Welcome back to the VRA Investing Podcast! In today’s episode, Speaker A breaks down another thrilling day on Wall Street with major indexes and key sectors hitting fresh all-time highs. We dive into the red-hot IPO market, spotlighting the explosive debut of Sarabros—a company at the cutting edge of the semiconductor space—and what its success signals for future IPO activity. Speaker A also explores why today’s bull market may just be getting started, drawing comparisons to the legendary ‘90s dot-com melt up.

Foreign. Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon everyone. Tyler Herridge here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a fantastic day out there today. Hope your week is going great this week as well. Another phenomenal week, really so far. Another day of all time.

Highs today for our markets, for our favorite sectors, for some of our favorite names as well. The list goes on and on. And what an eventful market. I know I say that often, but it really has been not just this week, it’s been eventful from the lows on March 30 and in subsequent V shaped recovery. It’s been an eventful market for 2026. I think we go back to Trump’s inauguration. Of course we had tariff mania in there really since the birth of this new bull market from 2022, October of 2022 to today. And have you been here with us for a while? I’ll say it one more time.

We’ve still got a long way to go. I’ll lay out some great reasons for it here today. We’ve got a lot of stuff to cover. If you’re new here, I’ll lay it out here quickly for you. What we’ll cover today, first and foremost, the big news of the day, the beginning of what we see will be a red hot IPO market. We had the Sarah Bras IPO today. We’ll touch on that briefly in the market’s reaction, which of course is the most important thing on that front. And then what we see going forward for the IPO market, of course we’ll cover our overall broad market action from our major indexes, the all time highs we got there from our internals, some interesting readings we’re seeing as well, kind of book bucking the trend here where we had seen seven out of the last eight days mixed, just not great internals.

Solid beat today. And one other metric in there that we look as look at under this hood of the market is very encouraging. It’s not just the mega cap names driving this market. People have said that for years. We’ve continued to see breadth expansion though there will be periods of time where we get outperformance from the Mag 7. That’s when they earn their stripes. They’re the generals. They’re there for the reason.

They’re the largest companies in the world for a reason. When they move, they move. Nvidia is an example of that today. So we’ll dive into a little bit of that. But first, let me actually say this Tonight Kip will be on the fantastic Wayne Allen Root Show. I hope you can join him this evening. Let me I know I have the time here. Let me get that for you on at 7:30 Eastern Time tonight he will be on War Zone.

So you can find it on Wayne’s Twitter feed. It’ll be on the Gateway pundit. This on the website. It’ll be one of the top links during that time or on Rumble as well. Looking forward to watching myself because it has been some phenomenal market action to watch here. Then tomorrow he’ll also be on the fantastic Grant Central podcast. So you won’t want to miss that. I think they’ll there’ll be some overlap, I’m sure, but they’re very different.

[00:03:30]:
One will be quick. The high hitters, the punches as Wayne Root is, is really great at, you know, the Root, the Root, the Roots on fire. And then we’ll slow he’ll slow down a little bit with Grant’s podcast tomorrow. So both of those I’m looking forward to. Hope you can join him for those as well. All right, just a kind of final recap here of what we’ll cover today. After the internals, we will cover those sectors and our VRA commodity watch as well. So without further ado, let’s jump right in to this red hot IPO market where Kip has covered these stats for some time and we haven’t come back to it in a while.

We often Talk about the 1995-2000.com melt up when the NASDAQ rallied 580% as of today, the Nasdaq another all time high. But from the bare market lows of 2022, I’ll give you an eyeball number here. I’ll redo this one because we are at all time highs now up roughly. I would just before I even get to this, 160% I would say would be my guess off the top of my head. All right, we’re eyeballing this here if you want to do it with me. The lows for the NASDAQ of 2022 10,088. Today we’re at 26,635. So just below that number we’re up 160% or so.

I mean really, you can do that in your head pretty easily. There’s about 160% though for the Nasdaq. Again the dot comparison where we rallied 580%. And during that time frame there was a red hot IPO market. Kip has covered it A lot here. I know I should have had the numbers right in front of me. I knew it. I thought I had them off the top of my head.

