Welcome to the VRA Investing Podcast! On today’s episode, Tyler Herriage recaps a dynamic start to the week for the markets, reflecting on the impressive gains since the March 30th lows while also diving into the current pullback across major indexes. He explores key topics including the recent moves in yields, the US dollar, and oil prices, plus expectations for Nvidia’s upcoming earnings and their potential impact on market sentiment. Tyler Herriage also addresses the “sell in May and go away” adage, provides insight into the rotational strength of this bull market, discusses bullish outlooks for commodities such as gold and bitcoin, and highlights why the VRA team remains confident in ongoing innovation-driven growth. Stick around for expert analysis, market sector updates, and the latest on commodities—all wrapped up with a brisk, insightful commentary to help guide your investing decisions.

.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 great day out there today, despite the shaky start that it’s been to the week this week for our major indexes. But what, what a run it has been from the March 30 lows. We’ll recap some of those gains here in the podcast today. Seven weeks of gains, to be exact, for our major indexes, specifically the nasdaq.

I believe they’re in the S P. I got it all here in my notes for you. So I’m not going to guess just now, but we’ve got a lot of great stuff to cover here today, even on a down day. But I’ll try to keep it short and sweet here for you today, much like these ribs I’m preparing right now. Got these on the smoker. This was just before I wrapped these, so I will try and keep it short and sweet here to make sure that these are doing all right for a church event we got going on tonight. The ones here on the left, whoo, man, these all looking good to me at least. Ones here on the left are the sweet ones.

The ones here on the right gonna be a little more savory, a little more spicy. So if you’re an experienced, you know, rib enthusiast out there, you know you’re firing up the smoker every, every weekend. Let me know what you think. Hopefully so far these are looking pretty good for tonight. So got a lot of fun stuff to cover today like that. But of course we’ll cover the serious stuff too, like this move higher we’ve seen in yields, you know, not just this week, but for a little while here, higher than we would certainly like them. As you know, if you’ve been here with us for a while, we do and continue to see yields moving lower from here over the medium to long term. We’ll cover a couple of the reasons, you know what, why we’re seeing this reaction in yields right now.

And with that, we’ve seen a move higher in the US Dollar as well. So we’ll cover all of that and more, of course, our major indexes and then all eyes will be on Nvidia tomorrow for earnings. And how many times have we seen this story where the market starts to stumble or maybe has been stumbling? Not in this case though, but this would certainly be a started assemble just began last Friday. So we’ll see if Nvidia can come in and save the day once again, regardless, we think they’re going to be phenomenal numbers. But of course it’s not the news that matters is the market’s reaction to that news. So we’ll cover all of that and much more here today. So let’s go ahead and jump right in because it has been three sessions lower for our major indexes here again, including the Nasdaq, the S and P. And now the semi is actually four days in the red.

Looked like they wanted to rally back today for a little bit. It got a midday surge, fell a little bit into the close. Different than what we’ve seen from the March 30 lows. We gotten pretty accustomed to good smart money hours, good internals. Neither one of those things have we seen over the last nine to ten sessions or so. Kip discussed this as well. I believe it’s maybe 9 out of 11 of the last sessions or so have had mixed internals. Not as strong as you would like to see in this scenario.

But just like our markets, we’re just at extreme overbought on steroids. We’re now seeing it in yields as well. So we do look for this move to start to reverse. And I’ll talk about a couple reasons why here in just a second. But first, before I get to our markets even, we’ve now come out just quickly here of those extreme overbought on steroids levels. And Kip Discover discussed this yesterday too. A pause like this in the market, especially after the massive move we just saw, it’s healthy. We’ll call this a pause that refreshes.

