What's up, Apes? I hope everybody had a phenomenal Tuesday here. I know that the Bank of Japan did because they officially kicked a bucket on negative interest rates. And that means every interest rate in the world right now is officially positive for the first time and way too long as well, so we'll be diving into that in just a quick second. Of course, we get some major stock moves in the day Bitcoin took an absolute dive, so we'll be talking about that in just a quick second and how it impacted a lot of the digital currency stocks that typically trade alongside Bitcoin's price action.

And we got some acquisition announcements as well in the biotech pharmaceutical industry. We are kicking cancer's ass or at least trying our best to. And hopefully that goes well there too. Hopefully it goes good for shareholders as well. Then, of course, we'll finish up. You guys might have heard a little something about the NAR, the National Association of Realtors. they are going to be paying out a fat check to a lot of home sellers across the United States over the next four years. Welcome to the Daily Peel's video stream of the day. It is currently 7.17 p.m. on this beautiful Tuesday, March 19, 2024. Welcome to the Daily Peel Global Headquarters. My name is David. Let's go ahead and get into it. So first and foremost, we've got to look at the market snapshot on the day. Solid day for the WSO alpha portfolio once again. I'm never going to be mad at a 35 basis points rise, but it's hard to be too excited about it when the S&P rose 56 basis points at the same time, but we did underperform the NASDAQ just barely as well. The NASDAQ grows about 39 basis points. So two days in a row underperformance, I mean, I'm surprised I haven't been fired already, but that's a situation that we're dealing with us right now. You know, we'll see what happens going forward, but a big reason for that is something that we're going to talk about in just a quick second, and that's the continual dive that Bitcoin prices have seen over the past week or so. I mean, they hit all-time highs. They crossed that $70,000, crossed even the $72,000 mark. And then it's been nothing but downhill since then, at least according to the price chart that I'm looking at right here. So we'll be getting into that just a quick second. But that definitely detracted from the alpha portfolio on the day.

You know, it's a small percentage, but it's a big fall. So it means a lot, even though it doesn't really mean a whole lot to the portfolio value in total. All right, let's go ahead and get into some of the banana bits of the day here for you guys. So the Federal Reserve is meeting tomorrow or today, depending on when you're watching this, J-Pow, the Silver Fox himself,

is going to come out at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, spit some game about interest rates, probably make my head explode and trying to read through all of his quotes, understand all the Fed speak that's going on right there, but you know that we'll be summarizing all that bullshit for you guys on Thursday morning, so definitely stay tuned for that. Guys, March Madness tipped off today.

I know that you guys are a bunch of gambling degenreants, just like myself and everybody else that I know. They are estimating about $2.7 billion is going to be run on just legal bets alone during this year's tournament. Keep in mind, guys, this tournament is less than a month long. It's about three weeks in total. It's called March Madness. It's actually going to finish up in April because a lot of people have difficulty counting things and labeling things properly. But like I said, 2.7 billion is expected to run on these games, and that's just illegal bets. If anybody's looking to place anything illegally hit me up, you know where you can find my book. Then we got Microsoft. They're drudging up some old trickery in

Silicon Valley poaching players from Google's deep mind team. I mean, hey, that's the name of the game.

Google definitely is not going to be too happy about it, especially given that their artificial

intelligence can't really determine if George Washington was white or black and other very basic

mistakes like that. Probably not a good side to have some of their most important people starting to flee. But nonetheless, Microsoft managed to scoop them up. We really started to dominate the game right now. Then, of course, we didn't think it was possible, but equity sentiment is getting even higher, judging why this Goldman Sachs indicator, be sure to check that out right there, because this could be getting into the territory where it's starting to be contrarian and that we're all a little bit too excited on equity markets going forward.

And you know what happens when we all get too excited?

No result can be anything besides disappointing.

So this could be kind of creating that last shooter drop.

I still have no idea what that phrase means, but the fact that expectations are created so highly, you know, things can still be going well, but not good enough, and that can certainly lead to declines in markets. All right, that's about it for the banana bits. Let's go ahead and get into the big story of the day. Guys, it's officially all over, Epes. The world of negative interest rates has officially ended. Thanks to the Bank of Japan.

Shout out to the Bank of Japan the first time in 12 years that the entire globe doesn't have any one single negative interest rate on it.

Now, I'm sure there is some cartel somewhere that's probably charging a small village negative interest rates.

But in terms of national, actually legal, recognized by the UN kind of interest rates, there are no more negative ones going around anymore.

So let's see what happened Tuesday morning in Japan, which is really Monday morning or afternoon for most of the rest of the world.

I don't really understand time zones too well.

But somewhere around that time period, the Bank of Japan officially raised their key short-term benchmark interest rate from negative territory up to 0% to 0.1%.

No, that is not a joke whatsoever.

That is the actual official rate.

This is the equivalent of their effective federal funds rate.

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