Welcome to the VRA Investing Podcast! In today’s episode, Tyler Herriage is here to break down an eventful day in the markets, celebrating fresh all-time highs across major indexes and sharing insights on the latest earnings from the tech giants. From mega-cap earnings, record-setting rallies, and surprising sentiment indicators, to a closer look at sectors, commodities, and what recent jobless claims mean for market direction—you’ll get the full picture on why this bull market is far from over. Tyler Herriage also explores the powerful CapEx trends driving the next wave of U.S. economic growth, discusses why now may be a better time to buy than “sell in May and go away,” and examines why the VRA team remains incredibly bullish despite short-term pullbacks. If you want timely stats, market history comparisons, and reasons to stay optimistic in today’s environment, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in!

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 fantastic day out there today. Hope your week is going great as well. After we got a couple sessions of a pause, we’re right back here to all time highs for our markets today. Good day all around here.

A lot of green on the screen to cover in today’s podcast. So we’ve got a fun one here for you today. Always great to get a day of all time highs here with you. Always great to be here with you though. But especially the all time high days are sweet because Kip and I have a long, a long running joke here on the podcast that so often he gets the all time high days and I of course get the big down days, you know, the bottom of the bear market lows days where he gets the best performers in the bull market days, which is honestly just, just hilarious to attract it over the years. So anytime I get an opportunity to be here with you on a day of all time highs, you can believe there’s not a chance that I’m going to pass that up. So we’ve got a fun one here for you today. Of course, this week’s major earnings announcements, which continued into today after the close we had Apple, which I’ll cover here briefly.

But more broadly, what we’re seeing from the mega cap names in tech right now. And so only fitting that I go ahead and say this, we’ve got another all time high check. As I mentioned earlier, major indexes, all time highs, individual names, and a lot more to cover here. And despite that one sentiment indicator that might surprise you today, I know I’ll go ahead and and tell you right now it’s not the Fear and greed index. I know how often I share that one here, so I might have given it away right there, but this one even surprised us today. So we’ll get to that here in a little bit. And finally, if you haven’t had a chance yet, you know, if you’re not a VRA member here with us already, you might not have seen that Kip was on Fox Business today. I’ll get to that link in a second.

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But if you’re not with us already, why not come and join us? We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now. You get full access to everything that the VRA has to offer and first access to things coming down the pipeline from the vra. We’ve got some very exciting Stuff in the works here right now. Some projects we’re very grateful to be a part of and we’re excited to bring to you as well. Whether it’s our options program that Kip talked about this week coming up here, launch for it. So if you’re not already on our email list, come and check us out at VRA Letter. You’ll get it whether you’re a member or not. You can find out more details there.

But also some other projects we’re working on, which I won’t dive in too much to here just today, but some really exciting stuff. Can’t wait to bring it to you here. And as always, thank you for being here with us. We’re so blessed for the opportunity to do what we do every day, which is what we love to research the markets, opportunities in companies, macroeconomic research, every angle that we can to help make you money. At the end of the day, that is our job and we take that job very seriously. If you can get better results, Kip says it often, then we by all means go, go be with them and their service over there. We’d love to know who it is. Maybe we can learn a thing or two, because we really do.

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We love what we do, love bringing you opportunities like this. We love beating the market, which we’ve done year in, year out, 19 out of 22 years now since Kip founded the VRA in 2003. And I’ll share here in a little bit and a second, some of these all time high stats from our markets because it has been a phenomenal run from the bear market lows of 2022, just weeks after Kip and I published our book right here, the Big Bribe. We published it just about a month before the bear market lows because what we were finding under the hood of the market in the fundamental story which Kip covered in that Making Money interview, you can find it on his Twitter or X feed. We’ll have it up. It’s on our Rumble channel already. It’ll be up on our website soon too. But Kid just did such a fantastic job of covering it.

Where we’ve been since then, you know, what our themes have been, how they’ve played out and what we see looking forward. So again, can’t recommend it enough. Go check it out. It was a phenomenal one. And Charles Payne wasn’t there today. It was Cheryl Cassoni, who’s fantastic as well. So you don’t want to miss it. Don’t want to miss it.

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But, but on that note, the market from Our publishing date of that is up roughly, you know, 145, close to now, 150% for the NASDAQ and you’ll see for the S and P over 100% now, which is phenomenal. But when we published that book, we got so much flack, so much hate, especially from your traditional Wall Street. Just couldn’t believe that we were bullish on the market because not only had we just been hitting, you know, a nine, ten month bear market, we were at the lows of it at the time and we were coming out with big bold calls to the upside. Dow Jones hitting 100,000, NASDAQ hitting 50,000. We’re almost halfway there now and right, not even quite at the halfway point since on our call. So point being here, we love what we do. We love this research, we love getting big calls, right? And most importantly, we, we love to help make you money. That’s what we’re here for.

