SPEAKER 04 : 0:00

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 : 0:25

Good morning and welcome to the Monday, August 4th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I am Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital Management, sitting in for Bill today as he’s jet-setting on the way to Detroit. The whole team will be en route. I’ll be headed over there later this afternoon. I’ll hear from Charleston, too. the Detroit Bloomfield Hills area. But market-wise, looks like we’ve got some green on the screen, which is nice to look at after Thursday and Friday’s pullback. We’ve got the S&P up 1.1%. That’s 70 points to 6,308. We’ve got the NASDAQ just under 21,000, up 331 points to up 1.6% today. And we’ve got crude oil down 2.4% to 65, 69. OPEC Plus was meeting late last night, early this morning their time. And we’ve got gold, which continues to be a good hedge in this market, up $20 to $3,383. That’s 0.6%. And Bitcoin bouncing back a bit today, up over the $115,000 mark, up over $1,000. That’s about just under 1%. So not much of a move for Bitcoin there. But good morning again and welcome to the Monday show. August 4th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I am Barry Kite, a planner and analyst here at Gundersen Capital. Handling the hosting duties today solo as we’ve got Jeff and Bill boarding their plane here in a bit to Detroit. They’re probably going through TSA at the moment. I’m sure that’s always a fun experience. But the whole… Whole team will be en route at various points this afternoon, commuting to Detroit. And looking forward to meeting some folks there Tuesday, Wednesday, and we added some times on Thursday. And also Bill doing the workshop at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Kingsley Hotel there in Bloomfield Hills. So I’ve still got a couple of spots left. So if you want, feel free to give Edie a ring at 1-855-611-BEST. That’s 855-611-2378. And so certainly looking forward to getting up there. Now… As we look back last week, a little rough there. I want to say it’s the worst week in the market for, I think it’s in over two months. As we kind of look back at last week and, of course, look towards this week, the theme really continues to be the only thing that’s certain has really been, continues to be uncertainty and good earnings. The markets certainly remain uncertain. resilient this morning, bouncing back after a couple off days on Thursday and Friday. We had a big, big week of earnings last week. We’ve also turned the page on July and welcomed August on August 1st and market certainly not off to a great start in August with a pullback on Friday and getting a little bit of that back at least here this morning. Last week we had four Magnificent seven companies report. We had Microsoft, Meta, Apple. Those had great reports, as Bill highlighted in the newsletter this week as well. Amazon, a little less thrilling, but still important nonetheless. So I think we’ve got six of the Magnificent Seven left to report, and then, of course, NVIDIA, which I believe is going to be at the end of the month. They’re always a little bit late to the game, save the best for last. So still one big one left in the Magnificent Seven. They should probably count as two. But as Bill pointed out in his notes, really despite Microsoft and Meta’s numbers midweek, Markets sold off a bit, certainly on Thursday and Friday. More of a slowdown in momentum, in our opinion, than a deep sell-off, if you will. Our job is really to determine if it’s a well-deserved breather for the market. It’s always healthy to have, you know, it can’t go up every day, so you’ve got to have some healthy pullback just from a chart standpoint, technical standpoint, so the market doesn’t get over its skis too far. But that has been on a tear since the second week of April. Or as we look into read the tea leaves, could it be something more? So there’s been arguments certainly for the market to continue to trend upward, primarily driven by earnings, which highlighted really the last couple of weeks in the newsletter in terms of what the earnings grade and earnings picture has looked like so far this year. Of course, future rate cuts could be certainly another tailwind for the market. The question is, when do we get those cuts? And there was also a shakeup at the Fed on Friday that we’ll get to here in a little while. And also, we’ve seen a big and strong M&A activity, which that’s certainly part of the administration’s plan to reduce regulation, facilitate regulation. and encourage