Welcome back to the VRA Investing Podcast with your host, Kip Herriage! In this episode, Kip Herriage gives us a timely market recap following a strong day for stocks, spotlighting Nvidia’s blowout earnings and what that means for investors moving forward. He unpacks how seasonality and rotational strength are driving current bull market trends, with sectors like software and the Magnificent Seven moving through cycles that highlight the resilience of the broader market.

Don’t look back, the market is closed. Good Wednesday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the Daily VRA Investing Podcast. Hope you had a good day today. A lot is happening this afternoon. Uh, Nvidia reported earnings, they crushed. We’ll get into that a bit. Really some, some great commentary and guidance from the company on this.

It, um, they’re very good at this. If a lot of companies talk the way NVIDIA did, I would say they’re hype artists, you know. And I think a lot of people still look at NVIDIA that way, like, I don’t— we don’t believe you. And this continued to beat, which they did again today with some— again, some great guidance here. I’ll read that to you in just a moment. Uh, also today, again, uh, a big, big move higher. Good, good solid day. Taiwan actually got back-to-back days with up markets.

So we don’t know what to do with ourselves here. We’re very confused over here. Tyler’s in Austin, I’m in Sugar Land, but I’m sure we’ll find a way to work through it. We’re not complaining, believe me. We’re just not used to this. Uh, so I was happy Tyler got an update yesterday. He didn’t get a lot of those. Uh, but then even happier that I got one today, and it was a good day.

Uh, solid gains across the board. Uh, look, we’ve been talking with you about this, about seasonality. Second half of February, not great. It’s actually in particular, it’s more this week, and it’s not like it’s horrible. It’s really not even that bad in a midterm year or an off-presidential election year. But anyway, you know, here’s the thing about seasonality. So many people are following it now. No one used to do this, right? Right? Nowhere.

No one. You know, Yale Hirsch, who’s the founder Stock Traders’ Almanac was kind of the OG of Wall Street analytics. I was fortunate enough as a very young stockbroker— we didn’t call them financial advisors then, stockbroker— this would have been in about 1987, 1988, in that range, to have dinner with Yale Hirsch in New York at Tavern on the Green. And just a fascinating guy, just a gentleman through and through. Already a legend. He was— again, he originated this, uh, and so, you know, rest in peace. Uh, Yale, his son, now is, uh, is running the business, doing a great job, by the way. Uh, but everybody now uses seasonality.

Everybody now uses analytics. You see it everywhere, right? So there’s two sides to that coin. Number one, it becomes self-fulfilling, right? If everybody’s reading the same stuff and saying second half of February isn’t good, guess what? People start front-running that. The market started getting weak in the first, second week of February before we got to the back end. But again, that’s a two-sided coin, because guess what’s happening now? I believe people are front-running the end of this somewhat negative seasonality, because, you know, the back end is March and April, right? Two of the best months of the year. So here, long story short, outside of the destruction in software stocks— we talked with you about a lot of that here. And momentum stocks, again, this, this happens in bull markets. You see sectors go into bear markets, you see rotation of strength like this.

But as long as the overall market doesn’t fall, that’s textbook bull market action. And by the way, that’s exactly what we’ve seen since this bull market started from the bear market lows of October ’22. So now you’ve got a rush of people like, oh, I guess I should have covered my shorts. I guess I should have stopped buying puts because, yeah, this, this, this month’s almost over and now we’re getting into March and April. Again, great seasonality. So we had a really a 2-week negative stretch again for the broad market. Uh, again, it’s a little confusing, right? Because you have like the software stocks down, you know, 34%, right, in 4 months. Brutal, right? Here at the same time Excuse me.

[00:04:01]:
We had, um, the Magnificent Seven, and this I think is, is stunning, uh, data here. The average Mag Seven stock is down 20% from its highs of last year. That’s 33% of the S&P 500. Remember, it used to be the only stocks going up are the Mag Sevens. That can’t be healthy. Well, what’s changed? Now, max 7 stocks are getting killed, or at least have been, but everything else is going up. That is rotational. It’s a very definition of rotational strength.

You look that up in a dictionary, you’re going to see the picture of this bull market. That’s how strong this is. And I think anybody fighting that and saying— and there’s so many bears out there, you gotta love it if you’re bullish. There’s so many bears out there, right? We’re seeing it short selling, we’re seeing them put buying, and certainly in sentiment. Sentiment is, you know, it’s just Just what, a month and a half ago, sentiment was getting a little greedy. Let’s all go now. Gone. So that’s, that’s very— if you’re bullish, this is all very good news for you.

