In today's episode, Tyler shares insights and recaps a stellar day in the markets, with a fresh round of all-time highs in key areas like semiconductors. He also gives a preview of tomorrow's much-anticipated Nvidia report, and what to expect in tonight's State of the Union address. 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. Hope your week is off to a great start here as well. I’ll go ahead and I’ll jump out on a limb here and say that my week is off to a little bit better of a start than Kip so far. Not for any, you know, real big reason or anything other than the fact that, uh, you know, he got the down day to start off the week yesterday and I got a good day today for our markets, including some all-time highs, which we’ll cover here today. Uh, got a lot of great, great stuff to cover here.

Hey, as always, you know, it’s always good to be here with you, period. It’s always great to be here with you, but an update, uh, is pretty nice. So we’ll cover everything that we’re seeing in our market right now. I got some good charts to share here today as well for what we’re watching. Uh, we’ll also dive into a little bit of the latest earnings and really highlighting what we’re going to see tomorrow. Uh, you know, the much anticipated— as is with every quarter, uh, NVIDIA earnings. They always report near the end of, uh, uh, the reporting period. As you know, we’re just a month away now from starting Q2.

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Uh, then of course we’ll look at some potentials for tonight’s State of the Union. Um, you know, can— Trump has now wrapped up one full year in office and, uh He’s got a lot to cover tonight for sure. A lot of stuff that people want him to talk about. I’m sure a lot of stuff that he would like to talk about and kind of put his own spin on, uh, versus what most people see in, you know, the mainstream media. I’ll get to that here more in a little bit. But again, good— great podcast here for you today. All-time highs, um, and we’ll touch on, uh, some really good stuff we’re seeing from our internals, our sectors, and and of course our VRA commodity watch as well. So let’s go ahead and start jumping right in here.

Uh, but it— you know, again, I have to come back to it. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but Kip and I do have a long-running joke, really from the origination of this podcast, that, uh, he would get the up days and I would get the really, you know, worst of the worst down days. Um, you know, I got, uh, I believe, you know, the 2018— we’ve talked about this Christmas from hell that Jay Powell engineered. I got that day in there. I got a lot of the COVID days, uh, the down ones, not the, the bounce backs up to the upside either. Uh, so for a while, you know, we would always joke that it’s such a repeatable pattern that we’re really— you know, it’s, uh, it’s negligent of us not to be placing trades based off of this because it’s just worked too many times. So Kip, if you bought puts yesterday at the close You know, after a day in the red and knowing that it was going to be my podcast today, I probably would have been a really smart decision, uh, statistically speaking, but, uh, didn’t pay off too well today. So sorry about that one.

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Um, and it has been a little bit of a weird pattern lately. Uh, you know, Kip got a down day yesterday, I got an up day to finish off the week last week. The day before that was also down, uh, for Kip’s podcast. So we’ve changed up the schedule a little bit here, and you know, hey, I gotta say, I, I don’t mind it. Um, I’d love to continue to keep, keep getting some updates, uh, but you know, with what we see coming not only for this market, before the US economy, for the global economy, you know, we think there’s going to be a whole lot more green days coming in our future for both of us. So you know, that helps to think about on days where you get a down day or you check your portfolio and it’s not maybe what you expected or hoped for, um, or you took a hit somewhere that, you know, maybe you were about to place that trade and close it, uh, or you didn’t buy a trade, right? And it goes up significantly on you. Now you’ve got to buy it higher. All those things happen in this game.

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Um, it is one factor that I think my background in playing baseball has helped me in trading. Uh, you know, they talk about it often in baseball. If you, uh, you know, if you get— if you go 3 for 10, you’re, you’re one of the greatest to ever do it. You’re a fantastic player, right? You go 4 for 10, you hadn’t been done since Ted Williams. Uh, uh, you know, you’re a legend. You’re the greatest to ever do it. And that’s, you know, so meaning you’re going to fail 60 to 70% of the time. Uh, so from a learning point of view and kind of character-building point of view for especially for, you know, someone growing up, uh, it really gets you comfortable, uh, forces you really to be comfortable with failure.