investment. And so you’ve seen a lot of merger and acquisition activity. A good example is I think Figma up over 200% last week. We had the big railroad merger announcement. So there’s just been a lot of activity in the mergers and M&A space. So that’s always a good A sign of an investment market, at least, where folks want to make deals or are willing to make deals, and that’s usually a good encouragement for the market overall. Certainly the arguments for a pullback are definitely going to fall squarely on valuations, which Bill has been harping on in terms of where we are at from a PE standpoint. Thankfully, earnings have done very well, at least to kind of give that high P.E. ratio a kind of makes a little potentially a little more valid. And, of course, the biggest other biggest kind of argument for a pullback is just the uncertainty. you know, around a number of things, whether it’s, you know, tariffs or, you know, economic figures or what have you. But, you know, always have some degree of uncertainty in the market. In this sense, it seems that we’ve had a good bit of uncertainty and we keep, you know, we get bits and bits of certainty along the way. So just some, we’ll look at some of those examples throughout the show as we get going here. But, you know, last week, as we mentioned, Ending on a sour note, you had the U.S. stocks Friday had their worst day since, I believe, sometime late May, and worst weekly performance in a couple of months. For the day on Friday, you had the S&P down 1.6%, and we had the NASDAQ down 2.2% on Friday, and the Dow finished down 1.2%. That equated to, from a week standpoint, you had the S&P was down 2.4%. You had the NASDAQ basically giving back basically even until Friday. It was down 2.2% on Friday, and the NASDAQ was down 2.2% for the week. And also the Dow down 2.9% for last week. So on the equity side, certainly some momentum kind of came out of the market, you know, while at the same time you had some great earnings from, you know, companies that make up a big portion of the S&P 500. So certainly something we’re keeping an eye on. You had, you know, kind of on the, I guess, silver lining was you had the Treasury, U.S. Treasury, 10-year Treasury get down to 4.22%. And as we’ve talked about, math-wise, as we’ve, interest rates go down, it makes that higher expected P.E. go up. So as rates come down, you can kind of justify a higher P.E. ratio a bit more. And then also, obviously, with the earnings growth we’ve seen, you could make an argument for potential higher PEs at the moment. So kind of got those juxtapositions there. Always some tailwinds and always some headwinds for the market. And the biggest headwind on Friday was the non-farm payrolls number. We’ll talk about some of that later. Here, in terms of the soft job numbers, also August 1st marked the day that some of the new tariffs were going to basically take hold, particularly for those countries that didn’t have a… didn’t have a deal in place so we’ll get into some of the non-farm payrolls and the and what those numbers were and some of the issues with those numbers as well i think sounds like the administration had some issues with the numbers too so we’ll we’ll get into that and just getting started on the first quarter of today’s best docs now show and we’ll be right back And welcome back here to the Monday, August 4th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I am Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital, taking the wheel for Bill today. Bill’s bags better be packed. They should be on the plane by now, but mine are packed here. Getting out of the office here in a few hours. I’ll be flying out midday today. Handling show duties here for Bill. Thankfully, it looks like we’ve still got some good news to report. We’ve still got some green on the screen. Dow is up 0.9%. That’s 43,985, so just under 44K. We’ve got the S&P 500 just over 6,300. at 63.10, up 1.17% today. And NASDAQ was leading the way down on Friday. It’s leading the way up today, just under 21,000 at 20,995. That’s up 1.67%. And gold continues to be a good hedge there, up 0.5%, at 3,380. Well, last week we certainly, you know, as Bill’s been, you know, highlighting in his newsletter, particularly these last couple weeks, we’ve had some huge earnings weeks, kind of a bulk of the S&P’s earnings coming in this little two-, three-week window here. And so second week in a row, kind of, you know, of the newsletter in terms of earnings and second quarter earnings season remains strong certainly one of the biggest tailwinds