And so, um, you know, and now, by the way, guess what it’s time for? It’s time for the rotation back into these groups that have been hit. It’s time for rotation. We actually been calling it this week, as you may know if you’re with us here at VRA. It’s time for rotation now back into the Mag 7.. It’s time for rotation back into software stocks and momentum stocks, and that started this week. It’s already started. You, you probably can see that if you’re with us and you view your portfolio. The stocks that were going down are now starting to go up.

That actually started yesterday. And now with this NVIDIA news, again, I think that we’re, we’re back in the sweet spot of this market. Again, we think March and April are going to be very good months. This is going to be extraordinarily good year., and now we’ve just shaken out a lot of bulls and created a lot of new bears, you know, that can join Michael Burry in, in buying, in shorting and buying stocks and buying puts on everything you can find. Uh, somebody put out a post on X today that I thought was spot on. Said, if you’re in the investment business and if you’re on social media, you have a choice. You can either be honest, which in the bull market means bullish, and put out good commentary and get no action, right? Get no likes, no reposts. Or you can be a permabear and be bearish all the time with worst-case scenarios, and you’ll have a massive following, but you’ll lose everybody that follows you a lot of money.

[00:06:30]:
I think that’s exactly right. And frankly, that’s where I want to be. Look, at some point in the next several years— I actually think it’ll be in the early 2030s 2032. It may extend longer, always could be shorter. But again, we believe this is a generational bull market. It’s going to go on for some time. There will come a time when everybody’s bullish, everybody in social media is bullish, everybody on TV is bullish. That’s when we’re going to be selling and taking profits.

I didn’t like the fact that this year Bloomberg surveyed, I think it was 21 market strategists on Wall Street All 21 were bullish, expecting the market to be up this year. Did not care for that. But here’s the difference. It’s one thing to say you’re bullish. It’s another thing to actually be bullish. And so we see right away, we get our first shakeout of a few percent and there go the bulls, right? Now they’re capitulating. Oh, you know what? It looks like things have changed. Now we have a credit crisis potentially.

Now war with Iran. Oh, now AI is destroying everything. Right, this again, this is textbook investor sentiment, textbook investor psychology, and it is exactly the way you want the markets to act if you— excuse me, investors to act if you are a bull. And of course, uh, we are here. Um, what else today? A Bitcoin up 7%. Uh, again, uh, Tyler and I just had this conversation. Sam and I too, by the way. Uh, they’re, they’re starting to pick up on this.

Tyler has for a long time. Sam’s just joined us, so he’s really getting the lay of the land here. He’s a marketing guru, uh, and now he’s learning the, you know, how the, uh, the foundations of the markets work. And Sam was actually asking me, what’s the correlation with Bitcoin in the markets? How do you, how do you know, uh, you know, is this a counter move, trend move, or is this a primary move high that we’re seeing in Bitcoin now? Again, up 7% on the day. Again, the lows were $60,000. We told you then that we believe those were the lows. There’s some great data on this. Uh, when, uh, when, when any, at any point since Bitcoin’s been around, when it’s had a 50% correction, we just had that when it hit $60,000.

The next year, Bitcoin is higher 90% of the time, and it’s up on average 125%. That’s very usable data right there. And again, I’m not seeing a lot of people talk about that, which is also great. But here’s the correlation here. We— I call this liquidity indicators, and it really helps us understand where we are in the cycle, where we are in short-term direction. Our big three, our big three are the semis. They’re number one. Bitcoin, frankly, is number two.

[00:09:19]:
And gold is number 3. You could probably say gold is 2, Bitcoin’s 3, because again, gold is, you know, I mean, gold is the Bible of actual money, okay? But it doesn’t really matter. Gold’s been going up. It got hit, that was very short term, like a 3-day hit, boom, bottom, back up again, right? And it’s going to keep going higher, as is silver. Silver, $91 today, hit a high today of $91. It’ll— I believe silver is going to be back over $100 very soon. I think it’ll take out its highs of $121 very soon. And again, I think, I think, I think in the next 3 years— our target officially is 2030 for $15,000 gold, $300 silver— I think it’s going to happen sooner.