Because again, even in the best case scenarios, uh, you’re still losing 60 to 70% of the time. Now obviously, if you did that in investing, it wouldn’t feel too good, right? Uh, but there are ways even with that, that if you could lose 60% of the time and still make money in the market if you use the right stop losses, right? If you take profits where you should, if you listen to your system— in our case, the VRA investing system, um, you know. But the, the— it does ring similarly true to investing as with baseball, um, you know. You look at some of the greatest to do it of all time, and, uh, yeah, a lot of them might only have, you know, a few losing years in their track record and some incredible returns to show for it, um, But I could guarantee you, you go back and look at even some of their best years, I’d be surprised if anyone got over 60% winners. You know, there’s a whole lot of people out there that are about 45% winners on trades, even less, and you would recognize their names. They’re phenomenal traders. Again, it’s about discipline, uh, you know, cutting your losses, uh, early when you can and holding on to those gains along the way. And we’re in an environment like that right now, especially to the upside, where It does feel great to take some profits when you’re hitting all-time highs on a day like today, uh, you know, but then you look down a year down the road and you’re kicking yourself because the rally just kept going for another year.

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Um, again, it’s tough when you bring emotions into that game, but that’s why we have the VRA Investing System to help us remove those emotions from our investing, from our trading strategy, um, and overall from our research even as well. It is You know, especially in today’s day and age with so much data out there, you know, it’s not that hard to find an argument one way or another. It’s why, uh, there’s so many perma bears out there because all of the things they talk about are real risks. They’re just, uh, overweighting the potential that those things are going to happen is what I would say. I’m underweight those kinds of things. And how do you reflect that in a money-making kind of way? It means your long stocks. Um, and again, not to mean that I’m Pollyanna-ish, you know, um, that everything’s just peachy out there. Um, but at the end of the day, um, I discount some of those risks in the market, and they’re acceptable risks, right? You weigh them, you take a look at it, you’ve got to use experience up against those things, um, to tell really where we’re headed next.

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And for all of the, the factors that Kip and I lay out out here on our podcast, um, that we remain bullish, right? There’s still the main three, uh, you know, the Trump economic miracle 2.0, which we’ll hear some tonight, right, from the State of the Union. So I’ll touch on that here quickly as well. Um, the innovation revolution meets roaring 2020s. Uh, then of course this ocean of liquidity that is out there right now in this market. We just saw global money supply hit an all-time high this week. M2 money supply, uh, when we get the next reading back, I’m sure it’ll be at an all-time high as well after growing, you know, over 4.5% in 2025. I don’t hear a whole lot of people talking about that anymore, but it’s essential to remember if you have a money market account, you know, even let’s say you’re earning 3, 3.5%, maybe even 4%, right? But they printed 4.5% last year. So even if inflation wasn’t above 4.5%, on paper you’re still losing half a percent, right? It looks like gains, and you know, $100,000 will turn into $104,000 because of that, but your purchasing power will actually be roughly $96,000.

You’re actually gonna— uh, it’d be closer to $99,000 in that case after just— because it’s only one year. But imagine that on a 10, 15, 20, 30-year time horizon, right? That’s significant gains that you’re missing out on. So it doesn’t mean that you should rush to get all of your money out of my money market account today, uh, but you should start making plans to do so and moving pieces of it at a time. As we talk about, for anybody who’s a newer investor as well, if you’ve got some cash just, you know, sitting in your bank and you just heard about us, you tuned into the podcast for the first time today, resist the temptation to put all of that money to work at one time in the very first day that you’re in there. Make a plan., right, for dollar cost averaging. And, uh, you know, maybe the first few months you do a little bit more because you are just kind of getting started in it. But, you know, whatever stocks that you pick to get started with, every month, you know, make it the same day of every month. Don’t even look at the price, just keep buying some more of your favorite companies out there.

