In today's episode, Tyler dives into a packed session, recapping today's turnaround Tuesday in the markets and setting the stage for what could be a bullish finish to the year and an even brighter 2026. He also explores the powerful seasonality tailwinds, the impressive leadership of the semiconductor sector, and fresh forward-looking earnings estimates that paint an optimistic picture for 2026

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 you’re Thanksgiving holiday was fantastic as well. We got a nice turnaround Tuesday here for our markets to the upside today. You know we got a lot to cover here today, so let’s jump right into it.

We’ll cover some of the bullish factors that Kip touched on yesterday as well. Not only for the month of December, but as we head in to what we see is a bullish 2026 as well. We’ll cover some great earnings data for you here. Not backwards looking earnings data either for Q3, but forward looking estimates into 2026 as well. Now that we’re just a little over one week away from the latest Fed decision, getting some more interesting commentary out here about the Federal Reserve as well. The then of course we’ll cover our major market action once again getting semis to lead to the upside today. Exactly what you want to see for from this market. You know, what we’ve seen looking backwards, but what it tells us going forward here as well.

[00:01:36]:
An impressive position that we’ve got here for the semis that you certainly won’t want to miss, man. Yeah, let’s just go ahead and jump right into it here. I really want to start with this earnings data, but first we’ll kick it off with some of the bullish seasonality that we’re seeing in this market right now and then we’ll get to that earnings conversation. This is the chart that Kip talked about here yesterday. What we are now just in day two of here. As Kip said yesterday, the beginning of December can be a little bit choppy. And then we get some nice upside action really beginning today and we saw it from our major indexes today as well. And then we get a little bit of a mid month lull.

And then that holiday shopping spree not only for presents but for stocks as well, propels us into the second half of the month. You know, we think we’ll see that from this market, but hey, it could be a runaway train from here for this market into year end given the pullback that we’ve seen over the last few weeks. Not so much last week obviously, fantastic week from our markets that really propelled the end of November to the point where most of our major indexes actually finished positive on the month of November. After the pullback that we saw from the all time highs at the end of October, you know, weak beginning of November, but we finished it strong. Exactly what we want to see. It was very good to see. Our market certainly needed it. So hey, it could be just back off to the races here in the year end.

[00:03:16]:
We’re hitting some short term overbought readings, but man, on our longer term VRA momentum oscillators, we still got a lot of room to run to the upside before we hit our most oversold, excuse me, most overbought designation, extreme overbought on steroids. We’re just nowhere near those levels now. And remember, you know, we’re in one of the most bullish months in one of, in the most bullish six months of the stock market period. Historically speaking, seasonality is very in our favor right now. That November to the end of April time frame. And then we have sell in May and go away. These old Wall street adages, you know, they’ve been around for a long time for a reason because they do ring true in most years. So love being in this incredibly bullish time frame of the year for stocks where now we get to take a look ahead of what we’re going to expect in 2026.

Now, Kip covered a lot of this on his podcast yesterday. I’ll recap a little bit of it here today. But first and foremost, I’ve got to share this chart with you because it is absolutely incredible. JP Morgan released their earning estimates for 2026. This is now a consensus estimate. So based off all of the analysts, this is what earnings per share growth looks like for 2026. Now, this headline here is very misleading. The 2026 earnings estimates for the MAG7 shoot up S&P 493.

[00:04:56]:
So the other 493 stocks shoot down sounds. Sounds a little scary, doesn’t it? Well, okay, we’ll start with first and foremost. The earnings estimates for MAG7 shoot up over 20% earnings growth on earnings per share growth expected from the Mag 7, the largest companies in the world. That is incredible, incredible growth. But the other 493 are going to shoot down. And again on this chart. Ooh, that looks a little rough, doesn’t it, folks? Read the number though. That is 11.3% earnings growth expected in 2026 from analysts.

That would be amazing growth all by itself. How can 11% growth be a bad thing? That’s when history is really a great guide for us here. When it pays to know your history. Because the average growth rate for the last 10 years in the S&P 500 has been 6 to 7% earnings per share growth. So at 6% that’s almost double the average level of earnings. Again 6 to 7% is the average for the entire S and P. So that’s including the Mag 7. So the other 493 stocks here, they’re doing just fine.