But so many of these companies, I mean triple digits that went up 50% plus on their first day of trading and a big number of them that went up triple digits on their first day of trading. We just saw that today with Sarah Bross. So a little bit of background here. This company has been around for a little while and if you haven’t heard of it before, you know, you wouldn’t be surprised if you’re not in the semiconductor space or in finance. There’d really not be a whole lot of reason for you to know about it because what they do is so niche and unique that, that if you’re outside of the space there would be no reason for you to know about it so quickly here from a 30,000 foot view. I know we have a lot of listeners here who are in that space. So if I butcher anything here, let me know. I know we’ve got a number of X amd whether you’re on, you know, the sales side or engineer side, I won’t say any names here but from, from a lot of different angles and a lot of other firms too.

But it was founded by ex AMD engineers, if I understand correctly. You know, just a week ago here from the financial point of view, that is what we do here at the vra. It was going to IPO again just a week ago at roughly a hundred and fifteen dollars a share today. Well, I’ll take, I won’t go quite to today yet because just after that announcement was made at 115 a share, they raised it because they said demand was overwhelming. It went to 150 a share. Went higher and higher and higher. Ultimately did go public today at 350 technically, you know, because it was supposed to IPO at a much lower level, up 70% on the day today went out this morning at 350. Closed the day.

See here, 311 after hours. Up a little bit. But this is an exciting one here. Yes. When a company goes public, as you heard it I’m sure many times in the financial mainstream media today, they say it’s a bad time to be buying them your exit liquidity. But when you have a phenomenal company, it almost doesn’t matter. And I’m not saying that this is for sure a great example of this I would do. This is not a recommendation.

You know, we do have our IPO strategy we’re working on Right now. So officially, I guess I can say that we have, we have talked about it in the vra, but if you want to know what we’re saying about it, come and join us. We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now. Check it out@vra letter.com you’ll find all of our commentary on this specifically today. Now I know members are probably thinking, you know, just, just give it to us. I haven’t had time to read the update yet, but we’ll get to that, we’ll get to that point. But point being here, there’ll be a lot of phenomenal companies that, that come out of this, even if they are at extremely high valuations, seemingly as I talked about on Tuesday, I think what we’re about to witness in this market, and I don’t want to speak for Kip, but I think he feels the same way, we’re about to see a move unlike anything. It will rewrite the record books and I’ll get to that actually in just a second.

[00:08:42]:
The, the market cap that we see today in companies is about to go parabolic as well. Apple was the first company to hit the trillion dollar valuation. I want to say it was 2018. I’ll look it up for you. Became a trillion dollar company August 2nd of 2018. Now we have 8, 10 companies in the trillion dollar range. Nvidia’s banging on the door of 6 trillion. Right? I mean they did hit another all time high today.

Are they there now? Let’s see. 5.7 trillion. We don’t think it’s, we’re far off at all from having a 10 trillion dollar company. And that company won’t be alone. It’s going to get crazy from there. So you want to find unique companies. There’s always going to be winners, there’s always going to be outperformers of the market. So if that’s your kind of interest again, come and join us.

That’s what we do here at the vra. So before I get too much into this specific ipo, which I do want to cover a little bit of, to the point of this being a record shattering IPO market, Kip covered all the stats of the returns. We could very well beat that. Although. But for what we’re seeing from 2026 so far, there’s not a record number of IPOs scheduled of individual companies. But the amount of money that is about to be raised. Excuse me, let me get some water real quick. Good timing.

I left you a little suspense there. The amount of Money that is about to be raised, the projected number already dwarfs the other records. If we just hit the projected number, it’ll be a record shattering again. Rewrite the record books kind of numbers. We think it’s going to be far, far higher than that. We’ve talked often about the record levels of cash on the sideline, whether that’s money market funds, the amount of home equity available, credit scores at all time highs. So the ability to lever up. Let me take a step back.

Even your consumer debt levels, you’ll see record high after record high. Well, we also have money supply at record high. Record high. The amount of financial instruments out there, also a record high. Of course that number is going to hit record highs as well. But as far as household debt, we’re nowhere near, you know, flashing the red lights at us. So the ability for consumers to lever up here is incredible. Even with yields at these levels.

[00:11:22]:
We talked about that on Tuesday’s podcast. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to that yet, the discussion on yields and, and what a 4 1/2% 10 year yield means, go back and listen to it. Because during that 1995-2000 rally, yields averaged on the 10 year 6.1%. So no, we don’t see yields at these levels or the fear of a rate hike later this year, which we don’t see happening at all first and foremost. But even the fear of it, they’ll try to overblow that fear. Even if they had to do it for whatever reason, we don’t think it could derail this market. All right, so quickly here on the Sarah Bras ipo, I do think this is interesting and I won’t nerd out too much here from the engineering side of it because that’s not my expertise, but I do love studying this stuff. Their design of chips technically I believe would be called more of a wafer.