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Um, uh, we talk about all of our favorites here every day at the VRA, and we’ve got a 14-day free trial going on, so You got nothing to lose there. Come and join us for 14 days free at vraletter.com. You’ll also find our podcasts and everything that we have to offer there as well. Um, all right, changing gears here a little bit, uh, like I did a second ago to the State of the Union, uh, you know, for tonight. Um, I did kind of touch on a similar topic here on my podcast Friday. Kip covered it yesterday as well, so I’ll kind of make it quick here. Uh, but I’m really looking forward to the most and expect to hear the most about, um, is the optimism of where we’re headed in this country right now. Of course, we’ve got problems that we’ve got to address, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of those that he addresses tonight.

But the mission at the end of the day— nothing’s changed, right? We’re trying to make America the best that it can possibly be. Make America great again. Um, and we’re getting out of the mindset that we’ve had from previous administrations. That is, you know, you should expect less. You should— you’re going to be eating bugs, right? You’re going to get a social credit score. Um, you’re going to have surveillance on every street corner. You know, the Europe model, what we’re seeing there. We’re going to import as many people, uh, regardless of what you think about it.

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Um, you know, we’re going to take— continue to take away parental rights and give those rights to the state, you know, because these are all of our— they’re not your kids, they’re all of our kids. All of that way of thinking, I think, is behind us to a point where it’s irrevocable at this point. The pendulum’s going so, so far to the left that, you know, there’s really not much that they could do to stop it from swinging back to the right now, you know. The— as much as, uh, I am a centrist, uh, you know, the, the lunacy from the left just got to be too much over the years. So, you know, we expect a message of optimism from that point, you know, highlighting, you know, his first year in office, or, you know, second term, first year in office, and the victories there, uh, whether it’s from economic victories, which we’ve absolutely seen. And, you know, anybody who debates against that, you really should dive into these numbers from, from an economic point of view, like GDP, to jobs point of view. Um, you know, while we haven’t seen some outstanding, just blow your socks off kind of numbers, look at where the jobs are coming from versus the previous administration. Okay, so first, yeah, jobs, jobs now being created by the private sector, by tech companies, um, industrials, bringing back U.S.

manufacturing here versus the previous administration Every time you check the jobs report, they’d focus on the headline number. Then you dive into it and you see, oh, it’s only government sector jobs and hospitality. Okay, that’s all that got created this month. Services sector, great, you know, tourism, you know, people are traveling, it means they have money to spend. Sure, that’s fine, but those aren’t the high-paying jobs that people are, you know, leaving their current workplace to— for greener pastures, you know. That’s— they’re working 2 to 3 jobs to make ends meet, and they’re counting, you know, your 2 part-time jobs as 2 jobs in the number to help benefit, you know, the way that the economy looks on paper for the Dems. Um, so again, great to have private sector growth coming back as opposed to solely public sector growth. And we’ve seen the same thing from jobs as we see in economic output as well.

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I shared this recently on the Fed’s GDPNow, uh, indicators that because of the government shutdown in Q4, you know, the government growth obviously was a knock on their Q4 GDP numbers. They say it brought it down by 120 basis points, okay, 1.2%. Certainly not nothing, but we still had a positive number. There’s no way you could have a negative print under the Biden administration and still had a positive GDP number. It would have been very hard at the time. Um, You know, so again, highlighting his wins from his first year and the optimism going forward that America’s best days are ahead of us. And of course, there’s a lot of speculation about what he’ll talk about. I won’t dive into too much of it here today.

One thing that, uh, we would love to hear about is a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. Love the Trump Bucks, or whatever it’s called, that kids, uh, you know, born in the last year and, and for the next few years will receive you know, $1,000 in their name in a market account that they’ll have access to at 18, and all the other things for kids who are like under the age of 10 who still get a portion of that. You know, this is what we should have been doing for decades in this country, uh, because there’s so much wealth that’s been created in this country. Look at a tiny country like Norway, okay, uh, where— I mean, they’re nowhere even near us on the map— excuse me, in terms of GDP, maybe GDP per capita, um, but, uh, you know, not overall GDP. I mean, there’s only 5.5— roughly 5.5 million people in Norway, but their sovereign wealth fund now exceeds $2 trillion in assets. That’s over $340,000 for every Norwegian in assets, okay? Whereas here in the US, we, we have debt. We’re born into debt, right? Um, Those funds are then used to take care of their citizens.

