In today's episode, Tyler breaks down a mixed day for the major indexes and takes a deep dive into the unexpected bright spots from today's action. Tyler covers a lot of ground, from the latest from Q4 earnings season to what investor sentiment is telling us, and even the groundbreaking merger between SpaceX and xAI. If you want to learn more about the latest shifts in stock market action, 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. It was a bit of a mixed day for our markets today. If you’re looking at the headlines, you might have thought it was a pretty rough day for, for our markets today. No doubt it was. For our major indexes, we’ll cover all of that here today, but we’ll also cover a few bright spots that we saw in today’s action coming from a number of different areas.

But first and foremost here, the small caps were able to finish positive on the session today. So it wasn’t all negative out there as far as our major indexes go. We’ve got a great podcast here for you today. Again, I’ll cover some of those bright spots on today’s action. And just before I started recording this as well, it looks like President Trump has signed a bill to, to put an end to this partial government shutdown. We’ll touch on that here a little bit today. Um, and if you’ve got a poly market or COW account that you bet the this government shutdown was going to go any more than about three days. Yeah, you may want to check your account there as it does look like these are settling as done on the prediction markets.

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And you know, what a interesting tool this has been to add to research here. You know, finding an area like this, such a broad array of industries, sectors, betting markets, all kinds of things combined into one here where you can see people really put their money where their mouth is on things that they believe. So might touch on a little bit of that here today, but I think this is going to be a whole new area expanding. They’re watching expand here on research. Speaking of research, we’ve also got some interesting earnings data to share with you here today and more earnings that we got after the close as well. We had AMD reporting and some big names to come on the week. We’ll also discuss the SpaceX and Xai merger. You know, what it means for the future of those two companies, but also potentially what it means for the future of Tesla.

And that’s really the big news. So looking forward to covering that here with you today. And finally we’ll cover sentiment and what this really last three days or so of trading has done to sentiment. You know, some of it might even surprise you a little bit. But finally, without giving too much away here, I’ll say this before anybody tunes out right, because we do very often come across as perma bulls. Well we’re certainly not. We’re not perma bears either. We don’t like to be perma anything.

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But we do remain extremely bullish on this market and we’ll explain a little bit more about why right now we see as a great opportunity to get your shopping list ready. This is an important time in this bull market. We’ll cover all of that and more here today. So let’s jump right in with earnings as we have seen some fantastic earnings come in so far for Q4 of last year. If we were to end the earnings reporting for the quarter before this week started really so far we’ve seen Q4 growth of 11.9% on earnings per share growth. If we were to finish at that level it would mark the fifth consecutive quarter of double digit year over year earnings growth from this market. That is impressive earnings number and now you know last week I talked about it that earnings kicked into high gear and now we’re getting into kind of the meat and potatoes of this earnings season where we’ve seen some good reports already. I mean Palantir was up almost 7% on the day to day.

We don’t have a position there so I’m not going to dive too deep into it. But similarly here on today’s action AMD beat on earnings per share and on revenue. The stock is getting hit now in after hours. So not necessarily what we want to see for the semis but but getting those beats is what matters here over the medium to long term you might see some short term profit taking thing. That’s a lot of what we’ve seen so far. And I’ll get to more of that here in a minute. But when you have earnings growth like we’re seeing right now, it makes it really hard to have a meaningful or long term correction in the market. So again just one major factor there why we see this pullback here as time to get your shopping list ready.

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Okay, I’ll get again I’ll get to more of that here in a minute. But first a little bit of what to look forward to for the rest of the week. As I said, Palantir reported yesterday, AMD reported today and then tomorrow we’ll have Uber, Eli Lilly and then some more, you know, big semiconductor names, ARM and Qualcomm. Then of course, you know, really the darling of the Mag 7 this year of the last year I should say not just 2026 has been Google. You know over the last few months since we’ve seen A pullback from these all time highs. And stocks like, you know, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, Google has just continued to chug along higher and higher, you know, right in the range actually just hit, excuse me, all time high today before finishing lower on the day. So again there’s been phenomenal growth from GOOG so far. But just to go back to what we’ve seen in this earnings season so far is once again it’s broadening action from this market.

We’re seeing a large number of companies that are beating estimates that are coming in with double digit year over year growth. And this is a theme we’ve had for a while now that this market is broadening and now we’re starting to see a rotational aspect to it as well, as you’ll see in our sector watching. But we do want to continue to see semis and tech leading the way higher. But they did just have a phenomenal year. The semis as a sector were up 14 to 16% on the month of January. So you know, a few days of a pause is we’re going to need a little bit more of that before we really start getting worried. But again it’s no, no longer can the argument be made that it’s only seven stocks holding this market up. This is broadening action is very healthy bull market action.