Kip Herriage [00:10:00]:
I think 2028, early 2029 is when we’ll hit those targets. This is that bull market for this group. This is the Bitcoin bull market for gold and silver. And, uh, so, but again, the these are liquidity indicators, right? So when the semis, gold, and Bitcoin are moving in the same direction, hopefully leading— we know the semis have been leading, right? The semis, uh, again, we share this chart often with you here at 3RA. Tyler covered it yesterday in his podcast, uh, very well, by the way. Great podcast again, Tyler. Uh, when Bitcoin’s leading the market higher There is no bigger bull market signal. That’s it.

That’s the directional signal. But it works both ways. If the semis are leading lower, you really want to greatly reduce your exposure to stocks and to the markets, okay? But Bitcoin’s led all year. It’s led from exactly the April 7th tariff lows. Bitcoin has led the S&P 500 higher. Again, that’s the tell. That’s the tell we look for, right? Gold. Gold has been leading all year.

So there’s 2 of our 3. The one that hadn’t was Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s always been its own thing, you know. Look, when it was $121,000, everybody wanted to buy it. That was really my first tell. We talked about at the time, when everybody starts calling me saying, how much should I put in Bitcoin? When I get— we get a lot of those calls, a lot of those emails, uh, would you buy these altcoins? And I said, Kip, how far is it going to spread to, right? We do like an altcoin here. Matter of fact, I think it’s my favorite cryptocurrency right now. If you’re with us here, you know what I’m talking about.

[00:11:40]:
Again, if you’re not with us, come join us. You get 2 free weeks. vraincider.com. vraincider.com. But point being, now that Bitcoin’s rallying, and again, we believe the lows are in, all 3 of our liquidity indicators— meaning there are no systemic issues, There’s no credit issues. There’s no sovereign debt issues globally, Japan or otherwise. And the coast is clear. That’s essentially what this means.

Now, seasonality is back to bullish. By the way, I think again, front running is taking place here. Bitcoin now, excuse me, NVIDIA has pulled back a little bit in the after hours, but I really think it’s still $197. It’s up a bit on the news. I believe this news with Bitcoin— excuse me, Nvidia— is, is going to be sustaining, right? I think you’re going to see Bitcoin traded— sorry, Nvidia popped as high as $203 on the news, and now it’s back to $197. But $200 is the highest level Nvidia has been at for some time. Remember, the all-time high in Nvidia is, um, It’s $212. So we’re not far from that now.

[00:12:53]:
And the chart looks good. Everything’s turning up here. Here’s some of the commentary that— again, their conference call is going on right now, but here’s what I picked up from the news release. Again, they beat on, uh, uh, earnings and bottom line. And this is pretty amazing data. I got to cover this with you quickly here. Revenue, they had $68.1 billion. Estimate was $66.2 billion.

This is for one quarter. This is for the fourth quarter, $68.1 billion. 5 years ago, this company was building gaming, uh, chips for gaming systems, and nobody knew their name, right? This is really an incredible American success story. Earnings beat by 8 cents a share, $1.62 versus $1.54. Data center growth, $62 billion versus $60 billion as an estimate. Gross margin, 75.2%. Remember that Imagine that, making 75.2% for a company of this size, the most important company not in the US but on the planet, uh, largest company out there, and to have this kind of gross margin, it is unbelievable. Uh, here are a couple of comments, uh, they said in their guidance, uh, customers are racing to invest and, uh, Agentic Systems if I can read my handwriting here, are causing extreme urgency to scale.

And again, that sounds hype-ish, right? That’s Jensen Huang. This is how they talk. The thing is, they back it up, you know, they back it up quarter after quarter. So I think it’s going to happen with NVIDIA is I think, you know, again, the lows were in. The stock was just— what was it, uh, 2 weeks ago? The stock was down to a low of $167. Uh, excuse me, $171. And again, now we’re back to, uh, $197. It’s already had a pretty good move.

I think this is the move that takes it back through all-time highs. And then I think we’re looking at $250. Um, I would think $250 by end of the first quarter— uh, excuse me, second quarter. And then I think by year-end, the stock is going to be $300+. Again, this is a leader. This is a VRA 10-bagger along with Tesla, are kind of our two big caps that we own here. And I think these are great stocks to own for the remainder of 2026. That’s a, that’s a high confidence call from us.

