In today’s episode, Tyler dives into the day’s stock market action, highlighting both the red on the screen and the bright spots savvy investors should be watching. He explains why having a reliable investing system is crucial during uncertain times and how sticking to your strategy can pay off in the long run. Tyler also discusses exciting developments with SpaceX and NASA’s announcement today of plans to return to the moon. Tune into today's podcast to learn more

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. Not quite the day that we had yesterday in the markets. We did have some red on the screen today, But there were certainly, certainly some bright spots out there today, and in our view, some big ones. And we’ll cover all of that here today and more for today’s VRA Investing Podcast. So great to have you here with us as always.

Uh, before I dive into what we’ll talk about here today, I’ll give you a quick recap of the podcast in a second. I will also be on Grant Stinchfield’s podcast tomorrow. That That airs at 11 AM. Uh, looking forward to being on with Grant. Just what an amazing guy, uh, you know, that he is, uh, on and off the screen. Absolutely incredibly intelligent, thoughtful conversations. Uh, you know, the last one that we did a couple weeks ago was just a blast, and we talked about some great topics as well. And thank you for tuning in.

[00:01:21]:
Thank you for your feedback on that as well. So looking forward to being on again tomorrow. Um, you know, this is an important time, I think, to talk about finance and individual financials here, because these are the moments where people get scared and they make mistakes in their portfolio. It’s why it’s so crucial that you have a system in place for your investing. It’s why we have the VRA Investing System. So if you’re not here with us already, and you don’t know, or maybe you’ve been with us before and you do know what the VRA Investing System is. You know, we’re updating it here every day, letting you know what those updates are ahead of the market open every day in a way that’s digestible. We’re not day traders.

Um, we tell you exactly what we’re doing with our money. We have no conflicts of interest, nothing like that. And that’s, in our view, something that sets us apart from so many other spaces in the financial industry as a whole, whether it’s from the newsletter side all the way up to money managers or brokers, you know, wherever direction you want to go from there. We every day here wake up excited to serve individual investors, to help you crush Mr. Market, as we want to as well. So like I said, we have no conflicts of interest, nothing like that. So we all win together. And again, thank you as always for your feedback.

[00:02:51]:
We’ve got such an intelligent group of people here. We really do need to plan some kind of get-together to all interact and do something fun pretty soon, especially once we get back to all-time highs in the next few months or so. It’s not a prediction here or anything like that, but how many times have we seen V-shaped recoveries specifically under Donald J. Trump? Right, 3 times, uh, maybe 4 really in his 2 terms. Uh, Kip and I have kind of been going through them a little bit. It’s almost— they’re eerily similar. A couple weeks to a month, um, people freak out. You look back to tariff mania last year— I’m sorry, I will get to the other topics and what we’ll cover today, uh, but tariff mania last year, quick harsh pullback, V-shaped recovery, um Before that, you know, going back to his first term, even COVID, uh, of course brutal, right? We shut down the entire economy.

We were back at all-time highs by the summer that year. Uh, 2018, the December from hell from Jay Powell. I know there’s one more in there somewhere. I’m sure that’ll come to me on this podcast, but not as important. What is important is that these are opportunities, not something to be fearful of. It never feels good in the moment, especially if you just got into the market, but these are opportunities. You’ve got to stick with it here. Now’s the time again for patience and to put money to work though as well.

Bottoms are messy along the way, but this is when dollar cost averaging really pays dividends over the long runs. So we’ll talk about all of that and more today. But you know, to kick it off here, I wanted to cover an optimistic topic because with everything going on with the Iran conflict, how about just everything going on in our country here locally, right? And globally though as well. Um, from many different angles, right? There’s a lot of reasons, good reasons out there to be fearful, to be worked up. That’s why, you know, the, the fearmongers sell so much of their product. It’s why they have so many subscribers on an email list, because they know that fear sells. Uh, there’s a quote, I’m forgetting what it is, but it’s some— somebody who’s a writer And they’re like, you know, in this business, you kind of have two choices here. You know, in the financial side especially, you can either sell fear, you know, grow a huge list, but no one will ever trust you in the long run, right? Your name won’t really be that credible, but you’ll probably make a lot of money just from the views you get, the clickbait that you get.