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There will come a time again though where the generals do resume leadership, you know, could be setting up for a phenomenal opportunity in that right now. So we’ve got some more earnings to look forward to the rest of this week. So stay tuned here. We’ll be reporting on it every day after the market close, then overnight. As you know, wrote about this morning, Kip wrote about this morning and you’ve likely seen by now is that SpaceX will be acquiring Xai. You know, pretty incredible run that it was over the last three years from these companies. Let’s, let’s take a walk down memory lane here. I guess you could say four years ago, but really, I mean three years and about, you know, three months ago, October of 2022, we had just gotten out of the Biden bear market.

I mean just right at that time, the lows which we called to the day, October 13, 2022, you know, it’s been a phenomenal bull run from there. That is when Elon acquired Twitter for 44 billion in March of 2023 is when he founded XAI. You know, it’s hard to believe sometimes that it’s only been a few years that these AIs have really been around Right. We were calling this an innovation revolution before Chat GBT even came out. We were again saying in October of that year. I believe ChatGPT was just before or just right around that time when it was released. So Xai founded March 2023. They reband branded Twitter from X that year.

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You know, it’s just incredible. XAI raised a $5 billion funding round at a $50 billion fund valuation. That was in 2024. Fast forward to June of last year. XAI raises another $5 billion at $136 billion valuation. So nearly tripled in the next six months after they did that fundraise. Now XAI raises 20 billion at a $230 billion valuation and was acquired by SpaceX. So now of course the rumor going around here, what will this ultimately IPO at is? It does look like it will be IPOing this year.

This is the highest value private company on the planet, you know, roughly 1.25 trillion market cap if it went out today. I mean the combination of these two is pretty incredible. Elon Musk laid out all of the goals. If you’re interested in seeing them, I’ll share them here quickly. But you can find this on the SpaceX Twitter account. They’re just talking about everything that they hope to do with this. The combination here. And really the most exciting part, of course you love seeing the free speech platform, real time information, but also advances in how we generate electricity.

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A big part of this is linking, you know, starlink with many of these services and having a space based AI data center. Right. If you are in space and you can, you know, get the exposure right for these satellites, you could produce solar energy 24 7. Now solar starts to look a whole lot more attractive once you get out into space. So that’s going to be a big part of it. It’s going to be very exciting. It’s, you know, just gotta love the images that they do. I mean they’ve really got a phenomenal branding team.

Um, but so really exciting stuff in the works there. I won’t touch on too much of it today here. I know we’ve got important factors to cover here in the market. If I had to cover just what, what a journey it’s been since Elon acquired Twitter in 2022. I mean, what a story. You’ll love him or hate him. There’s always a lot of speculation when he does these deals like solar, Tesla acquiring Solar City. A lot of controversy going around there, you know, but that you see his vision though, I guess when you start to break it all down and how all of these areas really do intertwine.

And you got to wonder who’s helping him with this, Right? That’s what Kip and I always say. There’s no, no way this is possible for one man to do this all on his own. Of course, he’s got some phenomen talent on his teams, but sometimes it’s tough to even keep up with the announcements. So, you know, for Tesla fans, I know the big question now is whether or not the two will merge from SpaceX and Tesla. So SpaceX XAI and Tesla. As you know, Tesla was an investor in xai. Of course, you see all the co mingling of these deals as well. You know, hey, we would love to see some way for the two to merge to get access as a shareholder, you know, before the ipo, which has kind of been floated around a little bit.

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We’ll see what happens. I don’t want to speculate too much here on the podcast, but we do see this as bullish for Tesla overall. Any improvements in their AI at SpaceX +XAI now can absolutely apply to real world AI use cases. And that’s what’s so important, is the data set to really train these off of. These aren’t just large language models which are, you know, can do incredible things, but they can’t drive a car, you know, so we’re seeing, you know, real world again, use cases with video camera. Right. And all of the different aspects that a computer can break down in milliseconds versus the human mind in seconds. So it’s really pretty incredible tech.

Anyway, again, I won’t ramble too much about it here today. All right, let’s take a look here. We’ll bring it back to our markets on the day after the Open. This morning we really marked the highs of the day not too far after the open and really headed down until the afternoon. Where that is a big bright spot on today is that we did manage to finish well off the lows of the day. As I mentioned earlier, small caps even managed to finish positive on the day. Not quite at their highs of the day, but still up three tenths of 1%. Right.

It’s not just flat on the days you’re good to see after that, we had the Dow Jones down just 0.3%, followed by the S&P 500 down 8, 10 of 1%. And then our laggard on the day, again, not what you want to see here was tech down 1.4% on the day to day and led lower by semis, down 2 1/2% on the day. So again, as I mentioned earlier, we just had an incredible month in January for the semis. You know, all time high after all time high. This is, it’s okay to see a bit of a breather in this market, but I think what we’re seeing here, what Kip talked, Kip and I talked about before this podcast today is this rotational theme for this market. You know, as I’ll get to in our sectors here in a little bit, some of our most unloved sectors in 2025 have actually even been outperforming the semis so far on the, on the year even ahead of this. This pullback, right, like energy has had an incredible start to the year. We’ve also seen it from materials industrials, consumer staples.

