In today's episode, Tyler Herriage breaks down practical strategies for navigating market sell-offs like we saw today. From discussing the latest government shutdown drama and its impact on investor sentiment to celebrating Blue Origin’s historic rocket launch, he offers a unique blend of market analysis, economic insights, and a touch of space exploration.

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 great day out there today. Not so much if you were watching this markets today, unfortunately, which would make sense that I am here with you for the podcast today. That’s Kip and I’s long running joke that he gets the big updates, the all time highs and I inevitably get the big sell off days. But we have seen a pattern change on that lately, haven’t we? I got quite a few all time highs in the last few months while Kip got some big down days. So you, you know, maybe we’re more into like a 70, 30 kind of environment of keep getting the big days and I get the down days.

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But hey, you know, it comes with the territory when you do a podcast every single day at the close. And it’s, you know, it’s what we love to do. As Kip always tells me on the big down days, these are the days that build character. Right? But hey, I love being here with you as always and we’ve got some great stuff and here for you today. But before I dive in to what we’ll cover on the podcast today, first off here wanted to let you know that if you’re around this evening, Kip will have two interviews tonight. So be sure that you catch those. The first will be on Wayne Allen Roots new hit podcast War Zone, which you can find in a number of places live streamed on Rumble. If you’re looking for the link you can find it on Gateway Pundit.

It’ll be the top one of the top links at on their homepage there or just go to his X feed, you’ll find it. Or Twitter feed, you’ll find it live streamed there as well. Make sure to catch the whole episode. Wayne has some of the best guests out there on and just some phenomenal commentary by himself of course as well. But that will be at 6:30pm Eastern time that Kip will be on in the and then second he’ll be on the Grant Stitchfield show tonight at 7:45pm Eastern Time. That is on Real America’s Voice. It’s been phenomenal to see Kip on that program as well. And tuning into Grant show, you know, he’s a phenomenal host as well.

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Get some great guests, some great commentary on there on that phenomenal network Real America’s Voice. So hope you can join him for both of those this evening. He’s got some exciting stuff to to cover as well as always. We spoke here just before the close, going through all of this together, what we’re seeing in the market. And, you know, if this down session like today has you a little worried, as would be natural, I think I’ve got a few facts here that back up not only why we’re bullish going forward, why we’ve been so bullish, but why we remain so bullish in the face of of pullbacks like this. It’s why Kip and his mentors created the VRA investing system to help us remove our emotion from investing. Because on days like today, it’s so easy to get caught up in the sentiment of it all. So that’s one of the things we’ll certainly cover here today, is the sentiment.

Of course we’ll cover this market action. Know, obviously when you’re the NASDAQ’s down 2 point, almost 2.3% on the day, it doesn’t feel good. But we have held Friday’s lows, which we have, you know, talked about being potentially the lows for the rest of the year. So we’ll cover why it’s not as bad as it may feel out there in the market. Then I’ll cover briefly. The government shutdown is finally over. You know, of course, I agree with Wayne on this one as well. It was kiss keep it shut stupid.

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But now maybe it was shut for too long is what the fear is, right? The fear going into it was that just the government being closed. Now the fear coming out of it is the government reopening fears. So we’ll cover that and what that has done to sentiment. I mean, if you’re not watching sentiment here, you’ll be very surprised by what you’re seeing when we have our market so close still to all time highs, not just here in the US but globally. So I’ll touch on that a little bit for the major indexes. So make sure you stay tuned for that part because there’s some really interesting stuff I think you’ll want to hear during our market coverage today. And of course, we’ll cover what we’re seeing in the market, internals, our sectors, and our VRA commodity watch as well. So without further ado, we’ll go ahead and start jumping right in here.

