In today's episode, Tyler discusses the sea of red in today's stock market action, unpacking the reasons behind the sell-off and explaining why the VRA remains optimistic about the bigger picture for both the US economy and the stock market. Tyler also breaks down news about Tech Insiders buying more stock, today's sector performance, and the latest moves from the commodities market. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

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. You know, if you haven’t checked the markets yet, just— I’ll go ahead and save you that, that one. Don’t, don’t do it today, uh, if you’re having— especially if you’re having a good day. Uh, was not a good day in the markets today. But I can say that with a smile because we do remain so optimistic about the future.

I know we talk about it a lot. It was in the title of my last podcast, but, uh, we’ll get into a few more of the reasons why today. But we’ll look at the bigger picture as well because I’m not an internal optimist. We’re not— that’s not what we do here at the VRA. We’re not perma bulls. We’re not perma bears. We don’t want to be perma anything. So when new events come to light We’ll analyze them fully here.

[00:01:01]:
Uh, you know, as we say here often, that’s exactly why we have the VRA Investing System, uh, because you can’t tell the market what to do. You have to see what the market is doing and have a game plan so you don’t end up being reactionary to moves like this. So we’ll discuss a little bit more about that today, especially with the increase in volatility. We we’ve had. I know we get questions about it quite often here, so hopefully I can address a few of those. And with that volatility comes a big decline in sentiment. We talk about it often, another contrarian indicator for us here of when we should be buying versus when we want to be selling. But by and large, you want to be a buyer when there’s blood in the streets, right? You want to be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.

Uh, you know, It’s, it’s tough to say that, uh, and hear that maybe sometimes, you know, you don’t want to be greedy or anything, but it’s, uh, it’s just an old saying and it has a lot of value when it comes to the stock market. Um, got a few other great topics here for you today. Uh, also of course we’ll cover our market action and where we finished on the day and the bright spots that we saw as well, our internals, uh, our sectors, and of course our VRA Commodity Watch, where we’ll talk about the number one topic on everybody’s mind, which is the oil market. Of course, really the number one topic on everybody’s mind is what is happening in Iran. So let’s go ahead and we’ll start it there and come back to oil, uh, towards the end with the VRA Commodity Watch, um, because that is the, the uncertainty that we’re seeing in the market right now, um, whether it was This morning, Trump saying, oh, actually, I thought the sell-off in the market could have been worse. Not— doesn’t sound great, because if you follow Trump at all, you know that usually when the lows are in, he’s saying it’s a fantastic time to be buying stocks. That’s what we saw last year during the tariff mania. We’ve seen on multiple shallower pullbacks along the way where him or somebody on his team will be asked about the stock market and say, oh, you know, actually, it could have been— it could definitely, uh, Uh, or it’s definitely a great buying opportunity.

We did not get that today. Not, uh, you know, just another— we’re keeping track of these things always. Uh, that’s what we’re here for. You know, I know a lot of you have full-time jobs that are completely unrelated to this field, so that’s what we’re here for at the VRA. Um, but yeah, so saying I thought stocks could have gone lower, and he also went on to say that oil could have gone a lot higher. It’s not what the market wants to hear. We’ll get kind of into that uncertainty factor in a second, uh, because we’ll see if this was enough. After the close, Trump announced that he’s going to extend the ceasefire specifically on their energy assets, Iran’s energy assets.

[00:03:56]:
They will not be attacking any of those targets for at least another 10 days, I think through April 6th. Um, the headline just came across right before I got on the podcast here today. Um, But what we’re, what we’re seeing in this market is classic uncertainty signals. Not necessarily bearish. We’re not certainly not seeing large-scale bearish signals in our systems. The fundamental story here remains unchanged. I’ll get into more of that. Kip covered it yesterday too.

Q4 earnings was just fantastic, okay? The Mag 7 have done nothing but they as an average, I believe they just averaged the Mag 7 alone 27% revenue growth or earnings per share growth, one of the two. I don’t have it right in front of me. Uh, average that again, 27% growth for the largest companies in the world. That’s impressive. Uh, so we got Q1 earnings right around the corner, uh, coming up here as well. We see, you know, whether it’s from the consumer side to the corporate side, balance sheets by and large are healthier than they’ve been in decades. Uh, so that story does remain unchanged, right? Right? All of the fears out there that you see the fearmongers go after so much— yes, you know, a lot of them make sense and it can be pretty valid. But when you really dive into them and you get a little more perspective, oftentimes you can see they’re leaving out a key piece of evidence to kind of fit their story there.

