In today's episode, Tyler breaks down a powerful move to all-time highs as semiconductors go parabolic to lead the charge. He walks through the latest earnings and what the major indexes are signaling about the strength of this bull market. PLUS, don't miss what history says about what comes next after similar “melt-up” moves. Tune in to hear how he’s thinking about positioning, risk, and opportunity as this semiconductor boom accelerates.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Tuesday afternoon, everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing Podcast. Hope you all had a fantastic day out there. Today was a good day for for our markets and I’ll get to that in just a second. But after we closed out last week at all time highs yesterday looked like it might be a tumultuous start to the week. This week is the Iran conflict going to pop back up all kinds.

Yields were up big yesterday for everything that Kip covered in yesterday’s podcast as well. And just like that, nothing can hold this bull market back. We hit all time highs today. So you’ve got all of that to cover and much more. It’s going to be a fun podcast. We’ll try to keep it short and sweet for you on this Cinco de Mayo if you got plans this evening so you can get out there. But I will be certain to cover all of the bases of this market today because it was a phenomenal day of action just across the board here. Exactly the leadership you want to see from the semis and the resilience, the continued resilience from this market in the face of headlines that just over a month ago would have sent us much lower on the day.

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Now we have markets that are quickly rebounding and finishing at their highs of the day and making all time high after all time high. Wait till you see one of the charts that I’ve got planned here for you today. It we’ve gone over it before but I haven’t shared it in a little while and will surprise you. It’s going to be, yeah, it’ll be a fun one today. So we got a lot of great stuff to cover. Like I said, a lot of all time highs out there and a lot of other stories going on as well. So let’s go ahead and start jumping right in one that I won’t spend a ton of time on. But I thought you might find interesting here.

The SEC today. Well, I’ll take a step back here because this is something that’s been rumored for a little bit. It’s something Trump was certainly pushing for and when he originally said it, I think it probably got, you know, as per usual when Trump proposes anything, the other side is anti that. But now that we’re two years into this administration, the new heads of each appoint like of the appointed bodies that Trump has. For example here, the SEC are really starting to step into their own. And now you’re seeing some policies that reflect that so if Trump wanted earnings to be reported semi annually as opposed to quarterly, which is what he was advocating for, those rumors have been going around. Today the SEC officially released their proposed amendments to the earnings rules to make this happen again, giving public companies the option to report earnings semi annually versus quarterly. Again, Trump has been advocating for it and you know, on paper I, I think it makes a lot of sense.

You hear often whether it’s about China specifically. Right. Because they aren’t as beholden to their markets. They’re not worried about the quarter to quarter numbers. They think in much longer terms than us. At least that’s the story that often gets told. Right. I’m not here to talk about that story today, but the incentive here is that companies would think in longer terms than just quarter to quarter if they have the option.

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And again, it is the option. They don’t have to go to this either. Right. So I kind of, I like the optionality of most things when it comes to government regulation. The other side, which I see as well from the left is, or just in finance that it means less transparency. This isn’t necessarily a left versus right issue at all. I think there’s a perfectly legitimate claim to be made on both sides of this issue. So I’d love to hear what y’ all think as well.

If you have a specific opinion on this, of why companies should or shouldn’t do it. Let me know what you think and I’ll just kind of lay out the rest of it here. From, from my point of view personally, I get that the less transparency side definitely get it. But I, maybe it gives more companies more time to cook the books. Is, is maybe a way of looking at it, but because it doesn’t technically mean less transparency, it means less often. Right. So we get the full reporting just later than you would before. Now a lot can happen in a six month period versus a three month period.

Doubt about that. And so there’s a lot of options to consider here. But could it encourage long term thinking? Maybe. So there’s, there’s a lot to think about in this here. So when you look at the former SEC commissioner did say that in a Biden appointee that markets are beginning to look like casinos. Okay. In some, some ways I definitely see that whether it’s poly market Kalshi, zero day options trading commission, free trad trading, you know, some of those do open up individual investors to more risk. But some of those are also phenomenal financial products when used correctly.

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And so why limit the access similar to the accredited investor Process, which is a sham. And the laws in 2016 that allowed crowdfunding, you know, reg a CF types of projects has been a game changer for a lot of smaller companies to get access to retail investors. Before, if you could only go to accredited investors to raise fund funds, there’s only a. There’s a limited pool of those people. Right. When you open it up to, yes, there are rules, but you can open it up to unaccredited investors and there’s caps and all these kinds of things. There are some phenomenal products out there that most retail investors don’t even know, I think that they have the ability to invest in now. So that is another.