[00:15:14]:
Um, all right, we covered rotational strength. Again, you know what our thoughts are here. We’re getting back into, I would say, say more of a normal bull market. And here’s a little insight on Kip Herridge: unless tech stocks are leading, I really don’t want I don’t want to be in the market. I don’t want to own bank stocks. I don’t want to own REITs. Home builders are good for a trade, but that’s it. Um, you know, I don’t have an interest in anything that’s a cartel relay.

Kip Herriage [00:15:44]:
I don’t buy defense stocks. I like to sleep at night, you know. We own Palantir, and after Tyler and I talked about it a bunch— I don’t think he really agreed with me on this, and by the way, he was right. Because he, he got the call right. But we sold the stock, we made like 85%, so, you know, we had a good profit on it. But, you know, that, that was— we sold it like 80 or 90 or something, you know. I mean, it went to 207. So Tyler was right, we should have held it.

I don’t like owning cartel stocks. So the banking cartel, the military-industrial complex, I have no interest in that because I just— I, I think I’ve reached an age where I just want to say fuck you. Yeah, I’m sorry for the, uh, F-bomb, but, um, I, I would never, never buy tobacco stocks, you know, uh, although we might have been lied to about some of that. Uh, anyway, uh, that’s kind of coming full circle, isn’t it, with everybody that’s dipping these ends now and everything? Um, but, um, different topic, maybe for different time. I’ll let Tyler and Tyler and Sam cover that at some point. And this, uh, younger generation that has fallen in love with these things. And apparently it’s not that bad for you, might even be good for you. Tucker Carlson’s been on this, on this, this, this, this train for a long time.

And there’s a lot of, apparently a lot of data backing up. Anyway, I don’t like investing in any of these companies that can hurt people. That’s banks, that’s military-industrial complex, that’s tobacco companies of old. And of course I could rattle off more, but we, we just choose not to to play in that space. And if we do, it’s going to be a short-term trade, you know, looking like a leveraged ETF that holds some of these positions. But, uh, other than that, I like sticking to my core competency, things I understand, things that I’m interested in, and companies that I tend to root for, right, and represent the best of investments, the best of, best of America, etc. So I want to spend— before I get into the internals here, I do want to come back here and talk for a minute about the State of the Union last night. All right, I wrote this up this morning.

[00:17:54]:
I won’t read it back to you, just kind of paraphrase. I think this is the best State of the Union I’ve ever seen. I really do. We knew going in that it was going to be long. Turns out this is the longest State of the Union in history. Trump broke his old record, right? And when it was ending and I heard him reading off his America First stuff and golden age of America, I’m like, wait, is he ending? I was like, that went really fast. And that’s not normally me. I’m looking, usually looking to disconnect a little bit before the end.

But this was different. This really, I think this State of the Union really, really touched people. And the structure of it was brilliant, right? All the heroes, true heroes that they recognize. I mean, it’s hard not to tear up for these. People that have been attacked in the military, again, by terrorists, or Americans that have been gravely wounded or killed by illegal aliens. This was genius, what— the way he put this together. Uh, look, I’m a lifelong independent. Uh, I’m proud of that.

I voted for both Democrats and Republicans since my first vote in 1980, voted for Jimmy Carter. Yeah, that was a mistake, but you know what, I became a Reagan fan shortly thereafter, right? Uh, again, uh, the idiocy of my youth. Okay, but, uh, what we was last night was the Democrat Party. Uh, I could never vote for any of these people. It’s completely unrecognizable. I know I’m speaking to a friendly crowd here, but their refusal to stand up, not just for America’s achievements, because Trump makes it sound like it’s his, and like a lot of these he does get credit for. This guy’s doing so much, he certainly doesn’t get credit for it. I think one of the reasons, frankly, is he likes to brag about himself.

That doesn’t, uh, make a lot of people like you. In Texas, if you brag about yourself, you, you kind of get kicked out of the state, or you have no friends. I mean, that’s just the way it is. But for these folks not to stand up for these homegrown heroes— and Trump really goaded them, that was Brilliant what he did there, right? When Trump, and they wouldn’t stand period. And when Trump said, just to paraphrase, stand in agreement if you believe the first duty of the American government is to protect its own citizens rather than illegal aliens. And of course, anyone that’s a patriot stands to that. Why wouldn’t you? Of course, that’s the government’s first job. And these clowns on the left, not one of them stood.

They didn’t clap. They weren’t smiling. They were mad. They were screaming. I think that’s the brilliance of this State of the Union last night. That is the playbook for the midterms. What Trump did last night is the playbook for the midterms. Compare and contrast the two parties.