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It funds retirement accounts, it funds social services. And now, I’m a free market guy, as opposed to, you know, especially on the healthcare side, the government has done to it has been awful, okay? I’m not trying to compare a 5.5 million person economy to us, right? But point being, their largest holdings in that portfolio are all American. It’s Apple, it’s NVIDIA, it’s Microsoft. So in some ways, the Norwegian people have made more money off of our own companies than most Americans have. By and large, most Americans have, right? Uh, because our government didn’t do anything to help us out in that regard. Um, so, you know, again, big— I, I prefer the free markets, but to get the government involved in a way like that, I, I would support something like that. Um, that should make people really angry even to think about that our government could have been participating in the upside of the free market that we created as a country. But instead, you know, we’ve been sitting on the sidelines buying mortgage-backed securities at the Fed, right, increasing their balance sheet that way, as opposed to starting a sovereign wealth fund, you know.

And whereas in our environment, for things like healthcare and the Social Security net to pay for more things, you got to raise taxes. Their sovereign wealth fund in Norway helps pay for all of those things as opposed to taxes. So would love to see something like that mentioned tonight. But overall, you know, uh, with everything going on right now, should be a lot of fireworks. Wouldn’t be— I wouldn’t expect anything less from President Trump. He is a great showman at the end of the day. All right, then tomorrow, um, you know, obviously after the State of the Union, all eyes will be on NVIDIA, uh, after the close, you know, we’ve got, uh, their earnings coming out. Of course, phenomenal earnings expected.

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And as the largest company in the world, you would expect all eyes to be on NVIDIA. But how many times have we seen this story since the Deepseek moment, right? Less than— I mean, maybe right at 3 years ago or so now. Or sorry, I said Deepseek, ChatGPT moment, okay? When ChatGPT came out and they were going to have to use all these NVIDIA semiconductors, and NVIDIA blew away earnings. And that was, you know, really a game-changing moment, not only for the semiconductors but the tech space as a whole, to really kind of kick off this innovation revolution in a lot of ways. And along the way, how many times have we seen the market amidst, you know, a 3, maybe 5% pullback— and NVIDIA’s earnings are coming up and there’s a lot riding on this, you know, can they do it here, uh, how many times have we seen Nvidia’s earnings be the catalyst for changing the pessimistic narrative, right? Going into their earnings, all these other companies, yeah, they’re beating, but growth is going to slow, or this is going to happen, or that’s going to happen. For the last 3 years, again, not just one last quarter or anything, for the last 3 years. And then Nvidia comes up and can they do it again? They probably can’t do it again. And then boom, they crush earnings, uh, and then jinsen wang gets out there and, you know, gives a show-stopping, uh, uh, earnings report and probably keynotes an address at some event and talks about a technology that no one’s ever thought of before.

Um, you know, one day that will come to an end. I don’t think it’s going to be tomorrow. I think there’s just too much exciting stuff on the horizon right now, and there’s really too many bears out there. Uh, let’s talk about sentiment here for a second because we’ve just, you know, all-time highs today. Advanced decline line from our internals, all-time high today. Um, and yet we’re still seeing, you know, extreme fear— not quite extreme fear, but definitely pessimism from our major, uh, sentiment indicators, right? We just saw more bears than bulls for the first time in months for the AAII. Fear and Greed Index remains in fear here as well. Um, You know, so it’s quite the divergence where you have not only all-time highs on the hood with the semis, but under the hood as well.

