Join Bill Gundersen as he dives into the tumultuous world of stocks and markets on today’s episode of the Best Stocks Now Radio Show. Delve into why gold is defying traditional market logic, reaching astonishing all-time highs amidst a backdrop of market volatility and weak dollar dynamics. Discover how the Google ruling has influenced tech stocks, giving much-needed buoyancy to a sector that thrives on news of favorable outcomes. Gundersen provides an insightful analysis of the complexities involved in these market shifts, balancing optimism with caution.
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 07 :
And welcome to the Wednesday. It’s Wednesday already. It is the September edition of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And I’m here with Barry Tide, our chartered financial analyst and certified financial planner. We have a mixed open to the market today with a very strong open for tech today. and the NASDAQ with that Google ruling last night. We’ve got the NASDAQ up 171 points right now. That’s almost 1%. It’s 80 basis points. The NASDAQ is at 21,450. The Dow is down, however, down just 15 points, however. It’s at 45,280. The S&P kind of splitting the difference there. It’s up 28 points. That’s almost a half a percent to the upside. And the S&P is at 6,443. Small cap stocks are down today, 60 basis points. The bond market, very quiet with the 10-year sitting chilly there at 4.28%. Gold. Gold is the story right now. Gold hit another new all-time high yesterday. It’s hitting another new all-time high today. It’s all-time highs on gold. We are almost at $3,600 now on gold. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin market’s up $1,000 today. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show. with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And I’m with Barry Tide, our chartered financial analyst. I said gold was almost at $3,600. It is. It’s now up almost 1%. $3,627, which is an all-time high on gold. Boy, I remember not that long ago, Barry, It was under $2,000 for the longest time, around $1,800, $1,900, somewhere in there. You got any thoughts on what’s driving gold higher here recently?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I guess, you know, I mean, number one, you know, the dollar’s weakened over time really since the tariff talk, right, and kind of tariffs kicked in. You’ve had, you know, what I think, you know, the euro at one point was parity with the dollar not too long ago, and now I think it’s, you know, around $1.15 for one euro. So anytime you’ve got kind of the dollar weakening, that bumps up gold. Obviously, the uncertainty, it’s really been the only hedge that’s kind of worked during the tariff time. And then you also have got a lot of other countries out there who have been purchasing gold. in terms of other central banks. So that increases demand for the shiny object there. But it’s kind of defying logic to a certain extent. I mean, it kind of hit that trading range, as you mentioned, for a while and then has just rocketed up over the last couple of weeks and turned kind of a new leg up for it.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, it broke out to new highs. And it’s up over 35% here so far this year, which really, like you say, it’s kind of defying gravity, defying the odds here with this move that it’s made in 2025. In the last week. The last week on that chart is wild. It’s wild. It’s right. And, you know, we own it through GLD. and IAU. But I will say this, that the gold stocks were also breaking out yesterday, like Newmont Mining and Barrick and Agnico Eagle and AU and all the usual suspects, including a lot of the small and microcap gold stocks. We had a big swoon at the open yesterday. With the other court ruling, we’ll talk about the latest court ruling on a different matter here in a bit, but last Friday you had the court ruling against the Trump administration on the tariffs being unconstitutional. Now, that appeal will be filed more than likely today to get that resolved because we can’t leave the markets in limbo like this. and uh it’s hard for me to imagine but you know he is using a uh a fairly recent law rule to justify these tariffs to act on these tariffs and it’s definitely going to get challenged to the max here at the supreme court when will we get the ruling i don’t know but they’re i’m sure they’re going to fast track it so we can get that uncertainty out of the way but As for now, keep in mind, the tariffs are still in place. The cash registers are ringing at the U.S. Treasury Department. And the trade imbalances are kind of being sorted out across the world. But the markets did cut about half of their losses yesterday. And then after the close of the market, you’ve got a very favorable ruling. I guess… A better way to look at it is it wasn’t as bad as it could have been for Google because they were trying to go for Google selling off, making them sell off Google Chrome, which is really important for Google’s franchise. And instead, the ruling was they don’t have to sell off that Google Chrome piece. And in a lot of other ways, it was fairly favorable to Google. And that’s one of our largest holdings here. We added it to our value fund portfolio several months ago. And then it started to break out, started to gain some momentum, and we added it to our premier growth portfolio, which has about 19 stocks in it. And Google is having a very good day today. That breakout looks like gold does. Alphabet, I should say, G-O-O-G-L. There’s two forms of Google. There’s Google, G-O-O-G-L, and then there’s Goog, G-O-O-G. It’s just a difference in class of shares. We own the G-O-O-G-L. But they trade in parity for the most part.