So they, you know, you see the wafers that they print out, those get cut up and put into the chips that ultimately go into Nvidia chips. AMD everybody that’s ASML does the extreme ultraviolet lithography. TSMC does the majority of the real bleeding edge printing and, and creation of chips. When you hear about Nvidia and these other big firms, they’re the design firms, they designed the chips. Samsung, TSM and now we’ll see if I’m blinking now. SpaceX, I guess I could just call it. And Xai. There we go.

And their Terrafab project, we’ll see if we have another one. There are A few other fabs, intel out there as well. But the really bleeding edge stuff, this is it too, on the design level. You know, again, it’s custom silicone, so it’s a really cool piece of, of equipment to look at. You can kind of visualize it a little bit, but all of the transistors are right there. And again, I’ll try not to butcher this here because this is. They’re the first company to do it. They’re technically decades ahead of others.

I’m sure there’s plenty of research departments that would argue otherwise, but they’re the first to do it. They’re the first to bring it to market. They are currently in the market right now. So of course there will be competitors, but they’ve changed the way that the stack is built for AI and chips. They do full, full service. So those stacks that you see in data centers from head to toe, they design their own to work specifically well with these wafers that I’m talking about. So essentially, at the end of the day, it means that there could be less interference. Some of the stuff I’m really looking into now, and I’m sure there’s politics behind this as well, of power throttling to some server stacks which can nibble away at their performance or the amount of IO for each chip.

That’s really what I’m digging into here because Nvidia, from an interview on Bloomberg today with the Sarah Bros CEO, talked about Nvidia seeking to control the IO market. Their MV link, we talked about that in their MVQ link for Quantum. They sought to control that because they didn’t want others to nibble away at their performance. So it’s going to be an interesting battle here. We talked so much about the general use cases of Nvidia chips and why they’ll remain a dominant player. You want to own leadership, but this is a different style and there’s going to be so much money to be made in this space. I’ve already spent more time on this than I wanted to, but it cannot go understated. There’s going to be so much demand for semis and all of them have their own niche use cases.

[00:15:19]:
I mean, in your phone, think about all of the individual chips that go in here, right? This one connects you to Bluetooth, that one to WI Fi. This one’s location, this one’s gps. Let’s go. This one’s audio list goes on and on. All right, so again, to the demand side, it’s going to be massive. All right, so to the IPO market. I feel like I had one more point I wanted to make here. I was jumping around in my notes a little bit.

Again, just a wrap. I mean, this is the first one here. It’s exciting, exciting company. We’ll dig into it some more as well. Again, if you want to see that work, come and join us. VRA letter.com but with this hype that we’re seeing now, I say hype lightly because in, in the media, you’re not seeing it as hype. It’s you can’t bounce around enough. The mental gymnastics you have to go through to be an anchor on one of these stations must be very difficult, a very challenging job for them.

And I’m being very sincere about that. I think that’s probably why a lot of them maybe don’t last that long or you catch them in. You can find clips of them saying just about anything. Right? And it serves a purpose. We’ve talked often about the psyop of negativity and it continues even at all time highs that keeps so many people out of the market under invested, even in the market. And that’s what we try to do here at the vra, is to help you see through those lies so you can make good investment decisions. So right now, again, we’ve hit all time high after all time high. Yes, we’re on the greedy side of sentiment, but we’re nowhere near even extreme group.

Again, how big is this move been? 160% in the NASDAQ from the 2022 lows, from the March 30 lows just in the Nasdaq. I mean we’re looking at nearly 30% gains from the lows. I mean it could be. I just eyeballed that number. I should probably have it right off the top of my head. The semis here again, right off, just eyeballing this number up 60%, another all time high today. And fear and greed is at a 66. AI came back today.

Over the last three weeks, bear bulls have remained the same. 38% of investors are bullish now 39. We increased by 1 percentage point this week. The number of bears also increased though. We have 36 and a half percent of investors are bearish right now despite all time high after all time high. Again, the negativity is really out there. Even when you think that everybody’s too optimistic. Everybody loves a quote.