We’re here to serve the everyday investor, not Wall Street. We’re here for retail investors, mom and pop investors, people who manage their own money or, you know, a smaller fund of money, whatever it may be, even all the way up to the top. We do have people with us here and we’re grateful for everyone to be here with us. But we do have some large money managers here as well. We take our work very seriously to help find the best opportunities out there in the market. So, you know, if you’re new with us here, come and join us. You can receive our podcast every day at the close@vra letter.com if you’re ready, come and join our 14 day free trial. Absolutely risk free to you.

Cancel at any time. And we love communicating with our members here as well. So feel free to reach out. We’re a resource. That’s what we’re here for. At the end of the day, we can’t give individual investment advice, but if it’s a question that we’re getting a lot or one that we like to, we can address it here on the podcast in a public forum. So there’s plenty of ways that we can do that. And we will always love the feedback as well because once we hear, you know, if it’s a pain point for one person, it might be for somebody else, maybe we can provide a solution for that.

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So again, very grateful to be here with you. Let’s go ahead and start diving in here because it was an eventful day. After yesterday’s Mega Cap earnings, you, we had Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Alphabet, all reported yesterday Kip covered it and covered it some in his interview today as well. So I won’t dive into all of it. Overall good numbers here and some companies reacted better than others. Amazon all time high. Google all time high. We’re starting to see the generals participate again.

Again. It is so funny when they’re hitting all time highs. Everyone says there’s only seven stocks leading this market. Whenever they’re not performing well, you know the sky is falling, right? The other 493 stocks just always seem to get lumped into that group. But they’re performing very well too for Meta and Microsoft. Still good numbers here. They were lower on the day to day. You know none of those are specific recommendations of ours here at the vra but, but we want to see them participate in healthy earnings like we’ve seen from Q4 to now.

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Very bodes very well for this market. The market didn’t peak until earnings peak. We’re light years away from that point right now. And a big reason for that is the, the, the CapEx plans for this year because the balance sheets for these companies are still phenomenal. They’ve been funding this with very creative instruments. This is the financial engineering that we laid out in the big bribe. But this effects affects so much more than just tech. It is infrastructure.

It is bringing AI to the physical world. Not just a portal on your computer, right? It is FSD from Tesla. It is all kinds robotics, right? Manufacturing, automation, all kinds of things that I will do. And here’s an example, look at how massive these spins are, the ramp up here. And still, I mean we’re, we’re really as a percentage of like GDP or sector weightings in some areas, you know, we’re still failing in comparison, you know, inflation adjusted wise to other major infrastructure buildouts. Whether it was from railroads or I think the other one was fiber optics, cables, those kinds of things. I mean we’re talking about not only a once in a generation opportunity here with AI, but something much more massive than that. And so a spend on that scale makes sense.

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And I mean take a look at this here again. It doesn’t just impact tech though. It’s going data center equipment is going to, that’s transportation. It’s got to get there, they’ve got to manufacture it. It’s going to take materials, right? Critical minerals along the way. So many sectors across the board are going to benefit from this and overall US GDP growth will benefit from this. You know, we still remain firm in our call despite some pullbacks in GDP in the short term. Some hiccups we look at for GDP to be by the end of Trump’s term.

It’s going to be massive. And I’m still in the camp that we probably need to raise our targets there. So we’ll keep going down the line here. Let’s jump into our markets a little bit and we’ll jump back and forth here because Apple’s earnings today were also good. So we’ll get some updated capex numbers for this chart here in that. But again, not just massive for tech, but massive for the market as a whole. And we’re seeing the impact of that starting to play out still. I mean we update this all the time.

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Are we early innings? Are we inning one? That’s the real question here. It’s not are we middle innings or late innings, it’s how early are we still in this market is. It has been phenomenal. Like I said earlier, The NASDAQ rallied 145% or so from the 2022 bear market lows. That’s great. The S&P 100 just crossed 100% gains from that level. It pales in comparison to what the time periods we’ve compared this to for the Nasdaq. We compared to 1995 to, to 2000.com melt up when the NASDAQ rallied 580% in five years.

That’s the kind of move that we’re looking for. And it makes a move like this, 140% great gains. But that doesn’t look like a bubble. That looks, if that’s a bubble, that is very boring for. Well, it’s a mundane bubble at best. And so take another look. Here’s another way to visualize that because I’ve shared the NASDAQ chart a few times. Here’s the S and P.