SPEAKER 02 :
What was interesting is it’s the highest – you’re talking about a breakout or a gap. We call it a gap whenever you’ve got these big price movements that are after hours. And it was the largest non-earnings gap higher since 2006 for the stock. Really? Pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah, in terms of, you know, like, so in other words, you know, biggest gap up, you know, off of something that wasn’t earnings related. So it’s pretty big news for them. They get to hold on to Chrome. You know, they, you know, also it’s beneficial for Apple as well because Apple, you know, uses Google search on their devices. So, yeah. Overall, a little boost in the arm for tech, which, you know, after the last few days, needed a little boost.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, it’s also a boost, I think, for Meta, which has similar antitrust concerns, and some of the other tech companies. And, yeah, the stock is up 7.8%. That’s a huge move. That puts Google at $2.76 trillion. $2.76 trillion. That puts it right behind Apple, I would say, probably. And Microsoft, you’ve still got NVIDIA in first, Microsoft in second, Apple in third. And Google has probably taken over fourth place here in the large cap, the biggest stock out there race. So very good day for Google today, and that is lifting tech. The NASDAQ is up. The Dow is down a little bit. And we’ve got that ruling that should get resolved. Well, it’s up to the Supreme Court. I’m sure they’re back in session, and we’ll see where that lands on those tariffs. But, you know, I think yesterday I noticed that as, you know, the day progressed, I think they digested that tariff news, analyzed it, looked at what the worst-case scenario could be. And in some ways, you could say the worst-case scenario is not that bad because it gets rid of the tariffs, the draconian tariffs on some of these countries. And I think the market kind of came to its senses. And, of course, you had a pretty good rally towards the end of the day. yesterday in the market. Okay, let’s see. What else do we have? We’ve still got some earnings to come in here. Today’s going to be Salesforce. I saw some news on Salesforce that I found kind of stunning as far as these AI agents. Pretty interesting. Keeping track of your sales pipeline without using humans. More on that when we come back. This is the Best Docs Now show. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Thoughts Now. So there are a couple other factors that I thought of here during the break that seem to be driving gold to these giddy heights, new highs. The markets are pricing in a 92% chance of a 25 basis point cut at the Fed’s September 17th meetings. And we don’t know yet whether or not Lisa Cook will be an active member of the board at that meeting. But the goal does like the interest rate cuts. And number two is the independence of the Fed, which would mean more cuts in the future if government were to get more control over the Fed. And of course, that is being worked on or attempted to be worked on by Trump going after Lisa Cook to get rid of her off of the Fed, replace her with a more dovish kind of person.
SPEAKER 02 :
I think Besson’s about to start interviewing. I think they’ve got about 11 candidates for the chairman of the Fed position once it comes available. If it doesn’t come available before, in May, right.
SPEAKER 07 :
Right. So, anyway, those are a couple of other things. And, of course, silver is rallying also. Silver hit $41 per ounce yesterday. And, I mean, you can just go across the board in the stocks. Agnico Eagle, First Majestic Silver, Alamos Gold, Avino Silver and Gold, Barrick Mining, Caledonia. El Dorado Gold, all the usual suspects pretty much breaking out and hitting new highs. Well, Citigroup weighs in today on their market outlook. They see the recent decline in the market, which hasn’t been very much, but it has been a little bit over the last few weeks, as a healthy recept. rather than a reason for alarm. Well, you know, I guess I’m a little bit more worried than that. Obviously, we still own most of our stocks. We have raised some cash, and we are a heck of a lot more cautious and careful about putting new money to work. It just depends on where it’s at. You know, I’m not going to be chasing the really high flyers at this point in time. And I think the valuation concerns. I did pen an article for Seeking Alpha. It’s been submitted to them. And when that gets published, I will let you know. But I address the current macro outlook and valuations in the market. And it’s kind of a follow-up to some of the articles I wrote recently You know, I’ve written two recently, one in March, no, April 8th of this year, saying I think the tariff, this whole situation, was that the low of the S&P? Was it 4,800? That was two articles ago. I said, I think the tariffs are going to work. Here’s why. And I think the market’s going to rebound. Well, it has. And it’s gone on to hit new highs. And then I wrote a follow-up article maybe a month ago, I suppose taking a victory lap around the track. Bill was right again. I should have titled it. And then this is my third article in that sequence because now we’ve come a long ways since April the 8th, some 35% for the NASDAQ, 25% for the S&P 500. I thought it was a very good time to do a revisit on the current valuations.