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Now, people would refer to that more as a defensive sector. And that makes sense. But I also think a huge part of that is that we’re seeing the AI build out and the materials needed, the building companies needed in order to do this. Those are what is performing well, right? This is a year where we’re going to see the build out really affect large parts of the economy and ultimately leading to higher gdp. Right. It’s again, tough to have a major market pullback when the Atlanta Fed is projecting plus 5%, 5.4% growth in Q4. We’re going to see even bigger growth here in 2026. So I’ll get to more of the rotational theme here with our sectors as well.

But Kip has discussed this on some recent podcasts that, you know, going into the last few weeks, we had hit overbought levels in a market that was feeling a little bit heavy. So we did say take some profits in our leverage ETF strategies specifically over the last couple of weeks. But I want to be clear about this as well. We don’t see this as the beginning of any kind of major move lower. And one big reason for that is one that we discussed coming into the year. It is sentiment. You know, the really, the one analyst stat that worried us going into January was the Bloomberg poll, where I believe it’s about 27 analysts. All 27 of them were bullish for 2026.

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You know, but at the time, even Kip and I said, you know, that’s more of a capitulation than a conviction buy, right? As in the first shakeout, these guys are going to be gone. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now. Take a look. I’ve got A few different sentiment indicators I want to share with you here today. First and foremost, one that we talk about here often, the Fear and Greed index. You’re probably getting tired of seeing it, but just yesterday we were in greed mode at a 61, you know, a week ago, 65. But from 61, just one session later and we’re all the way down to a 41. It is low.

I saw 38 out there today for the Fear and Greed index. Now again, just one indicator there. So take it as you will, but we’re also saw this here, the bull, the B of a bull and bear indicator hitting its highest level. One of the most bullish readings in history. Right. So a lot of bulls out there in this market. But again as we see it, we don’t think they’re bullish with conviction as you can see from the Fear and Greed index. I’ll share.

Sorry, I don’t even know why I moved that one. More here. We’ve talked about this a lot as well. We see the AII sentiment survey has come back with I believe it’s six consecutive readings of more bulls than bears. You know, after a year of never seeing that. So check this out. I shared this about a week ago as well. For the first time in over a year, AI bulls outnumbered bears for six consecutive weeks.

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Now you might think that’s getting overly bullish, but check out what it means for the market one year later, one year later, higher 100% of the time with big average gains. So, you know, a lot of people look at this, try to look at this from a contrarian point of view and say, oh, you know that that’s got to be, got to take the other side of that one now. But the data says otherwise. You know, until we get to a point where we have a pullback like we’re seeing here and the Fear and Greed index remains, that it’s not just greed, but extreme greed through this kind of a pull out when people are diamond hands, right. There’s they often, you know, GameStop people talked about that in the, the Meme stock stock era, Meme stocks, if you will, that your diamond hands, I mean you’re holding no matter what. That’s not the kind of conviction that we’re seeing in this market right now. So yes, even it worried us a little bit to see AI at those levels. We’ll get the latest read back Thursday.

I think we’ll likely see a massive swing from bulls to bears here like we’ve seen in the Fear and Greed Index. We also Got the put call ratio finished well above a 9, a 0.9. Excuse me. On the day to day, Anything above a 0.7 is really seen as excessive bearishness. So you know, bottoms are messy. Right? I’m not saying that today is the exact day to go all in. Right. As I said at the beginning of this podcast, we’re getting our shopping list ready here.

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We’ve quickly gone from extreme overbought levels in many of our sectors and major indexes and, you know, a number of companies. And we’ve wiped all of that out here in just a few sessions where we’re almost down to extreme oversold levels. Not quite there yet, but pretty close to those levels. And in bull markets like this, you’re the swing back to the upside can be massive, as we saw from gold and silver on a day like today. I’ll get to that here more in a little bit. Your final points here on the market, again, down days like this are never fun. It’s why we did lock in some profits on leverage ETFs this way. It’s a great time to have stops in on specifically leveraged ETFs, but we do see a lot of opportunity out there in this market.

Yes, probably from the October 2022 lows, much of the easy money has been made. We’re going to see a bit of a stock pickers market here, but that’s exactly what we enjoy doing here at the vra. If you’re not here with us already, come and join us for 14 free days@vra letter.com all right, next up here, let’s take a look at our internals on the day. Actually better numbers than you might expect on day like today. Even earlier in the session with our markets down across the board, even when the Russell 2000 was negative. Also we were pretty impressed by the internals this morning, or sorry, I shouldn’t say about midday today we had both the NYSE and NASDAQ almost positive across the board. NYSE was positive across the board and finished positive across the board. Again, those are numbers that you like to see on a down day like today.

