Join professional money manager Bill Gundersen and chartered financial analyst Barry Kite as they delve into the volatile world of stock investments. Today’s episode offers insights into the market dynamics impacted by the latest PPI report, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, and the anticipated earnings of Micron Technology. Bill discusses the intricate details of sector rotation and reveals top strategies to navigate these challenging market conditions.
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, March the 18th edition of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And I’m here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial analyst. And we have a downdraft in the market today after two pretty good days. And the culprit would be PPI. Oh, that darned old PPI. You know, just when everything’s going right, here comes a 0.7% print on the PPI, and the Dow is down 250 right now, which is a half a percent to the downside. Puts the Dow at 46,742. The NASDAQ is down a quarter of a percent, 53 points, 22,426. As we await Micron’s earnings after the close. Tonight, S&P 500 down 21 points.
SPEAKER 1 :
6,624.
SPEAKER 07 :
The Russell 2000 is down 16 points. Right now the bond market is pretty steady right now not much change in the bond market It is at let’s see the bond market the 10-year is at four point two three percent And we’ve got crude oil up five point three. There’s a problem today Crude oil is actually 2.6%. Brent crude is up 5.3%, however. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And I’m here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial analyst. I’ve got to send a code to somebody that needs it right now, and we’ll send that code to him, and then we’ll get to the show here. Bang, there’s his code that he needs. he can’t do it without me we had a good day in the market yesterday we’ve had two good days in the market in a row it seems like the market is getting used if it ever does to a war A big one in the Middle East with Iran. And it may have already priced in the impact of the war, the impact of higher oil prices, which probably are going to be temporary. And we kind of got back to a lot of the leadership stocks in the market behaving very well yesterday. There were some really nice moves in the market yesterday by a lot of the AI, Western Digital, SanDisk, the South Korean memory stocks, Nebius, etc., And a lot of news coming out, obviously, from NVIDIA’s big conference, GTC conference on Monday. And news continues to leak out on that. So that has led to a couple of interesting days in the market. Now, the Fed is meeting today. I saw one prediction, and it came from a big firm, Piper Jaffray. No rate cuts all year long, Barry. Are you in that boat, or are you going to roll a different direction?
SPEAKER 04 :
I mean, hey, we’ve got a whole different chairman that’s going to be in charge for most of the second half of the year. My guess is once you… From an oil standpoint, if oil stays at this level for an extended period of time, it could actually at some point bring inflation down because you could have some demand disruption across a lot of places. So my guess is probably still at least potential two on the table. That’s what I would think. I don’t think the consensus has really changed per se. We’ve still got 12 months of a year or so.
SPEAKER 07 :
And there is news here breaking Trump is doing something. There’s a law out there that he’s going to go around as far as oil goes. It should open up. should open up some supply. Is it the Jones Act?
SPEAKER 04 :
I think so.
SPEAKER 07 :
I think that’s what it is. Yeah. So that may help, okay? That may help. We’ve got the PPI is the bugaboo this morning. It comes in at 0.7%. And the headline was much hotter than expected, you know, at 0.7. Did you get a chance to look through that at all, PPI?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and the issue with this PPI, right, is in reality it’s going to be a different – didn’t put a bunch of stock in it because it’s going to – the PPI is going to change likely drastically if we go forward, you know, because this PPI rating from prior to… Doesn’t count the big pike in oil, right? Right. And then the other thing I will say from an oil perspective is, you know, there’s a big difference right now between, you know, Financial oil and what I guess you would refer to as physical delivery of oil. I’ve seen where you’ve got Brent crude prices say in that $100 to $105 range. Crude is being delivered right now in Asia for like $135 a barrel. There’s an issue there. The way I look at it is they’re going to be more. impacted at this point and have more reason to go ahead and start having some oil flow through the strait. So we’ll see. Could actually potentially have this last not as long because they are going to be wanting that strait opened as well.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, that’s the way I look at it. There’s a lot of pressure to get that strait of Hormuz straightened out. And China, number one, I mean, they need that Iranian oil. So I just see that being opened up here at some point in time, although it continues to be a struggle. In the meantime, I see that Iran is jamming a lot of GPS and spoofing, which is kind of weird stuff. But the problem is they’re getting information from China’s satellite navigation system. And it sounds like China may be cooperating on that, enabling greater accuracy in missile strikes for them and targeting across the region. Anyways, that… And I think, you know, there has been word that Russia has been providing info, intel to Iran also.