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, it looks like it’s been approved, and it’s just waiting to hit the Internet here shortly. It usually takes a little while. It says published, but when you click on it right now, it’s not pulling up yet, but they’ll have it updated. It should be hot off the press here maybe by the time we get done with the show.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, well, okay, if you follow me at Seeking Alpha, Bill Gunderson, you’ll get a notification any time one of my articles does come out. So just go to Seeking Alpha, and, you know, I have quite a few followers there, and you can follow me. Okay, well, I still got to train AI. Now, let me tell you this. When you go into Seeking Alpha to write a new article, the first question you have to answer is, And answer no to is, are you using AI to write your article? To write the article, yeah. That’s a new feature, by the way. Yes, I have not tried chat GPT to write an article. I have my own little nuances and style of writing, a little more simplistic and folksy kind of way of looking at the market instead of all the technical terms and fancy formulas and things like that, big words that even most people don’t understand. But anyways, Salesforce, they’ve replaced 4,000 customer support roles for their own product. Okay, they used to have 9,000 people that are salespeople for Salesforce, okay, using their own product to keep track. Now, you get into some of these big companies, and management of your sales prospects becomes a very, very big effort and mind-boggling type of thing. And I think I saw really the advent of the customer relationship management software probably in the very late 90s, early 2000s. I tried out Goldmine was one of the early ones that I used. You could send out a mass mail. You could track the people that were in your database. You could put notes in, you know, after you make a call and all this kind of stuff. Now, if you’re inquiring about Salesforce software for your company, You’re liable to get an AI chatbot, an AI agent. They’ve cut 4,000. They’ve cut their force from 9,000 down to 5,000. Those other 4,000 are the AI agents. So we haven’t gone that route yet. But, yeah, no AI agents here, right? No, you’re either going to talk to Edie or Jeff or myself or Barry or Jennifer. No AI agents yet. We haven’t gone that route. But, anyways, I bring that up because Salesforce, which is a member of the Dow CRM, probably the one that really revolutionized the whole CRM thing. you know, software, and by far the biggest player in the industry, is going to report earnings after the close. And Benioff, Mark Benioff, the CEO, he says he’s on a mission. He’s on a mission to replace people. He’s on a mission to make the company an agentic enterprise. meaning no real people to talk to, just getting all your answers and questions that you have about their product from their AI agents. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 03 :
But I must have used the wrong line. I’ve been on the right trail. But I must have used the wrong call. Hit us in a bad place.
SPEAKER 07 :
And I wonder what it’s good for.
SPEAKER 04 :
I’ve been in the right place.
SPEAKER 07 :
Now, back to the second half of the show.
SPEAKER 04 :
And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, the small modular reactors are getting some reaction here today.
SPEAKER 07 :
to some news out of NuScale Power, SMR, which is headquartered up in Corvallis, Oregon. Not exactly the nuclear capital of the world, but that’s where NuScale is. It’s now a $12 billion market cap company. And up till now, they really didn’t have any sales, but they’ve got a big pipeline of companies that are interested. NuScale is up right now. It’s breaking out. It’s up 14.2%. The symbol is SMR. As the Tennessee Valley Authority said, it signed an agreement with EnterOne Energy, a strategic partner of NuScale, to develop up to six gigawatts of new nuclear power on several sites. throughout the utilities region in the largest US small modular reactor deployment program so far. So I, you know, I’ve seen a lot of news recently on this. There, there’s only a few small modular reactors in the world, most are in China. And I think there might be one in the UK. But this is, you know, just how profitable it’s going to be and whether or not it’s a growth industry and whether or not, you know, these become deployed all across the country remains to be seen. But, you know, this is a move in the right direction. This is the biggest deployment yet. That would be equivalent, this amount, 6 gigawatts, of 4.5 million homes, well, that’s a pretty good-sized city that it would power, or 60 new data centers. So that’s, again, that’s pretty significant. The agreement is the Tennessee Valley’s latest effort to bring as much new nuclear energy online as quickly as possible. So my hat is off to Tennessee taking the action and trying to bring online more renewable nuclear energy. Okay, we’ve got Waymo launching their robo-taxi service in Denver and Seattle. And I mention Waymo because they already have good news out today. Google does. And I would just say, I mean, my observations of this whole robo-taxi thing, Waymo’s got the lead. And that’s Google, obviously, Alphabet. You know, I saw them running all over the hills of San Francisco. And I wasn’t in it. You know, I’m waiting. Give it a few. Give it a chance to work out the bugs.
SPEAKER 01 :
I wonder if one’s going to take us to the hotel when we get picked up in San Jose. You know what?
SPEAKER 07 :
If they’ve got one, I’m going to make everybody write in that thing to test it out because we are investors in Google.
SPEAKER 02 :
Not all together, though.