I am getting a bit of a late start here today as I was really, you know, couldn’t look away from my screens as I was preparing for the podcast as we had this Blue Origin launch today. If you’re not familiar, Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos’s space company, rocket company, the competitor to SpaceX. We’ve got a few of these here in the US now. But these two companies, Blue Origin, had a big milestone that they hit today. So that’s why I wanted to tune in there. If you missed it, they became Blue Origin became just the second rocket company ever for any company or country to successfully launch and land a rocket during suborbital flights. Now, if you look globally and other companies as well, you’ll find some other companies that have landed rockets, but nothing to the height, nothing to the magnitude of what we’ve seen now from both SpaceX which has done it, you know, they don’t even show it anymore on TV because they’ve done it so many times. That’s how impressive it is.

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But of course they’re going to show it when a company’s doing it for the very first time. They had one other test attempt of this. I believe this was only their second time to attempt this kind of launch and landing and they successfully did it today. Multiple successes on this. Now if you look it up, China is close in some regards, both the country and some of their companies as well. But again, nothing to this magnitude, nothing to this altitude, I should say, where it was able to get up that high and come back and successfully land a rocket or booster back on Earth for reuse. So a huge milestone there for Blue Origin. Congrats to the whole team there.

And one other fun fact about this one, I won’t dive too deep into it today, but they launched two satellites which will be in orbit in a very unique orbital pattern, I believe it’s called a kidney pattern or something like that, where in the next 11 months they’ll be propelling from Earth’s gravity into the long trek to the red planet onto Mars for some further surveillance there. So, you know, multiple successes. It seems that those satellites launch, launch successfully as well. So I, you know, I’m a huge fan of anything space related. Being from Houston, Texas. I mean, it’s in the, it’s in my blood, right? Loved going out to the Johnson Space center as a kid and as an adult had the, the privilege of being able the floor with the engineers, man, it was a while back now, but during a spacewalk and getting to see what goes on on the floor there from the engineer point of view and so much that happens behind the scenes really just there really is no more exciting endeavor, in my opinion than what’s happening in the space race. And Kip talked about this yesterday as well. This is part of the future of economic growth, not just space exploration.

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But you’ve likely heard a lot about putting data centers on the dark side of the moon, energy development from solar panels out in space that send that energy and other things back down to Earth here. All kinds of various avenues that don’t even involve, you know, man going out to space, but things that we can do with satellites that are the future of data as well, the future of communications, and an area where the U. S certainly needs to be a leader in. So very exciting to now have two US Companies on that front. Now I’ll take a step back here and we’ll get back here to Earth, literally speaking, where we did have the US Government reopening here. And again, going into the shutdown, everybody’s always concerned about what that’s going to mean for the stock market, for the economy. Well, we have a little bit more on what it does mean specifically for the economy here. But everybody was scared when the government was shutting down.

Now they’re scared again as the government is reopening. So a real damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of situation. But the real concern is that we won’t be getting back some of that economic data. Kip talked about this as well, that you really. You can’t take economic data that comes from the government at face value. That’s not just true for China. It’s true here in the US as well. But really, the scares today were when Kevin Hassett, you know, potential next Fed chairman, the name has been floated around out there, and I believe on Poly Market, he’s still in the running as well, said that economic growth for the fourth quarter may.

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May be cut for GDP by up to a percent and a half. It was supposed to be a big quarter. I believe the Atlanta Fed had gotten all the way up to 4%. I’ll just check it really quick here. Yes, had gotten all the way up to 4% GDP growth. So that could cut it all the way down to two and a half percent, is what he said today. We’ll see how that plays out or see if he was engineering some kind of buying opportunity. That’s how we’re looking at it here at the vra.

But of course, what that means for. For jobs numbers coming in. And now we won’t be getting back October’s jobs data as we should have gotten last Friday. You know, from that point of view, again, no concerns for us here. But on the economic side of things, as far as GDP goes, that should have sent a signal to The Fed again to be cutting. Right. As we’ve said for a long time here, the Fed has been behind the curve on cutting and Stephen Myon, the newest appointee from President Trump has echoed that, you know, calling for 50 basis point cuts. Let’s get down to a neutral rate sooner rather than later and stay there.