[00:18:04]:
I think it was Ben Bernanke who said this is irrational exuberance. It might have been Alan Greenspan, but in the last eight to Eight to ten months. If you follow just the media cycle we’ve gone from. AI is a bubble. And again, just the last eight to 10 months. I’m not even going. I could go back much further. Your tariffs were going to end the world this time last year, right? The April lows of last year, tariffs were going to destroy the global economy.

The decoupling of US and China was going to be terrible. Now fast forward maybe about August, September timeframe of last year. AI is a bubble, right? I got a lot of calls from people about stocks that they had sold. They were at or near all time highs and they were so proud of it. You know, great. You never go broke taking profits. I’ll never shame anybody for that. I’m not trying to do that.

[00:18:51]:
Don’t, don’t get me wrong, but those aren’t the calls that I get at market tops, right, where somebody says, oh, I just sold this and took profits. So is that a good decision? That’s not the sign of a top. Usually we’re somewhere in the middle. I’ll get some calls of what are some good ideas. And then towards the end it looks like, hey, I just bought the stock. What do you think? I just bought this ipo. What do you think? I just bought the spac. What do you think? Right, because that’s the last time we had an IPO market similar to this.

2021 was the record year and that was the IPO slashed back market. Really. And we know what happened there. We’re nowhere near that level of euphoria. So we’re from AI as a bubble. And then AI was going to take my job. So they just inverse it. Well, I may not be, it may be the real deal.

But then now you’re not going to have an employment so it won’t matter if it’s the real deal. Then it was, you know, the bubble had popped at the beginning of the year specifically for software. Right. Which had a good day today actually. I’ll point out finish it’s size of the day up 2.3%. Getting back to some of its highest levels since the beginning of the year, almost really the end of January. Then to the Iran conflict, right? Software was gonna blow up, the whole market was going to blow up. Then literally the whole world was going to blow up.

The Iran conflict was going to start World War iii. Then after the worst of it, and it never feels good, we stayed bullish the whole time. We added to positions, we bought new positions and we saw a V shaped recovery even faster than we Thought to all time highs in this market. I’ll go ahead and just share this one chart here quickly. I’ve got a couple other ones. I’ll try and be quick here today for you. I know I’ve already covered a lot here, but here we go. All time highs, SP 500.

Again, the fact that we’re not at extreme greed, despite the fact that we’re now, I mean, look at that. Above the previous all time high. We’re almost 7% above the previous all time high. First close ever above 7,500. First day ever above 7,500. And again, we’re not seeing extreme levels of greed yet in this market. Again, that psyop of negativity. And so back to it, right? We got the V shaped recovery.

And I cannot even joke about this. I mean it’s, it’s almost makes me mad to some extent, but it is, you know, if you can really remove emotion from this stuff. It’s funny because the NASDAQ has only had one series of back to back down days since March 30 and already last week. So not even this week. Last week I heard somebody say it’s a bubble and we might have just seen it. It could be today. Today might have been the day basically is what they’re trying to say. Again.

Now we’re 3% above those levels and the semis are up even more. So Again, things to look for. I’ll show you one right here. Saw this one. This came out today from the Economist. Call it the wrong way Economist if you will. We’ve talked often about back in the horse and buggy days, back I think it was the New York Times ran a piece that said, you know, cars are going to destroy the horse and buggy industry. Millions of jobs are going to be lost.

[00:22:10]:
Now I have some, some numbers here for you on that today and I’ll share a few of them. We can get to automotive in a little bit, but let’s go even a little bit more recent, okay. To a very specific example. I’ll be quick here in 2016, the godfather of AI said we should stop training radiologists because AI would do the job better. That was 10 years ago. Okay, fast forward to today. Well, 78% of all cleared medical devices are AI enabled for radiology. Despite that fact, radiology jobs record high.

Where’s the job destruction? Their salary record high. $520,000 a year. Incredible. Radiologist pays up 48% in that time frame. Right. To go to a more specific example, the tractor, everyone said the tractor also was going to destroy agriculture jobs, more horse jobs. Right now, no one can argue there’s less agricultural workers today than really ever. Right.

It made up about 40% of the workforce at the time. Today makes up about 2%. But those associated kind of adjacent, whether it’s transportation, you supply fertilizer, chemicals, other services for the industry of agriculture in 19, you know, rather, that time was 12 million people. The amount of people employed now is closer to 80 million people, roughly, that are some way connected to that. Sorry, I said 80, 46 million. So it went from 12 to 46 million. It’s probably much higher than that really. So again, point after point here that you can see another direct example, and I’ll give you this, I’ll stop after this.