SPEAKER 07 :
We don’t want to lose the whole crew on one giant street in San Francisco there. But, you know, that adds they’re in Phoenix now. They’re in San Francisco. They’re in Los Angeles. They’re in Austin. They’re in Atlanta. They’re planning Miami, Washington, D.C., Dallas, and now you can add Denver and Seattle. I’m in San Diego one more day. I have not seen any robo-taxis here at all. A lot of Teslas. A lot of Teslas in California. And I would say the second most common car I see are the Toyota Prius, especially when it comes to the taxis and the Uber cars. Vanguard sees a sweet spot for bond investors as yields remain elevated. Well, that’s true. I mean, you know, what is it? Five and a half maybe is where we’re seeing new bonds come out at.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that’s tough. Tough in the investment grade space. You’re not seeing hardly any, right? No. I mean, in the investment grade space, I was looking again this morning just because yields have kind of spiked up a tiny bit. But yeah, in that two to six year span right now, I mean, 5% is about the best it gets. And so we’ve kind of sat on the sidelines a little bit and just collected some money market interest there while we see where yields are going to go. But The 30-year did touch, not that we’re going out 30 years on the bonds. No, but it touched. 30-year touched 5% for a moment this morning.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, I saw that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 07 :
And that puts the 30-year mortgage back over 7%, I would say. Yep, yep. Well, and then, you know, I do see one bond offering here today, $500 million in senior notes with a yield of 6.75%. And the first thing you say to yourself is when I see six and three quarters percent, it’s got to be pretty low quality. It’s a home builder. It’s a small home builder, century communities. So, you know, six and three quarters is what they’re having to pay. to borrow money, but I’d be a little reluctant as a bond investor. And you know what? I’ve done a lot of studies here recently on bond funds versus holding the individual bonds, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the bond funds over the last decade or since inception, some of them have 15-year track records, they’ve averaged about 2% to 2.5% per year total return, which is pretty meager, which makes the problem even worse for the asset allocation crowd that does the 60-40, you know, based, or 70-30, where your age determines how much you should have in the bond markets. And that 70 and 60 or 50 or whatever it is, is being filled with bond funds, which is producing very meager returns. So you might want to have a talk with your financial advisor if you are in one of the classic asset allocation strategies based on your age and see, why am I in bond funds? Why am I not in individual bonds that I can hold to maturity? Because for me, the returns are about twice as good owning the individual bonds as opposed to the bond funds. General Motors sold 21,000 electric vehicles in August. That’s a new record. I did get a ride from an Uber driver. It was a nice little car. I believe it was a Kia, all electric, leather interior and everything. She said she gets about 250 miles out of it. That’s the range, and she has a charger at home.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, they’re not cheap. I mean, I keep seeing some of these Kias, and they’re good-looking vehicles. And then you look at the price tag, and I’m like, you know, $70,000 for a Kia, right? It just doesn’t compute well. you know, very well in my head, but they’re good-looking vehicles, actually. I mean, I’ve kind of seen myself, you know, kind of glance at those, and they turn out, and once I get close, I’m like, man, what kind is that? And it’s turned out to be a Kia almost every time.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah. Well, General Motors has claimed they have strong demand for the Chevy Equinox, the Cadillac, the Lyric, and the GMC Sierra. I would just say be cautious because the value of those things does not hold up well at all. We’ve seen that with the SUV that we have that is all electric that really has lost 65%, 70% of its value, which is not very good. Lucid. I looked at Lucid yesterday, and I go, that thing looks terminal to me. I don’t think they’re going to make it. It was down 10% yesterday in afternoon trading. The interesting thing about Lucid is the Saudi Arabia wealth fund, investment fund, holds a controlling stake of around 58% of the company. So there are deep pockets behind Lucid, but I’m just not seeing Lucid as a player out there very much. Rivian is probably the one that I see the most next to Tesla. But Lucid Stock, and I think they just did a reverse split. It’s pretty bad when you do a reverse split and it continues to go down. What are you going to have to do? Another reverse split? Not good. Okay, when we come back… You know, right now, there’s a battle in the renewable energy market, and it looks like nuclear is winning out. There’s a couple of big losers today in that battle. And then we’ll take a look at a couple of smaller stocks that have put up some pretty big returns here recently. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 03 :
And welcome back here to the final segment of the Dust Talk Now podcast.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, the loser in all of this renewable energy race, the winner seems to be nuclear, big time. And we continue to see, I see appeals, the court allows the EPA to claw back billions of dollars in grant money, which was granted in the final days of the Biden administration. That auto pen was really flying there. And, you know, a lot of the Coalition for Green Capital, the Power Forward Communities, Climate United Coalition, got a lot of grants. And Trump, you know, is trying to claw back those grants and redirect the monies. And the courts did rule in their favor there. And I also saw that the Trump administration… is going to review the previous approval of a Massachusetts wind farm project. And we’re seeing a lot of that being undone. I would say AI is the biggest factor, one of the biggest factors there. in its need for massive amounts of energy that the wind and solar just cannot provide.