for the market in our opinion at the moment as of course we say here all the time stocks follow earnings last week we had 161 companies report And 123 or 76% of those beat their earnings per share estimates. And also, more importantly, sometimes it’s because it’s a harder number to manipulate. You had 121 companies beat their revenue expectations. So, Basically, 75%, 76% for both those numbers. Just a great, continues to be a strong earnings season here, second earnings season. We had Meta. Some of the companies reporting last week, we had Meta. Their revenue, just to blow out earnings report, revenue grew 22% year-over-year, easily beat expectations there. That’s about 15% year-over-year growth. Well, they were expecting 15% and came in 22%, so a pretty solid beat there. Amazon, as we said, kind of a little bit of a mixed bag. Their EPS, earnings estimates, and operating income came in above guidance, but the problem was their go-forward guidance. Obviously, the stock market’s forward-looking. They ended up kind of being below the midpoint of the consensus estimate and subsequently dropped. Let’s see what they’re doing here today. I know it was around, I want to say around 8% or so on Friday, somewhere in that range, and down about just under 0.5% today. So a little stabilization after a rough day on Friday for them. You had Starbucks reported… came in better than expected. They didn’t have a huge hurdle to jump over there, but they reported better than expected. Ford, going up to Motor City here later this afternoon, Ford had a Good report in terms of the numbers, but the issue is they took a big hit on the tariff side of things. I think it was around $800 million during the quarter from terms of tariff impact. And now they kind of revised upwards what the impact or headwind is going to be for all of 2025. It looks like it’s going to be now around $2 billion. Initially, they were expecting $1.5 billion. which in turn obviously is going to affect their earnings and having brought the stock down from there. Let’s see what Ford’s doing here today. We’ve got Ford up half a percent, so Wood will bounce back after some kind of that report last week. Their vehicle sales are 0.3% for July, so We’ve got at least some buying in the space, and, of course, tariffs, how that will impact them will vary as some of the uncertainty comes out regarding those tariffs. And we got ExxonMobil and Chevron last week. Exxon actually thought this was an interesting stat. They formed, in terms of their revenues, Actually, the highest oil and gas production for any Q2 quarter since the company was, I guess, merged with ExxonMobil, so about 25 years or so. So that was pretty interesting on the oil and gas side for Exxon. You had Chevron report as well. MasterCard and Visa were reported last week in both companies. really reflected what we would consider solid consumer spending. The main point there, as we say here all the time, is the economy and the world economy, for that matter, is really driven by a lot by consumers in the U.S. So in terms of MasterCard and visas, we’re not seeing any drawback from a consumer spending standpoint. So that’s a tailwind for the economy and for earnings. As we mentioned, we had a Microsoft report last week. Both of those had great numbers, particularly Microsoft, Apple, They crushed some estimates, and that was really because they sold a lot of iPhones more than expected. I don’t know if that was folks picking up an iPhone before a potential tariff kicks in or not. However, that shakes out. It’s still equated to, I think, $1.57 in earnings for Apple, and the estimate was $1.43. So a significant beat there. Microsoft also had a fantastic report. Just from an earnings standpoint, things are looking great. Other things, other uncertainties out there, but at least on the earnings front, which is really what matters a lot of times from a stock perspective, we’ve still got solid headwinds there. And when you look at trading for the month of July, Ending Thursday, some of the best and worst performers of the month. You had GE Vernova, which is a name we own here, GEV, up over 30% for the month of July. AMD, a name we own in our value portfolio here at the firm. They were up just under 30%, 29.5%. Super Microcomputer, that kind of name is back after some accounting issues or accounting worries. They were up over 24% last month. And same thing with Arista Networks, ANET, A-N-E-T, up 24%. And we’re blazing through the first half of the Best Docs Now show. And we’ll be right back with the second half.

