In today's episode, Tyler takes a deep dive into a day marked by all-time highs across a wide range of sectors, illustrating just how much the current bull market is broadening beyond the “Magnificent Seven.” He breaks down standout earnings from Taiwan Semiconductor, which sectors are leading the charge, and what the future of the innovation revolution holds. Tune into today's podcast to learn more.

Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon everyone. Tyler Herriage here with you for today’s VRA Investing podcast. Hope you all had a fantastic day out there today. I have to say here I’m very happy to be here with you today as always, but especially on a day with some all time highs. If you heard my podcast on Tuesday, you know our long running joke here that Kip usually gets the all time highs and I get the days after that on the down days. So always great to be here with you on a day of all time highs and a wide breadth of all time highs that we’ll cover here today.

You know, not just the mag 7 as so many people have loved to talk about and in this bull market over the last few years that it’s only seven stocks. No, that’s not what we’re seeing here today is not what we’ve been seeing. What we are seeing is again the breadth of this market expanding here. Textbook bull market action and exactly what you want to see. So we’ve got a lot to cover here today, most importantly, earnings. We got some semiconductor earnings. Earlier today we got Taiwan semi releasing earnings. We’ll cover that.

[00:01:26]:
And really that set the tone for the day after that. The markets were a rocket ship at the open this morning. Now we finished closer to the lows of the day, which is not what you want to see. But still solid gains on the session today. Exactly what we want to see. And quickly here I will say no podcast tomorrow will be in meetings and then Monday is also MLK day, so the stock market will be closed. We’ll be back here with you on Tuesday after the close. So real quick recap of what we’ll cover here today.

Again, earnings and some more upcoming earnings as well. But Taiwan semi a huge one here. We’ll dive into that today. We’ll also cover many of those all time highs. I’m excited to share those with you because there’s many that I think you might have missed today that really fly under the radar of, you know, especially in the financial mainstream media you wouldn’t have seen today. And it’s exactly again what we want to see from this market. Textbook bull market action. And then another major story from today that we’ll talk about is the tokenization of assets.

If you’re a longtime listener, longtime VRA follower, you know, this has been a main theme for us since we wrote our book the Big Bribe. You know, three and a half years ago now we were talking about the tokenization of assets then. And it’s looking like 2026 will be the year where they this theme really starts to kick into high gear, which means just so much more added to our already ocean of liquidity theme, our financial engineering theme. I mean, wow. It’s going to be tough to all of this in the podcast today, but I’ll do my best and we’ll continue to report on it here. But got some big news out of that here and it looks like 2026 is going to be the year that it happens. You know, a little hint of what we’re talking about here. The SEC chair Paul Atkins just said yesterday that within two years all US Markets will be on chain, which means being on blockchain, which means tokenization of assets.

[00:03:46]:
Now it doesn’t just mean the stock market either, as we’ll cover later today. It’s a tokenization of real world assets as well that if you want to tap into your home equity without going to a bank, you can sell fractional pieces of your home. That’s what we wrote about in the Big Bribe. And it’s looking more and more every day like that is becoming a quick reality here in one massive deal that got done today. Maybe maybe the biggest of its kind so far and a major, major deal. Very exciting. So I’m excited to bring that here to you today. All right, so we’ve got all of that to cover and more.

So let’s start to jump in here to it as I want to start with Taiwan Semi earnings. You know, I love covering the semiconductor space in Taiwan. Semi is the space, right? If you’re not too familiar with the area you may have think of Nvidia is and they are the largest by market cap out there. When you think of semiconductors, you think of Nvidia. But Nvidia is not a semiconductor maker. Okay. They are a semiconductor designer. And even more specifically than that, they wrote the software that most firms design their own chips off of.

[00:05:06]:
So they really control the design space, but they don’t touch the manufacturing side of things. Taiwan Semi is the leader in this space and really the most advanced nodes out there. If you are familiar with this space, you know, or if you’re familiar with Moore’s Law, which is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years and we’ve accelerated even faster than that getting in to Wright’s Law, which I believe was actually originally designed for industrial parts, which said that not only will they double every two years, but the costs will come down as well. So Even at a faster pace than Moore’s Law. Well, Taiwan Semi has been an absolute crucial part of keeping up with that rate of change, improving these laws. True. As you’ve gotten all the way down to below 7 nanometer chips that made up 77% of their wafer revenue, you’re now talking down to get to 5, 4, 3, 2 nanometer size wafers. I mean, infinitesimally small at this point.

