In today's episode, Tyler covers another remarkable day in the markets, highlighting what might be one of the fastest V-shaped recoveries in recent memory. From the March 30th lows, tech and the semiconductors have staged a massive rally, with the semis up 25%+ and hitting new all-time highs. Plus, get the latest updates on commodities, the U.S. dollar, and why it's still not too late to take advantage of this bull market.

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. Hope your week is off to a great start as well. I guess I’ll stick with the adjectives here because it was another amazing session here for the markets. There really isn’t another way to classify it.

What we’ve seen over the last 10 sessions from the March 30 lows to today has been pretty stunning massive moves from the lows of this pullback to all time highs. Maybe one of the fastest V shaped recoveries of all the ones that Kip has laid out in his last few podcasts. And let’s go ahead and start there. We’ll go ahead and recap what we’ll talk about in today’s podcast because thank you Kip, for, you know, thank you dad for covering for me last week. As I was on a due diligence trip, Sam and I were working on some fantastic projects for you here at the vra. We might be able to get into that a little bit today, but first and foremost, Kip will be on Warzone with Wayne Allen Root tonight, his fantastic podcast and weeknight show at 7:30 Eastern Time tonight, 6:30 Central. So if you’re seeing this in time, go, go and join them for that. You can always come back and replay the podcast if it’s, if it’s after that is aired.

[00:01:41]:
I’m sure we’ll have a recording of it soon for you as well. Kip and I, as we always do at the market close every day, have our, you know, end of day conversation. We’re always speaking throughout the session as well, but specifically after the close, you know, kind of recap the day and we got a chance to dive into some of the topics that him and Wayne will be discussing tonight. It’s going to be a fun show, so hope you can join them. And like I said, we’ll have a recording from you if you’re catching this a little bit late as well. So looking forward to that one. Again, exciting day here all around. For the podcast today, we’ll cover of course, the high notes of today’s action from all time highs to 52 week highs to just incredible moves off of the lows and much more.

Here, touch briefly on what some of the latest is in the headlines. But as we said, we said this from the beginning and we’ll touch on this too. This has been a purely headline driven pullback in the market, of course, oil shot or energy shocks to the system could have some, some lasting effects. We’ll talk about that as well. But nothing that’s strong enough to derail the US economy at this point. It could be a little bit tougher elsewhere around the globe. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that all the, all the talking heads in the financial mainstream media were saying you need to diversify away from U.S. stocks.

[00:03:16]:
Now, just a few short weeks later doesn’t look like such a good idea. We. When you have leaders in Europe telling, you know, their citizenry that the cheapest energy is using no energy at all, that’s really what we’ve come to here in 2026. I mean, it’s shocking to say, but we think most of the worst of it won’t be felt. The worst of the fear. Right. The fear is always. I won’t say always, but so often the fear of something happening is worse than when it actually happens.

Right. How often have you experienced that in life where, oh man, after that was over, whether it’s a public speaking kind of thing or, you know, whatever your, your fears are in life, once you’ve done it, it’s kind of, you know, that wasn’t quite as bad as I imagined. We think the same is true here for the market, whether it is the Iran conflict, especially though oil prices where we haven’t seen the highs from February taken or Excus March at 119 a barrel taken out yet. Right. We got close, but not quite. And again our tune has been unchanged here. We’ll cover it more here in a minute because it has been a fantastic move higher. And again from the beginning we said we would use this pullback as a buying opportunity.

[00:04:37]:
So without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump in here. Today is. It’s great to. It’s always great to be here with you for the podcast, but man, it’s always fun to get a big update in a series of updates like we’ve seen. So I really was pretty bummed to have missed last week’s podcast again for a very good reason. We were hard at work on a trip there, you know, but you see a day like this and a move like this and you know, Kip covering for me last week, it almost makes you wonder, you know, should I do less podcasts now? That is absolutely a joke. You couldn’t keep me away from doing here, doing these here with you, even on, on the good days, on the bad days, it doesn’t matter. You’re stuck with me here on this one because even going into this week I was excited to be here with you today.