[00:05:36]:
And then if you want to do it the right way and provide valuable research, you’ll beat the market, you’ll help people, You help people beat the market, but your audience is gonna be a little bit smaller. I think the tide is turning on that a little bit because, you know, with AI, it makes it much easier to sniff out somebody who’s a BS artist, right? You can double, you know, fact check ’em really quick. But the reverse is also true. If you know how to use the tools, you can do great research really quick. So everything that we have here that comes to you every day, we do ourselves, right? Every word that we write, every podcast that we produce, uh, no AI involved in any of that at all. It’s 100% handmade. But these are also tools at our disposal. We use them every day for all kinds of different projects.

I think that’s how you look at these. For anybody who’s kind of anti-AI out there, I get it, but it’s going to be absolutely essential. It’d be like learning how to use a computer 30, 40 years ago. You can fight it all you want, but it’s gonna be pretty essential. And so what’s important to remember is that it is a tool and not a crutch, right? Use it to your advantage, not just to take away the thought process. That is one advantage, you know, to many of us out there. I feel bad for kids today in some ways, you know, just get through school cheating with AI. I get it, right? The system’s broken.

[00:07:05]:
It’s not really a good curriculum method in the world of AI. There are schools that are specializing on this already. I know I’m getting down a rabbit hole, but, uh, that’s not the way that it’s supposed to be used. So I’m grateful that, uh, I did not have access to it as much growing up. All right, so on days in, in times like this, not only is it important to have a system, it’s important to remember the optimistic side of the story and the reasons why you’re excited to wake up in the morning. And whatever your profession may be, uh, you know, Elon talks about this a lot. Elon Musk talks about this, of, you know, life can’t just be a series of never-ending miserable problems, right, that you wake up every day to solve. You’ve got to be excited about solving some problems.

If you’re gonna have to solve problems either way, you might as well make them exciting ones, uh, right? So we’ll talk a little bit about not only being optimistic but rational optimism, especially with the fear levels we’re seeing right now. Um, so let’s go ahead and dive in. But also, of course, we’ll cover the today’s market action, uh, what we’re seeing from our major indexes. Again, some aspects that might surprise you. I’ll give you a little hint: one of them is in yields, and yes, they were higher today. Uh, so again, might surprise you a little bit. We’ll cover our internals, sectors, and of course our VRA commodity watch. All right.

[00:08:26]:
So again, leading with the bright spots, although I probably have maybe gone a little long, maybe you’ve heard me talk too much about it. So this will be quick. I’ll keep it fun, quick here. So if you’re not familiar with who Jared Isaacman is, you may not be. I don’t think he’s exactly a household name, but if you happen to watch the SpaceX documentary that was on Netflix, I believe it’s still on Netflix. Called, uh, Countdown or something like that, uh, and it counted on inspiration to something like that, um, where he was a— the lead, the captain, I guess you would say, of an entirely civilian Space Force— it’s a space crew, uh, entirely civilian crew-led mission. Went up with SpaceX, orbited the Earth for, I believe, a couple of days, uh, and came back down, most of the process being automated. But how nice is it this guy’s now the NASA administrator? You have a NASA administrator who’s passionate about this field, who’s been to space, uh, you know, has so many different angles, you know, as a private civilian.

[00:09:36]:
I think he has some of the highest certifications of any civil— pure civilian out there for jet engine technology and stuff like that. Um, so great to see somebody, and I believe— I mean I’m forgetting his whole background now, um, sorry. But I believe before that as well he sold a company. Anyway, I won’t dive too deep into it like I said, but he’s a go-getter at the end of the day. He, he loves and supports Elon Musk, right? He wants to move fast. Of course, in space you don’t want to move fast, break things like they say in tech, uh, but you want the breaks to happen in the test area, not in practice, right? Uh, but they announced today they’ll be scrapping— NASA will be scrapping plans. I believe it was for a joint mission to have a new International Space Station essentially, but it orbited the moon. And today he said we’re scrapping that.

