 of this year, especially as Kip discussed yesterday, and I’ll touch on here more in a second, the double-digit earnings growth we’ve seen so far from Q4 earnings coming in. And the incredible numbers that these large tech companies have been increasing their CapEx for 2026. Uh, I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but we’ll touch on all of that and more. You know, I think that this almost could be looked at as a, you know, wrong way indicator here from the Atlanta Fed. I bet the final number comes in and blows away a 3.7% kind of number. You know, they’re seeing Not to say that it’s always so political, and I’m not going to put on my full conspiracy theorist hat on right now, but there’s been a lot of hype about the Trump economic miracle 2.0.

And so every chance that the establishment gets, you know, to take a little jab in there, to take a shot at the Trump economy that is on fire right now and remains on fire and will only increase from here, in our view, that applies to the job market. That implies continuing to see lower inflation, disinflation, and ultimately deflation. Uh, our long-term call for GDP remains unchanged, that before the end of Trump’s term here, we’ll see 8%+ GDP growth. You know, if you’ve been listening to Kip’s podcast, I’ve been trying to get him to up it a little bit here, but those are conversations for another day. But it is always great to have, uh, you know, the president coming out with even better expectations than you. How great is it to have a president who is an optimist? Uh, you know, Kip talked about this a lot. I believe it was 2 weeks ago. I touched on it as well, um, probably around the time of Davos when Elon Musk said, I’d much rather be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right.

[00:06:16]:
Now, how great is it to have a president Like Trump, who is an optimist, and as he said in his first term, a big part of his job is to be a cheerleader for America. You know, that kind of sentiment cannot go understated compared to the previous administration, not only Biden, but during the Obama era as well, when we were told that economic growth was going to slow, the, the it was almost unspoken of saying America’s best days are behind us. You’re gonna have to get used to just living with less. Your kids are gonna have to live, live with a little bit less. We gotta start living, you know, more below our means. Look at the complete 180 that we’ve done with here, where we’re talking about, um, you know, so much prosperity being created here in America. And if you want to go as far as Elon, right, that We’re stretching, we’re reaching for sustainable abundance for all. I mean, you know, take the word sustainable out of there because it might have some negative connotations for some of y’all, and I completely understand that.

[00:07:30]:
Um, but, uh, who wouldn’t want that, right? If you take away those negative connotations, sustainable meaning we can have these for forever, abundance, uh, is what Elon has been talking about a lot over the last year and what artificial intelligence could potentially bring. So Trump on Larry Kudlow once again exceeded our expectations. We’ve been calling for the Dow Jones to hit 100,000 by 2030. We’ve said that since 2022, by the way. So, you know, we’ve been one of the most bullish out there for sure. When Kip and I published the Big Bribe, our call Dow Jones 100,000 by 2030, NASDAQ 40,000 by 2030. I think we’re going to end up being on the low side of both of those, which is fantastic. We love to see that.

But at the time, you know, we had just ended a brutal bear market under, uh, the Biden admin, and so many people, you know, looked at us like we were nuts for, for calling for that kind of growth. With what was going on at the time. Um, you know, again, our views remain unchanged, and we may be revising those higher. So not only did Trump, you know, bump it up by 2 years to 2028, but for our call for 8% GDP growth, you know, here’s what he had to say about his new Fed chairman selection in Kevin Warsh. Okay, there’s been a lot of talk, and most of that is exactly what it is— talk without understanding the full story of Kevin Warsh’s economic views. Everyone calls him a hawk for all the wrong reasons. Uh, we can get to that. We’d probably do a whole podcast on that, right? But quickly, you know, for, for my Fed watchers here, I’ll touch on it.

[00:09:22]:
That what Kevin Warsh wants, what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessette wants, and the Trump administration as a whole wants is to remove the Federal Reserve as the backstop here for the last source, you know, kind of the final, uh, line, the final defense of liquidity. Okay, we’ve seen it since the Great Financial Crisis. The central banks work in unison, that whenever they want certain policies to happen, they’re all moving in the same direction. When they’re all when they want more liquidity, they’re turning on the money printer, right? Japan and the EU going to negative interest rates, the U.S. going to zero, all in coordinated efforts. Okay, that’s what the monetary regime has been since 2008, and it’s really only served to transfer more wealth to the upper class, right? Dividing the two and killing the middle class along the way, achieving really of the elitists out there goals. What the Trump admin seeks to do, I think, you know, to put it as simply as possible, again, is to remove the Federal Reserve and the central banks of the world as the last stop of liquidity and correcting what we would see as a major mistake, really, going back to 1913 and the creation of the Federal Reserve. But we’ll stay in in the modern era for right now, where that power should be with the Treasury.