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If you look at the Fed’s dot plot towards the end of 2026, you he’s on the same page with just about everybody else. It’s just the timeline that he’s adjusted. So anything you hear about him in the mainstream media being this hugely dovish member of the Fed is not that he’s hugely dovish compared to everyone else. It’s just the timeline of when he wants to get there by and completely agree with that here. So again with cuts to economic growth, you would expect the Fed’s odds of cutting rates to have gone up. Well that’s not what we saw today from both the CME’s Fed watch tool, which that’s can be all over the place. Earlier in the session today their odds were, excuse me, for the first time in months that we would see a pause from the Fed. I mean just one month ago it was a 95 probability that the Fed would be cutting rates by 25 basis points.

Then of course we had J. Powell’s comments at the last federal open mouth committee. As Ed Yardeni says, the FOMC meeting where he said, you know, the December rate cut is far from a foregone conclusion, really seeming like another get Trump kind of attempt here, kind of a final fu on the way out as he’s entered this lame duck period before. He’s gone in May and fades into irrelevancy. Because this guy loves the microphone. Expect him to do a whole lot of paid speaking engagements appearing on news networks as often as possible because this guy just loves being in front of a microphone. And it could not be worse for the market. There’s no Fed chairman out there that has a worse track record than him of sending the markets lower when he’s talking.

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So we think the Fed should be cutting rates in December. Of course we’ll have to wait and see on that one. But Poly Market as well, you know, saw a big drop today in the odds of a a 25 basis point cut in December now, which is probably far more reliable when you have real money online betting than the CME’s fed watch tool. Again though, rates aren’t at such a restrictive level to where we won’t still have economic growth. So we look at this once again as a buying opportunity. I’ve got a few facts here coming up for you as well on that front. But first, what has this done to sentiment? I mean we’re just, you know, week, a week or so away from all time highs and sentiment has fallen off of a cliff. Look at this.

I’ll share my screen on this one. Just two weeks ago we were at 44% bulls. How fickle those bulls were though. We’re now all the way down to 31.6 bulls, 49, nearly 50% bears. If this ends up being a top for the market, which we see is incredibly unlikely, as you know, we have not changed our tune at all for this innovation revolution bull market that will exceed the dot com era bull market. We’re only a fraction of the way there. You know, the, the bull market during the dot com era rallied over 575%. Well at the peak.

Even at the all time highs, the Nasdaq has only rallied 133%. So we’re nowhere near the euphoric levels of what we saw during the dot com era. But again, if this were to be a top, it’d be the most called top of all time because you can’t escape it in the financial mainstream media. You can’t escape it from, you know, the loudest voices out there on financial Twitter either. But some of the most reliable names out there remain incredibly bullish. Kip and I were talking again before the podcast about Rich Ross, the technician over at Evercore who we really like it when his work and our work lines up. He remains incredibly bullish as well. We just got that in before the or just after the close here today as well.

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So very good to see. He sees this as a buying opportunity for us as well. But what a massive increase there that we’ve seen in bears. I mean the highest that we’ve seen going back since before June. As far as back as this single page goes here, again, we’re just less than 5. I have some stats on this in a minute. Less than 5% away from all time highs on our laggard, the Nasdaq, roughly 4.7% away from all time highs. And we have this many bears in the market.

Again, when you have a pullback of 5 to 10% and this is the reading we’re getting on bulls, that’s the, that’s when we will say this is frothy. We are, you know, at or near a top in the market. We may not even be there yet because it can Stay, you know, irrationally exuberant as I believe that was Ben Bernanke who, who coined that phrase. It was Alan Greenspan who coined that phrase. But once that’s irrational exuberance when we get to those kinds of levels. And also here, fear and greed all the way down. Now back to the extreme fear mode. Not quite as bad as we were one week ago, but still extreme fear when we’re this close to all time highs.

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You know, not surprising given the atmosphere that we’re in. But again, just pretty hard to believe with how bullish we have been. I just don’t see it in this market. But we love to see it. We love to be contrarians here at the vra. There’s another good sign that we are on the contrarian side of the market right now. So that being said, let’s take a quick look here at our market action. All four of our major indexes did finish lower on the day.