SPEAKER 04 :
So, not good. Yeah, well, and we also had, I think, I saw this morning, you know, attack on, I believe it’s the largest gas, LNG gas plant in the world. I think it’s actually one that, It’s actually one that, I think it’s Qatar, but it’s one that Iran actually shares this gas field, I believe, with Qatar. And the gas field became under attack today.
SPEAKER 07 :
Qatar is mad, too, about it. They’re mad at Israel. They thought it was kind of reckless. to attack that oil field. So anyways, there’s a lot of cross-currents, a lot of cross-currents in the market right now. Well, tonight will be a really big earnings report. Believe it or not, even though the earnings season is over, there’s always a few hanging out there like NVIDIA, and Micron is definitely an outlier as far as when they… Now, Barry, when I wrote my last newsletter of December, do you remember what my top, well, I actually made two top picks for 2026. What was one of them?
SPEAKER 04 :
We had Lily and then the other being Micron.
SPEAKER 07 :
Micron is up 62% year to date. And we actually bought it before January 1st, obviously, and we cashed in on a 65% profit. uh… and now we are uh… back into a but it is the biggest winner i’m gonna guess is there is there a stock out there uh… in the s and p that has done better than sixty two percent year-to-date one is one doesn’t come to mind at the moment of them uh… they’re going to do something that had somebody had a buyout maybe i it certainly was an eighty and tear johnson and johnson And last year, my number one pick was Palantir, and it was up over 100%.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think that was the number one name in this S&P, at least for a majority of the year last year. Yeah, so, okay, we did it.
SPEAKER 07 :
B-W-R-A is the hashtag there. Bill was right again. I have people repeating that in comments on our articles and over on X. They kind of know that I have a reputation over here to keep. Trump asked, when will Powell cut rates? The market is saying never. That’s what the market is saying. And I also saw Piper Sandler’s Nancy Lazar. She’s pretty well known on Wall Street. Say, no interest rate cuts this year. Meanwhile, we’re at 4.22 on the 10-year, and that’s too high. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 1 :
Music
SPEAKER 07 :
And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Stocks Now show. Micron is set to report tonight year-over-year profit surge of 452%. on 138% revenue growth, driven by strong AI-related demand for memory chips. Remember the memory chips, particularly DRAM, which is Dynamic Random Access Memory, Barry. I actually featured a stock in my book that did SRAM, which never really went anywhere, oh well, but I did learn about all the different SRAM and DRAM and whatnot. Of course, the new one is high bandwidth memory. which is HBM. And there’s four companies. There’s SanDisk. There’s SanDisk. There’s the two in South Korea, which are SK Hynix and Samsung. And then there’s Micron. And then there’s ancillary companies, though, that are moving with these stocks. The next ring in Saturn’s rings are the Western Digital. Seagate falls in there. And then I’ll tell you another ring that is involved in this whole data center thing, and there was a lot of news on it yesterday, which I’m going to get to, are these fiber optic stalks. And wire, copper wire stocks that are part of the networking inside of these racks inside of these data centers, which someday will be orbiting in space. uh… that’s a whole nother things like will probably go to work up some kind of an article on that as as more news uh… comes in on uh… some new uh… open claw is the new term right now and uh… we’re doing uh… some research on that so anyways that is the court that is the center of the universe right now the market universe you go outside of that there’s not a whole lot working Barry. Other than that, you go to the trucking stocks, the food stocks, the industrials, the medical, the healthcare stocks. Nothing else is really working right now. I don’t know where we would be were it not for data centers, but that continues to be one of the hottest areas in the market.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, and they touch everything. I mean, think about what all their time, and we’ve even been following air-conditioned companies, right? Obviously, power companies. I mean, there’s so many different ancillary pieces. Follow the Deconstruct it and follow those tentacles out into corporate business, right?