Um, so what we’re seeing again, market sell-off, commodity sell-off as well, not as oil, but gold and silver. We continue to see that, although a little hint. Gold does remain higher on the year, which surprises people when I tell them that, because we were, you know, above, you know, what, $5,500 an ounce, and now you’re below $4,500. How can you still be higher? Or, you know, above $5,600, now you’re at $4,400. How can you still be higher on the year? So we’ll get to that. Um, and we’re seeing the opposite in yields, as one might expect. If people, uh, you know, are selling bonds, yields go higher. Right, so bond prices, uh, this inverse correlation.

[00:06:03]:
Anyway, you know, Trump though, here’s the key point, is watching yields. We talked about the 10-year on Tuesday, so I won’t go too much into it today. Um, but because all that still remains true as well, we think we were— this is a countertrend move and a long-term downtrend for yields. The 10-year today back above a 4.4, 4.41 is where we finished, up 2%. Again, so that means your bond prices are going down, uh, yields up. Yeah, you got it. Um, so, you know, Trump is watching yields here though. I think that does probably— that might have had something to do with those comments at the end, uh, because again, it’s not just the fears as we head into a weekend, especially, uh, you know, traders don’t want to be long going into a weekend that they’re fearful about, right? So you can get rough Fridays in a situation like that.

Um, but we think we’re getting to a point of maximum pressure here where, like we saw with tariffs last year, uh, which was a much bigger sell-off than what we’ve seen so far, right? We don’t expect it to be that deep of a sell-off, uh, as tariffs are far, far below what we see— what we saw from COVID It would have to take something outside of the current scope of conversation to happen for something like that, in our view. That, that’s how we see it here because of the fundamental factors that I mentioned earlier. Um, well, once we can get this behind us and some more certainty into the market, we think it’s going to be a blast-off move higher for all of those, again, fundamental reasons there. But again, yields up while everything else is down. Trump sees this. You know, this is about the time where you start to get hints of a pivot, uh, an off-ramp if you will, because people are afraid that this weekend ends up with boots on the ground, all new kinds of stories. You know, we just hit new lows of 2026 today, right? I’m not going to sugarcoat any of this here, um, so we’ll get to that on our markets here in just a second. But how much further could this go, right? Because you have a rough Friday and then open rough on Monday.

Well, you know, I don’t— I’m not being wishy-washy here, but this is what the market is telling us with its uncertainty, is it can’t tell either if it’s gonna be that, or could there be a broader peace announcement over the weekend? It’s certainly possible as well. I’m not gonna try and weigh the odds here and be wishy-washy like that with you, though. That is what the market is telling us of the uncertainty. But for all the reasons I laid out earlier in all of our podcasts earlier this week, while the short-term bottoms are messy. The putting in lows, that process can be very messy in the market. But other than the very short term here, over the medium to long term, we remain absolutely unchanged in our bullish conviction. Uh, we think if you look again back to tariffs in December of 2025, December last year, if you’d asked people about tariffs, it was basically a nothing burger compared to where it was in April earlier in the year. The stock market’s back at all-time time highs.

[00:09:12]:
Yeah, there’s discussion of tariffs, but hey, you know, there’s other— there’s other things going on now, right? That was 3 or 4 news cycles ago. Most people really don’t remember it and the pain they felt in the moment of it happening. Um, the same, in our view, should hopefully be true here, right? Not hopefully— we think over the medium to long term, absolutely. But by December of this year, it might look differently History does not always repeat, but it does rhyme, right? By December of this year, most people, this will be an afterthought. It’ll be 3 to 4 news cycles ago. We’ll have the midterms out of the way. And not getting into speculation of how those look today, but the stock market will be at all-time highs. That’s our view.

You know, midterms, that’s another area that we’re paying close attention to. You know, we’ll get into that topic. We’ll save it for another day. But again, Not to be wishy-washy, but the markets hate uncertainty. Even this doesn’t look like fear necessarily from the markets today, even though we did finish at the lows of the day. It looks like uncertainty about going into this weekend. Um, and the markets hate uncertainty more than fear. So you can climb a wall of worry, right? But uncertainty, you can’t see the floor in front of you really.