As Kip and I were talking about his podcast yesterday, I was getting amped up for this podcast today. That was before we had the kind of finish we had today. I’ll give you a quick hint at what we’re going to be looking at for our markets where we’ve seen a number of areas from in just 10 sessions. You know it’s April 14, but 10 sessions since the March 30, which is marked the lows so far and very I’ll give you a lot of compelling reasons why it looks like not looks like the lows are in. We’ve said that as well. I just want to make sure I’m speaking with the right conviction there because it’s exactly what we’ve been saying and and we remain firm in that because we’ve gotten all the way back to all time highs. We’ll get to that in a second. It really an impressive move though.

[00:06:16]:
So again, ah man, great to be back here with you. Hope you’re having a great start to the week. Let’s go ahead and jump right in here because we did get some economic data back today as well. This is the government data, right? We don’t usually we usually take it with a grain of salt no matter what. The data point that we’re that we’re getting here is here. I want to check one thing before I we’ll talk about this while this is getting set up. So whether it’s cpi, pce, ppi, the government estimates very typically skew the way that it’s most beneficial. If the Fed is trying to convince everyone they’re scared of inflation, they’ll get hot reads.

You know, for years we said before 2020, for years we said that inflation was much worse than they were saying. And then after we’ve added 40% to our money supply in between 2020 and 2021, we said they were still underreporting with Biden hitting a 9% plus inflation rate. Now they’re leaving it a little bit to the upside here again as a get Trump. We’ve discussed it on a number of podcasts. I won’t try to get too deep into it here today, but as we’ve seen it from 2022 before Trump was in office, we’ve said inflation was a rear view mirror issue, that it peaked in 2022. We published the Big Bribe just months after that peak and just about a month before the bear market bottom in October of 2022. So we’ve got a pretty good track record on it so far, including being long for all of this bull market. You know, the Nasdaq so far from the lows of October 2022 up roughly, you know, 130 or so, it’s been a good move to the upside.

[00:08:12]:
We think it’s just beginning here. But we did again, back to the inflation data here. Of course, the oil story is what is is scary, more so globally though than here in the U.S. as I mentioned earlier, the energy concerns, where EU leaders are asking citizens to ration energy uses, that is where Trump’s plan really comes into effect. And I won’t take too deep of a dive into this today. We’ve talked a little bit about it. Kip’s talked about it a lot as well. But the US Being energy independent couldn’t be more important than in a situation like this.

We’ve already seen a number of empty vessels coming to buy oil from the US it’s what Europe will be doing depending on how this conflict goes from here. Again, the point is this is going to increase US gdp. We already have the oil supply here, so our price increases will remain subdued, which we think will keep inflation down as well. And as you know, we’re in the midst of an innovation revolution. Innovation drives deflation. I was on the Charles Schwab network a few weeks ago, you know, just before this market bottomed really, or maybe just right after. I have to get the exact date for you here. I think about exactly two weeks ago.

[00:09:33]:
But we made that same point there as well, that the innovation revolution was going to drive deflation. Oil prices, even at these levels, we don’t think we’re going back to a 9%. It’s in it is a rear view mirror issue for us here. And I’ve got a couple other points that I’ll bring up with our markets that’ll make this a little bit clearer for you because we saw great action, exactly the kind of action you want to see, and yields today as well, exactly the kind of action you want to see in the US Dollar today. So it’s not just to the upside. We’re seeing all of the telltale signs that the worst is behind us from this market. And again, so much of this has been a headline driven market. The other 180 we’ve seen in the headlines, as we say often, it’s not the news that matters is the market’s reaction to that news.

Even when we’re getting bad headlines, it can’t keep this market down, right. Whether that’s futures opening lower in the evening but finishing at the highs of the day because that’s exactly what we’ve seen roughly the last 10 sessions. Our markets finish at their highs of the day while yields in the dollar finish at their lows of the day. Ten sessions of that. That is a fantastic pattern. Textbook bull market action for coming out the other side of this. So let’s take a look here at our major indexes on the day. Exactly what you want to see leading here.

[00:11:00]:
Tech. NASDAQ led to the upside. The Mag 7 names having some big moves today. If these after hour readings are correct here I just want to refresh my screen and miss it. You know Nvidia let’s, let’s look at both. We’ll get it going. Rewrite up over 3.8% or so. Tesla was also up I believe yes, 3.3%.

Google Meta all of these big moves to the upside where the biggest fear was not too long ago software names While the sector itself hasn’t quite lived up to the the FIFO theme with the rest of the tech story the Mag 7 as they’ve been the lag 7 for the last few months it’s time for them to earn their stripes. They had phenomenal Q4 earnings and pulled back from there. There’s all kinds of stats that we that we could share but markets don’t top before earnings peak so we have not hit an earnings peak yet. And one more, I’ll go ahead and share this one now as well. Earnings. We are just kicking off Q1 earnings here. Kip has talked about this. We’ve had the banks going here.