We’re so early in this bull market until people really start to see these, because more of them are going to be coming on the market sooner and sooner. So there’s a lot of phenomenal retail products and I think the same about Kalshi and polymarket. There has to be something done about the potential for insider trading, their government trading, military trading. But by bringing them to the forefront, you can get those aspects fixed by legalizing them. Either way, they’re going to take place in dark pools in various places. So we’ve said it for a long time. This is the wild west of free market capitalism. Is this another example of that? Maybe.

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So are markets beginning to look like casinos? Maybe. I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily gambling though. Right. These are totally different. There is a gambling, if you’re doing, again, trading those kinds of things. But as far as investing goes, these are well researched and informed decisions and the public should have the ability to do what they want with their own money. At the end of the day, that doesn’t have anything to do with this SEC proposal. But as far as regulation goes, I guess is kind of the point that I’m getting at.

So again, let me know what you think about the SEC proposal about some of these betting markets. That’s become a more controversial topic lately as well. And certainly the insider trading for the government. All right. One aspect that I didn’t touch on in my intro today is earnings. So let’s kind of shift gears completely here because we do have another big week of earnings. I know we just had a big week of earnings last week. Not quite as many of the high flyers in this.

Certainly some names you’ll recognize. So let’s take a look. And today we had a big one as well. We had AMD after the close date. I’ll get to that story in just a second. We had Palantir yesterday, Shopify today. Sorry, let me just pull up my system here. And so I’ll get to AMD in just a second.

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But for the rest of the week, again, some interesting ones, Uber, which is going to be interesting. Absolutely. What they’re going to do with Tesla rolling out, you know, the Cyber Cab, how that is. They need to hurry up and strike some kind of a deal with Tesla. They’re doing, I see other deals that they’re making, but Tesla is the only company that looks even remotely close to having a factory ready vehicle for self driving, which is the Cyber Cab. And that is a huge advantage versus Waymo, who is reliant on Jaguar to make their vehicles. Then they have to add on their aftermarket mods to these vehicles. Could they use it on other vehicles? Sure, but that’s not what they’re tested on right now.

Other companies doing the same thing, all aftermarket mods to existing vehicles, there certainly could be a market for that. But if all of a sudden one integrated system floods every major city, it’s not going to last too long for those other companies. There’s some other ones. One that rolled out here in Austin recently is, looks similar to the robo van and it only runs downtown, so I don’t think it even come outside the city at all. Certainly couldn’t go on the highway. So it’s limited, but I mean it’s an exciting time. This is the innovation revolution and we want to encourage, while we love Tesla, that’s our call, that’s our favorite. We encourage competition.

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Innovation is exciting and you know, you want to own the winners and sometimes they, they move so quickly it’s tough to keep up. That’s why we try to stay focused here with, you know, our discipline with the VRA investing system. All right, so AMD today again, more semi related. This isn’t a position of ours. We want to see the semis leading though. Had a good day. AMD was up 4% on the session today. I’m a zoom out a little bit here because I got to tell this story.

Up 4% on the session leading up to earnings today. Good earnings beat on earnings per share, beat on revenue, if I’m not mistaken. Guidance looked good as well. Right after earnings, the company fell to from being up 4% on the day to being down 6%. A 10 swing and it did not last very long because let’s just. I got to get it to refresh you. I’m glad I did. I’ll tell you why in a second.

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But you’ll see. Here’s what we’re looking at. So like I said, up 4% in the session and then you look here, that’s that down 6%. Got down to 342 and now look at it, it’s up almost 12%. I’m glad I checked because it was up roughly five and a half 6% just before when I was checking their earnings before this podcast today. So phenomenal move there and bodes well for the semis tomorrow. And I’ll use that to lead into our markets on the day to day. We’ll get to the semis in just a second because they did lead again today.

So again bodes well for what we’re going to see tomorrow. But zooming out one more time to our markets more broadly that we closed out the week at all time highs last week yesterday looked like, you know, like we’ve seen time and time again with the Iran headline fears. Right. It was a sharp move lower after stories were floated that US Military sunk multiple Iranian boats. There might have been an attack on a US Boat. There was all kinds of rumors flowing around. Markets didn’t like it. Dow Jones was down 1.2%.