Why do we want— we want to be there, right? And they announced exactly that, plans to return to the moon. You know, Trump has already talked about this, the 2028, I believe, timetable to get, uh, you know, people back onto the moon. Sorry, one second, let me get, um Excuse me. Um, so the launch schedule— my main point here is what’s coming up quickly. And I actually haven’t read the full part of his tweet, to be totally honest. These are just my notes from an interview that he did earlier today, uh, that the Artemis project will basically kick this off, launching next week and heading to the moon. After that, Artemis III, which will, uh if I’m not mistaken. Okay, Artemis 3 will be like— he said it’d be like Apollo 9, if I’m not mistaken.

[00:11:16]:
You’ll launch, prepare, test, and get ready for the actual moon landing in 2028. Um, some incredible stuff, incredibly exciting stuff happening there. And then in 2028, we get our next Mars window as well, when Earth and Mars are the closest together in orbit. Uh, we’ll be sending a mission there. As well. So, um, really exciting stuff. Great to have somebody competent, great to have somebody with a vision, uh, and ambitious too. Not just a vision, but an ambitious vision, uh, to go after here on the moon.

Pretty incredible stuff. And the one other exciting story happening here— I know I have already talked a lot about Elon Musk’s, but wow, I mean, so many things today. How about that for Tesla launching the TerraFab, right? Uh, working on a write-up for this now. Um, if you’re interested, let me know. Uh, I’ve got some great notes on this topic, right? It’ll be the largest facility ever built by 30 million square feet. The current largest is the Volkswagen facility in Germany, 70 million square feet, um, for their chip project, where a large portion of these chips will be specifically designed for use in space. In these solar projects, in AI, um, uh, excuse me, digital— excuse me, um, what is the word I’m looking for here? Um, data centers in space is what I’m going for, essentially, in AI in space and sending that compute power, uh, back down here to Earth. Uh, I’m butchering it right now, I’m just so excited about all of these projects.

Um, so, you know, he announces that over the weekend in addition to all of their other projects. But again, the TerraFab project, NASA getting a huge space budget to build, you know, operations on the moon. Whose chips do you think they’ll be using? Of course, there’s plenty of companies that I’m sure we don’t even know about that make advanced chips only for the military. But, uh, hey, they’re already working with the military with SpaceX, so why not use their chips as well? 100% American-made at the TerraFab. So pretty excited about the one being built here in Austin. It’ll be a much smaller footprint than that, kind of an advanced forward facility to test and design, and then it’ll be like the Gigafactory where they can put that all over the world. And again, I— sorry to talk about Elon, this is why I brought it up— The Boring Company just announced with the city of Dallas that they will be building a free underground tunnel system. Uh, again, all of these things happening at once, these are some exciting things and part of the innovation revolution that we’re seeing unfold right now.

[00:14:04]:
All right, um, we talked about a good topic. Let’s talk about a bad one here. Not something that would derail the innovation revolution in our view, at least not at these levels, and we don’t see them going higher. We’re going to talk about yields, which did head higher today. You know, I’ll share the chart and we’ll talk about it here in just a second, but that is, you know, it’s been really steadily moving higher from the lows in March, which was, you know, basically a new low on the short-term time horizon. But as with so many things in the market, this is when you need some perspective. So we’ll take— let’s, let’s take a look. We’ll walk through this chart together.

Where to begin? I didn’t have time to draw this up. I am running a little short today. Um, we’ll try and get you out of here as quickly as possible. Let’s start here for the 10-year. This is a 1-year chart, okay? Like I said, I didn’t have quite time to draw it up, but we’ll walk through here together. Um, yesterday Those highs were 4.44, okay, for the U.S. 10-year Treasury, okay? 4.44%, the highest that we’ve seen since July or so of last year, okay? Not great, right? We— series of lower highs— excuse me, lower lows and lower highs for the most part now being violated. All right, again, in the short term, didn’t feel great.