[00:06:20]:
You know. And when you’re seeing 20% potential growth from the seven most important companies in the world and seriously in the world, you know these are the largest market cap companies in the world. They don’t just lead our markets, they lead global markets. You know, it’s, it’s pretty hard to have a major market pullback much less a bubble popping, right? It’s everybody’s scared about right now the AI bubble popping. It’s hard to have a bubble pop when you’re having 20% plus earnings growth. So these are amazing numbers here for our markets. I’ll get into a couple of other key points here in earnings. You’ve heard me talk about these quite a bit as well.

Just have a few more comparisons to make for you. But again hard to have a major pullback and especially a bubble pop at that kind of earnings growth. Now we hear a lot of people talking about, you know, PE ratios though are you know, record high levels maybe in the last few years. But 2021 saw higher P E ratios from the Magnificent 7. Right now the forward looking PE ratio for the Mag 7 is a little elevated at 36.8 times earnings. That’s the forward PE ratio. Now we’ve compared this time period a lot to the 1995-2000.com melt up where the NASDAQ rallied 580%. Well, we’ve got the Mag 7 today.

[00:07:57]:
Back then they were called the Four Horsemen. You had Cisco, Microsoft, Dell and Intel. Only, only Microsoft still in the Mag 7. Now today, you know, intel. Interesting turnaround story to watch for here. Little little soon on that one but will be an interesting turnaround to watch for. Okay, during the dot com era melt up at the peak forward PE ratios were over 80 times or excuse me, PE was 80 times earnings. Okay.

Again today we’re at below 37. Okay. So we’d have to more than double from here to get to the insanity of the dot com era. And again just four years ago in 2021 we’re at a 47.3 so we’re not even near the recent peak. But let me give you even further breakdown here because Cisco was the, at the height of the.com era it was the largest company in the world. It was a 500, nearly 500 billion dollar market cap which is you know, pretty insane to think that today we’ve got over companies over $4 trillion in market cap. But Cisco’s forward P E during that time was over 150. Looking backwards it was actually over 200 at the peak the trailing number was over 200.

[00:09:25]:
So today Nvidia, the world’s largest company, nearly $5 trillion valuation, getting right back to those levels, you know pretty close here to 5 trillion but at the all time high it was 5 trillion. So for comparison Nvidia today for PE44X compared to 150 at the peak of the of the dot com era for Cisco. So Nvidia their price at today’s earnings with no earnings growth, not 20% earnings growth that we’re looking for next year with no earnings growth. Nvidia’s price would have to more than 3x from here to get to the dot com bubble era. Long levels of insanity. How crazy is that to think about, right? We have roughly, you know, 12 to 13 to $14 trillion company here in Nvidia before we reach Cisco’s levels of insanity. So these are very real companies here today that are showing immense levels of growth, exceptional levels of growth for the mega cap names. Right? Again, this is another reason we said this here often.

Kip and I both that if this is a bubble popping that we’re witnessing right now, it would be the most mundane bubble of all time. It’s really a pathetic excuse for a bubble if this is a bubble popping here. But again when you look at 20% earnings growth year over year potential and 11% earnings growth from the rest of the 493 names, that makes it very hard to see a major bear market or a bubble popping as in the cards for this market here. Again, it would be a pathetic excuse of a bubble for multiple reasons here that we’ve talked about these here often too. We’ve yet to see an IPO boom even like we saw in 2019. Right where and Kip talks about this here often that he experienced during the dot com era where companies would go public and be up 100%, up 50 to 100% on their first day of trading and then just shoot off to the races from there. I mean those kinds of companies just aren’t out there right now. We have had a very mild IPO year so far.

[00:11:44]:
We also haven’t had a mergers and acquisition boom. Some sectors have seen that. We’ve seen some M and A deals in gold in the miners, nothing crazy. Same thing in energy stocks. Again, nothing crazy. That’s what we’re going to start looking for as we head forward into really melt up ville for the AI and innovation revolution, folks. Again, we are far from a bubble in our view right now and Kip talked about this yesterday. We’re just seeing the pieces of the puzzle here being put together.

I’ll cover a few of these here, but Kip talked about this one on his podcast yesterday as well. Back to mergers and acquisition, we’re seeing a large potential here to get more M and A as Trump in his changes at the FTC. Roughly, you know, 10 to 1 deregulation, right? For every one regulation that gets passed, 10 have to be done away with. That should help usher in a wave of mergers and acquisitions. Um, you know, really just getting rid of most of the mistakes from the Biden Biden era rulings that really hamstrung these companies from pursuing deals like this. They knew they were going to get caught up in years long review processes to make an acquisition, to do a merger. Those should be streamlined now. They should be encouraged and not vilified.