[00:04:26]:
It’s a theme that we’ll come back to many times in this bull market. So keep a note of it. And another theme is the rotational aspect of this bull market, as you can see today as I’ll cover as well. So I guess as you’ll see in a second, we still saw a good amount of green on the screen. Whether it was our sectors, individual names, you know, it wasn’t all red out there. Whereas when the Iran conflict started and the subsequent sell off in our major indexes every day was read everywhere is not what we’re seeing right now. So again, without further ado, let’s start jumping into it because this is something that has a lot of market watchers worried. It’s yields heading higher, it’s the dollar heading higher, it’s oil heading significantly higher, right above $100 a barrel.

No one wants to see that. But at the end of the day, those factors come down to one issue and it’s the war in Iran. And Kip and I have talked about it at length that we do think that this is the worst of it is behind us and Trump is looking for an off ramp. Kib has covered this a number of times. When Trump pivots, he pivots quickly. We expect to see that. So if you get some news, even the hopeful side of that news, you know, it’s right back off to the races for this market. And again, that’s been our view from day one.

It’s been our view since this conflict began. It’s why we were buying the dip during the 10% correction. So, yes, we remain extremely bullish on this market. But I will go ahead and share this chart here quickly of yields. Kip shared this. You see me drop a similar one many times. But why, why invent reinvent the wheel in this case scenario here. But what we’re seeing this was Trump’s inauguration peaked at a 4 just before Trump’s inauguration.

I believe that’s January 16th. It was at 4.8. Reading now to today, you know, we’re right at these resistance levels where it’s failed before. Again, you’ve heard me cover it many times. Fully expect that to be the case. We get, again, a reversal from the war in Iran, reversal in oil prices. And this tanks quickly, just like we’ve seen because of oil prices, increases in inflation based off of the traditional metrics, you know, the BLS metrics from cpi, pce, those often we talk about it here. We prefer truflation, much closer to the truth than a much lower level right now from truflation.

[00:07:09]:
And again, a big part of that is oil. So another one here, quick chart for you. The US Dollar again, another one that we’ve discussed a lot. If you just go to a year even, I’ll do that for you. Looks messy, right? Looks like, oh, man, that’s a low. We could be headed up good just to Trump’s inauguration. You have to go back far. Again, that’s January 10th, ten days before his inauguration.

Identical to what we saw in his first term in 2017. It’s what he said he wanted. Now it’s what we’ve seen. Now we’ve got Kevin Warsh with him at the Fed, which of course people are going to talk all day that, oh, he was hawkish once upon a time. You know, I think that we’ve talked about this a lot as well, that between Trump Besant and now Warsh and, you know, the rest of this team, which is so far at least For Trump’s second term is much more of an A player team than it was during in his first term. Right. The second term team has already proven to be a lot better. Look at the Atlanta Fed already back to a, you know, 4% plus projection for Q2 GDP.

Right. And so I’m going to go a little bit out of order here now in this pot, in this podcast because I just brought that up and I do want to stick on that, that point that we’ve talked about this a lot. We think by the end of Trump’s term here, GDP is going to be massive. It’s going to blow people away. We’re in the process of raising those estimates and what we’re going to see over the next year, two years, is going to be nothing short of incredible as the innovation revolution and the AI revolution here really begins to take hold from so many different angles most people don’t even have any clue about. As of right now, the only real world use case that most people are aware of is full self driving for AI. There’s going to be so many more coming as they continue to get better at a faster and faster rate. So like I said, I’m going to jump around a little bit here.

[00:09:25]:
Let’s see. I don’t want to blow past anything for you. So we’ll wrap on the Fed here. Okay. Because the market, and specifically the betting market is now starting to price in a rate hike in 2026 just hit another high today of 35%. Actually was up at 37% at one point of the high today. That’s scary. People are afraid of yields heading higher.

Mortgage rates are already above 6%. Nobody wants that. No one’s going to sell a home that you have a any less of a mortgage than that. Especially not a 3% or potentially even 4%. Why would you move at all? If you have to go pay, where are you going to move to? If you sell your home? Right. Maybe you could rent. In some cities, like here in Austin, rents down significantly. You know, a little bit of a free market at work.