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Industrials and materials really are industrials, I should say, in transports hit hard because of the increase in oil prices. Oil back above 100 and it’s still there right now, which is another resilient aspect to this market. But it makes you think, oh no, here we go again, right. For this market, what we’ve seen from the lows to today is each one of those dips has been shorter and shorter, which we look at as a tell from this market. Kip talked about this also. So I won’t repeat too much of it, but it is exactly what you want to see is markets heading higher on bad news. Again, I mentioned this earlier that just a few weeks ago you couldn’t get away from it. Any bad news in the market was going to be crushed on that news.

Now we’re seeing the opposite here. Very good to see. And so after a day like yesterday, feels good to come back to a day of all time high. So great to be here with you as always. But especially on all time high days, the small caps actually led on the day to day. Russell 2000 all time high. NASDAQ also hitting an all time high today up. Let me just zoom out here a little bit for myself.

Up just over 1% on the day 25, 326 and leading the NASDAQ exactly what you want to see. The semis SMH was up 3.14%. Phenomenal. And there is a difference in weighting though between the ETF and the semiconductor index, the Philadelphia index, the sox was up 4.23% on the day to day. Now the chart I mentioned earlier that I was going to come back to here it is because we share this chart often and we’ve said that each one of the pullbacks to this trend line have been phenomenal buying opportunities. Okay. Not only going back to the tariff mania lows of last April, but how many? We’ve now seen four pullbacks of 10% or greater in Trump’s presidency, two terms that have resulted in a V shaped recovery. 2018, Jerome Powell hiking rates into December, the December from hell 2020, you know the plan.

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Dimmick 2022, sorry, that was Biden 20. Last year 2025 was tariff mania, that was number three. And then this year, 2026. Each one has proven to be a fantastic buying opportunity. But now, just since terror of mania of last year, every time that we’ve seen a pullback of this trend line of SMH to spy the chart that we share all the time, it’s been a phenomenal buying opportunity. Look at that. Just parabolic. Move higher.

So I wanted to share this one today because when I pulled it up originally, this is what I was looking at. I drew this on 310 most recently and that was the trend lines off here because you can’t see the previous, you know, two months that have happened. So it doesn’t look like it connects. Right. And then you zoom to two years and you see it and just look at that. Move higher. Truly incredible. And yes, we are at extreme overbought levels.

We really haven’t pulled back from that here. But markets and, and sectors like this in names that get to extreme overbought and stay at those levels. There’s not much more bullish than that. There really isn’t. I know that might seem counterintuitive because, you know, we use that as an opportunity to pause our buying. That is ideally when you want to be positioned. But if you’re new to the market, it’s not the end of the world. You didn’t miss out on the neck on this bull market.

There’s still plenty left to go here. If you’re worried about that, look back. On some of my previous video podcasts. I shared multiple charts of the S&P 500. Some of the best days to ever buy were all time highs. You would have outperformed every hedge fund manager out There just buying, just by buying that at all time highs, just by buying the S&P 500. So if you’re interested in learning more about that kind of a mindset in the market and find positions that outperform the market as well, that’s what we do here at the VRA every day. It’s exactly what we want to be doing as well.

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So we’re super grateful, we’re incredibly grateful for this opportunity and we want to provide that service to retail investors because there’s never been a better time to take control of your own financial future. There’s never been more tools at your disposal, cheaper fees than ever, more access than ever. So come and join us. We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now. We want to show you exactly how we do it with the VRA investing system. You can sign up@vra letter.com Again, we have 14 day free trial going on. And check out the podcasts while you’re there. Sign up to at least receive them every day at the market close.

All right, let’s start to wrap it up here. The S&P 500 also all time high today. As I mentioned before, the Dow Jones has lagged here a little bit after. We haven’t seen an all time high coming out of this Iran conflict yet, although the transports did do it. So we want to see them begin to act better here. But no real red flags going up. But we’re certainly keeping an eye on it. Absolutely.

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I feel like I had one more chart on the markets. Oh, this was it. I almost forgot to wrap it up because Kib just told me this before the podcast. He just ran the numbers on those four meltdowns that I told you about. 2018, 2020, 2025 and now 2026. All V shaped recoveries after the average move higher of the other three scenarios. 2018, 20, 20, 2025. The average move higher in the S&P 500 over the next year is 70%.