Again to the fear and green point. We’re one day away from an all time high in the Dow Jones, the first close ever above 48,000. And that’s where sentiment is right now. Wow. You know, and the Dow is not all tech. We have, we got Nvidia in the Dow now and some tech names in there, but this isn’t the NASDAQ that we’re talking about. These are supposed to be the value names and we’re hitting all time highs yesterday. So again I got a great status here here in just a second.

Dow down 1.65% on the day after that right there with it. The S&P 500 down 1.66% on the day. Our laggard on the day was small caps down 2.77%. And again, again the NASDAQ down nearly 2.3% on the day, which is not what you want to see. Tech leading lower. And we did have the semis leading tech lower down 3% on the day today. But importantly here for all three of our major indexes, Dow, NASDAQ S&P 500 and the semis for that matter, the Friday lows have held so far. That’s what we want to see here.

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So overall, here’s where we stand. Okay. The S P500 even with this big move lower today, still just 2.6% away from an all time high. And for anybody who says it’s just seven stocks holding up this market, I’ve got a few reasons why that is just not the case. Right. They heard that. They’re parroting it from somewhere. Else, because look at the equal weight S&P 500, it’s less, it has less distance away from its all time high right now than the S P 500 itself.

Right. So the other 493 stocks are doing all right. Just 2.2% away from its all time high. Now as I mentioned earlier, the Nasdaq being our laggard doesn’t feel good. We’re 4.78% away from an all time high. That would be considered roughly a mild correction. A correction being 10% in the market. A mild correction.

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Pullbacks of roughly 5% happen on average 3 and a half times per year. So this isn’t something that we shouldn’t be able to get used to if you’re in the market. Right. This happens very regularly. Part of the markets in general. Okay, but another great point here that JC Pretz made today is if you look at the cues, okay, is the NASDAQ 100 after that the next 100 stocks that are non financial related. So the up and comers, you know, they don’t qualify for the Q’s, but still, I mean a lot of good companies in there. The symbol for that ETF is QQQJ.

Okay. The next gen 100 just hit an all time high yesterday. Right. So there’s still a lot of bullish things happening in tech as a whole. Now the big fear now of course is are the data centers that they’re going to be built, but will we have enough energy to power them all? That’s a big concern. Having a lot of conversations with people in the know about that right now. So I got somebody at the door here, let me just check. But a lot of concerns out there about these data centers and I, and I get that one as well.

It’s a story we’re working on here because the nuclear story as we do like it a lot here. We think it’s a big part of the future of energy. You know, it’s becoming more and more clear to people that these facilities won’t be online next year. You know, we’re looking at 2027, 2028 just to get a few of them online. Of course big companies like Microsoft and Google are reviving some of the old nuclear projects, but we’re about at the end of being able to revive of the revivable projects out there. Now if we can get some more deregulation in other spaces from the, the Trump administration, great. Maybe nuclear can move up in those timelines. Would love to see that.

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Absolutely. But in the meantime, it Means we’ll be relying on natural gas, which makes up roughly 40% of power behind these facilities anyway. Right. Now, of course, we can look at other things like solar and wind. Not a fan of wind energy here. Personally speaking, solar does have a future, does have a place. Absolutely. And of course we can’t ignore what we’re seeing from Tesla and the battery impact that we could potentially see the massive growth from that area.

Being able to conserve some of the energy from the off hours from these plants. There will be some massive ways to increase our energy production, but how much can we ramp it up? So that’s the big concern in tech right now that we’re hearing a lot of. We’ll continue to report on that here. But yes, by and large, again, these 5% mild corrections happen three and a half times per year. Okay. So this isn’t anything out of the ordinary that we’re seeing right now. And again, we’ll look at it as a buying opportunity. And here’s another great point for that.