How much smaller can you really get? Taiwan Semi is one of the only, if not the only, company in the world that can do this. Outside of that, Samsung is really still playing catch up in that regard. And there’s a few other companies within that that just prove how fragile this supply chain is and why. You know, for all the people talking about semiconductor production being taken over by China, they don’t have a Taiwan Semi inside of China. Right. We’re not believers in the two countries, one system kind of approach here. Many of Taiwan, Taiwan Simi’s chip production is prohibited from going to China. And a lot of that, they’re building plants here in the us Samsung building plants here in the US to make these extremely small chips.

[00:07:02]:
But Taiwan Semi really is the only game in town. And I can dive into so much more of what that means. And we can talk about asml. Right. And I, I could spend a whole podcast talking about that company. It’s absolutely a fascinating story what they do there. I’ll just quickly, you know, if you’re not familiar with that story. They do extreme ultraviolet lithography.

Okay, I know, sounds like a bunch of big words. Essentially, they print the wiring onto these chips by using these incredibly complex machines. The whole process couldn’t be done without these machines. And the origin story there is fascinating as well. If you want a little bit more on that, I highly encourage the book, check out Chip War. But I think it’s so fascinating. I wanted to pause there for a second because we just had a couple of them installed here in Austin, Texas, where at Samsung’s plant. Now again, TSMC is the same thing when they design their chip fabs.

They have to design the foundation of the building, the location of the building, all around ASML’s technology. Because it weighs like 300,000 tons, the entire building is built around their tech. So without, you know, one or two or three of these companies out there, we wouldn’t be able to produce any of this. All right, let’s get back to tsm. I know that’s where I started and I don’t want to jump around too much, but it’s just such a fascinating story. So TSMC again, Taiwan Semiconductor really the only game in town, the only people who can really produce Nvidia chips. Samsung’s working on it. Sales came in beating estimates at 33.7 billion versus estimates of 31.

That’s up 25 and a half percent year over year. Huge beat there. Beat on earnings per share. Now their margins, incredible 62% margins which you might expect from a company that is the only game in town. But here’s the interesting point. Nvidia only designed chips. TSM doesn’t design chips at all. They only produce chips.

[00:09:10]:
And there’s a lot of reasons why that’s the case, why chip designers no longer have fabs. I think AMD was the last company to do both. Now it’s been a decade plus since they’ve done that but with those margins on their earnings call they even said these are too high. They really want to focus on ramping up spending and delivering products here. They, they want to bring down their gross margin and despite that their Q1 guidance for gross margin is even higher. Actually that was a big part of this stock’s rally today, which it did was up huge on the day today hitting an all time high, finishing up roughly four and a half percent on the day. Final stats here, net income 16.3 billion versus estimates of 15 billion and again that operate operating margin is just absolutely killer. Now the real kicker here, again kind of back to the operating margin point was from their earnings call, their CEO, our cfo, excuse me, Wendell Wang.

Wang said that they expect the next three years of CapEx to be significantly higher than the last three years combined. Okay. Over the last three years they spent just over a hundred billion dollars on capex. But now in expanding to product and expanding production capacity, getting production over to the US as well, they expect to spend roughly 50% this year in 2026 of what they spent the last three years between 52 and $56 billion on CapEx. That really got things going today. A lot of excitement about expanding those production lines. Like I said, they’re some of the only people that can even do this. Samsung is working on it, working down to getting to those smaller nanometer size wafers that I was talking about earlier.

But as far as reliability goes, Taiwan Semi has it in the bag here. So fascinating company as you can tell. I love this story and fascinated by this space. I know we’ve got a lot of you out there who work in this space as well. So if I butchered anything there, call me out on it. I love learning. And you know, there’s so many bottlenecks in this space which creates a lot of opportunity for investors. As you know, if you’re a VRA member here, I don’t like to talk too much about our exact positions.

