In this insightful episode of Best Stocks Now, join Barry Kite as he navigates a seemingly quiet day in the market, touching on significant themes in the economic landscape. With an emphasis on the recent tariff news impacting major sectors such as energy and pharmaceuticals, we explore investor sentiment and the ongoing Brexit concerns. Ev trends also feature prominently, with Tesla taking center stage amid fluctuating international markets.
He’s been seen on CNBC, the Fox News Channel, and the Fox Business Channel. His articles can be found on MarketWatch, Seeking Alpha, thestreet.com, and many other places. He’s the author of the weekly Best Stocks Now newsletter and the inventor of the Best Stocks Now app. He’s president of Gundersen Capital Management. Here is professional money manager Bill Gundersen.
SPEAKER 01 :
Good morning and welcome to the Tuesday, March 25th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I’m your host, Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital Management, handling show duties for Bill today while he and Jeff are meeting some of the great folks in Sarasota. I know they got to meet some folks yesterday and have a busy schedule today. So holding down the fort here in Charleston for them today. We’ve got kind of a bit of just a… A bit of a boring day in the market. We’ve got the S&P up just up one point, literally 1.33 points. So we’re technically in the green. We’ve got the Dow down 50 points. That’s only down 0.12%. So basically flat. NASDAQ up 14 points here, so up 0.07%. Get your decimal points ready here. We’ve got crude oil still under that $70 range, up 0.7%. And we’ve got, I guess we’ve got gold, this is the big mover, up $25 today, still above that $3,000 level, up 0.85%. And then we’ve got Bitcoin basically flat right at $87,000. 544. So, well, good morning, and again, welcome to the Tuesday, March 25th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I’m your host, Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital. Sitting in for Bill today, well, I guess, you know, not much going on in the market, at least at the moment, but it was nice to start the week with a solid day for risk assets yesterday. The risk appetite certainly seemed to once again kind of revolve around, certainly revolved around the tariff narrative. I don’t know if anyone else out there is tired of hearing about tariffs, but I wish we’d go ahead and let’s figure this thing out and either get them on or get them off so we can have some clarity on it. But, you know, yesterday the thought was that the tariffs would be, you know, kind of less sweeping, more calculated tariffs. And more kind of exceptions may be made along the way. The trick is what exceptions are those and what industries or sectors are they going to affect the most or least from that aspect. And we’ll look at that a little bit later. But EV stocks certainly fared very well yesterday. Tesla bouncing back pretty significantly. At one point, it was up over 10%. News out of China in terms of adoption of EV vehicles. I know we talked about it towards the end of the show yesterday, but essentially over a 50% penetration there and expected to have roughly, what, I think over 70%, 75% by 2020. 2027. China seems to be pretty gung-ho about getting these EVs out on the road. Tesla certainly benefited from some of that news and just benefited from some investment. Kind of a short squeeze there from Tesla’s bounce back. But, yeah, yesterday you had 10 out of 11 S&P segments trending higher. So that’s a pretty broad-based kind of rally there. News-wise, we’ve got – you had, in terms of giving you some risk appetite there, you had – If you look at Bitcoin yesterday, it rebounded. It was kind of pushing towards that $90,000 level, I think, as we’ve seen in the markets as we get older. you know, some optimism in terms of, you know, the tariffs maybe not being as wide, expansive as thought. You’ve seen kind of, you know, risk return to the market as kind of ebbed and flowed. You certainly saw it in names like MicroStrategy, which were up over, you know, I think it was up over almost 7% yesterday. Coinbase was up over 5.5% yesterday. So you had a lot of those crypto and really risk on names there. And Tesla was one of those driving, no pun intended there, but kind of driving the move higher yesterday. You had, if you don’t realize, the stock was kind of trimmed basically 50% from its 52-week high yesterday. It had nine consecutive weeks of losses. So the move over the last day or two, let’s see what it’s doing at the moment here. We had some other news come out. Down 1.5%, so off a pretty big move yesterday. given a little bit back today, but you’ve got a protest planned for March 29th. He’s obviously still a lightning rod, Tesla’s lightning rod, in terms of sentiment in the market as well. So we’ve got a protest planned for March 29th, actually. Tesla is going to be delivering their Q1 numbers in terms of what their deliveries were for the month. That comes out next week for Q1. And the FBI has actually created a task force to look into these attacks on Tesla dealerships, vandalism. They had a bomb squad, I believe, that had found some different devices at one of the showrooms in Austin. So just a big wad of news around Tesla devices. It doesn’t have to do with cars or automated