That is incredible. And I think it’s from the lows to the new new highs. But man, that is an incredible move and we truly believe we’re heading into years that are going to exceed that. We’re starting to see it now. It’s all a few headlines today from There’s a conference going on somewhere, but Steve Mnuchin was one of the people. There was another banker in there who’s saying this is early innings of an AI revolution or an innovation. You know, some version of our theme innovation revolution that we’ve been saying since 2022, it’s exactly what we laid out playing out through 2030 and now we’re starting to update some of those that it’ll be even longer. So we’ve been the, the biggest bulls on Wall street since 2022.

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We can’t find anyone who’s been more bullish than us. And it does sound like they’re starting to catch up. As contrarians, we want them to hold off as long as they, as long as they can before they get too bullish on, on this market. But even then, once they do join in, that’s going to be still just middle innings. We’re still so early here. All right, internals on the day to day, much better here. Not stellar but much improved from what we saw yesterday. Certainly 2 to 1 positive advanced decline on the NYSE just shy of that on the NASDAQ 52 week highs.

The lows just about 4 to 1 positive across the board here. NYSE and NASDAQ combined, good numbers. Volume here also solid beats, no big 70, 80% upside volume moves that you love to see but still good numbers here today. As for our sectors, all 11 sectors in the SB 500 finished higher on the day to day. Very good to see. Let me type in one thing here if I could spill for myself. All right, yes, all 11 sectors finish how we’re actually led by materials on the day to day. But tech gets all the awards all time high today.

Coming in second place though on the sector watch after that, industrials and laggards if you want to call them that were the financials and the utilities here as well. One other side note, on the day today we did see a lower move in yields. Although that move yesterday was a little bit scary, it did not take out its recent high. So here I’ll go ahead. I did not plan on this but I’ll go ahead and draw it up real quick. We’ll take a look together. 10 year yields here. U.S.

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treasury yields again didn’t take out this short term high here. That is good to see. We want to continue from here. Lower highs and lower lows. And in the short term you can see it might look like higher highs and higher lows to some extent from even from here. Right. But now you zoom out a little bit more. This is really, I’m being very broad here and doing this quickly.

I haven’t drawn anything up before this. I didn’t actually honestly, I’d only looked at the daily action on the ten year before this because I do look at this chart And Kip does as well. So much. Well, it’s good to see here again, we haven’t taken out this high when you zoom out on a longer term. So we still have a series of lower highs and lower lows. From here again on the two year chart, we’re seeing the same thing. So again, technically you call that a higher low. We want to see this resume.

We’ve said that this was going to be the peak just before Trump’s inauguration and it’s almost identical to what we saw from 2017. And now think about what we got in by 2020 we were at basically negative rates, right? Almost not on the ten year. But again, so that’s what we’re looking for here. Let me zoom out and take a quick look at that. Why not? We’ll go full 20. So the 2017 20. Jay Powell hiking rates. That’s right.

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But then you see the collapse in yields. That’s a zoom out. Very big zoom out. Look here, you don’t even move higher yields that even register. All right, enough about yields. I’m sure you’re, you’re bored of it by now. Our long term theme again though. I mean, I’ll do it one more time.

Lower yields, that remains our long term call. All right. All right. Finally here for today, VRA Commodity Watch. We do have some green on the screen and after hours trading here. I’m gonna quick refresh. I will say slightly negative now. So gold miners definitely leading on the day.

GDX was positive on the session. Gold $4,560 an ounce. Really we remain extremely bullish on gold. And the miners here, some accumulation and probably not probably some buying happening, some selling happening from long term holders. These are still incredible numbers. And think about it from this perspective. We’re about $1,000 off an all time high. And gold is still positive year to date.

Give you the number on IT. Even up 5.29% on the year still. So always perspective always helps. Silver $73.23 an ounce. Copper just below $6 a pound now. And oil is lower. So still above $100 a barrel at $102 a barrel. And another one of our FIFO stories here, first in, first out, Kip talked about that software had a great day yesterday, little backing today, but that’s all right.

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Pretty much flat. Bitcoin though, hitting its highest level since January 31st today and now at $81,582 a bitcoin. Another group and we have another crypto we like a lot as well, so again, come and join us. That’s all we have time for here today, but you can sign up to receive our podcast every day at the market close@vraletter.com click that podcast link at the top and we’d love to have you with us. Check us out for our 14 day free trial while you’re there. And if you found some value in this content, please help us out. We’d love to spread this message for free everywhere that we can. Our podcast every day at the Market Close are free.

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