I’ll leave that to Kip here. But we are aggressively long the semis and we remain so here even at all time highs, which the semis did hit another all time high again today. So back to that textbook action market broadening. The semi is leading. Exactly what we want to see from this bull market. And on the earnings front, we’re just about to kick into high gear here. Next week’s going to be an exciting week. Let’s take a look at some of the upcoming earnings that we have.

[00:12:06]:
So next week again, exciting week. We’ve got Netflix 3M on Tuesday, again Monday close for MLK Day. A few other big tech names coming in the week. You know, some healthcare names, Johnson and Johnson, then intel on Thursday, which has also been on an absolute tear. Some more banks coming in later in the week. But it’s really two weeks from now, the last week of January where we’re gonna have some fun. These are some big names coming up. So two weeks from now, Boeing, that’ll be a fun one.

Texas Instruments also, I mean they were one of the pioneers of the chip space. And Wednesday now we get into the mega caps here. We got Microsoft, Tesla, asml, who I mentioned earlier, right. The, the point of bringing up ASML earlier with Taiwan semi too is if they’re increasing Capex, that should bode well for asml. It means that they’re buying more of their machinery. Again, the only company in the world that can do EUV lithography, extreme ultraviolet lithography. And as far as reports go, China’s nowhere near the level of ASML at this point. I mean potentially five years behind on this.

You know, there’s some talk that they might be able to start getting into production on these things in 2028. A lot of people say it’d be 2030 before they even get close to these kinds of levels. They solved, you know, a multi decade long problem with their technology. So pretty incredible stuff. And then some more mega caps here. We’ve got out Apple two weeks from now as well. And then, you know, here’s the rest of the, the look of earning season, really the heart of it over the next three weeks here. So stay tuned.

[00:13:53]:
We’ll be reporting on it here every day at the market close. So going to Be some fun podcasts coming up here. And on the Tesla front, we just wrote about this this morning, a pretty incredible quote that I have to share with you here. As you know, Tesla has been our number one pick for the innovation revolution. Tesla also working on their own AI chips, which will possibly be produced by Samsung, actually. So we’ll see what happens there. Who knows with Elon, he might even want to get into the fab space. Have you seen what they’re doing with lithium batteries? The.

The first of their kind manufacturing facilities for. For these. What Elon can do. Going from idea to execution really makes every other CEO in the world jealous. Even Jensen Wang, the CEO of Nvidia, has said what he’s done with his AI data centers he does in months what other companies do in years. So pretty incredible stuff. But here’s the quote, and I’m blinking on, on who said it now even. But they were talking about being at the Tesla factory where they’re working on Optimus.

Optimus 3 is the version that they’re working on now. And he said that it was so incredible that within two to three years, no one will even remember that Tesla ever made a car. Most people hear Tesla and they think car company. We’ve said for a long time, it’s not a car company, it’s a tech company. And that’s why they have the valuation that they do. People are catching up to that story now that these cars are. Aren’t cars. Right? They’re robots, really.

I’ve started to see that story a lot more that it is a tech company. That story has really caught on. But the fact that within a couple of years, people won’t even remember they made cars. That’s how incredible Optimus could be. Elon has called it what will likely be the greatest consumer product of all time. You know, when you think about that category, you think about the iPhone, we think about the potential of robotics. How much bigger of a category could that be? You know, we talk about Tesla and the Cyber Cab again, robotics is not a car. It’s a robot that can make money for you round the clock without any input from you at all.

[00:16:12]:
Well, what could a robot do for you? Whether that’s on the manufacturing side, whether it’s just freeing up more time for you to, for creative output, to focus on your work during the day in any type of repetitive tasks. And also, I mean, we know that they’re a real world leader of AI applications, obviously with the cars, right? That’s a huge step up from any other company. The real world use cases. There’s no one close to what Tesla has as far as data goes for real world use cases. So buckle up, folks. This is when the innovation revolution is kicking into high gear. You know, this has been our major factors here, okay? We talked about the structural bull market that are going to carry U.S. stocks sharply higher into 2030.