But it was really one in the same whether it was PCs, computers taking jobs. Right. But specifically spreadsheets were going to destroy the bookkeeping industry. Okay, Those jobs are going to destroy. All right, maybe, you know, no more pencil in a spreadsheet by hand. So it will destroy some jobs and there will be displacement. Not saying there won’t be displacement. Okay, make sure that that’s clear.

But the amount of people who went from bookkeepers to now, accountants, financial analysts, financial planners, numbers in the millions versus a few hundred thousand people who are bookkeepers. Right. But that’s where the fear took everybody versus the reality. So the latest one is software engineers as well. Okay, take a look at this. Indeed, take that data as you will, but indeed, hiring, okay, this is the dark line. Overall hiring, it’s been going down. Software engineers, wow.

[00:25:02]:
That’s the opposite of what you’re going to hear in the news every time. So not only for the radiologist example, the agricultural example, yes, there’s displacement and yes, there’s job loss along that way, but I don’t think you’ll find anybody who would say they would rather go pick weeds by hand than use a tractor. Right. It enables people to go from backbreaking work to a higher level of work in the financial space or digital space. It allows you to free up mental capacity for more creative functions. I know that’s been the talk of AI. Despite that, we’ve seen a lot of artwork and songs and stuff coming from it. But we do think that will be the case and people are underestimating the potential here.

All right, quickly here, I’ll wrap it up for you today because it was a good day here again, all time highs, NASDAQ all time high in the semis, Nvidia, all time high up 4 1/2% S P all time high again first close above 7,500. Dow Jones first close above 50,000 I believe since the Iran conflict began. Right in the range here now. And it would be our final major index to get to this level to an all time high. Let me just see here. 50,512 is the all time high. So really two more days like today would do it. But really like I mean yeah, 1% move would do it then and we’d be closing at all time highs.

[00:26:32]:
Really hard to believe after the fear that was in this market just a month and a half ago. All right, for our internals on the day, not stellar numbers, no big two to one beats or anything but positive across the board here. So I won’t cover those in depth. Like I said, no two to one beats. Really any of. Excuse me, except for 52 week highs, the lows solid. But I do want to point out the number of stocks that are above their 50 day moving average. I did not prepare this chart but I will go ahead and pull it up here.

Continues to hit. Excuse me, is below all time highs right now. Okay. We look at that as very encouraging. Okay. Right now 50 stocks above the 50 day moving average just 45%. At the beginning of the year it was over 70%. So.

So again signs that you’re nowhere near a euphoric kind of top. Because the euphoric top everything’s going up. If it is just the Mag 7 keeping us at all time highs then it’s this rotational bull market. If you remember our themes, we’ve discussed this all year when we saw the broadening effect and we saw stocks above their level of 50 day and 200 day moving average at high levels. Right. And the video was nowhere near all time highs. Tesla, you know, Google, Alphabet, Amazon. Only two of the seven of the Mag 7 were anywhere near their all time highs.

Market all time high for all time high though we said then we love to see it. For anybody who’s saying it’s only seven stocks, here you go. Proof that it isn’t now today that the generals are acting like they’re supposed to, we would say yes, that’s what leaders do. When the rest of the market needs a break, they step up. And when they need a break, we expect the market to return to broadening. The rally has been in the semis on the hardware side after this we would not be surprised if it was software leading to the upside. Could be some value names. This will be a fantastic bull market.

Could be the transports coming up next that we see a big drop in oil. Speaking of which, Trump did meet with Xi Jinping today. Some interesting points coming out of there. Xi warning Trump about Taiwan, cautioning that mishandling could lead to clashes and even conflicts. The White House really didn’t respond, instead stating that the two leaders agreed to deepen trade ties. Some of that was surprising. Some of the trade talks were really surprising, especially again just a year ago with the tariff talks, everyone saying it’s going to blow up the world. So we’ll continue to report on that as well.

As for our sectors, we finished with six out of our 11 sectors higher on the day to day. And finally here, our VRA Commodity oh tech did hit an all time high. The tech sector did. Finally here for today our VRA Commodity watch. Gold is now up in after hours was down today. 4600 an ounce. Silver $84 an ounce copper $6.57 an ounce or excuse me, a ton. Just below the recent all time highs $6.64.

[00:29:45]:
And oil still above $100 a barrel at $101 a barrel folks. That’s all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our podcasts 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. Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time. We’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.