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes. And, you know, as an investor, well, you know… To be in the best stocks now, you have to be in the best neighborhoods of the market now, and that’s where you’re going to find it. That doesn’t mean that every best stock now out there right now comes from the AI patch. The oil patch is also kicking in a lot of them. And sector rotation is taking place all the time in the market. I’ll tell you what’s falling out of favor very rapidly is the precious metal move. Silver, gold, which I think we called the top in that again. Bill was right again. And those stocks are really starting to break down now. And that mostly is because of a strengthening dollar and profit-taking. You know, that’s another part of sector rotation. They kind of play, it’s kind of like a restaurant that’s hot for a little while, you can’t get a reservation to the restaurant for several months, then all of a sudden it’s easy to get in there. The same thing happens in the stock market. There is a bit of a popularity contest, and money does chase the hottest areas of the market, at least smart money does. Let me tell you, we had an account come in yesterday, And I don’t know where it was from, but it had every single big name, big box stock that we talk about all the time that are just going nowhere. I mean, I look at some of their big names, mind you. But I look at their charts and it’s just like, why would anybody own that thing? And yet, you know, this portfolio was full of those stocks. And I don’t know where it came from, but I’m going to guess that it’s from a big wire house linked related firm. Well, it’s with us now. And that’s my job now is to clean it up. Get your gardening tools out, Bill. Well, it’s April, or not April quite yet, but the gardening centers are starting to be full of spring flowers to plant. The ground is warming up. My tomato plants are about two inches tall right now. I’ve got to get out all the dead wood that’s left from last year, and that’s the way I look at these stocks that came over. There’s just so much dead wood. And that is not atypical. It’s typical of what comes to us when we get it from a big wire house firm because they just don’t let their people venture out much further than AT&T and Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson. That’s all the further out on the limb you’re allowed to go. That just seems to be the mantra. Okay, optoelectronics. There was word yesterday that, you know, Jensen Wang said, we’re still using copper. But the fiber optic stocks, they’re having their own little convention right now. The Optical Fiber Communications Conference in Los Angeles. Well, I didn’t get my invite, but that’s okay. I do know the hot stocks in that group. It’s AAOI, Applied Optoelectronics. It’s Lumentum, L-I-T-E, which we already sold for a huge profit. And it’s Coherent, which we also sold for a huge profit, C-O-H-R. And then they sold off when Jensen Wang made his comments, but they had a good day yesterday because they were – uh… saying some good things at this optical fiber communications conference in los angeles uh… which i believe webbush i think webbush is headquartered in los angeles i remember seeing their they’re on a big one of the big buildings downtown l a i could see them uh… sponsoring a conference like that marvell is also uh… on the periphery of that as far as the chips go m r v l Now, news on NVIDIA. And in my opinion, as I look at this stock, I think it’s been the whole China situation that’s probably kept that stock going sideways for so long. But NVIDIA gets approval to sell H200 chips. And they have now confirmed, NVIDIA has confirmed that China, or NVIDIA has received Chinese purchase orders. So we’ll see. Maybe that will get that stock moving. It’s been kind of in a flat line even though they had sensational earnings report. And the value is there. The performance is there. The only thing lacking is the chart. The chart is just in a sideways trend right now. But NVIDIA has received Chinese purchase orders. We’ll be right back. 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 GundersenCapital.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. Thank you.
SPEAKER 03 :
And welcome back here to the second half.
SPEAKER 07 :
Today’s Best Docs Now show, February or April 6th, 7th, and 8th. April 6th, 7th, and 8th. Sarasota again.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and I think, what, 6th is the Monday. I think Edie told me it’s 7th and 8th. Oh, is it 7th, 8th, and 9th? I think 7th and 8th is the Tuesday and the Wednesday. If we need, then we’ll add on. There’s my calendar. Yeah, I’m one day off.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, I’m one day off. 7th, 8th, and 9th. Okay, I got it now. And that’s a trip I look forward to every year. We usually go try to get the surf soda.
SPEAKER 04 :
Get your sunscreen out. Yeah, get your sunscreen out. It’s usually kind of the – we always come there about this time, and it’s bouncing back between warm and chilly here in Charleston. What, woke up again? It’s 37 degrees this morning. So we’re hoping to get down to a little more – Regular sunshine down there, right?
SPEAKER 07 :
But on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, we have Tuesday and Wednesday right now, we have those one-hour slots available to meet with us. I’ll be there in the meeting, and Barry will be there in the meeting. And hopefully you’ll be there in the meeting if you’re listening and you’re sitting there with Disney stock and AT&T and Procter & Gamble and all of these duds. Anyways, that is coming up, and we’re looking forward to that. And then, of course, Tuesday night, Tuesday night, the 7th, will be the workshop. And we’re going to be at the Evan, even workshop. I don’t know if it’s Evan or even.