[00:20:53]:
I think that’s the playbook. And the other thing, of course, They have to pass the SAVE Act. Look, we know that 80-45% of Americans support it. Democrats— this is truly bipartisan. And we know why the left doesn’t want to do it. But however they have to get it done, you know, do it with filibuster, whatever, I do not care. This has to happen. And if Republicans don’t get this done, if Trump doesn’t get this done, Republicans deserve to lose in the midterms, and they will.

These rigged elections, it’s time for that nonsense to end. This must happen. I know I would doubt there’s anybody on this podcast that disagrees with what I’ve just said. Uh, okay, let’s get to the internals here. I’ll keep it quick. Uh, good, good, uh, good, not great. NYSE 1.5 to 1 positive, um, on advanced decline. Volume 54.6%, up volume.

Uh, NASDAQ 2 to 1 positive and 67.1% of volume. It’s very good there. Again, we had solid gains across the board. I will repeat, NASDAQ was up 1.3% today, okay? The semis were up 1.6% today. That is textbook bull market action, and we saw it right here again today. Again, everything is coming back, uh, into Again, I, I think it’s melt-upville. I think March and April are going to catch these bears short, and I think it’s going to be painful. And again, they’re going to be complaining about all the reasons the market shouldn’t be going up as it’s going up, because this is going to be an amazing year.

[00:22:31]:
This stretch we’re in that will carry into the 2030s— high confidence call— of the innovation revolution is we’re just scratching the surface of this. We’ve yet to get to an IPO frenzy, right? This is, you know, dot-com on steroids, as we called it. We’ve yet to get to mergers and acquisitions that are skyrocketing. Again, these haven’t happened yet. And as Tyler loves to say, this is such a powerful stat. During dot-com, NASDAQ, tech-heavy NASDAQ, went over that 5 years, rose 575%. NASDAQ, since the bull market started here late 2022, is only up like 100— I think it’s like 120%, right? So yeah, this bull market is early. Dips will, will continue to be a buy.

And when the markets double— the markets will double from here by 2030— and by then we’ll finally start getting people going, you know what, maybe this thing is real, maybe there is something to it. Again, this is primarily about the innovation revolution and the transformation that’s going to take place in the U.S. and globally because of the wonder of technology. And it’s going to be so much more good than bad. Again, I can’t wait to see all the new products, the new companies starting. Again, we’re not even scratching that surface yet, but folks, they’re coming. I think you, I think you probably feel it deep down, don’t you? It’s something very special is coming out of this. Yeah, there’ll be disruption, there’ll be companies put out of business.

Welcome to reality. That happens anyway. May happen a little faster now, uh, but look, gonna be far more good, uh, than, than bad. Uh, millions of additional jobs will be created. Millions, many millions, uh, because of AI. And that’s because that’s what technology always does. It always creates more jobs, not less, even when you can’t make sense of it, and even when the fears start to get palpable. Oh my God, look at all these people can lose their jobs.

[00:24:30]:
Even when that fear is present, you have to remember that in history, technological advancements are 100% in creating more jobs, not less. That is a repeating pattern that you cannot beat. It’s like you just can’t beat it, right? All right, um, uh, Internals Today— excuse me, Sector Watch Today. Not great here, actually. 5 sectors higher, 4 lower, nothing big to the downside. Upside led by technology at 1.8% and financials up 1.7%. They’ve been hit pretty hard of late, again, fears of a credit crisis. That’s not happening, by the way.

In our commodity watch today, again, gold and silver and the miners continue to surge. Gold was up today at one point, I think I saw it at $50, $60 an ounce, finished up $12 an ounce, $5,188. Silver, again, as I mentioned earlier, $91+ is a high for the day. $89.31 right now, up 2% on the day. Copper today up 1%, $6.04, back above $6 a pound. Crude oil today down 5 cents a barrel, $65.58. And finally, as I said a minute ago, Bitcoin— yeah, this is, this is good. $60,000 is the lows.

That, that, that, that should— that will, in our view, will be the lows. Last trade now, $68,500. Liquidity, the trio, right? The, the trio that indicates liquidity is back and that, and that the markets are getting ready to roar. All three of those now moving higher: the semis, Bitcoin, and gold. All right, folks, that’s it for the day. Hope you had a great day and even better night. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow. After the close.