[00:12:13]:
We obviously today and yester had some more with Goldman JP Morgan but tomorrow we’ll have some fun ones. We’ve got ASML coming up. You know one of the most important companies in the world, one of the only or the only company currently that can do EUV at the level they do that is extreme ultraviolet lithography. The process behind it is incredible. Essentially you know no less than about 30000 miracles have to occur per second in my mind. If you go watch a video of how their technology works it will blow your mind. It is incredible that human beings could figure this out. And then another one of the most important chip stories in the world.

Tsmc the Nvidia of actual production Nvidia. You know a lot of people think of them as a chip company. They’re specifically a chip designer and they build a platform that a whole Lot of people build their models off of. That’s the really value story. A big part of the value story for Nvidia. Now, TSMC Taiwan Semi is the actual fab that makes the most advanced chips in the world. Samsung is getting there with it. Tesla will be using Samsung to make some of them.

[00:13:28]:
You know, Intel’s trying to get back into the real hunt at being at the leading edge of chip production. There’s a lot of exciting things going on in this space. It should be another good earnings quarter for these companies. And then we have Netflix also. You know, I’m not going to follow that one. I’ll watch for it. But no position here for us. But as part of a rising tide lifts all boats.

Absolutely. Much like the banks, we don’t necessarily want to have a long term position and especially some of the larger banks out there. But as part of a healthy bull market, you do want to see them participating. All right, now we’ll dive into our market action again. NASDAQ leading the way. It’s unbelievable to see where we’ve come in the last 10 sessions. We’re just about a percent and a half away from an all time high already. We were just at the lows on March 30, 10 trading sessions ago.

[00:14:27]:
As Kip discussed already though, you know, the really exciting news here is the semis up over 25%, 25% from their lows, hitting another all time high here today. You know what, I’m going to pull up one more chart here. I got two for you because this is just too pretty not to share. Just straight up, no annotations, nothing. The semiconductors. Smh. Wow. I mean, again, you don’t like to see that lower low there ever, but textbook bull market action that we’ve seen.

And you know what makes it even better? Kip put this out earlier today. Oh, here, give me a second. I got to refresh this because it’s too good not to share. I couldn’t take credit for it from, from Kipper on this one. It’s a chart. I’ll give you a little hint while we’re waiting on it. The chart that we do share here often, if you’re a regular listener, you’ll know where I’m going with this one. Here we go.

One of the most important all time highs that you could see and that is SMH to spy. Sorry, the X is a little bit in the way there, but we share this chart quite a bit. Again, SMH up 25% and the S&P 500 has been going parabolic as well. That’s how much better the semis have been outperforming. I mean, fantastic to see, great to see, especially when it’s what we’ve been looking for from this market and we expect to continue from here. Folks, we’re still in the early innings of a.comesque move higher. For reference, the Nasdaq rallied 585% during the dot com melt. Up again so far.

I’ll even measure it again. I won’t measure. Right now we’re up roughly 130% from the bear market lows compared to 585%. So much further, so much more opportunity. If you feel like you’ve missed out on this move higher, you panicked and sold. Hey, that’s okay. It’s all part of the learning process here. This is a lifelong endeavor that we’re all embarking on together and we love being here with you for it every single day.

[00:16:47]:
I feel like I have one more point there on the semis. Well if it comes back to me, I’ll be sure to get it to you here. But what a fantastic buying opportunity this has proven to be once again. And in that.com 585% move higher. We can’t forget that there were multiple five plus pullbacks of 10% or more similar to what we just saw, including a technical bear market of 20% during that time period. Each one proved to be a fantastic buying opportunity. We think that’s what we just saw now and there will be more to come. So when you see this next time it’s always going to sound scary in the moment but that’s when you know you want to be greedy when others are fearful.

All right, next up here, another exciting one here. What we want to see leading to the upside is the Russell 2000 as well. It was our next up up 1.3% on the day today. The S&P 500 also up just shy of 1.2% on the day today. And is also, I mean we’re just points away from an all time closing high today. The all time high was above 7,000 but where it closed that day was just slightly above where we are right now, right in the range of an all time closing high. Now the Dow Jones on the other hand is the furthest away of our major indexes from all time highs, only three and a half percent. It’s been an incredible run there as well.