[00:15:24]:
Highs of 2026. But then, you know, remember who was president just a few years ago, right? Uh, let’s take a look at yields before Trump was inaugurated. This is days before Trump’s inauguration. The 10-year peaked at a 4.8. So even at the highs here, roughly at those highs there, the 10-year is almost down 8% from Trump’s inauguration to today. That is the trend that we think will continue. This is the countertrend rally that we’ve talked about that we do not expect to see continue from here. Um, you can only go out so far with stock charts, but I have a few more stats for you.

We’ll zoom out. Um, let’s see here. We’ll go a little further. 10 years. All right, so you see, you know, we violated a little bit of an uptrend here, coming down. This is, you know, COVID era, zero interest rate policy. Let’s go way back though, okay? Yeah, maybe even a little further than that. Like I said, this only goes back so far, so we use other charting tools for this usually, but this is the best way to visualize it, okay? So see this long-term series here of lower moves and yields? We do think that it will continue, mostly because we think the innovation revolution is going to drive deflation so much so that it will actually help how much money that countries have printed in the last few years.

That’s how intense the deflation coming forward could potentially be. Okay, but if you look at, you know, 1900 to today, if you go back even further, uh, the average yield on the 10-year, 4.5%. You know, today below a 4.4, we’re actually still below, you know, the average of the last 125 years. But look at what happened here. This is the Paul Volcker era where we hit these highs. Okay. Of above 15%. Uh, again, similar deflationary thing.

[00:17:19]:
I won’t get into all of it today and those policies from the Fed. However, I will say for the average from 1980, Paul Volcker peaked again 1981, but the average 10-year from 1980 to today is roughly 5.3%. Our 10-year yield, again, 4.37. We’re well below those levels right now. So a little perspective helps here. Yes, we want and need to see yields head lower, but point being is that yes, these are restrictive, but they won’t hamstring the economy and businesses and Americans. But there’s no doubt about it, this— the policy here is purely get Trump and damn everybody else, because this policy, this higher-for-longer policy from the Fed, uh really impacts lower to middle class Americans far more than the, the first America, okay? The 1%. We often say the first and second because the middle class has been absolutely decimated and taxed to death, uh, and feed to death, um, fees is what I’m saying there.

But, um, excuse me, who is affected more more by the high-yield policies? It’s somebody who has millions of dollars in the bank and wants to go buy a second home, or somebody who’s trying to buy their first home, right? Who’s trying to buy a used car to get to their new job? Who is affected more by those higher interest rate policies? If home prices remain as high as they are, you know, near the national average— let’s just call it half a million for, for nice round numbers, you know. I mean, I’d have to actually run the numbers on this, but just off the top of my head, If you can bring interest rates on a 30-year mortgage down, you know, 1.5%, 2%, 3%, maybe not even all the way to where they were a few years ago, you’re talking on a 30-year mortgage, no refinance, you’re talking about the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars at that point. So it’s very serious, right? Again, that affects the second America far more than the first. The other one is that it might actually be contributing to inflation. Home builders aren’t going to build new homes at terrible yields, right? They’re going to work on their existing projects and kind of slow down the new ones, ultimately participating in keeping rent housing all over prices high. Um, anyway, um, point being here, again, we need yields to come lower. And which is why at first, when Kip first told me Uh, his idea of having Trump drop the charges against Jay Powell to have him get out of the way and Kevin Warsh actually, you know, get nominated and, and have it— the Senate hearing happen, and Tom Tillis getting out of the way, all of these things. It seems like small potatoes in hindsight when you think about it.

[00:20:16]:
At first it’s kind of jarring. Think about it a little bit and what the pros would be there. We have bigger fish to fry here. All right, so let’s kind of start to wrap it up here for the day. Again, mixed day for our markets, but this is what’s interesting. Last point on yields here and into our markets. Small caps led the day, led the way all day today, finished off the highs of the day, still solidly higher, about half a percent higher on the day. Small caps are the most interest rate sensitive group out there.