So NYSE advanced decline did come in positive. NASDAQ slightly negative, but no big beat there. 52 week highs lows 2 over 2 to 1 positive on the NYSE, slightly negative on the NASDAQ, but volume also positive for both the NYSE and the nasdaq. Exactly what we want to see here. Next up, looking at our sectors on the day to day, we finished get a quick refresh here with five out of our 11s P500 sectors higher on the day today. As I mentioned earlier, some of these might surprise you. Energy has been leading the way actually as the sector hit an all time high today. Again this rotational theme to our market.

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Big bounce back after oil was, you know, down big yesterday. I’ll get to more on oil and gas here in a second. But what volatile swings we’ve seen. I mean natural gas was down 25 and a half percent yesterday. Right? I mean massive move and to get XLE the energy sector and the price per barrel of oil was down huge yesterday as well. Yet the energy sector was able to hold on to a lot of these gains and was the one of the biggest movers on the month of January as well. Other leaders today for our major indexes we had materials also finishing higher on the day today. That is a 52 week high as well.

Consumer staples also hitting a 52 week high today. Let’s see if we keep going down the list here. You know again those do and can be more defensive sectors but we look at it more as a rotational trade here as especially with metals going the way that they’re going. If you pay attention to Dr. Copper, that’s a good sign. When copper’s on the increase it means people are making things. Means what we’re seeing here is a global reflation trade taking place in commodities really leading the way. Then our laggards on the day to day for our sectors.

Tech did lead the way. Lower, not exactly what you want to see. Communication services after that, healthcare, consumer discretionary and the financials. I want to run one more chart here before I get on to the next one. Real estate sector did finish lower on the day to day. Home builders, you know we track that instead of the real estate sector up two and a quarter percent on the day to day. Good day there. All right.

Finally here for today, our V commodity watch. Get a quick refresh. Gold is up on the day. Compare especially compared to yesterday’s action. Like I said, the last three sessions, I mean we saw a three session decline of 21% in gold, technically a bear market in just three days at the lows yesterday fell over $1,000 an ounce. Now we’ve said for some time that once we hit that round number of 5,000 that’s where we expected. Gold deposit went all the way up to 5600, so exceeded even our expectations. And there are very few people as bullish as us on gold just one year ago.

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I mean nothing has changed in our tune There were the biggest bulls on Wall street going into 2025 on gold. We do remain bullish here, but we wouldn’t be shocked to see, you know, a little bit of, I hate to say backing and filling, that’s not quite the right term I’m looking for, but a little bit put a new floor below where gold is. But we remain extremely bullish on the miners as well here. So many of these companies were designed to be profitable with gold at about $2000 an ounce. They’re break even somewhere between 1200 and 1500 dollars an ounce. So anything above 2000 and especially above 4000, above 4, 500 and these companies are going to be making a lot of money. So we do remain bullish on that sector as a whole here, even with this shakeout. But again, these are shakeouts of kind of the weak hands.

We don’t see this as a sign of a major top in place. Silver fell even more here than gold in the last three sessions. I mean, 41 from its all time high of $121 an ounce. Of course, you know, that’s not great, but we bounced back in a big way today. Up 7%, finishing the day at 84.74 an ounce. And still what an incredible move that is for silver as well, even with this pullback. All right, next up here, Copper clicked on my screen. Sorry, hold on, bear with me.

Copper was up 4 1/2% on the day. Finishing day at $6.08 a pound. Really right in that same area right now, crude oil. See now I’m into future trading here. So let me just check one more thing. Was up 2.8% today at 63.90 a barrel. Really right in about that same amount. Now finally here for today, bitcoin, you know, has been hit hard here.

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A lot of rumors swirling around for this group. We’re paying attention to it here closely. You would think that we could be approaching some sort of a meaningful bottom here. But you know, again, these pullbacks don’t feel good. Now down 3.7% at $75,748 a Bitcoin, you know, on news really that this has been manipulated slightly by, you know, the elites being released in kind of the epine emails that intelligence operations were involved in the early stages of bitcoin. To what extent that’s still being found out. But you know, that has always been kind of our number one conspiracy theory about bitcoin is that who was it likely created by likely intelligence agencies. Again though, as far as the long term impact of blockchain technology and cryptos as a whole.

I’d say that we do remain bullish here, but we’re playing close attention to this story right now. Folks. That is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcasts every day at the market close. You can sign up@ vraletter.com or click the podcast link at the top and we’d love to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in. We’ll see you here tomorrow for the close.