We’re looking at gains for the S&P 500 of 30% this year, this year alone in 2026 and the Nasdaq up 50% this year alone. We think this year, although it’s been a great run from the 2022 bear market lows, the NASDAQ is up now roughly 135% or so. Remember, the dot com melt up was over 585%. That’s a parabolic move higher, not 135%. If this is a bubble we’re witnessing, it’s the most boring, most mundane bubble of all time. So that’s what we have to look forward to, right, is that other 450% in returns and beyond. A lot of money is going to be made by a lot of people and hopefully you’ll be a part of that as well. Right? That’s what our goal here is every day, is to help the individual retail investor, the small mom and pop trying to retire early, trying to put their money to work as the money printer is working against them because they’re not turning off the money printers.

[00:18:11]:
Okay? We are going to grow our way out of our debt problem. And with that comes more money printing, which means you must own inflationary assets. That means owning stocks means owning precious metals, as we’ve seen. And we’ll cover today some more all time highs in that space as well. It means owning real estate, which we’ll talk about in a little bit more as well with the tokenization of assets and of course, the newest kid on the block, Bitcoin, to go back to the tokenization theme. A lot of exciting stuff yet to come here for this market. And again, so much money to be made. Don’t let it all be made from the big banks and the hedge funds out there.

We want the individual retail investor who’s participating now more than ever to be the ones who profit from this the most. And that is our goal every day here in what we do at the vra. It’s what we’re passionate about. So what we love to do, as you can tell from our excitement, Kip and I both, and Sam and Josh and Danielle, everybody on the team here, we we love what we do. If you’re not here with us already, come and join us. We do have a good time as well. So We’ve got a 14 day free trial going on right now@vra letter.com you can find full access there to all of our positions in top buy recs to participate in this innovation revolution. And again, back to the big three that we’ve talked about for this structural bull market.

Okay, it is the roaring 2000s meets the innovation revolution meets the Trump economic miracle 2.0, which is tax cuts, massive deregulation and of course the one big beautiful bill and everything that comes with it, tariffs and everything that comes with it. Hopefully the, the elimination completely of income taxes here in the U. S. How wonderful would that be to unleash American prosperity? These are the kind of factors, the megatrends that we talk about here regularly that are going to power markets higher for 2026 and all the way into 2030. But this really we see as an important year here. We’re going to see massive earnings growth over this time and we do, we think this is the early innings here. And with that we are starting to see optimism increase. We’ve now got the Fear and greed index back into greed mode here.

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We also have the AII sentiment survey here. I’ll pull this chart up really quickly here for you. There we go. Just came in at the highest level of bulls that we’ve seen in over a year and a half. November of 2024 was last time we saw bulls at this level. Nearly 50% now. And here’s a great stat for you here as well. I’m going to look at this because I don’t want to butcher it, but when you see bulls outnumbering bears like this for six consecutive weeks, as you can see, we’ve had now when it this has occurred, the market is higher one year later.

You know, after a period of not seeing it, the market is higher one year later, 100% of the time with average gains of 17.6%. That’s well below what we think these returns will be here. But that’s just to tell you how early we are in this bull market. And as we’ve talked about, once we start getting to the level where we’re at 60, 70% bulls for weeks and months on end, that’s when we’ll start to get worried about irrational exuberance and excessive optimism in this market. But right now I would say if we had a pullback like we had at the end of last year where you get a 3 to 5% pullback, which is common. It will happen at some point this year. So it’s inevitable. Right.

Usually about every 18 months or so you have a 10% pullback. Well, we had one in April of last year from, from March to April, tariff mania. So we don’t expect that to be the case. But if we got Even again that 3 to 5% pullback, we this would flip flop. People say they’re bullish, but do their portfolios really reflect that? Do hedge fund managers portfolios really reflect that? There’s so much uncertainty out there from, from those groups, the hedge fund managers out there, that at the first signs of weakness, they’re going to want to be out of this market. Right. This is not a really. They’re not convicted of their bullishness yet.

[00:22:43]:
I don’t think that is the case. But we are seeing it from name as well. The national association of Active Investment Managers, their exposure index hitting a 96 here, marking the seventh straight week of name exposure above 90. Again, that sounds like some excessive optimism here. But when we’ve seen these kind of streaks in the past, there are six scenarios where we’ve seen it over the last decade. In all six of those scenarios, the S&P 500 was higher one year later as well. I’ve got a quick chart here to show you on that as well. Great tweet here.