[00:13:16]:
Getting rid of some of the antitrust rules out there, of course we’ve got to have anti monopoly and antitrust rules, but the way the Biden admin did it was way too restrictive. These can be done far faster, especially in the age of technology. These should be done within days, not months or even potentially years in some cases. So this is just the beginning. A lot of those rules will go into effect starting January 1st. So we aren’t even there yet. Right? Add in the facts that Kip talked about yesterday. So we’re going to see massive pro growth policies going forward because of Trump’s big beautiful bill.

You’re not a fan of a big bill like that, not a fan of the increase in spending. But Trump was never going to be the president of austerity. He wasn’t in his first term. He never claimed to be when he was campaigning. This is about, you know, him and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson’s plan to really print away a lot of the US debt to grow our way out of this, this problem that we have. You know, like it or not, that’s the world that we live in and what it’s what we talk about here so often. It’s why you must own inflationary assets. We just got M2 money supply back last week, growing another 4.6% year over year.

[00:14:36]:
So even if your money market account is growing 4% or so, four and a half percent. Yeah, inflation’s not at that level but that means that you’re barely breaking even on the debasement of your currency. So a few other pro growth policies that we see going forward, slashing corporate tax rates to 15% again unleashing deregulation, getting energy deregulation out there so that we can supply power to these data centers. But on the consumer side, permanent extension of the 2017 tax cuts including a doubling of the child tax credits. No taxes. Or as much as Kip talked about yesterday on Social Security benefits, overtime pay, you know, no tax on tips. There’s another one in there I feel like I’m forgetting. Potential stimulus checks going out.

Not really the same stimulus checks, but maybe on the insurance side. Right, allow put that money in Americans pockets instead of the insurance companies pockets. Let us spend that money the way we would like to spend it, not giving it to the insurance companies. It’s absolutely crazy. Right? All right, so again reducing corporate taxes though on the corporate side here, going to allow for an increase in capex, bigger write offs for these companies, 100% expensing. All of these kinds of things are going to be direct liquidity injections for the market. Adding fuel to the fire. Again, if you’re in a money market account, you, you’re barely keeping up with the debasement of your currency.

So we have to be in stocks while you must own inflationary assets. So that means owning stocks, it means owning precious metals and the miners, it means owning real estate and of course the newest kid on the block, bitcoin as well. So we’ve yet to see the beginning. We’re not even a full year in to Trump’s first term yet or Trump’s second term yet. A lot of these are really going to kick in to high gear as I talked about on Wayne show as Wayne has written about as well, Wayne Root, our good friend here at the vra, as Wayne has written about, we’re expecting massive growth next year from this economy, 5% plus on GDP and will likely be to the low side there. So there’s so many bullish factors here in front of us for this market. Now is the time to be getting positioned. Kip tweeted this out last week that within a few weeks we won’t even remember the pullback that we just saw from the all time highs in late October, the pullback in November.

[00:17:15]:
I mean already we are near bull back to all time highs. So let’s jump in to our market action here. On the day we were led by tech. Exactly what you want to see. Nasdaq up 0.59% on the day today. But even more so what you want to see are semi leading tech over 3 to 1 outperformance here today. SMH was up 1.83% on the day to day. Not far away from from its highs of the day either.

Now we recently bought a leverage a leverage semiconductor ETF three time leverage semiconductor ETF of your members. You know what it is. If you’re not a member, why not come and join us? We’ve got a two free week trial going on right now and some exciting gear and offers that you’ll want to see as well. If you come and join us for two free weeks@vra letter.com we’re up a big over 33% in that position right now because the semis they lead to the upside and they lead to the downside from that pullback. We’re down as much as 15% from their all time highs as of today. That number is now just three and a half percent away from all time highs. That’s a massive rally we’ve seen in just the last couple of weeks from the semis and we think it bodes well for the future, not just for tech stocks but for the market as a whole. But we do want to continue to see the semis leading or tech leading the market in semis leading tech.

[00:18:47]:
All right, next up here we had the Dow Jones up just less than 4. 10 of 1% followed by the S&P 500 up a quarter of 1%. And then finally we did have the small caps are one index to finish negative on the day but not by much here down 2. 10 of 1%. It’s also been an impressive rally off of the lows here. And what has been a little surprising about this rally here, I’m gonna pull this chart up because I think you like seeing it. We cover this one here often. I know, but man, on a day like today we just got to cover it here for you.