Tyler Herriage [00:20:46]:
So how are they— why are they leading the way higher for our major indexes on a day like today, right? Uh, that might be a little hint from the market that this move in bonds might be getting overdone, right? We’re going to get back to lower lows and lower highs in yields in the short term. That might be what small caps are telling us here today. We just saw, you know, bond yields hit extreme overbought readings. Our markets with this pullback, extreme oversold. This is when you would start to expect it to happen. Small cap action looks very good here. All right, next up for our major indexes, we have the Dow Jones down just 0.2%. Was positive at midday today.

S&P 500, um, might have gotten into the green briefly. Um, I don’t have that chart right in front of me, but was down 0.4%, just below that level. And the Nasdaq led the way lower. Not what you want to see, down 0.8%, but But an important but here, the semis led everything on the day, up 0.8% exactly. You know, textbook bull market action of what you want to see. Similar in the Dow, transports up 1.3%, right? So even led the semis today, but that’s what you want to see from those groups. Bitcoin has also continued to make— put in a series of higher highs and higher lows here. Software got hit today, but overall our FIFO theme does remain intact.

[00:22:17]:
One final chart here for the markets. Wow, Fear and Greed Index, extreme fear. You know, this is some of the lowest readings we’ve gotten in a long time. It’ll be interesting to see later this week as well. And again, folks, that perspective matters here. We get pullbacks like this, we’re not even at, you know, a 10% correction for the S&P, I don’t believe, yet. Uh, I know we touched there briefly for the NASDAQ, but Those do happen every 13 to 14 months. They always— not always, excuse me, so often.

And especially in a period like we compare this to the dot-com melt-up where the Nasdaq rallied 585%, we saw 10% corrections over 5 times, at least 5 of them with the technical bear market in there. Uh, so each one of those proved to be excellent buying opportunities. We think this is again one of those, just to restate it here. All right, uh, wrapping up here for the day. Internals, uh, you know, mixed to positive, I guess, about at midday. Uh, so finished a little bit weaker in some areas from where we were, but certainly still some bright spots here. NASDAQ was negative across the board, but NYSE volume came in positive here on the day, and much— we finished well off the lows, uh, is, is my point here. Uh, but other than NYSE volume, it was slightly negative across the board.

[00:23:49]:
Next up, looking at our sectors here on the day-to-day, energy led the way higher today, as you might expect. We’ll get to oil prices here in a minute. Um, but before we even do that, companies— the oil companies, you know, we’ve talked about this here— they have great balance sheets, even going into this, right? So even if this is a short-term move in oil, their earnings, you know, are gonna be pretty good for the next few quarters. We’ll see if they waste it or continue to invest it, because again, they have very healthy balance sheets here, which is why they’ve reacted so parabolically positive to, uh, this move in oil, uh, which could, in our view, will be a short-term move. So I’ll get to that here in just a second. Um, our other leaders on the day for our sectors— sorry, let me pull that up— we finished with 7 out of our 11 S&P 500 sectors higher on the day. May have thought it was a pretty good day just looking at that. After that, um, we have materials, utilities, and industrials.

Our laggards on the day: communication services and real estate. Finally, here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Gold now, last trade, $4,500 an ounce. Again, even with this move higher— or move lower in gold, still positive on the year this year. Silver now at $71.82 an ounce. Copper at $5.52 a pound. And oil now below $90 a barrel here, $88 a barrel. And what I was going to say here earlier that might surprise a lot of people, even with all this action, our view remains unchanged.

[00:25:26]:
The highs in oil is in. You know, it was a narrative-driven shock and it will have an impact, right? We’re not gonna— we may not see $60 right away, but the futures market in oil is still pricing in $70 a barrel by about October, you know, $78 a barrel by that time. Uh, so not too bad, all things considered. Um, finally here for today, Bitcoin still above $70,000. A Bitcoin at $70,212. A Bitcoin, 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.