SPEAKER 02 : 19:50

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 : 20:28

Because there’s something in the air We’ve got to get together sooner

SPEAKER 01 : 20:39

And welcome back to the second half of the Monday, August 4th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I am Barry Kite, planer analyst here at Gunderson Capital, serving as relief captain this morning as Bill has taken off to Detroit. The whole team will be getting together. uh there uh today and we’ll be there tuesday wednesday and fly back uh thursday evening so looking forward to uh to getting out there and looking forward to bill’s workshop at seven o’clock at the Kingsley Hotel in beautiful Bloomfield Hills. So if you’d like to join us, feel free to give Edie a call, 855-611-BEST. That’s 855-611-2378. Or you can always send us a message via gunnersoncapital.com on the website. Of course, if you’re not in the Detroit area, can’t get out to see us, feel free to go to GundersenCapital.com. You can always sign up for the newsletter, four-week free trial of Bill’s live trading subscription, which gives a little insight into what’s going on in his head on an hour-by-hour, sometimes minute-by-minute basis in the market. And the good news is we’ve still got some… Still have some green here on the screen. All of the major indices are up roughly just everything’s up about 1% or higher. NASDAQ’s leading the way at 1.67%, five points under the 21,000 mark there. We talked about kind of some of the biggest winners for July, that being GE Vernova. We had Supermicrocomputer, Arista, AMD up almost 30%, some names that we’ve got in the portfolios here. In terms of the laggards, really, July was a rough month for the healthcare sector. I mean, you had Healthcare sector in Chipotle, Chipotle down 26%. They’re not used to having had pullbacks like that since they had the kind of outbreak, foodborne illness outbreak a handful of years ago. You had UnitedHealth down another, it’s hard to believe that they can be down more, down 23% in July. You had Baxter down 30%. In July, Molina Healthcare down 48% in July, and Centene down 54% in July. Centene was the biggest laggard in the market in July. Well, you know, we’ve certainly kind of touched on what we had last week in terms of the earnings calendar this week, which is most importantly looking forward as the market is as well. Today, after the close, we get a big name, Palantir, a big position here at the firm. That’s PLTR for those typing in the symbols over there. They’re up a little over 3% today. They’re going to report after the close. Certainly, Palantir, one of our biggest positions. I think it’s our fifth largest holding. And, of course, those are Bill’s top pick at the beginning of 2025. They’re going to release earnings again after the close today. Forecasting is basically a 54% jump in earnings per share and about a little over 36% year-over-year revenue growth. Obviously… Big player in the AI space. Got two U.S. governments, a big portion of their earnings going to be roughly expected to be about $10 billion by 2030. Their commercial division also has been growing. It’s going to be looking to be about 33% of their revenues at the end of 2030. So Issue there, obviously, is a high valuation with Palantir in terms of P.E. ratio. Doesn’t mean they can’t grow into it, but P.E. ratio-wise, 4P of 265. But from an earnings growth standpoint, projection-wise, earnings per share expected to grow 41% this year, 27% next year, 33% in 2027. So solid earnings growth there, certainly a hefty multiple and certainly a name that has been, momentum-wise, everyone’s kind of dove into that, up 100% so far in 2025 alone. But we’ve got, in terms of the stock, the stock’s beaten earnings per share and revenue estimates in seven of the past eight quarters. So I saw something where, in terms of the option market, I think the option market’s pricing in about a… A 15% gain once earnings are announced. So don’t hold me to that, but that’s in terms of math. That’s the bet where the option folks are at in terms of the market. Later on, also reporting today, we’ll get Simon Property Group. It’s been, I guess, the old strip mall stock there. It’s probably kind of been a tough space. Tanger Factory Outlet. We get On Semiconductor. That’s kind of an interesting one. We’ve got Diamondback Energy. Tyson Foods. So we’ll get some chicken. And then Wayfair, I think, reported us. I reported this morning. and they had just a blowout quarter. I guess I don’t know if that’s folks shopping ahead of time before some potential tariffs were going to kick in or not, but stocks up over 8% today. It’s $70.93. That’s Symbol there is W for Wayfair, but getting a big bump on earnings. Tuesday, we’ll get, let’s see, we get AMD, which is obviously a name we own, big name out in the market. That will be, comes after the close on Tuesday. Expecting roughly about a 27% revenue increase. And they’ve got a bit of declining earnings, I think, expected this time, mainly because they’ve been spending on On R&D, which they kind of need to in terms of trying to catch up or if they can catch up at some point, potentially with NVIDIA. So it takes money to make money, I guess, in that sense. But stock’s up 46% year-to-date. It’s one we own. in Bill’s relative value portfolio. Companies beat earnings expectations seven out of the last eight quarters, and revenue-wise has beat eight out of eight times. So playing the earnings game pretty well with AMD. And we’ll also get Pfizer tomorrow, kind of a ho-hum stock, one of those stocks that we see. And a lot of portfolios and one that we don’t get too excited about. Their future really relies on their oncology pipeline. So all certainly hope they make plenty of progress in the oncology space. Would love for them to figure out ways to continue to To fight cancer out there, but from a stock perspective, not one that we’re interested in at the moment. It certainly doesn’t fit our grading system there. Pfizer’s beaten estimates in eight straight quarters. The problem is I think they’ve only beat revenue estimates in four of those estimates. uh report so uh not the uh like i said it’s a little easier to manipulate earnings than it is top line revenue so the top line revenue number is really what’s kind of hurt them along the way tuesday we’ll also get bp caterpillar lucid uh let’s see we get duke energy um it’s One of Bill’s favorite stocks, not really, Archer Daniels Midland. We’ll have Rivian also reports there, Cummins Engines, Marriott, Aflac, Yum Brands, which is Taco Bell, KFC, that restaurant group. So a big blend on Tuesday there. And Wednesday is going to be highlighted by Disney. It’ll be interesting to see some of their streaming numbers. They’ve missed revenue expectations in 50% of their last eight reports. They’ve beat their top line, but they’ve also had some… waning expectations. I think their hurdles have been a little low there along the way. Shopify, another name we own, a big stock, as we’re going to be reporting before the market, when the market opens on Wednesday. So that’ll be one we’ll have our eyes on. And we’ll also get McDonald’s, Airbnb, Giraffe Kings, Zillow, and Apache, Novo Nordisk. So we’ve got a big earnings week, probably one of the last big ones, and then we’ll get some trickling out over time. But we’ll be right back for the last quarter of the Best Stocks Now show.

SPEAKER 06 : 31:09

You’ve got to go where you want to go.