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More stocks advancing than declining. You’re seeing the equal-weight S&P 500 starting to participate. We’ve done all of these highs without the Magnificent Seven names coming in, and now people are getting bearish. No, no, I, I don’t think that that’s going to be the end of this bull market. And again, if it was, it’d be the most boring bubble, like people have called it, that the market has ever seen, especially compared to the dot-com era. We rallied 585% on the NASDAQ during that time. So far we’re up less than— I mean, right at maybe 130% from the 2022 bear market lows. So that’s how much, you know, of a parabolic move we have to look forward to, and we think that we’ll get.

Um, I feel like I had one more note here on the sentiment factor. Um, you know, again, just an interesting divergence to see the under the hood— all the things that people were complaining about not seeing last year. They were bearish because it was only 7 stocks and, uh, you know, uh, it wasn’t broad enough of a rally for them. Now the rally is broadening and, uh, no, this is the bubble peaking. You know, it’s always— if it’s not one thing and it’s another, um where I think I kind of left off on a point maybe about 5 minutes ago, honestly. Um, that, that’s why the perma bears do sound so smart though. It’s such well-researched information. It makes so much sense.

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Uh, but again, they, they overweight the worst case scenario. All right, to our markets on the day for today. A little rocky out of the gate this morning, but that didn’t last long. We finished higher across the board, near the highs of the day. And exactly what you want to see, the semis leading the way higher. But first, for our major indexes, small caps led the way up 1.2%. After that, we had the NASDAQ up over 1% on the day today. But again, nothing compared to the semis.

And this is a chart we key off of a lot here, SMH to SPY. Once again here today, breaking out to another high. When we’re seeing all-time highs from this indicator, you do not want to be short stocks. Uh, so semis up, I believe, 1.5% on the day today, finishing right in that range. Yes, 1.5% on the day today for the semis. So really good to see— you know, we love small caps here as well. So great to see tech leading and semis leading tech. Next up, we had the S&P 500 up 0.77% on the day today.

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Uh, while it is a little bit off of its all-time high, I mean, we have the Equal Weight just points away from an all-time high right now. Again, very good to see. After that, the Dow Jones also up about 3/4 of 1% on the day. Um, all right, we’ll start to wrap it up here a little bit. I got a few more charts I do want to share with you before we check out, but the internals on the day— again, I believe it was another all-time high from the NYSE advanced decline line here. Coming in not quite 2 to 1 positive there, but over 2 to 1 positive on the NASDAQ Advance/Decline today. 52-week highs and lows came in positive on the NYSE, just about right even on the NASDAQ today, uh, and then finally here, volume, you know, good numbers here today. Uh, looks like I got a little refresh of my screens after the close, uh, looking like right in the range to 70 to 75%.

Upside volume. Very good to see. All right, our sectors on the day coming in with 9 out of our 11 sectors higher on the day. We were led by consumer discretionary, uh, followed by industrials. Materials were up there as well. Really, so many of these sectors are right at their all-time highs. Didn’t quite get to those levels today, but you know what did? Utilities. Utilities did hit an all-time high today.

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Uh, I mean, that’d be a great sector to see you know, some creative disruption with new energy, uh, you know, technologies coming out, you know, get rid of some, some of those burdensome regulations because that sector as a whole, you know, is, uh, like a cruise ship going, you know, it’s not making any turns quick. Um, so we can kind of, you know, take off the governors and let it get to work. That’d be awesome. Our laggards on the day healthcare, uh, and then energy, which actually did hit an all-time high yesterday for energy. Um, so no worries there. One more chart I do want to share here is for the financials. Let’s just— I’ll go ahead and pull it up and we’ll talk about it. I actually did finish higher on the day, but earlier in the session, you know, hit its lowest level since June of last year.