And I think Kevin Walsh agrees with this. So it’s not that, you know, he’s extremely hawkish from an interest rate point of view, but that he’s ready to be done with the world of quantitative easing and central bank manipulation, and coordinated manipulation at that. So that’s very different That’s a very different thing from being hawkish. And again, giving that power back to the Treasury where it belongs. Uh, so again, that might have oversimplified it a little bit, but I hope that helps break it down where Kevin Warsh is not hawkish, so to speak. But so back to the GDP conversation, okay? Trump on Larry Kudlow said that if the new Fed chairman Kevin Warsh can do his job that he’s capable of doing, is what he said. Then the US could see GDP growth of 15%, maybe even more than that. I mean, wow, you know, basically doubling our prediction from there.

[00:11:54]:
And I believe that he even said— I didn’t have it in my notes here, but I think that he said that before the end of his first term, that why not, why can’t we get to that level of growth? I mean, when you get to our sector watch here in a little bit, in the areas that we’re seeing all-time highs and the resurgence we’re seeing right now in some of these sectors and individual names. It’s very exciting talking about massive manufacturing expansion, massive industrial expansion, transportation and logistics innovation, really, and expansion, because we are entering a whole new era where you have autonomous semis, drones delivering things, right? Why couldn’t we get to the point, as the US being the leadership in capitalism and freedom as a whole, why couldn’t we grow again at a double-digit pace?

We’ve seen it before in history, and I think that if you look on some of the examples and comparisons that have been made to Trump’s economic approach, well, we’ve seen that kind of double-digit growth from those eras going back, you know, the post-World War II era. You know, obviously the ramp up in the armament for World War II, which is, you know, a lot of people say got us out of the Great Depression. You know, really it was getting rid of the, the, um, New Deal policies and getting back to more of a free market system. Although the armament, of course, um, was a massive boon to GDP at the time. If you want to read another fantastic book out there on this topic, Freedom’s Forge. You know what it took, the coordinated effort from our largest companies here in the U.S. to arm up and prepare for World War II.

[00:13:37]:
Fascinating read. But so not looking at World War III, let’s look more at the post-war era, hopefully, as the growth that we’re looking at. Peace and growth, let’s see if we can get it. That’s our view here. Um, I think that it does still, to this day, fly in the face of many of the mainstream economists, market watchers, you know, any talking head that you see from financial mainstream media. Seriously, um, they— many of them wouldn’t agree with that. So it’s great to see an administration who does. All right, that being said, let’s touch on our market action of the day today, um, bring it back to the here and now, as we did get again the Third day in a row of all-time highs from the Dow Jones.

Fantastic to see. Not a huge day— excuse me— and we did finish off of the highs of the day, but the Dow did still finish up 0.1%, just barely off the lows of the day at 50,188. I could get used to saying that, and then we’ll go to 60 and 70 and beyond. Um, great to see. Uh, after that, none of our major indexes behind that finished higher on the day. I’ll point out here the transports have been on a phenomenal run, didn’t quite get to that all-time high here today, but seeing some really early signs of life from— I hate to see early signs because it’s been a fantastic 2026 so far for the group as a whole, but there’s some exciting stories happening here that we’ll be working on. Uh, as far as our major indexes go here on the day, next up we had the S&P 500 down on the day about 0.3%, but to the under the hood and market broadening theme that we’ve been talking so much about, once again here we saw RSP, the equal weight, um, S&P 500 ETF, hit another all-time high here today. Fantastic to see.

[00:15:44]:
Next up, the Russell 2000 small caps, down about 0.3%, uh, right in the range of the S&P 500. And again, not what we want to see here really. NASDAQ leading the way lower, down just shy of 0.6% at 23,102. Um, you know, one point here for this group, and the semis did finish, uh, they did finish better. So, you know, one, they still finished down on the day but better than the NASDAQ. So a little bit of a bright spot there. But what we’ve seen from this group has been really, you know, textbook resilience, okay? Despite so much of the Mag 7 really has not done much to help this market on the year. It’s been Google, which has also pulled back significantly from its all-time highs.

To see the NASDAQ, to see the semis hitting all-time highs without some of the largest names in there taking place, has us even more bullish on the long-term prospects of this group. For example, here on the semis, you know, it hadn’t been NVIDIA as much as it has been, you know, looking at stocks in the last few sessions here. Maybe not as much today, but Taiwan Semi, ASML, Micron, you know, helping participate. Intel even, which I don’t know if that’s a great decision or not, but it’s been on an incredible run. Again, the broadening aspects of this group, and you know, rising tide lifts all boats. We still like Nvidia a lot here, but it’s very good to see the rest of the market contributing as well. And despite the fact here On the software side, you know, the hardware side has been the story really with the semis for the last— I mean, semis are up 100% last year. Software being down so big, and to see the NASDAQ remaining, you know, right in the range of all-time highs here, again, that’s very impressive resilience from this group overall.