[00:18:14]:
But a chart that looks almost identical to the semis in a lot of ways is the Transports, Dow theory, you know, classic buy signal there. When the transports are hitting an all time high, the Dow is soon to follow and vice versa. And the same is true to the downside as well. So be cognizant of that during this move higher. But the transports another big move higher today up over 2%. You know, another factor here telling you that oil prices are going to come down much sooner than most people expect. And that remains our call here, which I’ll get to in just a minute. But the transports, I mean right there are basically right there.

You know, the Semis are up 25% from the lows. Transports are up 20% from the lows. So again, fantastic 10 sessions here. Our major indexes finish at their highs of the day. Semis finish at the highs of the day. Let’s see. And again, yields finishing at a 4.25. Yes, we would love to see them lower, but again finishing at their lows the day.

US Dollar finishing at the lows of the day. Oil close to its lows of the day now down 7% here. Crude oil at $92 a barrel. We’re still seeing oil in the 70 a barrel range by September of this year. That date keeps moving up. The first time I started looking at this data, I think the furthest I saw it out was like December at like 79 a barrel again. So then went November, then October and now September. But our year in forecast remain the same.

[00:19:54]:
We’ll see a lower dollar, we’ll see lower oil likely below $70 a barrel and certainly much better prices here in the US the 10 year should be well below 4% with third year mortgages far lower. Kevin Warsh is I believe is scheduled to begin his Fed chair hearings. Oh, what? I’m blanking on the exact name of those, those congressional testimonials. It’s not it. Anyway, somebody will correct me, I’m sure, but those are set to begin next week. You know, we’ll see. There’s still the holdouts there who don’t want to give Trump a win. They want to get rid of Jay Powell’s investigation, all these things.

We’ll see what happens. But if he can get get in there sooner than people think, yields will be coming down much faster. We’ll also have this Iran issue out of the way, which just seems to be a revolving door of issues. Right. And from the beginning, obviously we were, we didn’t want to go back to war in the Middle east, but Trump has been the peace president. So we’ve said we’ve Trust him and we absolutely trust our military and we’ll continue on that front. And as I’ve said to Grant and some of our Grant Sinchfield in our conversations on his podcast, we’re going to stick to the financial story here because in so many of these political battles, military battles, following the money is a really smart money move at the end of the day, and we think we’re seeing those. There’s telltale signs.

Have you been tuning in here with this last few weeks? It’s what we’ve been pointing out. Our focus continues to be on semis and tech. We want to see them leading the way. We want to see housing improve. That’s a big contrarian call of ours here. There’s so much negativity in the housing market, but 40% of homeowners own their home outright. There’s roughly $37 trillion and home equity with again, 40% own their home outright. And I think the average is roughly 70% of home equity that people have right now.

[00:21:56]:
There’s so much untapped potential and debt ratios, you know, multi decade lows. Even with everything that we’ve seen, those have continued to remain the same. So anytime you see the fear mongers as Kip and I talk about often, they oftentimes make fantastic points. And it’s, you know, very hard to prove some of these wrong. But in so many of these instances, what it really is, what they’re telling is the truth. But they overweight the negativity and underweight the potential good news that’s coming. As Elon says, I’d much rather be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right. All right, so again, fantastic move here.

Fantastic last few sessions, really in hindsight already, tough to say hindsight. We aren’t technically back to all time highs across the board, but this is the move we were looking for. We said these corrections take place regularly and we used it as a buying opportunity. If you didn’t do the same on your end, that’s okay. There will be more opportunities. But come and join us. We want to help you here. That is our goal here, day in and day out is to serve the retail investors, serve mom and pop investors to find great opportunities in this market and to outperform what we will see.

Not so much from inflation, but from money printing. Because we just got the money printer going again. I believe the February M2 money supply came out. I bet I could find it quickly here for you. The stats on it. I want to say it came in though, again, In February, there’s a lag on this data at roughly 4.6% increase year over year, hitting another all time high. I may be off on the percentage increase, but that was another all time high. And when M2 money supply is hitting all time highs, you’ve got to be long assets, right? You must be long stocks.