With that comes Lower sentiment. We got AII back another week here. Far more bears than bulls. Bears are back below, uh, 49— or excuse me, below 50% for AII. We were 50, like just above a 50, uh, last week. And bears remaining very low as well. Fear and Greed, extreme fear mode. Really across the board we’re seeing readings upon readings of extreme fear in sentiment.

[00:10:58]:
Uh, we could get a little bit higher of a put-call ratio. Uh, we might look for a little bit higher of one, but we did finish above a 1 today, which is excessive bearishness. All right, so let’s take a quick look at our market action on the day today. We did finish lower across the board here. Uh, the— let’s see, NASDAQ did lead the way lower, down 2.38% on the day today. That is a new low for 2026, not what we want to see. And the semis did lead lower, down roughly 4.5%. On the day today.

But I won’t stop there because the semis did hold their recent lows. That’s good to see. Uh, you know, not saying that that means we’re out of the woods by any means, but that’s constructive action. Uh, you know, stocks start selling off before the major indexes. They bottom before the major indexes. We’ll see if that, uh, remains to be the case here. But we have a theme exactly for this. We’ve talked about it for weeks, our FIFO theme— first in, first out, right? Software stocks got hit the first and the hardest.

They are so well above their lows from just a few weeks ago. Our other one, Bitcoin, has been at higher levels, but it’s still well above its recent lows, um, and has been putting in a constructive chart series here of higher highs and higher lows. Same thing with the software index as well. So we want to see that continue. And probably the biggest news, uh, that you may not see a whole lot of places— I saw it, I don’t know if I saw it, I wasn’t turning into a whole lot of financial mainstream media. There’s better sources out there, like the Schwab Network, for example. Uh, I’ll be there on Monday, um, just before the market closed. So hopefully you can come and join us.

[00:12:38]:
I’ll be talking about all the VRAs’ market views. Um, yeah, looking forward to being on. Always a pleasure being on the Schwab Network as well. Also be on Grant Central’s podcast. It airs tomorrow, will be out tomorrow at 11 Central, 12 Eastern time. So I hope you can join us there as well. All right, so back to this chart though. Insider buying— this is a major screen of the VRA investing system.

Uh, you know, we’re looking for whether it’s company-wide share repurchases that they announce at earnings, insider buying, C-suite buying, all of those kinds of things. So this is a big one here, okay? This really cannot be understated. If they think— if the insiders think that their stocks are undervalued You know, no one would know better at the end of the day. Um, so this is kind of the under-the-hood story that you really like to see. Uh, so again, if they think their stocks are cheap, then what are they? Most likely then they’re probably pretty cheap. No one, no one would know better than the insiders. So again, some bullish factors out there absolutely taking place under the hood of this market. After that, we had the Russell 2000 down 1.7%.

On the day today. The S&P 500 down just about the same amount there. Um, and then finally the Dow Jones, I guess you could call it our leader on the day today, was down 1%. I will point out the transports have been acting very healthy here, even in, in the face of higher energy expectations. Uh, you know, that another is another sign to us here of a growing economy. Um, Brian Ridge painted the picture this way, that, uh, with all of the manufacturing going on in the US, we really are in a boom time while Europe is going through a doom time, it seems to be. Of— well, we’re the biggest energy producers in the world, right? And energy independent in many ways, and only growing in that regard. We’re financially independent.

[00:14:39]:
We still have the world’s reserve currency. We could talk more about energy, but maybe a podcast for another day. Um, But even, even kind of bigger picture than a US boom and Europe doom, there’s just— there’s so many bullish factors to this innovation revolution that aren’t getting the headlines that they deserve. There’s a lot of building happening in this country. And again, that’s not just healthy here for the US, as we should be independent in every way that we possibly can. Uh, but it is ultimately bullish for the world, uh, as we see it. So again, you know, it’s tough when the markets are finishing at their lows of the day, some hitting new lows for the years, and we’ve seen this for the last few weeks. And like I said, the uncertainty is what really drives the market crazy.