driving or robots, but there’s a lot of things, different cross-currents around that name certainly at the moment. I thought of Bill this morning when I saw this news. Kathy Wood, who’s still very bullish on Tesla, she still sees the stock hitting, I think it’s $2,600 in five years. So her outlook has not changed for the name. I believe she said that in an interview in the last, I think here, I don’t know if it was this morning or yesterday evening. So she’s still bullish. uh still still a big bull on the name uh you know how you get to 2600 pretty uh um you know i didn’t need her to weigh that out uh for us over the next five years but um she certainly has been a big proponent of it and holds a good bit of the shares uh in her uh in her arc arc funds there uh in terms of uh you know in terms of the market right we had uh And from a technical standpoint, and you certainly can follow that along with that in Bill’s newsletter, in terms of it’s one of the sections I always kind of like the most is the technical indicator section. But it’s one of the first ones after a good bit of the weekly news. But S&P was right there at its 200-day moving average yesterday. I believe it finished just above the 200-day moving average, but it’s one of those periods where whenever you’re bouncing around those kind of support levels, it can create some additional volatility. whether it’s some of this technical trading or some algorithmic trading. When you get to those kind of significant levels or numbers in terms of where support can go either way at that point. But yesterday, it was a good state above it. Right now, markets basically… remain flat. So we should still be on the green side of that 200-day moving average figure. Other action we’ve seen yesterday is, of course, gold continues to be a solid safe haven there above the 3,000 mark. Gold mining ETFs actually just started getting some of their first monthly kind of net inflows in about six months now. So miners eventually, I guess as long as they run the business well and get the gold out of the ground in an efficient manner, certainly a way to play that gold space. currently, particularly with some leverage because they get the gold out of the ground using some leverage and interest as well. Well, we’re just getting started here on the First quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. We’ll get into some what’s going on today in the market. And we’ve got some things on the economic calendar, some Fed speak to get into. But we’ll be right back. Stay with us.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
And welcome back here to the Tuesday, March 25th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I’m Barry Kite, planter and analyst here at Gunderson Capital. Taking the wheel for Bill today as he’s, him and Jeff, meeting with folks. I know we’ve got Edie down there too in Sarasota. uh meeting with uh meeting with some folks uh clients and um and future clients down there so i hope uh i know they’ll have a uh have a good time uh seeing seeing the people out there well i’m not missing much here in terms of uh you know in terms of the market at the moment not many big uh big movers out there we’ve got Let’s see, the Dow is up 9 points. That’s only 0.02% here. We’ve got the S&P up 9 points, up 0.16% here. NASDAQ up 0.22%. And gold, I guess the big winner, up 0.62% today. So not a lot going on, looks like, at least from a volatility standpoint. I think after this quarter, we’re probably okay with not a bunch of volatility. We’ve got this year, I mean, you had a lot of the volatility in the upward direction. Going through to about mid-February, then mid-February the market hit all-time highs and then subsequently corrected down in terms of some names being over 20%, particularly on some of the MAG-7 names, those in the AI space. So today it looks like we’ve got a bit of a quiet market, so we’ll take it. From an economic calendar standpoint, we’ve had a number of Fed speakers this week. One was speaking at 8.40 a.m. this morning. Then we had the New York Federal Reserve President, John Williams. He was speaking at 9.05 this morning. Just got the consumer confidence number out. That came out at 10 a.m. this morning. It was another kind of not great figure here. It looks like consumer confidence came in at 92.9. It was supposed to be around 94.2 was the consensus. We’re at 100.1 in February, marks the fourth straight month of declines. And it kind of falls in that sentiment level where we had consumer sentiment falling, a lot of it due to potential inflation fears or just not knowing what was going to potentially occur with some of the tariffs. or the tariff talk. And then we had the investor sentiment figures were not great either. So we’re in this kind of pessimistic mode, I think, a lot of times. And I’ve said it on the show and said it kind of talking with clients. There’s a lot of the stuff that What we see as headwinds for the economy or bad stuff that gets focused on is all very quantifiable. In other words, you have a certain number of jobs or federal jobs removed. or a certain amount of the budget right was removed we saved this much money those things are very quantifiable and all those things are going to you know have headwinds for the economy but the stuff that is harder to quantify