Okay. In a bull market, it typically is escalator up, elevator down for the market. Those aren’t the days where you want to be panic selling. Okay? And here’s some great proof of that that you know, unless you have a timing system like the VRA investing system, you’re just a long term holder. Time in the market is better than timing the market for a lot of people. It’s so hard to be a long term good day trader. Check this out. This is from bespoke earlier today.

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Emotions in investing don’t mix. Emotion. Emotional investors tend to sell when the market’s going down. Like today buy when the market is going up should be doing the opposite. Again, buying the dip. Look here below, okay? Buy and hold is the best, right? If you can bear through those things. If you buy, excuse me, only after big declines, not big declines, but just declines in general. Your returns would still be very good.

But look at what happens if you only buy after down days, so on, or excuse me, after updates. Your returns would only be 44%. Part of that in there was negative during oh, seven. Right. You’d see a big rip. Yeah. That’s when in bear markets is not buy the dip, it’s sell the rip. Okay? And we’re not in a sell the rip kind of environment.

This is a perfect chart of why you want to be buying the dip. Look at those returns compared to what happens when. If you’re buying on a big update, you’re chasing the market. You have fomo. FOMO is never A good reason to be buying into the market. And there’s a great example for you there. Again, that’s the, the kind of scared money that the what investors refer to as the fast money, often for retail investors. And that’s who we want to help here every day at the vra.

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So if you’re not with us already, come and join us. We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now because that’s exactly who we want to help, the small guy out there. We’re not here to help Wall Street. That’s not why we do this. We’re here because we love it, first and foremost. Well, first and foremost it is to help others always. But secondly, because we do love this, love commenting on it, love watching it day to day. So we figured give this research away, Give as much away for free as possible.

But if you want to know our exact picks, exactly what we’re doing with our own money here at the vra as a newsletter, we’re blessed to not have the conflicts of interest of Wall street, where a lot of these people, they’re salesmen or sales women, right? Salespeople that don’t always have your portfolio’s best interest at heart. They’re not always selling you what you need, they’re selling you what they get paid off of. Okay? And even from the fiduciary point of view, that gets a lot of laughs from the insiders because even then, you know, they say they succeed when you succeed. Well, oftentimes they’re taking profits way too early so that they can get paid on those gains as well. All kinds of different ways that they can finagle the system to line their own pockets. One other point here before I move on, that we see is a sign that we’re nowhere near a market top. Look at the IPO market, okay? That’s the dot com era peaked at 511. Just before the top.

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Right at the top. Even after Covid. Okay, even going into covet to some extent. But after Covid, we had the SPAC boom. Different than maybe an IPO. That’s why we have equity issuances, IPOs and secondary offerings. We’re just at a 56 today. This is nowhere near a euphoric type of market.

There’s a lot of great private companies that have yet to go public. When we get to the point where we’re seeing IPOs every day and they rally over a hundred percent, as Kip talks about, you know, if your IPO didn’t rally in the dot com Era over a hundred percent. Nobody wanted to be a part of it. You basically got laughed out of the room because it wasn’t serious then because everybody else was seeing those massive gains. Sorry, adjusting myself screen here. But again another sign there that we aren’t in a frothy market. All right, so on to some factors that we wish were better today. But we’ve seen a great improvement in the market internals.

Not so much here today as we did have more declining than advancing stocks on both the NYSE and the NASDAQ. Roughly 3 1/2 to 1 negative on the NYSE. A little bit worse, 3.8 to 1 negative on the NASDAQ. 52 week highs and lows really could have been worse, slightly negative on the NYSE. Just 5, 5 more stocks hitting 52 week lows than highs. And again we have roughly 90% of global markets at or near all time highs. Like either just hitting all time highs in the last week or so two weeks compared to hitting, you know, or at least nowhere near those kinds of levels. It’s not just here, it’s not in the US this is a global bull market.

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Then on the Nasdaq where we don’t have quite all prime time players, right. There’s a lot of stocks in there that really not to say they shouldn’t be in the Nasdaq but just aren’t quite up to par compared to the nyse. So roughly just over two and a half to one negative on the nasdaq. The then on volume we want to see this improve but you’re not quite to extreme levels where we get kind of like the, the bearish volume levels that this could be the sign of something bigger. But we did see 78.6% downside volume for the NYSE today. Slightly better on the Nasdaq. Still not great. So that was a little bit of a, of a bright spot there on the Nasdaq.