But we’ll remind you here that during the 1995-2000.com melt up, when the NASDAQ rallied 580%, the 10 year yield averaged 6.1%. So that’s why we say here, no, we are not concerned about yields at this level. Of course we want to see them lower. And there will come a point when we are concerned about it. Absolutely. But again, the strength of this bull market won’t be hamstrung by yields at a 4.6% in our view again.com era 6.1% on average at points was far higher than that. And this innovation revolution is going to blow that away. So again, back to the main point here.

We do remain extremely bullish and that’s a real reason why, of course the earnings growth that we’re seeing here is incredible. I know a lot of people have gotten this question a lot as well. What about selling May and go away? We don’t see that being the case for multiple reasons here. Okay. First, these major tech companies are spending like crazy and it’s not coming out of their cash hoards, it’s coming out of revenue. Right. So whether ramping up spending capex, these facilities are in the process of being brought online. In the process of the permitting being complete, they’re moving the next stages.

[00:11:41]:
Some of them are being brought online. Right. They’re moving at a hundred percent full steam ahead in some cases 110% full steam ahead on this. We think that this will be, we’ve said it from the beginning of the year. This will be the year people really start to see the effects of the iteration revolution. We’ve already seen it showing up in earnings. You know, just to quote a couple of those earnings stats here, Q1 earnings coming in at better than 27% growth for, for the mega caps here. That’s incredible.

Again, not the sign of a market top. And the second here, really, again, the summer months don’t matter here because we’re going, we are moving so fast and so we don’t think it’ll affect earnings at all. Secondly though, if you look back over the last decade, sell in May and go away has not worked very often. The S and P has been up 12 of the past 13 maze 9 of the past 10 junes and up the past 11 Julys in a row. So we’ll see what we can get. We know that the Republicans certainly need it. Trump certainly needs it going into the midterms. It’s going to be an important one here.

All right, so like I said, I’ll keep it short and sweet for you here today. Our major indexes did finish lower across the board. High notes here, small caps did lead the way lower after that. Nasdaq, S, P A Dow just about the same amount. We did finish a little bit off the lows today. Like I said with the semis. Tried to rally about midday, briefly turned positive but couldn’t hold on to them. All eyes again on Nvidia for tomorrow and the good news about a three to four day sell off right from a massive move higher that we’ve seen from March 30th.

[00:13:37]:
The great thing about it, we’re now at out of extreme overbought on steroids levels. All right, quickly the internals on the day. Like I said earlier week, what we’ve seen lately, you know, no massive beats that really concern us here. We did have a couple of two to one beats like NYSE advanced decline. But as long as we don’t continue to see these shrink together, no real, real major concerns for us just yet. Looking at our sectors on the day today we finished with five out of our 11 sectors higher on the day. A little defensive here. Healthcare, energy, as you might expect, utilities, real estate and consumer staples higher on the day.

As for our laggards, well just gotta add naturally laggards, materials, communication services and consumer discretionary. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch where I did want to get one refresh here on this one. All right, gold last trade here below $4,500 an ounce at $4,485 an ounce. One that we’ve talked about here a lot has been the gold miners. I mean what a move that it’s been to the upside. And we do still remain extremely bullish on both gold and the miners here. And here’s a huge reason so much of the gold mining industry is the market has not priced in this increase in gold prices at all. A lot of these companies are still priced like gold was at $2,000 an ounce in their profits in the upcoming earnings are going to show it.

[00:15:18]:
Kips talked about this one as well. Look at that highest margins across any sector that’s just beginning here. As you know, our long term price targets on gold are far above where they are today. All right, wrapping it up here. Silver now, last trade $73.97 an ounce. You know at the highs of the day was almost $80 an ounce. So big move lower today. Copper $6 and 20 cents a pound.

Pulling back from that all time high of $6 and 60 cents. And Bitcoin here let me last trade. I have just below $77,000 a bitcoin just right below that level. But folks, that is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up@vra letter.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.