is you know reducing you know regulations or red tape to encourage investment and encourage longer term investment and so the some of the payoff for some of the near-term pain or the quantifiable pain is certainly, you know, going to be harder to quantify down the road. So we’re seeing that, you’re seeing that in a lot of these sentiment surveys where, you know, the confidence or the, sentiment out there isn’t very strong. Optimism isn’t very strong at the moment. Of course, that ebbs and flows over time. We did get some news. Like I said, we had a lot of Fed speak. We had Atlanta Fed President Rafael Bostic. I think he initially had two interest rate cuts for the year, and I think he’s pulled that back. He’s kind of thinking we’re only going to have one. interest rate cut at the Fed this year. That’s really kind of regarding, I think tariff increases may kind of peak inflation up for a period, which… We’ll kind of delay the Fed in terms of lowering rates. We’ll essentially push that back a little bit more into 2027. So it’s interesting to see some of these economic takes in terms of them trying to read the tea leaves as well in terms of where we go, particularly from April 2nd. In terms of the government, we always talk about the debt ceiling. It looks like that is scheduled to be hit sometime around July. Certainly there’s a lot of moving parts there in terms of what cuts potentially are done through Doge or what the tax receipts are in the first part of tax season. Anyways, we’re kind of shaping up for some debt ceiling debate. I’m sure it will be tied to Some of the tax fight or tax bill that will be, you know, it’s going to have to be dealt with here pretty shortly. But we’ve, in terms of some of these, you know, down forecasts, we’ve also had, saw where Vanguard does downgrade some U.S. growth forecasts for 2025. There’s been a couple of large wire houses that have reduced the expected GDP for the U.S. in 2025. And we’ve got, let’s see, Vanguard cut the U.S. economic growth forecast for 2025. It’s going to now, it’s going to be expected, I think they’re Tim, we’re going to come in at 1.7% in 2025. I guess they assumed 2.1% to begin with. So I guess that’s a pretty sizable cut there almost. It looks like about a 20% cut to that figure. So we’ll see. Of course, a lot of that is subject to change, and we’ll talk about some of the – Some of the tariff pieces when we come back in the second part of the show. And we’ll also look under the hood and see if we can find some names moving around here. Not a lot going on in the markets after, I guess, what seems to speak. Seems like it’s been a while since we’ve had a day like this with not much movement, even though we finally got the markets, NASDAQ’s up almost a quarter of a percent here, finally up 44 points at the moment. So we’ll dive in, see if we can find a little action out there. But you’re certainly always welcome. to reach us at GundersenCapital.com. Thankfully, not all the days are as volatile as they have been. But we’ll be back for the second half of the show. That’s the best stocks now.
SPEAKER 05 :
And the boys upstairs just don’t understand anymore. Well, the top brass don’t like him talking so much. And he won’t play what they say to play.
SPEAKER 02 :
This is Bill Gunderson. Thank you for tuning in to today’s Best Stocks Now, Best Inverse Funds Now show. I put several hours of research in during the wee hours of the morning each day to bring you the very best cutting edge stories that I can. To get two free weeks of my newsletter, go to GundersonCapital.com. To talk to us about our fee-based only money management services, call us at 855-611-BEST. Now, back to the second half of the show.
SPEAKER 07 :
And welcome back to the second half of the Tuesday, March 25th edition of the Best Docs Now show.
SPEAKER 01 :
I am Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital. Sitting in for Bill today as he’s down in sunny Sarasota meeting with folks. And, of course, if you ever want to stay up to date with Bill’s thoughts on the market, Get his newsletter at gundersoncapital.com. Or certainly if you’d like to have a discussion about how you’re allocated, your portfolio, feel free to give us a call, 855-611-BEST. That’s 855-611-BEST. 6-1-1-2-3-7-8. Always here to be a resource any way we can. But, yeah, I mean, yesterday certainly we’ve got some green on the scoreboard here today. Markets seem to start picking up a little bit. We’ve got the Dow up 0.2%. We’ve got the S&P 500 up 0.25% and the NASDAQ up. 0.26% at the moment. Bitcoin basically flat on the day, so it doesn’t seem to be a huge risk appetite there. out there at the moment. But certainly yesterday, you had a 2% move in the NASDAQ up. Certainly seemed to be fueled at least partly by tariff talk and kind of a more of a muted kind of stance yesterday at least. So the question is, obviously, none of us really know what what’s going to end up happening with the tariffs. But I guess the question really is kind of what could the impact be. Of course, we’ve got Liberation Day coming on April 2nd. That will have to do with some of the reciprocal tariffs. Trump’s mentioned that he’s got some info coming out here shortly. I think some of this information is going to likely come out leading up to that April 2nd larger announcement. Certain countries