This is the seventh largest bull market, strongest bull market since 1949. 100% gains. That’s where we are today. You know, again, another 90s comparison from 87 to 2,582% gains, very similar to the Nasdaq. We don’t have the exact S and P timelines and targets here because we’re continuously updating them for how long this bull market is going to run. We think that will exceed those kinds of numbers though. I can safely say that. So it’s good to see not just in tech.

Right. There’s another example in the s and P500. And one more stat here for you because the s and P500 did hit an all time high today. Okay. Now even going into the session today, we’re going to hit an all time low monthly closing high. Okay. I mean, just about barring a big move lower, we were going to finish at a monthly closing high. Not only do we do that, the SB said no, you know, we’re going for it all and close at an intraday all time high, all time closing high all the way around by every way you can measure it.

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Great way to close out the month of April where we had gains of two 10.4% in the S&P 500. Phenomenal month here. We’ll recap some of the other major indexes in our sectors here in a little bit. But one more set for you here on the S and P before I move on. Since 1950, when it closes at that monthly all time high level. So again, going into the day we really had it. The rest of the year has never been negative 17 for 17. Average gains of 10%.

We think that this year will likely outperform that. That’s been our call since January and it never changed despite the pullback. If you’ve been here with us the whole time, you know how bullish we remained and we’re pounding the table that it was a buying opportunity. So again, just some fantastic stats. If you’re worried in this market, if you bought just at the all time high, which maybe today even right, we think you’re going to be very happy with your purchase over the long run. I shared that chart on Tuesday. Have you bought only at all time highs? You outperform just about any other time you could have bought the market. So it’s scary to buy at those levels.

And we typically don’t add to positions we already want to be positioned by the time we get to all time highs and those extreme overbought levels. But if you’re just getting started, you’ve got to get your toes wet. Right? It’s time to plant that tree. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Next best time is today. So again, fantastic stats, they’re fantastic. Close today in our markets really closed just about at their highs of the day, which in some cases means their highs of the month as well. So before I finish up our market stats on the day, I got one more economic.

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I got one piece of economic data here. Jobless claims, initial jobless claims coming in the lowest level since the 1960s. 60s phenomenal. So to the GDP numbers earlier, we think inflation remains a rearview mirror issue. We think we’ve seen oil peak. I’ve got a great screen share for that in our VRA commodity watch as well. It should be off to the races. Yields lower, dollar lower.

But one thing is surprising. Despite hitting all time highs again, I’ll share this chart first because it’s phenomenal chart. The SB just, I mean it’s a beautiful candle today. All time high. Just great to see. And at the same time look at the AI survey. We had a couple of one week where we saw a big increase in bulls. Can I see that right? Yes.

Now we have more bears than bulls. We hit all time high after all time high. A record setting rally from the March 30 lows. Now we’re here one month later at all time highs. And I mean we’re, we have less bears obviously we still have, I mean right in the range of bulls that we were here. I mean it’s incredible. Good one week where everybody got bowled up and then reality set in I guess. But as contrarians we love to see that.

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And another sign that we’re nowhere near a top here. Fear and greed is still in greed mode here. But this is really interesting and certainly it’s not the fear and green is not at extreme greed by any means here. So pretty phenomenal contrarian indicators here. All right, so for our other major indexes, the Russell 2000 actually led the way today. Again this is textbook kind of stuff you see here because we had yields lower today. Exactly what you want to see. Exactly our call, the US dollar lower on the day, semis leading, tech leading and the Russell 2000 responding as it should.

American strength. This reflects it is. These are the small cap companies that really make up the US public economy from, from a good portion. Of course the mega caps run everything but they’re very interest rate sensitive. So what does this tell you? That rates are going to be heading lower. That is a market tell for us here in this in the Russell 2000s just right in range of an all time high as well. So again, textbook bull market action there. Next up, the Dow Jones up just over 1 1/2% on the day today.

Led by the transports once again here they pulled back significantly well, well away from their extreme overbought levels that we had seen up 1.3% for the transports. Would have liked to see them lead the Dow, but that’s all right. Already covered the S P finally here for today, the nasdaq up about 9/10 of 1%. An all time high. I mean again, exactly what you want to see. Tech leading the market. And while we didn’t get an all time high today, we might have gotten an all time closing high, let me see just off of it it looks like. But the semis up two and a quarter on the day to day.