Excuse me. From market stats, you see the spots where we were, you know, these are the kinds of moves again you see in the beginning of massive moves higher. So yes, there will come a day where we’re worried about excessive optimism, but we’re just not there yet. Again, we got a pullback here which we would use as another opportunity to buy the dip. We think that again, the number of bulls and bears would flip flop from where they are today. All right, so great stuff there. Hopefully you can tell our excitement about what is to come for this market and really what we see overall with those big three factors I talked about, we’ll use any pullbacks as an opportunity to buy the dip. All right, let’s take a look here at our major market major indexes on the day to day.

Whereas I mentioned earlier rocket ship out of the gate today, unfortunately we finished closer to the lows of the day to day, but still some phenomenal gains here and small caps continuing to outperform here. Russ2000 Again, another all time high today. If you’re a regular listener, you know this is the move we’ve been looking for in the Small caps. You know, for Kip and I both talked about this at length. But one major fact that I’ve talked about and Kip’s talked about as well repeatedly over the last year, over the last six months or so, is that when the Fed is cutting rates, small caps tend to perform outperform large caps over the next six months by 5 to 7%. Big outperformance from small caps. This is the visualization of what that looks like now because small caps are more vulnerable to interest rate moves. Okay.

[00:25:15]:
Um, but this also bodes incredibly well for the US economy. Cause small caps are US firms primarily. We’re looking for 5% GDP growth this quarter. Uh, you know, we could be looking, you know, we’ve said we’re looking for upwards of 8% GDP growth. We might be on the low side there, which sounds incredible because we really haven’t seen that kind of growth in decades under the Obama era. Okay. It looked like GDP growth of that level was from a bygone era. Okay.

Now it’s looking like that could be a reality again. And it’s proof of what Americans can do when you unleash American prosperity, when you take really the boot off our throats. Cut taxes, eliminate these needless regulations. Look at what Europe has done to their companies, right, outside of asml, which is a Dutch company. You could argue that though, because so much of the technology comes from the American defense machine. If you look into their origin stories, they’ve regulated themselves out of massive businesses that we have here in the us so that would be a future that you could look at if we were under a Democrat leadership. Okay. If it was Kamala, that’s what they want.

They want everybody at the top profiting and they want to keep the boot on the throats of the everyday person out there. But when you unleash the creativity and work power of the everyday person, the everyday American, we can get to double digit GDP growth. I have no doubt about it. I think we’re seeing the proof of that right now with the Trump economic miracle. So we expect small caps to continue to roar here. You know, as we say often new highs beget new highs. And we saw a lot of those today. After that we had the Dow Jones up six tenths of 1%, just shy of an all time high for the Dow Jones.

[00:27:12]:
But if you’re a Dow theory fan, we got the transports hitting an all time high today as well. And leading the way over the Dow again. The Dow of 6/10 of 1% transports up 1.8% on the day. Fantastic move there. Followed there by the S&P 500 up just over a quarter of 1%. Now this is where I’ll get in the broadening action. Okay, The S&P 500 didn’t hit an all time high today. But this tells you just how well the other 493 stocks are doing.

It’s not just the Mag 7. Okay, the equal weight S&P 500 all time high. I’ll get to the Nasdaq here in a second but we saw QQQ J hitting an all time high today. People talk about the Q’s. That’s the, you know, the NASDAQ 100 QQQJ is 101 to 200. Okay, the up and comers, the growth area all time high today. And again it’s not just growth though either. We saw the Russell 2000 value index hitting an all time high which you’ll see in our sectors.

You know the value names. Transports, materials industrials either at or near all time highs as well. Then the mid capsule, the S&P mid caps all time high today. Clear broadening action from this market. Again, I’ll say it again, textbook bull market action and just what we want to see. Semis leading the charge. So I’ll get to tech here. Semis, you know, like I said, finish well off.

Their highs of the day today. Were up much more earlier in the session. Still managed even despite finishing at their lows of the day. Up over, over 2% hitting an all time high. NASDAQ did manage to finish higher on the day as well. Just right there by the S P500 up a quarter of 1% on the day today. Looking at our internals on the day, you know, good numbers here for, for the, the lagging that we saw into the close which again not what you want to see but no real major concerns from us here. But man we had stellar numbers yesterday as Kip covered.

