In today's episode, Tyler dives into the current state of the markets and offers an optimistic outlook on a tough trading day. Despite much red across the screen, the VRA sees this market action as a countertrend move within a larger bull market. He also covers the latest developments in the Iran conflict and what they mean for your portfolio. 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 great day out there today. You know, if you’re watching the markets today, it might have been a little tougher to have a great day out there today. So I’ll go ahead and kick it off here today with a little bit of positivity that Kip and I have been discussing a lot here on the podcast, um, you know, over the last few sessions. And that is that nothing has changed in our view here at the VRA. We continue to look at this as a countertrend move in this bull market, and we’ll look at days like today as buying opportunities as opposed to fearmongering out there.

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But, uh, hey, if you’re, if you’re a regular listener here to the VRA Podcast, uh, and you knew that it was going to be my day today, uh, you, you might have been able to see this one coming. Now, heck, you might even made a trade, uh, in advance of it. Uh, hopefully you closed it out this morning because Kip’s got the podcast tomorrow, uh, so we’ll likely get a reversal. But hey, you You know, I gotta say, I’m pretty grateful here. I’ve gotten some big up days lately as well. So, you know, these just come with the territory of what we do here at the VRA. But again, I know it’s tough on days like today, never feels good to see this much red on the screen, but also point out, it really wasn’t all bad out there today. We’ll cover all of that and much more on this podcast.

Of course, we’ll cover some of the latest of what’s happening with the Iran conflict. Kip did a great job of covering that yesterday. I’ll cover it from one more area that we’ve gotten, you know, a little more detail about overnight and in the session today as well. Also, I got to point this one out, another bright spot. You know, we finished well off of the lows today, while some of the areas that, uh, you know, are a little more bearish leaning for the market as a whole, you know, opened really high today, huge moves higher. You know, specifically I’m talking about the VIX here, uh, and ultimately finished well off its highs of the day today, closer to its lows of the day. So quite the inverse of what we saw from our market. So despite the red on the screen, uh, it was very good to see our major indexes and some of our favorite names, you know, finishing well off the lows that we saw this morning.

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So, uh, especially here on the VIX though, I’ve got a great stat here for you that you really won’t want to miss. So stay tuned, I’ll get to it here, uh, in just a second, you know. But overall, again, I’ll cover the bright spots here today and why we see this as a countertrend move in this bull market. And, you know, for all of our new listeners out there, I’ll go ahead and give a quick recap of, you know, our VRA bullish thesis, um, as we head into the next few years. Uh, in 2022, Kip and I wrote our book The Big Bribe, which you can see over there, where we talked about an innovation revolution that was going to take in our 5 megatrends that were going to take the Dow Jones to 100,000 by 2030, that’s going to take the NASDAQ to over 40,000 by 2030. All of those remain in place here. And remember, as I said, we wrote it in 2022. Biden was the president at the time.

So now that Trump is back in office, I mean, that’s a whole nother feather in the cap of our bullish thesis here. You know, the Trump Economic Miracle 2.0, which we’ve talked so much about here, but really will kick into high gear and under the surface of this market already is. From the one big beautiful bill, tax cuts, that one of the biggest ones out there that really you continue to hear very little about from the mainstream media or financial mainstream media is deregulation and what that can do If you’re worried about inflation, right, deregulation can help that in so many different ways. Get the bureaucrats out of the way, you know, get kind of the mid-level managers— no, no shade to anybody in one of those positions— but to get the regulators out of the way. Of course, we’ve got to have safety concerns out there, but, uh, so much of what our government has become is like Europe where we’ve got a nanny state. You know, look at, of course, Some great things have happened with OSHA. I would say probably many worse things though have come because of it. You can’t climb a ladder in this way.

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If you’re walking up the stairs, you have to hold on to the handrail or it’ll, it’ll be a fine. Yeah, that’s a real thing. I won’t say what company this is, uh, but, uh, it’s a company that you would all recognize. Um, and a friend of mine worked at this firm and they had all these kinds of rules. You know, your screen would turn off every X amount of minutes and you had to go and take a break. I mean, I get it, and, uh, you know, employees should have, uh, you know, livable working conditions. It shouldn’t just be, you know, a sweatshop behind a computer screen, right? Um, but man, we’ve got to get the government out of so many of these things, or we are going to become like Europe and they’re going to stifle innovation, uh, and prohibit it, you know, really to the advantage of our adversaries at the end of the day. Uh, so I won’t dive too much into that, but again, back to our bullish views.

We got the Trump Economic Miracle 2.0, uh, which we see will take, you know, GDP to 5% and beyond. You know, our call has been 8% plus by the end of Trump’s term. I think that that could even get up to the double digits by that time. We’ve talked about it here a lot on the podcast. Um, and then, so I’ve talked about, uh, tax cuts, one big beautiful bill, really deregulation, uh, and of course the ocean of liquidity that we see in this market, um, that is going to really start to tap in here. Okay, we saw the 10-year yield up on the day, which I’ll get to a little bit here. But folks, if you’re still sitting with your money in a money market account, you have to know, you know, global money supply just hit another all-time high. U.S.