may get breaks. Certain industries may get breaks. So we’ll have to see certainly how a lot of that plays out. One that’s already playing out is Trump is going to impose secondary tariffs on Venezuelan oil, which essentially means if some other country purchases Venezuelan oil, then in some form or fashion they’ll be subject to a tariff on something else from the U.S. Crude’s been… You know, a little higher on the news because you’re taking a little bit of supply out of the overall market there. The U.S. imported just under 230,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan crude in 2024. So there’s not a huge amount of U.S. supply that’s going to be – that we’re – that were taking off the market. But China is a very big purchaser of Venezuelan oil. I believe China received just a little over 500,000 barrels a day of crude from Venezuela. So that is going to be potentially subject to some type of secondary tariff. And that will kind of, it can hurt some U.S. refiners. Of course, U.S. refiners were using some of that Venezuelan crude, refining it, also some Canadian and Mexican crude. So refiners have some issues in terms of how these tariffs are going to affect them and their business going forward as well. So that’s on the oil side. We did get a note. We did have the CEO of Airbus essentially express some concerns about the tariffs. First, of course, it would be a burden for both of them, Boeing and Airbus. Of course, Boeing being Airbus’ biggest competitor. Both of those companies would suffer in any type of tariff situation, but the CEO for Airbus mentioned that he thinks Boeing would take the brunt of it. in terms of the most impact, and that’s really because Airbus has some geographically diverse production, so they can kind of work. They have some ways to work around those tariffs a little bit, a little more flexibility there for Airbus versus Boeing. Another discussion I’ve heard, this is one that’s gotten a lot of talk the last few days, just, of course, imposing tariffs, potentially imposing tariffs on the pharmaceutical industry. That’s a tricky one. Obviously, drug costs are something that all Americans and voters are focused on and places that will hit your pocketbook pretty quickly and usually aren’t planning for it there. But that’s a piece because a lot of these active ingredients aren’t manufactured here. I was looking at a breakdown of where a lot of what they call the active ingredients of a particular drug or pharmaceutical, close to half of them are made in India. That’s 48%. You know, Europe, I think, is around 22%. China, 13%. And, you know, really just only about 10% of the active ingredients, at least from 2021, study in 2021, were manufactured in the U.S. So if you’re applying tariffs to China, say the pharmaceutical industry will, you know, essentially 90% of, you know, of the active ingredients in pharmaceuticals that are, you know, that we’re, you know, that America’s consuming will be, you know, potentially affected by some type of pharmaceutical tariff. So, The BC, it’s very interesting in terms of how this all plays out, which industries are affected. We’ve also seen some positive. You’ve seen some positive news on some fronts. You’ve got Northern Dynasty Minerals, symbol there is NAK, had a huge pop yesterday. One of the things they do is they’re a mineral company. Miner and Refiner, they’ve got, I guess, one of the, trying to get drilling rights or trying to get it developed. I think it’s the world’s largest undeveloped copper deposit. It’s in Pebble. I believe that’s in Alaska. But that’s a company that is benefiting from an executive order that Trump signed to boost mineral output. We had Hyundai Steel invest $5.8 billion in the Louisiana steel mill. So that’s an investment into… I think that’s part of a $21 billion investment that Hyundai Steel is going to make into the U.S. I think they’ve got some manufacturing plants. They’re going to build some mills around Alabama. Savannah, Georgia. And we’ve got this 5.8 already going to a mill in Louisiana. And it’s going to essentially, I believe, once it’s online by 2029, we’ll produce 2.7. a million metric tons of steel annually. So that’s bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. in that example. And then there’s other big things. Shell is betting on big LNG being a big additive to their earnings through 2030. I think they’re trying to boost their liquefied natural gas sales by almost 5% annually through 2030. So that’s another, certainly a big player in terms of liquid-fired natural gas and reducing some of the red tape and some of the environmental holdup in some of those types of industries. Last, let’s see, we’ll get, I think we’re getting down towards the end of the segment, but last, it looks like Trump Media is going to partner with crypto.com for uh to make a line of america first etf so look for those those will be uh coming uh coming out soon i believe uh here looks like maybe the next uh a few months or so but we’ll be uh we’ll be right back look under the hood and see if we can find some things moving in the market it’s the best stocks now show
SPEAKER 06 :
You’ve got to go where you want to go. Do what you want to do with whoever you want to be. You’ve got to go where you want to go. Do what you want to do with whoever you want to be.