[00:29:23]:
Still good numbers today. We had 2 to 1 more advancing stocks than declining stocks on the NYSE and came in positive on the NASDAQ as well. Not quite that 2 to 1 outperformance that you’d like to see. 52 week highs and lows nearly 10 to 1 positive on the NYSE. And actually did you know, got a refresh here at the close. Four to one positive on the nasdaq. Great numbers there. Volume a little bit closer here and or one weak spot on the day after a stellar day yesterday.

But NYSE did come in positive. NASDAQ actually came in Negative here, you know, with that, you know, end of day kind of sell off, maybe a little bit of profit taking. Again, not conviction from the large bulls out there. Think that they’ll, they’ll probably regret those decisions later. But slight negative number on volume for the nasdaq. Next up here. Looking at our sectors on the day, we finished with 7 out of our 11s and P500 sectors higher on the day. Our leader was actually utilities.

[00:30:26]:
You know, a lot of chatter in that space of could this group be getting exciting? Right, Doing away with the regulation that is hamstrung this space? We’ll see. But they led the way today. After that we had the industrials all time high. Real estate was up on the day. If you’re a regular listener, you know, we like the home builders. Instead of tracking real estate. Home builders hitting another highest level since mid September. Up 1.3% on the day.

It’s exactly what we need to bring down housing prices. Right. We need home builders building more homes. Let’s see if we can continue to get rates lower on that front after that. Tech was higher on the day, the financials higher on the day. Again, we’re not fans of the financials here but, but you do want to see them participate as part of a healthy bull market. You know, especially if you start to get IPOs. If you look back to the dot com era melt up, the financials perform really well because they’re helping these companies into their IPOs.

But regional banks actually did really well today, up nearly 1.9%. Again, another sign of, of bullishness here. If we were starting to look at weakness in the economy, which by any metric you can’t really see that right now. Maybe job growth has, you know, they keep talking about the low fire, low hire type of economy. We do think that will change and we’ll start to ramp up employment as well. I have one other point on that. Yeah, if you were looking at economic weakness, you’d see it. Usually regional banks can be an early warning signal and just none of that right now.

Materials also all time closing high today. Not quite the all time intraday high. Energy which has been on an incredible run was our laggard on the day to day. Oil prices got hit. I’ll get to that here, more in a second. Followed there by healthcare and communication services. All right, so let’s get to those commodities on the day today where we did get an all time high earlier in the session from Silver. Silver hitting an all time high today.

[00:32:29]:
Oh, excuse me, just below that Level I got a refresh here, you know what I mean? We’re still right in the range of it essentially was above 93 earlier in the session. The all time high 93.70 an ounce. Now at $92.18 an ounce. Gold just below its all time high as well. Still maintaining above $4,600 an ounce. At $4,620 an ounce. Gold miners tried to participate today up a quarter of 1%. Just below there was all time highs as well.

Copper now higher on the day, slightly just below $6 a pound at 599 a pound in oil as I mentioned earlier, you pulled back got above $61 a barrel. Now back below $60 a barrel at $59.19 a barrel. As we saw some reports earlier that us we just completed our first sale of Venezuela oil. I talked about that a bit on Tuesday and how that will benefit U.S. refineries. We want to continue to see gas prices coming down. Right? It’s a big part of inflation. Energy costs go into everything.

That was a big part of the PPI number yesterday. For people talking about that were high energy prices. Well NAT Gas, let me run this chart real quick because it was down you like 9% yesterday. And from their highs in December when nat gas is down 37%, you think that might have had something to do with the PPI number? Probably right. Energy was a big part of it in that PPI number. So for anyone trying to say oh well CPI was okay, but PPI is something to worry about. A big part of it was energy and I didn’t hear a whole lot of people talking about that. So that massive drop in energy prices, you know, inflation, as we’ve said here, a lot in our view is a rear view mirror issue.

[00:34:31]:
All right, finally here for today, let’s talk about bitcoin and crypto as a whole. Bitcoin is slightly down on the day at $95,600 a Bitcoin right now. But again the story of the day and will likely be a big story this year is the tokenization of assets. As I said earlier, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said that all US markets will be on chain and within two years. Today we got a big example of what the tokenization of assets looks like as Galaxy Digital. You know, I’ll go ahead and say it. VRA BI REC here, massive day today. Up over 15% on the day announced that they received approval to expand their data center in West Texas and to do so they issued a tokenized CLO A collateral loan obligation.