Let me pull this up. All right. I think many of you probably know what I’m going with here. Yes, the fear and greed index. As I said we, we were right back in the range of all time highs after the pullback that we got. The shakeout that we got really the shakeout of weak hands there. S&P 500 now just 1.3% away from an all time high semis after being down 15% 3 1/2% away from its all time high. NASDAQ 2 1/2% away from an all time high.

And dow Jones just 2% less than 2% away from its all time high. And the fear and greed index still in extreme fear mode. We briefly, very briefly earlier today got into fear mode before we fell back. You know, we got a bit of a midday lull from our markets today. And again, semis rallied back to finish almost at their highs of the day today. And still just extreme levels of fear. Again, folks, not the sign of a market top. The signs of a market top will be when we see a pullback like we got in November.

[00:20:30]:
And that indication remains at greed to extreme greed even. And everyone out there is saying, buy the dip. Not when everybody’s saying, oh, it’s an AI bubble popping. That’s just the question we’ve gotten so much of. And me personally as well, you know, I’ve talked about this here before. You know, at other market tops. I’m getting calls from friends that are like, hey, I just bought this stock. What do you think? It’s not, hey, should I buy this stock? No, no, they’ve already done it, right? And they just want to, they want confirmation on it now on this pullback.

It’s, hey, I just sold all my stocks. I did. I just sold my largest positions. You think that this is a bubble popping, right? You’re seeing the same thing. They’re already telling me what they’ve done and not calling them the weak hands here. You know, hey, you never go broke taking profits, right? We look at this as another opportunity, though, to buy the dip. It’s exactly why we have the VRA investing system. After a pullback like this, when everybody’s starting to lose their head, that’s when we’re making purchases.

So why we added this leverage ETF to our portfolio at the time as well. That’s why when we continue to use monthly dollar cost averaging into our favorite positions, not when they’re at extreme overbought levels. When we’ve seen pullbacks like this, it was a perfect time for it. We want to see this rally again continue from here. One other factor that should help this rally I mentioned earlier, we’re now just eight days away from the next Fed meeting. You know, here’s another bullish factor. I just want to make sure I don’t miss any here. One more bullish factor here, that Powell’s term will soon be up.

[00:22:14]:
He should resign now instead of going through this lame duck period. People might remember him a little more positively than we should, but he is certainly has been The Arthur Burns of my generation, if you don’t know who that is, he was the Fed chair before Paul Volcker, who, when Paul Volcker had to come in, raised rates incredibly and saved the day for the US Economy. It was really not looked at favorably at first when he was doing that, but he stopped inflation and Arthur Burns is looked at as the guy who caused it because of failed policies cutting rates too early. Anyway, I won’t dive into a history lesson here today, but check this out with Kevin Hassett looking like he’s going to be the next Fed chair. We’ll find out for sure early next year. Trump just said he’d make his announcement early next year. We’re now at an 89% chance here to 10% of the Fed cutting rates. Look, look how much this has changed.

If you can see this here up a little bit from one day ago, but just a month ago, I mean, we had flip flop back and forth. Take a look at Poly Market, right? The actual betting markets where people are taking bets. What is this? Not that long ago it didn’t give me a. Oh, there we go. Okay, so November 17th, we were crisscrossing that it was really 50, 50 at that point just a couple weeks ago. Now look at this massive divergence that we’ve seen. 92% on the betting market that will get a cut in December and he absolutely should. We’ll see what we get into the first FOMC meeting of next year.

Of course, again, that will be really entering. Jay Powell is already in the lame duck era right now, but then we’ll really be in the home stretch of getting him out of the market or getting him out of the Fed. That’ll be a nice day there, man. I’ve been skipping around here a little bit today, but before I move on to our internals in our sectors, I do want to go back to semis and tech here really quickly. Again, you want to see the semis leading tech is exactly what we’ve seen. Do you want to see the semis leading the market as a whole? Look at this trend line again, this was another indication for us here that we wanted to add that semiconductor position every time that we’ve come off this trend line from the April lows has been a fantastic buying opportunity. Look at right at the beginning say became an important support level there. And once again, we’ve been straight up from that level now.

[00:24:49]:
Exactly what you want to see. And we’re seeing similar aspects here from the gold miners to gold as well. Also what you Want to see from that group. All right, so quickly here I’ll start to wrap up on the day today. Sorry for jumping around a little bit there but again nice to have a turnaround Tuesday into what we expect to be should be a good next few days here for the market. Now the internals, we would have liked to have seen better numbers here today. They were slightly positive or at least more positive than they finished earlier in the session. But advanced decline did come in with more declining stocks than advancing stocks today.