[00:17:48]:
You know our view, we remain incredibly bullish here. It’s It’s hard to believe that we’ve now are getting close, not quite, we’re about a little less than 3.5 years into this bull market. October will make 4 years, but we’ve now, we’re now over 1,000 days, about 1,200 days into this bull market, making it the 10th bull market ever to last this long, uh, according to Bespoke. So I mean, fantastic company to be in there. We think this market does have a long way left to run. Um, all right, here, any other notes that I want to get to for our major indexes? I do want to quickly cover here what we’re seeing in sentiment right now. Let me get my screens right here. Kip touched on this a bit yesterday as well, but the number of short sellers that we’re seeing from this market, you know, last year Uh, we look at this right here, this chart, as another bottom signal.

Record levels of hedge fund shorting, uh, you know, the most short since at least 2020, even larger than what we saw from tariff mania last year. Again, signs of a market bottom, not a market top. Exactly what we want to see. We’re also seeing the Fear and Greed Index not long ago in greed mode. And despite, you know, a minor pullback, not even a correction here of 10% or more is technically a correction, 20% technically a bear market. The fact that we’re seeing sentiment retreating so quickly, right, we were just in fear mode, right, but not too long ago. We, when we get to the point where we’re seeing too much bullishness in this market, we’ll see Fear and Greed Index after a 5% pullback like this remaining in it in greed. Maybe not quite extreme greed, but it’ll still be in greed.

[00:19:45]:
Everyone will be buying the dip. You know, AAII will remain at 50, even possibly 60% bulls at that time. Right now we’re at 39. We do have more bulls than bears, but it’ll be really interesting to see what we come back with on Thursday this week. Um, one other policy point here from Trump and the economic goals, bringing down yields. Take a look here at the 10-year. You know, this is from yesterday. 10-year was down another 1.2% today.

But this is from Trump’s inauguration to today, a series of lower highs and lower lows. This is exactly what— outside of this little area right here, we want to get back to seeing lower lows for sure. But overall, that’s exactly what we’ve seen in we expect to continue here. And wait till you see what we saw in the home builders today, and, uh, you tell me that they’re not expecting lower yields. We’ll get to that here in a second. Quickly, our internals on the day today. Again, for a day where 3 out of our 4 major indexes finished lower on the day, these are strong internals. We’re positive across the board, really right up until the close, and still only finished negative in one area, and even then just barely.

[00:21:03]:
It was the advance decline. We had slightly more declining stocks than advancing stocks on the NASDAQ today. Again, just barely. Still came in positive here on the NYSE. Speaking of beats though, NYSE almost 10:1 positive, 52-week highs to lows. Uh, you know, shy of that, we had just the 38 stocks hitting 52-week lows. That is impressive. And then on the NASDAQ, just shy of 3 to 1 positive.

Still great numbers on volume. No big beats here, but did come in positive for both the NYSE and the NASDAQ today. Very good to see. All right, the one I’ve been excited to cover here are sectors on the day. Today we’re led by utilities. You know, a lot of people would say defensive, maybe not great You know, hey, new highs beget new highs. This group didn’t quite hit an all-time high but is its highest level, uh, in the last few months here. Good to see.

[00:22:02]:
Right after that though, the real estate sector. Okay, if you’ve been with us here for a while, you know, hey, great seeing the real estate sector higher, but the S&P real estate sector is mostly made up of REITs. It did hit— let’s just check here— that is a 52-week high. Just shy of, you know, not too far away from an all-time high. But you know what did hit an all-time high today? The home builders, XHB, the home builder ETF. Uh, excuse me, I’m sorry, that is— sorry, a 52-week high. Uh, my bad there, I’m looking at the huge movers here on the day from this group. But again, another sign of an industry sector expecting lower yields would be homebuilders.

Some huge movers on the day. Let me take a look here. Toll Brothers now on the, on the full day up over 6%. DR Horton 5.7%. KB Homes 5%. Lennar 4.5%. Pulte nearly 4% higher on the day today. Fantastic move higher here.

[00:23:08]:
Again, a 52-week high. From this group, uh, exactly what we want to see, um, in this market. After that, the all-time highs— materials, big talks about this year with the CapEx from the tech companies, right? The build-out of data centers, materials and industrials, bringing back manufacturing here in the US as well. All-time highs, materials Big move higher here, finishing up 1.29% on the day today. All-time high industrials, all-time high. Um, for our laggards on the day, we did— energy did finish slightly lower on the day, but before that, also all-time high. Our laggards on the day, as you might expect here, tech, a proxy for tech, communication services did lead the way lower, followed by financials and healthcare. Uh, tech did a little bit better on the day today as far as a sector goes.

Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. You know, I won’t spend a ton of time on this here today because if you haven’t listened to Kip’s podcast from yesterday, you know, and you want to learn more about gold and specifically the miners, I mean, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to his podcast from yesterday.— you have some fantastic stats here that I’ll just touch on, uh, briefly. Really some work that isn’t being done anywhere else. And so he’s been cited in a few different articles about it. Very cool. Um, but when you look at portfolio allocation and a number of different metrics here from a macro point of view, there is so much to love about this group and so much that is— I mean, even despite breaking out of, you know, a decade-and-a-half bear market and basing pattern here, hitting all-time highs in January, this group is historically undervalued. There’s a historic dislocation in valuations right now in the mining sector. I talked about this on Charles Schwab just a couple weeks ago, that most of these mining companies you know, their, their breakeven rates on gold are below $1,500 an ounce.

[00:25:28]:
In some areas, even better. That is basically a license to print money for these companies when gold’s above $5,000 an ounce. So, uh, right now, senior miners, the largest out there, and even more so for the junior miners, are significant— trading significantly below the the value of their assets. Kip does a deep dive into this, and if you want to learn more, come and join us for our 14-day free trial at vralletter.com. You’ll get the full breakdown and our favorite positions as well. Uh, but this is a fantastic point that I really love seeing. If you took every gold miner currently in the world, every public gold miner in the world, and you combined all of the valuations All of them combined on the planet, their market cap would only be $1 trillion. To put that into perspective, Walmart just crossed $1 trillion.

You know, for all of the gold miners in the world to be worth a Walmart, you know, even though obviously Walmart isn’t a small company, right? But when you have gold above $5,000 and ounce. Again, and the value of their assets, again, their price-to-book ratio, looking at things like this with gold— I mean, even if gold had a pullback here, but with gold at $5,000 an ounce, again, historic dislocation. And right now, gold miners represent just 1% of global equities as far as the historical averages go. You know, that’s roughly 10%. So you can see a 10x from here just to get back to normal levels, but have been as high as 18% in the past. So again, so many incredible numbers here, and I just scratched the surface of Kip’s breakdown from yesterday. So again, I highly encourage you, uh, to go back and listen to that one if you want to get some more info about gold and the miners and what we expect going forward from here. All right, taking a look quickly here at our commodities on the day.

[00:27:39]:
Gold, if I’m not mistaken, closer, close to its highs of the day now at $5,066 an ounce. But we did see, uh, the gold miners finish even better on the day because earlier in the session gold was lower. Gold miners still managed to finish positive on the day today, and it has been a historic run, you know, really parabolic move higher that we got from silver even more so. There will be some backing and filling in that. We look at all of these as buying opportunities. Silver, um, now at $81.19 an ounce. Copper, $5.90 a pound. Um, oil here, uh, you know, firmly now above $60 a barrel at $64.32 a barrel.

We know that Trump and Trump admin want to see lower oil prices. What range that looks like, you know, remains to be seen here. If, uh, energy— like, we, like, we want to see semis leading tech, you want to see energy stocks leading the commodity as well. We’ve absolutely seen that from the energy sector here, uh, even with oil in the $55 to upper $50s per barrel, energy stocks were hitting, you know, 52-week highs, all-time highs. It’s very bullish and constructive for this group. Uh, and finally here for today, Bitcoin now lower on the day today by 2% at $68,594 a Bitcoin. Kip talked about this, uh, a lot recently as well, that we’ve now seen, you know, the third most oversold condition on relative strength for for Bitcoin. A retest here of some of those lower levels and possibly, you know, the $65K range.

[00:29:31]:
We don’t expect it to take out the lows that we saw, you know, kind of the end of last week and into the weekend at about $60,000 of Bitcoin. We think the lows will hold here, but again, a retest of about the $65K range would not be a huge surprise for us. Um, but there’s so much negativity out there in Bitcoin right now from all kinds of different angles. Um, you know, this is— remains the largest market cap cryptocurrency. It remains the biggest name in the space. We think that continues. Uh, so we do remain bullish on Bitcoin here. Again, come and join us at vraletter.com for our 14-day free trial.

We think you’ll stay with us for life after subscribing. Uh, that’s why we give away those 14 days, uh, so you can take it for a test drive, see if it’s for you, take a look at, you know, everything that we have to offer for free. And again, I bet you stay with us for life. Uh, so we look forward to having you there with us. You’ll get all of our breakdown here on Bitcoin and much, much more. Obviously commodities, as I touched on as well, in every pick that we have right now in the VRA portfolio. Portfolio. And we are making some moves here.

[00:30:46]:
I have made, uh, you know, a good amount of moves. We’re not day traders. We look at it as when the market presents opportunities, we’re going to take advantage of them. That is why we have the VRA Investing System. Right now we remain at 9 out of 12 screens bullish. So again, come and join us. But that’s all we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe.

You can do this as well while you’re at vraletter.com. For our daily podcast to get them delivered in your inbox. You can sign up at vrayletter.com, click that podcast link at the top. Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for The Close.