SPEAKER 02 :
And wind’s been the biggest, you know, kind of one that’s been really knocked down, I mean, completely, whether it’s, you know, the Trump administration or just… You know, I’ve seen, you know, we’ve got a restaurant here, 167 Raw, and they have one up in, there’s actually one in the Massachusetts area, and I see them post all the time about, you know, anti-wind and how it’s, you know, how it’s kind of ruining their views and ruining, you know, their view of the ocean, ruining, you know, they’re killing birds and, you know, falling apart.
SPEAKER 07 :
The fishing grounds, too. Right. It’s not good for the fishing grounds. Boston is, you know, I know the lobster fishermen were all up in arms. You disrupt that ocean floor and that’s another fallout from all of that. Kraken robotics. Okay. This is one that I own. I’ve done really well. I wish I would have put more into it. It’s one of the leading robotics stocks in the world. K R K and F it’s Japanese. Hence the five letter symbol. They got $13 million in new orders, but I did a little visit on their, uh, their returns as a stock. Over the last five years, KRKNF has delivered an average 41.2% per year as a stock, okay, annual average return, and that goes up against the S&P 16.6. Over the last three years, it’s been 113% per year. versus the S&P 20%. And over the last 12 months, the stock’s up $114. No, 111%. And the S&P is up 14.8%. So it’s been a big, big beater of the S&P 500, delivering a lot of alpha. And then I looked at my current valuation on the shares, and I have it with 84% upside potential. So that’s one to look into. I’m certainly not recommending the stock, but Kraken. And this whole move to robotics, that’s been a big deal. There’s been a lot of losers in that area, but there’s been a lot of big winners. I think of SYM Symbiotics, which does a lot with Walmart. These smart factories being run by nuclear energy at some point in time, I suppose, but robotics is a big deal. Okay, then we get back, you know, to a couple old school stocks that time has passed by. Macy’s continues to attempt their turnaround. The turnaround is showing progress. But an investment in Macy’s over the last 10 years, there’s just no way of fighting the trend. You know, I’m downtown San Diego. Our Horton Plaza, which was a massive shopping center, is basically gone, torn up, razed, reused, totally redirected. That’s a big craze, and I remember Nordstrom’s was the big anchor tenant. Macy’s was an anchor tenant in there. There were massive restaurants in there and escalators, and it was quite a destination place. Not anymore. Amazon to your doorstep, baby. That’s the way it’s gone. An investment in Macy’s over the last 10 years has lost 10% per year. Oh, man. Talk about the slow decay, the creep, the crawl. And over the last 12 months, Macy’s is down 9%. I think it will survive, but, you know, unfortunately, not anything like it once was. And then I saw another one, Campbell Soup, which, hey, look, somebody owns these stocks. These are widely held stocks out there. You might not realize that Campbell’s Soup is Rouse now, Goldfish, Snyder’s Pretzels, Prego, Pepperidge Farms, the Kettle Brown, Pepperidge Farms, Milano Cookies, Swanson Frozen Dinners, V8 Paste. But over the last 10 years, you’ve lost 1% a year in Campbell’s Soup. which is pretty chunky returns there and not exactly a growth industry. Despite all of these brands and the supermarket that they own, it’s kind of like your Kraft Heinz or others. You know, you’re looking at 1% or 2% growth at best. And if stocks follow earnings, which was another big key in my article that I wrote about stocks and indexes following earnings and showing proof of that, When you’ve got a 1% or 2% grower, that’s the kind of stock price appreciation you’re going to get over time. Okay, well, we’re out of time for today. I’m headed home later today. Luckily, the airlines now have pretty robust Internet. I shouldn’t miss a beat here today looking at the charts of stocks we own. The B-plus or better-ranked stocks today, the A-plus momentum stocks, and other bellwethers and indexes, et cetera, that I check on a daily basis. So we’re always on top of that market, not only looking to the future, but looking in the rearview mirror for any kind of a correction that may creep up on us and compress those multiples, which are pretty fat, pretty fat right now. Okay, to set up an appointment with us. They’re in the Bay Area two weeks from today. or over the phone, over Zoom, 855-611-BEST, 855-611-BEST, four-week trial, then the newsletter, GundersenCapital.com. Have a great day, everybody.
SPEAKER 05 :
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.