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money supply hitting another all-time high. Cash is trash. We printed 4.5% of new money just last year alone. So if your money market account is earning any less than that, you know, really you’re barely breaking even. You’re treading water at best in a situation like that. So as we see this cash come off the sidelines and into the market, again, that’s the liquidity that we’re looking for to come back into this market again off of the sidelines. So I will get to more of that throughout the podcast today, but suffice to say, I wanted to start off with a little positivity on a day like today for you. Uh, so going into the session today, futures were deeply in the red.

It might have even surprised you a little bit with the way we finished yesterday. And really, as we see it here, so much of this— you hate to say all of it, but much of this has to do with the Iran conflict going on here. Uh, but this doesn’t change our view that when bullets Fly stocks are a buy. It’s really been the messaging around this that has concerned so many people. You know, first off here, our Secretary of War Pete Hegseth yesterday made the statement, you know, we’re not ruling out boots on the ground in Iran. That scared a whole lot of people. You know, I think so many, especially in my generation, I know, uh, in older generations as well, have seen what has happened in Iraq and Iran. We don’t want to get dragged into another conflict like that.

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And it didn’t help when Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated that one of the primary reasons that we’re even there is because we saw that Israel was going to attack. And if Israel was going to attack You know, what backlash could we see from that? So we decided to go in with them as opposed to just letting them do what they were going to do. You know, that’s unpopular on multiple fronts there. Okay, again, as I just said, no one wants to go back to war in the Middle East. No one wants to see more US soldiers dying in the Middle East. And it’s not exactly a very popular political opinion right now to be siding with Israel in terms of war, right? Uh, that, that’s for both parties. That’s not just Republicans or Democrats, it’s really across the country. Um, but I will say, you know, if this can be executed in a way similar to Venezuela, obviously not a one-day kind of, kind of deal, um, if we can get away from these forever wars, which that’s really our, our third one here, is that ahead of the open this morning, Trump said, you know, and, and for some things, we essentially have an unlimited supply of munitions.

You know, people don’t like to hear that. Trump was supposed to be the no new wars president. You don’t want to hear anything about forever wars, right? And we completely agree with that. But if we can get in and surgically strike— and I’ll get to this here in a second— there could be one, you know, really main reason, uh, for this here, and it, it’s really flown under the radar from a lot of the financial media, and I think that’s by design, um, you know. But no, again, no one wants to hear forever wars, right? So, uh, Pete Hegseth has done a phenomenal job as the Secretary of War. I thought the press conference yesterday with him and I believe General Kane, I mean, was fantastic, other than that we’re not ruling out boots on the ground. Again, that scares people, okay? But that sentiment that’s not quite yet into reality yet. So if we can, you know, pull off a surgical operation here, then that’s fantastic, right? We have the most powerful military in the world.

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There are times when you have to act like it, right? Instead of, you know, really kind of just playing the field, you know, not going for a win, but, you know, really playing not to lose in a lot of ways, where we’ve seen the US military hamstrung by previous administrations. If we can get in and get out and get our goals accomplished, you know, that’s a whole new era of US military dominance that we really haven’t seen in decades. Uh, it seems that no matter where we’ve gone under other administrations, it either hasn’t turned out the way we wanted It lasted way longer than we wanted, and it cost way more than anybody wanted. Um, so we’ll see what happens here, but I do want to dive in to one unique angle here, uh, that I’m sure many of you have thought about already because we’ve got a great smart money audience here with us. And thank you all for being here with us every day. Um, you know, so grateful for the opportunity to do what we do. Um, And Kip and I do wake up excited every day to do this and to serve our clients in a way that hopefully you find valuable as well. So one of the issues overnight has been this massive move higher in oil that we’ve seen in the last few sessions.

Oil got up to nearly $78 a barrel at the highs of the day today. That’s its highest level that we’ve seen since June of last year. Of course, as far as Trump’s policies go, that didn’t seem to be in line, right? We talked a lot about lower gas prices. Now we also have to remember the U.S. is the largest producer of oil in the world, right? And second place really isn’t even that close. Okay, um, while Iran is now roughly, you know, the 5th largest producer of oil in the world, and of course that’s big, right? But when you zoom out, you realize it’s really about a quarter of what the U.S. produces. Now that is substantial, okay? That’s roughly 5 million barrels a day compared to our 20 million barrels.