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Anybody want to take a guess what they were up for the month? We know they rallied at their at the peak from the March 30 lows to now almost 48% for the month of April alone. SOX the semiconductor index up 38.4% just exactly. Again textbook bull market action. You want to see the semis leading or sorry tech leading and the semis leading tech. On that note The NASDAQ was up 15% on the month. So over 2 to 1 outperformance from the semis. Great to see finally here. Kip shared this I believe yesterday as well but so often you’ll hear it a lot coming up, especially with May starting tomorrow, sell in May and go away.

Now we love some old Wall street adages but they don’t always ring true. And you got to pay attention to the broader market factors like everything we’re seeing from earnings to all time highs to deregulation policies continuing to come in. All kinds of great things coming up for this market. Getting this Iran conflict behind us, oil lower all of these things. It really hadn’t held up though sell in May for the last 13 years or so. Check this out. The S&P 500 has been up 12 of the last 13 Maze 9 of last 10 Junes and has been up 11 out of 11 of the last July’s. So this is looking more like a time to buy than a time to sell in May and go away.

We do continue terrain incredibly bullish. We’ll use any weakness as a buying opportunity for so if you see weakness along the way, hey that’s an opportunity, not something to be scared about. All right, our internals here. I’ll start to wrap it up for the day because phenomenal numbers here after five straight days of bad market internals not only do we get good market internals again we finished at the highs of the day. Good to see a strong smart money hour. And this is really good to see after those five bad days of internals because these are good beats across the board. Advanced decline over 4 to 1 positive on the NYSE, almost 3 to 1 positive on the NASDAQ. Combined 3 to 1 positive 52 week highs to lows.

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That’s both NYSE and NASDAQ. And then volume. You know phenomenal numbers here. 75% upside volume on the NYSE, 71% on the NASDAQ that’s a rally. That’s what you want to see. That’s conviction. Great day all around. Looking at our sectors on the day, 10 out of our 11 sectors finish higher on the day.

A lot of these in the range of all time highs not quite there. But we were led by communication services, industrials and utilities. Our laggards on the day. This might be an error on the screen because it depends on which ETF or index you’re using. The tech sector might have finished slightly lower. Most of our screens don’t have that. So maybe one lower sector pretty close to all positive. All right, finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch.

Again, what we’ve seen from this market, from the Iran sell off has been everything goes right. Market sell off, yield rise, dollar rises, oil rises, gold falls, precious metals fall, gold miners fall. We’re seeing the opposite of that once again. And what you would expect to see is simply a resumption of the move higher we were seeing already. And it looks like that’s where we’re getting to now. You know, just like with markets, you know, the bottoms along the way are always messy. It’s never straight up. But we look at this as a healthy consolidation and a pause that refreshes overall.

I mean, think about it, even at the lows, I believe gold was still higher than for 2025. That’s how big the move higher was earlier this year. That could fall a thousand points and still be higher on the year. Gold on the day of 1.6% and the gold miners leading. Good to see, just like with semis and tech. Let’s see next up here, silver at 74.24 an ounce, copper just above $6 a pound. And finally here, oil. I’ll stop here for a second because I mentioned earlier I would talk about this.

But overnight on fears that tensions were escalating once Again, oil hit $111 a barrel. Not what you want to see from the market. But the fact that we’re hitting all time highs is again another tell of the direction things are going. By the open, it looked like some financial conversations have happened. Whether it was Scott Besant or somebody out there on Trump’s team. Oil by the open was negative in the markets, had reversed their losses and started looking flat to higher. And that to us was a tell again that the worst is behind us and the market all time highs really tell you all you need to know. But here’s one other factor.

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The Economist, when they put out headlines, it’s often a death sentence to that move because it is such a big institution. It’s like steering a cruise ship. Right? They probably worked for this piece for weeks. Maybe it was correct a while back. Not so much today. They did this with the dollar recently. I tried to find that chart today, the peak like to the month in the dollar. And here was their their cover today.

Tyler Herriage [00:23:47]:
Still in la La Land. Why oil prices are not yet high enough. All right, if that’s a contrarian indicator there, which we take it as the highs are in for oil, that’s how we see it here and it’s how we’re going to continue to play. It doesn’t mean we can’t be bullish energy stocks because even with oil slightly above where it was just a few months ago, these companies are in a phenomenal position to make a lot of cash. You know, great break even rates per barrel. Very healthy balance sheets all around. Looks pretty good. Finally here, bitcoin now at $76,500 a bitcoin.

Another group we remain bullish on here 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@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. We’ll see you for the close. Please make sure to like subscribe share everywhere, whether it’s Rumble x Facebook, wherever it is and if you want us there.

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