SPEAKER 01 :
And welcome back to the March 25th edition of the Best Docs Now show. Last segment here. Of course, if you’d like to stay up to date with our thoughts, Bill’s thoughts on the market, you’re always welcome to sign up for the newsletter. We’ve got four weeks of Bill’s live trading emails that you’ll get during that trial. You’re always welcome to go to GundersenCapital.com. Or feel free to give Edie a call here, 855-611-BEST. That’s 855-611-2378. Well, the good news is everything here, everything on the screen is green at the moment. We’ve got the Dow up 0.2%. S&P up 0.31, NASDAQ up 0.47%. So everything, even Bitcoin up 0.16 at the moment. So a little life in the market. It looks like it’s certainly a little least of life towards the green end here. Not a lot going under the hood in terms of the market. It seems like we’ve been getting a lot of, we talked about it at the end of the show yesterday, but getting a lot of, you know, EV news in the last few days. It looks like Waymo, that’s Google’s self-driving vehicle unit, is going to be targeting cars. I guess Washington, D.C. in 2026. So we’ll have, I guess, self-driving cars coming to the district. It says here, formalize the regulations needed to operate without a human behind the wheel. in the district. So that’s in the making there. The company, you know, Waymo has been pushing, they’ve got expansion and they’ve been in the Bay Area for a while, but also to Atlanta and Miami. And of course, you’ve got, you know, Tesla launching a robo-taxi and uh austin and california uh within i think within this year and then amazon you’ve got uh what zooks i think it’s zoox uh they’re testing uh robo taxis in san francisco uh and uh and on the vegas strip so and looks like uh getting closer and closer to uh to seeing a robo taxi near you um Feel free to fire us some pictures when you come across one of those things, as Bill calls it, boots on the ground. So if you see one out there, let us know. Of course, yesterday we talked about Tesla rolling out full self-driving in China. We’ll say it just in terms of we talked about Tesla being up pretty significantly yesterday. You know, it is interesting. I mean, the backlash around the world. I mean, I was looking at sales in Europe. Tesla sales in Europe plunged again in February. And let’s see, they were down 40%. So the number of cars registered in February were down 40% from a year ago. And the actual amount of European car sales were actually up 26% in February in terms of electric cars. So You had an increase in electric cars sales in Europe and a decrease in electric cars sold by Tesla in Europe. A big mismatch there, and those are things that are harder to quantify in terms of people’s opinions. It’s kind of like the fashion industry. Things are in vogue and then not very quickly. It would be interesting to see what that looks like going forward. One name we own here, BYDDF, their company revenue topped $100 billion in 2024. That’s the first time their annual revenue has succeeded that. $100 billion, so that’s pretty impressive there. Their full-year revenue increased 29% in 2024, and their sales of electric vehicles jumped 40%. So just BYDDF continues to be Strong name, not just in China, but I also saw where they’re selling, I guess they’re selling some of those cars into Europe as well. So I think it looks like the EV BYD sold 4,400 vehicles in February into Europe. So keep an eye on that there. A couple other little ideas of note, I saw where Apple’s iPhone shipments to China dropped pretty significantly in January. Just really the smartphone industry as a whole in China seems to be, I don’t know if they’re in a lull in terms of everyone has one or not. No one’s in a replacement cycle at the moment, but shipments on the iPhone dropped 17% year over year. Actually, 17% in general in smartphone shipments in China dropped. And then for Apple, that was 21% year over year. Even their domestic brands were down 13%. So interesting take there in terms of the smartphone market in China. Last piece here, Alibaba. So they made the news. It’s a name we own. Their chairman, Joe Tsai, expressing concern about potential AI bubble in the U.S. in terms of primarily on the data infrastructure side. A lot of the, you know, he’s kind of questioning some of the, you know, huge expansion into data centers in the U.S., meaning some of these data centers are being essentially built on spec data. You know, meaning being built and then, you know, in hopes that the demand will be there once it’s ready to roll off. So just an interesting, you know, interesting take there. And, you know, a company that’s in the mix and they’re in, you know, they’re in the AI space. They’re in the growth space. They’re, you know, the Amazon of technology. So it’s a pretty interesting take there from Alibaba. Well, we’re looking forward to hearing about Bill and Jeff’s escapades down there in Sarasota. We’re looking forward to hearing how those meetings go and hearing from the folks out there. Always feel free to reach us at GundersenCapital.com. You can always give Edie a call, get on my calendar, get on Jeff’s calendar, get on Bill’s calendar. We’re happy to take a look at how you’re positioned and if we could help in any way. Give us a ring, 855-611-BEST. That’s 855-611-2378. Have a great day, everyone.
SPEAKER 04 :
This show is not a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Bill Gunderson or clients of Gunderson Capital Management may have long or short positions in stocks mentioned during the show. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Gunderson Capital Management is a fee-based registered investment advisory firm. All accounts are held at Charles Schwab. Schwab is a member of SIPC and FINRA.