SPEAKER 01 : 31:34

And welcome back to the August 4th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I’m Barry Kite, pointer analyst here at Gunderson Capital, taking the wheel for Bill today as we make our way to Detroit. Looking forward to getting out there. We’ve got, of course, it looks like hopefully we’ll end up in the green today. We’ve got… Markets are still all up. All three major industries still up over 1%. So everything’s in the green there. In terms of… Had a lot to talk about this morning in terms of reviewing last week and previewing the current week here. We don’t get a ton of economic news this week. We get a little bit of Fed speak at the back end of the week, but… You know, one shakeup kind of on, you know, late Friday, and then, you know, kind of heard it on a lot of the weekend news shows, whether it’s news news or financial news. But we had a, of course, we had the non-farm payrolls report, and we’re going to have, I think, the data chief, changing the data chief there in terms of the labor numbers. And we also had Fed Governor Adriana Coogler. She’s going to step down. I think her last day is going to be August 8th. She was a Biden appointee, so what that does in terms of the makeup of the Fed, she’s a governor, a voter in terms of the committee to vote for interest rates. She actually didn’t know this. When I was reading the story, she actually didn’t vote at this last one. She didn’t attend. I guess that was a precursor to her, you know, stepping down. So President Trump will be able to name that person. The question is, who do you name there? Of course, you could potentially, you know, the talk is potentially, you know, naming someone who will eventually become, you know, the Federal Reserve Chairman as of at least, I guess, at the latest in May. uh 2026 depending on if powell runs from the door but beforehand but uh you know still uh you know really the four kind of primary names have been bounced around for a while now uh kevin has it uh kevin marsh we refer to the them as the kevins and then you’ve got christopher waller who is already on uh you know already already is a fed governor uh and then of course uh treasury secretary besant Besson would probably be a great pick. The only thing is I hate to kind of give him up as the Treasury Secretary. If we could clone him and have him in both positions, then that might be nice. But it’ll be interesting to see who gets named there. Apparently he’s planning on announcing that in the coming days. So hopefully, you know, probably going to get some word on that this week. Also, in terms of the non-farm payrolls, we had a big, not a great report there. We had non-farm payrolls increase 73,000 in July. Consensus was around 110. We added 14,000 in June. But the biggest kind of issue was those massive revisions. that came from the prior two months. We had June, I think, was revised down around 133,000. May was reduced by 125K. So you put that together, that’s over 250,000 jobs. And it’s not anything we haven’t seen before. I mean, we had, I don’t know, maybe eight months ago or a little, not quite a year ago, we had the revision of I think it was around 800,000 to a million jobs that kind of were created over a period of time. They revised it down. So in other words, those close to a million job additions were kind of statistically removed, if you will. And so, you know, Trump has decided to fire the chief labor data person there. I think the biggest issue is whoever has taken over that spot, you know, it’s really about survey and survey error when you have – and it’s been a problem for a long time because it’s – in terms of the jobs report, it is a survey and participation in that survey is really – decreased over over time you know all surveys are going to inherently have you know some sampling error the problem is is that error becomes larger as your responses decline so your smaller sample size sample size goes goes down sample error increases so Whoever ends up in the role from a data standpoint, right, and it’s not necessarily a new problem. It’s one that we’ve seen for a while, hence that large revision, almost a million jobs about a year ago. the main thing is, you know, if there’s a way to improve that survey, right? Is there a way to encourage folks to, and businesses to report? Is it, you know, is there, you know, from a sampling makeup, is the economy changed, right? Is, you know, what’s the, you know, what’s the way to kind of fix the data? I don’t think it’s really, you know, necessarily, you know, just penciling numbers in. I think it’s, you know, there’s an issue there from in terms of how, uh, from a statistics standpoint, and I’m taking a lot of statistics, statistics classes, certainly not a statistician, but, uh, but there’s gotta be a brighter minds out there that can come up with some, um, with some numbers that won’t, uh, you know, that, that, that we can kind of rely on a little bit better than, uh, kind of what, uh, we’ve seen for a consistent period. And it’s really been even before COVID, but really since COVID those, uh, The survey participation has been very low. The interesting thing is, from an interest rate standpoint, one of the tailwinds, at least at some point for the market, will be lower rates. At some point, we will get that rate cut, but just the whipsaw that we saw between Wednesday, you had the Fed announcement. I think you had the Chances of a cut drop pretty significantly in September. Then the next day we got kind of a little bit of a higher PCE number than expected in terms of inflation. So that kind of reduced the chances of a rate cut even more, kind of around 38% or so. And then now on Friday with the jobs report, you had it shoot up to, I believe it’s about an 80% chance. Let me pull it up here. Yeah, 85% chance now of a rate cut in September. And that’s significantly up to just a week ago. I believe one week ago it was 63%. So just a big move back and forth there last Friday. I’m getting the week kicked off here. Bill will be doing the show from Bloomfield Hills in Michigan here tomorrow and this week. So please join us. If you want the newsletter, go to GundersenCapital.com. And I hope everyone has a great day. Stay well out there.

SPEAKER 03 : 39:39

This show is not a solicitation to buy or sell any securities.