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Um, So why does that matter here for oil prices in the US? Well, it’s removing oil supply from the global stage, much like Venezuela, where Venezuela could be producing a lot more oil. Over the last few years, it’s only been about ranging from 800,000 to a million barrels per day, but their highest ever, ever was almost nearly 4 million barrels a day. But taking Venezuela offline removes that, you know, roughly 1 million barrels a day off of the global stage. Of course, the Russia and Ukraine conflict has removed a lot of oil from the stage, maybe not from, you know, China and in Russia’s allies, but from, again, kind of the global stage. And there has been a number of disruptions from other areas, whether that’s, you know, Turkey, uh, or other kind of Eastern Europe area oil production, right? But here’s the key that I wanted to discuss here today. You know, Iran, significant producer, right? 5th in the world, nowhere near the US. But what does it mean for a country like China who buys roughly 90% of that supply from Iran? 70% of Venezuela’s supply went to China as well. So if we’re thinking strategically here beyond, you know, just getting rid of the current regime, which, you know, it’s hard to believe, uh, people on either side were celebrating this regime, right, who just killed what, 15,000 or so protesters in the last few months? You know, it’s tough to verify some of these reports, but it— I mean It’s tough to back.

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It’s not a very good look to back anything like that, right? Of course, I get that it’s unpopular to be there, but man, you know, saying that this shouldn’t have been done or some type of violation of Iran’s sovereignty, you know, are we just supposed to stand by while other nations, you know, murder their own citizens? I think not. I’m not necessarily for the US being the world’s police, but I don’t think there’s any justifiable way to say, you know, oh, well, they should have just left him in there. Okay, but back to the oil conversation specifically. That’s what everybody else is focused on, right, is the leadership in Iran and, um, you know, what this means geopolitically. Okay, let’s look, you know, second and third order consequences here. What does this mean for China, right? I mean, that’s a significant number of barrels of oil just gone every day for them in the short term here, right, until it gets back online. You know, what does that mean to our largest adversary? We’ve talked about this one here a lot. You’re not going to have the AI, uh, you’re not going to win the AI race without energy.

So if we, you know, hamstring our adversaries on the energy front I mean, it’s tough to see a way where that doesn’t benefit the US. And for anyone, myself included, who can be skeptical at times of, uh, 4D chess, then, you know, this looks like real working 4D chess here. So not only will it disrupt China’s energy supply, you know, uh, if Iran is weakened right now— well, I’ll get into this from a few different angles, okay? If Iran is weakened and their ballistic missile’s abilities taken away, what does that mean for the Strait of Hormuz, right? Where China— that’s where so much of their energy comes from, okay? Um, if we’re able to take that supply under our control and remove Iran’s ability to be there that effectively makes China structurally dependent on the US. Now that is 4D chess, okay? You know, that takes off the table China’s ability to invade Taiwan, right? Oh, go invade Taiwan? We’ll shut down the strait, right? Where are you gonna get your energy from to support this war at the end of the day? Um, and the You know, big concern over the last few days has been with the Strait of Hormuz that these London insurance companies have removed, you know, any services for shippers going through that area, basically making it unaffordable to ship through that area. Now check this out, first screen share of the day. Trump tweeted this, you know, a couple hours before the close here, hour and a half, 2 hours or so. Effective immediately, I have ordered the United States Development Finance Corporation to provide, at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance and guarantees for the financial security of all maritime trade, especially energy, traveling through the Gulf. This will be available to all shipping lines, and if necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.

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Wow. So Trump wants to keep energy flowing. You know, if you’ve got any Dune fans out there, uh, the, the saying in Dune is the spice must flow. Well, in the real world, oil is the spice essentially right now. It’s essential to growing our economy, the global economy, um, you know. So I think this is a really powerful move here from Trump to make, uh, And really, I mean, should help bring down oil prices. And again, the big point here is that China will be structurally dependent on the US. Now, what this means though for the US, okay, because again, this isn’t popular by any means.

No one wants to get into a prolonged war here. No one wants boots on the ground, okay? Democrats or Republicans, it’s not popular. But Trump is also very good at reading the room. As Kip has often said, there may be no one better, okay? And it really is the art of the deal— push, push, push until it looks like something’s going to break, and then pivot. It’s a negotiating tactic in many ways. I mean, look at tariff mania from last year, right? Push, push, push until they come to the table and a deal is ultimately reached. Obviously, war is much different than— are, you know, real. A hot conflict is much different than an economic conflict.

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But, you know, I’m not one of those people who talks about the taco trade, Trump always chickens out. It seems much more strategic than that. But we’ve seen it time and time again: push, push, push, and pivot. So can we get the same thing here from Trump? You know, really, we’ve got the primaries going on today Then of course the midterms later this year. This has to be taken care of by then, or, you know, I hate— as much as I hate to say it, obviously, I mean, Republicans really have to win, have to win the midterms this year. Uh, this doesn’t help, right? So we’ll see if Trump can make a pivot here, uh, you know, start to look for an off-ramp possibly. We’ll see what happens. But one other factor here for the primaries that has to get done is the SAVE Act has to be passed.