[00:23:52]:
You must own precious metals, that’s gold, silver and the miners. You must own cryptos. Our favorites here, bitcoin. Absolutely. There’s no secret there. We’ve got one other favorite here at the vra again, come and join us. You’ll get free access to everything we have to offer for 14 days. And one last point here about the markets.

This isn’t shocking, but again tells you how much potential to the upside is left. We just hit all time highs in our leader the semis. We’re one to two percentage points away in our major indexes. And the fear and greed index is still in neutral. Again, not shocking because we were just at extreme fear single digits just a month ago. It usually tells you the exact reading on that. I wouldn’t mind seeing that one month ago is a 21. It got again single digits during that time frame.

[00:24:48]:
Now to be back in neutral at a 47. Again, there’s no excessive bullishness in this market in some areas. We’ve already reached, excuse me, short term overbought readings. But as far as sentiment goes, we just, I mean, aren’t seeing it yet. There’s still a whole lot of room to run to the upside. There’s still so much short covering taking place. You know, the short covering like that hadn’t been seen in years, you know, since COVID potentially. You know, we’ll wait for the dust to settle and find out what the real data is before I quote any two directly.

But that’s a recipe for a big move higher. All right, let’s take a look at our internals on the day and we’ll wrap it up here. You know, really good readings here. Again, great readings from the last two sessions. You know, two to one positive or just shy on both the NYC and the NASDAQ for advanced decline. 52 week highs and lows, just nine stocks on the NYC hitting 52 week lows to 126, hitting 52e highs. Big beat on the NASDAQ as well. And volume, just shy of that 80% upside volume.

[00:25:55]:
We wanted to see for the, you know, what technicians call a breath thrust back to back days of 80% upside volume. I believe one day of 90% would also qualify for a breath thrust, but still phenomenal volume. Both NYSE and NASDAQ for our sectors on the day. We finished with 8 out of our 11 sectors higher on the day to day. You know, again, big rallies off the low, not quite to all time high levels here. The tech sector is the closest, but not far away really across the board here. Energy has pulled back significantly with oil. To be continued on that, on that story.

Might take a little while for the, for this group to reprice and see where oil goes from here. But so many of these companies, even at all time highs just have very healthy balance sheets, great assets, great cash reserves, great debt ratios. You know, a lot of what you want to see from a healthy energy sector right now. And for AI, we have to have a healthy energy sector despite how many people on the left want to fight it. And despite all the news headlines you’re going to see, see about how data centers are ruining the world, these are not unsolvable problems. Now I want to be very clear about that because for much less than the fictional railroad got built in California, right? Everybody talks about water shortages here in central Texas. I mean ancient Rome built aqueducts further distances than we need here. I think we’ll be okay, right? There’s massive desalination plants all in use currently all over the world.

[00:27:37]:
The combination costs of both of those, if done without waste, fraud and abuse, would be far less than proposed for the California light rail. These are not unsolvable problems. It’s a willpower issue. And Elon Musk proves that in time and time again in multiple industries every single day, from a space flight to autonomous driving to electric vehicles. Time and time again he do, he does what everyone said was impossible. And I think that’s a, you know, powerful lesson to learn from. All right, finally here for today, our VRA commodity watch. We had gold and GDX both up on the day.

We want to see GDX leading just like you want to see semis leading tech. But it’s tough to complain when you got a 2% upside day for both. Gold now at $4,800 an ounce. Fantastic. And GDX well off lows. Big rally off the lows here as well. Silver now at 79.62 an ounce. Excuse me, I think I said gold.

[00:28:40]:
4, 8004864 an ounce. Copper now at $6 and 8 cents a pound. And oil as I said earlier, down big on the day at 91.28 a barrel, back below $80 a barrel by September in the futures market. Finally here for today, bitcoin. This is one of our FIFO themes here. Back above 74,000. Let’s see, that’s one of its highest levels earlier in the day. Today.

Let me confirm here at the highs that it was above 76,000. We think that bitcoin is due for a big move higher as well. Folks, that’s all that we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our our podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up@vraletter.com, click the podcast link at the top. You can find our transcripts and everything else that we have to offer there as well. So thanks again for being here with us today. Hope you’ve had a great start to your week and let’s see if we can’t keep it rolling from here. But regardless of the market action going forward, we remain extremely bullish here.

If you feel like you’ve missed out, it’s not too late. Come and join us. We’d love to have you with us here at the vra. Thanks again for tuning in with us. Until next time, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.