You know, Kib and I talk about this one here a lot, that we don’t have any love for the financials, no position here. But you do want to see it participate as part of a healthy bull market. And right now, you know, it would be great to see this be a double bottom. You see the support levels over here. This is a 2-year chart, by the way, uh, which I wanted to zoom out to show you, you know, over the long term, still a nice series of higher highs and higher lows. But we do want to see this hold here and get back above the 200-day moving average, uh, because a lot of people, you know, conflate the financials as a broad sector as kind of like, you know, they’re looking for what J— uh, Jamie Dimon was talking about, okay, the cockroaches, uh, in the financial markets that he said so much about that we’re gonna have to get to the bottom of and figure out. Well, you’re typically not gonna see those impacting XLF as much, right? It’s just too massive. It’s all the really big banks, and if they have a problem, you know, they’re getting a bailout anyway.

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Where you want to look for cracks actually is in the regional banks— and even, you know, there’s more sectors you can go to beyond this as well. But quickly here, before I leave the financials, good to see them reverse those losses from earlier in the session and finish up on the day. But when you start to see the regional banks underperforming, you know, that’s when you start to, to look at and say, all right, you know, uh, maybe there’s something here I need to be paying attention to. They can be kind of the canaries in the coal mine, if you will, you know. More of a warning than that is— than an absolute alert. Uh, but look, we’re just not seeing worrisome action. This is another 2-year chart here. You know, again, we saw XLF below these major moving averages.

We’re just off of all-time highs here, you know, just, uh, you know, 10 sessions ago or so in this market, and above all the major moving averages. So again, no love here for the financials for us, but I wanted to point that out uh, just to ease any fears out there possibly. You know, uh, you can see a lot in these charts, right? You know, tariff mania lows over here, uh, you know, Trump inauguration excitement over here. Uh, you know, they say a picture’s worth a thousand words. I think the same is really pretty true of a chart. Um, all right, just quickly here for the financials too. Yields were higher on the day. We do want to see those continue their moves lower.

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Uh, but finally here, let’s get to our, uh, commodities for the day and we’ll wrap it up. Uh, we said gold now at $5,153 an ounce, but I mean, at one point today it was down as much as $130 an ounce. Uh, so basically to make it all the way back to even is pretty good to see here. Uh, and on a day with gold lower like it was, again, low, uh much lower earlier in the day. Good to see the miners finishing positive here on the day, up nearly 0.4%. And one more chart for you here that, uh, similar— you know, you want to see semis leading tech, right? You want to see the miners leading gold as well. Same for energy stocks leading the commodities, which we’ve seen that as well. But, uh, you know, look at this outperformance here.

We want to see that continue. But we think this chart looks great. Uh, for the sector as a whole. Another one that looks great on the chart right now, silver, now at $86.87 an ounce. Uh, and finally here for today, copper, now just below $6 a pound. Oil at $66 a pound. And I’m running a little bit short on time here today, but Bitcoin, you know, kind of retesting those, those lows. Let’s see if we can get a double bottom there.

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One thing that we did like to see is that Michael Saylor’s company— you may be familiar— MicroStrategy has been absolutely decimated with this latest Bitcoin sell-off. And a lot of worries out there, you know, uh, we’ll have to just wait and see if Michael Saylor can pull another rabbit out of the hat as he has done so many times before when the naysayers really ruled him out. And now he has the most short company in the world. Short interest for MicroStrategy is now at 53%. You know, one key factor here as a contrarian, you know, when you see signs like that, it’s not typically of a bottom— of a typical— of a market that has peaked and has got a lot lower to go, right? That’s the kind of action that you see near a bottom, actually, in the reversal to the upside. Uh, so we’ll see, you know, uh Like I said, Michael Saylor, um, has made fools out of a lot of naysayers over the years, but they’re looking to be right in the short term here. Um, but the market does love to fool as many people as possible. Now you’ve got the majority on the short interest side.

You know, one day there will become— so there’ll be a problem where there’s no one left that’s more bearish than they are out there. Um, so this is really looking like it has the potential for a short squeeze kind of move higher. Let’s see if we can get it, folks. That’s all we have time for here today. Please be sure to subscribe to receive our podcast every day at the market close. You can sign up at vraletter.com, click the podcast link at the top, and we’d love to have you with us. Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time, we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.