This allows for on chain execution of this loan and the way that they’ll distribute it and that you can buy into it through tokenization. What all that is going to look like going forward and what that means for the everyday investor is yet to be seen here really. But this is going to be massive. Right? And again, an example of what the tokenization of assets look like. They’ve already started their lending platform, their arch lending platform. You know, Galaxy Digital has framed themselves as the Goldman Sachs of crypto. They’re really at the intersection here of crypto and AI, Right, because they’ve done crypto mining. Many of those data centers can also be used for AI as well.

You know, I’m not exactly sure what the transfer process would look on those, but that’s what back in the day when the video first started going crazy, everyone said GPUs were just for gamers. And then it was, oh, GPUs, they could be used for bitcoin mining. But what even is bitcoin? What even is cryptocurrency? That was like 2017 and then the AI race started and they realized that GPUs are far better at CPUs for AI training. So, you know, the amount of assets that this company has and the way they position themselves, we see this as early innings for this company. But their arch lending platform has already lent 75 million. You know, and essentially what it does through tokenization provides instant loans so you don’t have to go through, you know, traditional bank secured loans backed by digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and others. You know, our other favorite, we have a new crypto recommendation which you can find with your two free week trial. We also saw interactive brokers with a big announcement here that they will be enabling stablecoin funding for their brokerage accounts.

[00:37:20]:
All kind of news here in the tokenization space. Okay, Larry Fink, you’re not fans of BlackRock here, the world’s largest asset manager had this to say, okay, in the future, every asset, every currency, every transaction will be tokenized. Now this is what we’ve talked about on the worries of like a cbdc, a central bank digital currency, which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen here in the US but as I’ve said here previously on the podcast, what’s the Trojan horse going to be? Right? It could have really been Bitcoin at the end of the day, when Bitcoin first started coming out, it was decentralized, anonymous. Well, both of those things are looking less and less true every single day. What he said next is worrisome that it will be tracked and routed through digital wallets that you don’t control. Again, I’ve covered this for some time going back to the World Economic Forum, okay, and their bank of International Settlement settlements. The general manager, Augustine Carsons, who used to lead the central bank or the Treasury, I believe in Mexico, I believe it was the central bank there, said that CBDCs will give them, and I quote, absolute technological control over, over your personal spending. Okay? That is what they want.

So we have to be aware of it, right? That is not what we want. At the end of the day, their goal is to get rid of what they call the gray market. They hate it. They hate it. They hate it when you use cash because they can’t track it. They hate that they want to be able to see every purchase no matter how small, no matter how large. That’s why in European countries you can only make cash transactions of a certain size now, right? These are the regulations that we need to be aware of and that we want to avoid. Ultimately, you know, it’s a reminding of the Canadian trucker convoy, okay, where they were able to debank and seize crypto wallets even of these truckers.

[00:39:16]:
That’s what they want the ability to do. You break your social credit score, they take your money, they take your assets. That’s not what we want from this space. So I’m just, you know, yes, we’re bullish on the tokenization of assets and what that means for, for the ocean of liquidity, which we also just got another all time high in money market accounts today, which is unbelievable. That’s cash on the sidelines, ready, ready to hit this market. As money market accounts, their, you know, the interest that they’re paying out drops with rates falling, that money is going to be looking for higher yield, more liquidity in this market, tokenization of assets, more liquidity in this market. So that’s the positive side here. And really the positive side for, for the financial markets is that it should lead to transparent and honest markets for big or small, no matter where it is.

But we do need to be aware of it on the personal safety side and be actively aware of it. So we’ll keep you abreast of all of that situation and how it’s unfolding here. It’s a story that we’ve covered here often at the VRA and we’ll continue to report on it here as well. So if you have any thoughts on that, if you’re an expert in that space. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Email us at supportrainsider anytime. But folks, that is all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our VRA podcast every day at the Market Close.

You can sign up@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. Or, excuse me, not tomorrow. Have a great long weekend everyone. We’ll see you back here on Tuesday for the close.