So again, on the market, we look at this as a countertrend move. You know, I do think that this Strait of Hormuz conflict is really— the Iran conflict, but specifically the strait— is a very interesting angle to look at this conflict for. Um, all right here, so I know I went a little longer than I planned to on the beginning there. Um, but you know, when you get days like today’s, right, we wanted to see the recent lows hold. Some have, but some haven’t. Okay, bottoms are always messy in the market, but you know, it’s beginning to look like a flush that we’ve seen here, and the flushes kind of mark the end of a move lower in the beginning of a big move higher here. So as an example of the flush I’m talking about, you know, the Fear and Greed Index has absolutely collapsed here. Got as low as a 29 earlier today, finished the day at a 32.

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But I mentioned the VIX earlier was up, I mean, 30% earlier in the session today. Wow. Okay., you know, ultimately, like I said, finished closer to the lows of the day, only up about 9.9% on the session. I’ve got a few stats here that I want to share. You know, as a rule of thumb for the VIX, whenever you’ve got a VIX day of up more than 20%, it’s usually indicative of a washout that leads to bottoms. Okay. Uh, There we go. Okay, take a look here.

Uh, so that was again 20%, but also when you see the VIX moving above a full standard deviation, historically it bodes really well for the market over the next month. Just a few examples here, um, the SVB failure, uh, just a couple of years ago, uh the— this yen, UK volatility as well. S&P up 2.3% over the next month. I forgot to say here, up 7.5% over the next month. I believe— I don’t have the stats right in front of me, but the market is higher 1 month later like 90% of the— 96% of the time, I want to say, when you see a move in the VIX like this. So as far as market stats go, I think that’s pretty good. All right, um, Before I get to our major indexes on the day, which did finish red, I do want to point out, you know, we’ve got two areas that we’ve talked about for FIFO, first in first out, which continued here today. Software names, IGV, the software ETF, finished up over 1.5% on the session today.

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That’s the kind of moves that we want to see continue here. Uh, first in first out, we’re looking for Bitcoin to do the same. We want both of those. Of course, we want to see the semis leading higher overall, but to get out of this move, we want to see both software and Bitcoin heading higher because they were the first in to this sell-off. Now we want to see them leading the way back higher. All right, quickly, here are major indexes on the day. Today we were led lower by small caps, down roughly 1.8% on the day. The S&P Well, excuse me, NASDAQ was after that, down just over 1% on the day today.

Um, I just want to run, you know, got to point out here, the semis of course leading lower is not what you want to see. You know, still above most of their major moving averages, which is good to see. Really, uh, compared to the rest of the market, has not pulled back nearly as much. Um, And finally here, the Dow down 0.8% on the session today. Looking at our internals on the day, as you might have expected, not great numbers here, but certainly not as bad as you might have expected. Uh, advanced decline coming in negative for both the NYSE and the NASDAQ, roughly 2.5 to 1 negative on the NASDAQ, but over 3 to 1 negative on the NYSE. Again, obviously not good but it really could have been much worse. 52-week highs, lows, they are a lagging indicator but are one bright spot on the day, coming in positive just barely on the NYSE, coming in negative on the NASDAQ.

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Finally here, volume, rough for the NYSE, roughly 77% downside volume. We really want to see that change, uh, later in the week this week. But the NASDAQ was negative. You know, I’m not going to try and say that it was flat or anything like that, but really not a big beat, not what you would expect. No 2-to-1 beat or anything like that. So especially compared to the NYSE, much better. For our sectors on the day today, as you might expect here, all 11 S&P 500 sectors lower on the day today. We were led lower by materials, industrials, and healthcare.

And I guess you could say leading, but they’re still red on the day by financials— excuse me, communication services and real estate. Finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. Gold in after-hours here is now higher on the day at $5,132 an ounce. You know, was down earlier in the session, or, you know, in the main session day. This is futures trading now. And GDX down a big 8.7%. 7%. Uh, you know, obviously not what you want to see.

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You want to see the miners leading gold to the upside and holding on better than gold to the downside. But I got to point out, you know, we just hit an all-time high yesterday. That was an intraday all-time high before finishing lower, but we did finish green on Friday, which was also an all-time high. So no, we don’t look at this as, you know, the top for the miners. Um, next up here, silver now at $83.19 an ounce, copper at $5.84 a pound, and then oil, as I mentioned earlier, was just a couple cents shy of $78 a barrel this morning. It then peaked and moved lower from there, now at $75.38 a barrel. Finally, here for today, Bitcoin. As I mentioned, we do want to see this leading the way out.

Not quite getting it here, uh, today, down 4/10 of 1% now at $68,500 a Bitcoin. But we do look for a big move higher from here. Uh, folks, that is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up 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.