So I don’t want to sound overly optimistic as I say this, you know, but if you’re still in at this point, you know that I am an optimist. But also a contrarian, right? And again, not a perma-optimist. I would say I’m a realist and, uh, can also believe in the reality of the moment that I might not understand how this could turn out for good. Okay, um, but based off the VRA investing system, again, when we look ahead to December of this year, we think it’s going to be a repeat, or at least a rhyme to what we saw last year, that by December this pullback will be long forgotten. And as to the short term, again, not to sound wishy-washy, but lows are tough. You know, when you really are looking for a low, you do see kind of a flush kind of event. Doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been today. Um, so in the short term, that’s where we’re staying on our toes here.

Uh, you know, we’re watching this all day, every day for you here. Uh, we’re super grateful to be able to do this with you here every day, but this is when, you know, the VRA investing system really earns its keep, I’ll say that. So again, we think we have a lot to look forward to here, and we’d like to see this resolved obviously sooner rather than later. We didn’t sign up here for another war. You know, the whole thing was no new wars, right? Um, all right, so looking at our internals on the day here, uh, you know, for a day like today, not too bad really. Could have certainly been worse. Uh, roughly 2 to 1 negative for both the NYSE and the NASDAQ, uh, for advance decline. Also negative 52-week highs to lows, as one would expect, um, when you’ve seen a little bit of a sell-off like this, but nothing crazy by any means.

[00:17:14]:
Lastly, volume also roughly 2 to 1 negative on the day today, but no, you know, 70, 75, 80% downside volume kind of days, and really not a 90% kind of day that you really don’t want to see. Looking at our sectors, you know, it wasn’t just a throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of day today. Those are the days that make you question if it’s a liquidity event. We’re not seeing that either, for all the concerns of the cockroaches in the financial system, as Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan has put it. So the energy sector also, as you might expect with energy prices higher and they’re drilling for more than ever, at more efficient, uh, systems than ever before. Energy did hit an all-time high today, followed there by utilities. Uh, our laggards on the day: communication services, as you might expect. Tech— which communication services and tech essentially very similar, right? Communication service like 40% Facebook or Meta and Google or Alphabet.

I don’t know why they do that to their names. I do, but it’s That’s another story for another podcast there. All right, finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. And into, uh, actually in futures trading now, getting this out a little late. Gold is essentially flat on the day, $4,409 an ounce. But again, as I said earlier, it may surprise a lot of people that if gold was just, you know, at the end of January or so at $5,600 an ounce. You know, this is abysmal. We’ve been destroyed, right? Well, we’re still higher in 2026 so far.

So obviously it doesn’t feel good, especially if you went out and bought gold for the first time at those levels. You know, pullbacks like this are— this is a sharp one though, for sure, but it had been a massive move higher. We think this is a fantastic opportunity to buy the dip, not only in gold, specifically physical gold, but also the miners. That’s what this pullback will serve as for this group, because there’s still so much upside ahead and genuine price discovery still to take place in gold after decades of manipulation. Silver, same boat as well. Uh, silver now at $68.37 an ounce. Copper, $5.48 a pound. And oil, uh, was higher earlier in the day today, not too far off of them though, but at $94.48 a barrel.

[00:19:49]:
We really, you know, we think that the highs are in as far as the $120 barrel. Trump’s comments today certainly don’t help that. But when you look into futures contracts, we’re still seeing— it actually just came down a little bit— we were still seeing oil in the 70s by October. I believe, unless something’s changed here after the close, the— it’s actually moved up a month. The futures contract for September is now in the 70s, roughly $79, $78 a barrel. So that’s what the market’s telling us. Expect lowest, lower prices, price lower prices quicker than most would lead you to expect. So folks, I know it’s a rough day out there, but this is, you know, a good time to, you know, go back Over your positions, find the strength, continue to dollar cost average, and, uh, you know, don’t panic at the end of the day.

That’s the key here. Any sci-fi fans out there, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has two words printed on the cover: don’t panic. And that’s especially what you don’t want to do at a time like this. If you can keep your head about you when everybody else is losing theirs, then you know you’re going to make better decisions. At the end of the day. And you will, you know, strictly from a financial perspective, maybe not overall in life, but you can be greedy when others are fearful then, right? And then you’re getting out when others are getting greedy. Folks, that’s all 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 at 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.