Again some of that is the, the traders going into those penny stocks and that’s another thing as well as some of the younger traders get into this, you saw it during the COVID era, whether that was the altcoin craze or the NFT craze, that’s all money that’s not going into the market. Right. Like a lot of it. Again for the volume side of things today might be going into some penny stocks, not going into the big names that money should be likely going into, but looking for the big moves, looking for a 10 bagger out there, real aggressive kind of money. All right, next up here, looking at our sectors on the day was better earlier in the session, but energy was our only sector to finish higher on the day today. I want to run one chart here really quick as natural gas did hit a 52E high here today. Now a big part of that, of course, is seasonality to be expected heading into the winter months going to be more demand. What we’re hearing is that going forward again to power these data centers, that natural gas is a large, large part of that.

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So this could be a higher, for longer kind of move from natural gas still. Again, doing a lot of research in that area right now Then we did have consumer staples, unchanged on the day to day, but our lagging sectors, as you might expect, were in the tech area. We had consumer discretionary, really kind of a proxy of tech, tech sector right after that. And communication services again, pretty tech related. And then industrials and utilities yields were higher on the day now at a 4.11% on the 10 year, but still below the recent highs. And since Trump was inaugurated, that’s been our call all year was that yields were going to go lower. And we got a lot of flack for this. I can’t believe we got it this year.

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Talking about the US Dollar going lower, right, which the dollar was lower on the day, but just like we saw in 2017, okay, 2016, Trump was elected, 2017, he was inaugurated. Dollar peaked just before the inauguration. It’s almost identical to what we saw then, which is what gave us so much confidence in this call. And it’s what we’ve seen from the dollar. Of course, just like everything, it won’t be a straight down line, but we do expect the dollar to continue lower. We expect the money printer to stay on, which I was surprised to get some push back on that as well from some people I know who are in, you know, the economic space, whether they work for different firms or I won’t say the other areas that they work in. But they’ve been surprised by this move lower in the dollar. They’ve been surprised to see the money printer.

They think that when Trump gets a new Fed chairman in there that there’s a good chance that they would stop the money printer. We don’t see that as the case. As you know, we’ve talked a lot about here. It does seem to be, if you, if you’re reading the tea leaves and listening to their conversations between, you know, Scott Bessant when he’s in the news, it appears that a big part of getting rid of the debt will be to print some of that away. Now just a couple other recap on the sectors here. The healthcare sector did hit a 52e high today before finishing lower on the day. I believe that’s an all time high there from the healthcare sector. Actually I’d have to double check that but at least a 52E high.

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So as always new highs beget new highs for the financials. Kip covered it yesterday. We had a number of all time highs from this group. We saw another round of all time highs earlier in the session today with Deutsche bank and Goldman Sachs hitting all time highs before falling into the close. Now finally here for today our VRA commodity watch where Gold you know did finish lower on the day. Now higher in after hours up 2/10 of 1% at $4181 an ounce. Silver also higher in after hours not far away from that all time high at $52.33 an ounce. Oil still below $60 a barrel at $58.79 a barrel.

And finally here for today, one chart here that we are paying attention to is Bitcoin which did break below its recent lows to hit its lowest level since roughly June I want to say of this year earlier in the day today so actually got below those levels. The lowest level since about May of this year in bitcoin. We want to see this kind of a one and done. Let’s get above that level. Some important support levels that were at there in bitcoin. As you know we do remain long term bullish on bitcoin and another crypto is here that again if you come and join us@vraletter.com you can learn more about that one as well. Very exciting new and what we see is an upand cominging crypto, not necessarily an altcoin. This one has a fantastic use case.

Very very interesting. All right 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 at VRAletter.com Click the podcast link at the top and we’d love to to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.