Of course the the Mag seven doing well today helped out quite a bit but no 2 to 1 beats or anything like that. Very slightly negative for advanced decline. 52e highs and lows did come in positive on the S&P 500 did come in negative again just slightly though on the Nasdaq. Improved into the close there. Then finally here volume again no big beats here but did come in negative on the nyse. And I mean close enough to call it flat really though on the Nasdaq but not what you want to see on a day like today where we have the semis leading the markets finishing, you know not quite back to the highs of the morning but well off the midday lull of the day. I mean really we were closer to the highs of the day today where we finished. So as far as chart action goes, good day from the markets for the internals.

[00:26:26]:
Would have liked to have seen a little bit better of action. Maybe that’s a little skepticism from this market right now from market watchers about this move higher again. I told you though how close we are to all time highs. We want to get back to those levels here pretty quickly and it’s been an impressive run from from the lows here and we’ve got some good stuff coming our way as we head into again we are in this seasonally extremely bullish time of the year for the market. All right. So looking at our leadership on the day to day, we actually were led by the industrials on the day. Just barely beat out tech there at the close follow there though buy technology up over 8/10 of 1% and then communication services essentially a proxy for tech energy lower on the day today. I’ll get to oil here in a little bit.

Was surprised. Well I won’t get into that here today. But then followed by materials and utilities. We did see yields lower today. We want to see that level break below 4 though. We’re at a 4.08 so not far from it right now but the 10 year yield down a quarter of 1% today. All right, finally here for today, we did get a little bit of pullback in commodities. Gold actually now slightly higher, really flat and after hours trading at $4,238 an ounce.

[00:27:51]:
That brings me to my final chart here on the day to day that I mentioned earlier is GDX to gld. You see that? All right, let me zoom out just a hair there. Similar deal to what we’re seeing from the semis. Each time we’ve gotten back to this trend line, it’s been a phenomenal move higher from there in the miners. Exactly what you want to see from this group as well. Semi is leading tech miners, leading gold, energy stocks, leading oil. All of those things are good signs from the markets.

Exactly what we’ve seen here as we do expect it to be a good end of the year. And as the money printer is back on, should be a good year for gold as well. Again, gold now still over $4,200 an ounce. $44,240 an ounce. Silver pulling back a little bit after those all time highs for silver now. Well, let’s see. I mean right in the range still. We’re above $59 an ounce at this moment.

[00:28:57]:
So right in the range of those all time highs. What an incredible run it has been from silver. You’ve heard us talk about that as well. You know, Kip first bought silver in the VRA portfolio in his, I think second ever update in 2003 along with gold. And silver is incredibly undervalued compared to the historical ratio of gold to silver. How much? They usually are multiples of each other there. Silver historically undervalued even at these levels. So silver could be due for a phenomenal move here.

Copper now slightly lower on the day at $5.24 a pound. And then oil as I mentioned. But even at that level here for copper is one of its highest levels from its sell off from mid summer where it got to almost $6 a pound there fell all the way to $4 and 30 cents. But good to see Dr. Copper putting in a series of higher highs and higher lows called Dr. Copper because it goes in just so much of construction. And that tells you we’re building here not only in the US but globally as well. It’s going to be a global bull market.

[00:30:09]:
We said that as well for some time. Finally, oil essentially flat on the day today from after hours trading at 58.69 a barrel. And finally here, Bitcoin having a big move higher on the day. Let’s see if it’s changed much since I started this podcast, but helped out today by Vanguard announcing that their clients will now be able to buy Bitcoin ETFs. We saw massive inflows for Bitcoin ETFs on the session today, I believe. I also saw an headline, so forgive me if I if I misquote this one here, but I did see a headline just before I got on the podcast. I think it was bank of America saying that they would now recommend that their clients put a certain percentage of their recommend their clients put a certain percentage of their portfolio into bitcoin. Wow.

[00:31:05]:
I mean, that’s a pretty, pretty bold statement from one of the largest institutions out there and certainly looks to be bullish for Bitcoin. Q4 is the most bullish quarter of the year for bitcoin. Hasn’t been acting that way so far in Q4. I think I have to double check the numbers on it, but Kip and I talked about it a lot earlier. Roughly 45% gains on average from bitcoin in this course. That would have to be an incredible run from here, but hey, let’s see if we can finish the year strong for bitcoin as well. We do remain bullish on it here. So folks, that is all that I have time for here today.

Please be sure to subscribe to receive the the 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 we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the close.