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s E-V-E-N. Yeah, I always call it the Evan, but, yeah, it looks like even. I mean, usually Evan’s spelled E-V-A-N.
SPEAKER 07 :
But we’re over there in Lakewood Ranch, as usual. And if you’d like to make an appointment with us, 855-611-BEST, 855-611-BEST. grab one of those appointments or make a uh… reservation to the workshop at seven p m at the uh… even hotel on tuesday uh… april the seventh so that’s uh… or update their okay now let’s get back here to uh… the markets which are down a little bit today the it you can blame a hot p p i report
SPEAKER 04 :
you know look how important numbers are 0.7 for heaven’s sakes has got the market all shook up today and it’s about expectations i think what it said 0.3 was the expectation came in at 0.4 0.7 so we were 0.4 above but i mean that’s i mean you know obviously it’s a month over month number ppi inflation does fluctuate pretty pretty pretty wildly sometimes but yeah We know in this business, if the market’s expecting this, it comes in different one way or the other, then the market’s going to react.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, and a hot PPI print does not affect earnings. It affects the multiple, the multiple in the middle pretty much. It contracts that multiple a little bit. That’s what you’re seeing is a little multiple contraction. We ended last Friday at 20.66%. forward pe for the s&p 500 which is the lowest it’s been in quite some time we were up to 23 at one point in time goldman sachs that says that the long-term trajectory for the s&p 500 looks very healthy this is ben schneider their chief u.s equity strategist said the six to twelve month trajectory for the s&p 500 and broader u.s equity markets remain healthy despite elevated uncertainty. Seems like we always have elevated uncertainty, though. You know, that’s just kind of something that we live with. Guess there’s a little more out there than normal right now in the uncertainty equation. But they still like it. And, you know, the consensus is right around $8,000, above $8,000, actually, for the end of the year. Now, that was before the war ensued. And the question is, does the war impact earnings? I think it impacts the multiple somewhat. It contracts the multiple because of the unknown factor. There’s another factor on your multiple. But I still think $8,000, let’s just call it $8,000 as the consensus, the target price for the S&P 500. Okay, Nibius. Man, they’ve been in the news a lot. They’ve been getting one contract right after another from this company and that company. And I’ll tell you what I did, which I… I have observed, Nebby’s had fantastic news two days ago, and it rocketed higher. It gapped up. A gap is when it opens much higher than where it closed the previous day, and there’s a gap. It creates a gap in the chart. And almost always, more often than not, a company will take advantage of a big move and good news like that to do what, Barry? To do a secondary offering, right? Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Issuing more shares is what I would say.
SPEAKER 07 :
And I saw the good news. I saw the gap. We’ve owned this stock before. Their sales growth is phenomenal. But they’re not profitable yet. But they do have phenomenal sales growth. Their recent quarter was 547%. This is the Netherlands-based AI infrastructure company. So it gaps up. And then yesterday I saw them announce a secondary offering, and it was down 10%, something like that. I said, you know what? There’s my chance. And I took advantage of the pullback and the secondary offering yesterday and bought into Nebius, and we’re back into it. And now I see today they’re doing a small. It’s not impacting the stock. The stock is bouncing pretty good today. Maybe I made a good buy there yesterday on that big pullback. Now they’re going to do a private offering of convertible senior notes, $4 billion. of convertible senior notes this is only a 28 billion dollar company so that’s a pretty sizable offering really and it’s you know the first time i’ve really seen tech it seems to be a kind of a a fad right now to turn to the debt markets which they have not traditionally done in the past But anyways, this stock’s looking pretty good here today, and they’ve certainly had a lot of good news here recently. But I would just say, if you see a stock gapping up, Don’t buy the gap up. Wait for the next day for them to announce their secondary offering and let it gap down, and then you may have an entry point there, okay?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, let them issue additional shares, secondary offering, or even maybe convertible debt, right? We have seen some convertible debt offerings here over the last couple, few months as some of these smaller companies were trying to get creative in terms of raising money.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, if you do the math, if a company has a million shares out there, and let’s say their profit’s a million dollars, that’s $1 per share. And if they say, well, we’re going to print some more shares up and sell them and raise our shares to, let’s say, $1.25 million, the earnings remain the same. Now you’re dividing that million dollars by $1.25 million, and you’re down to $0.80 per share. And if you’re using a multiple of, say, 20, you had a 20 times $1 per share as a $20 stock. You do a secondary offering. You dilute the earnings. And now you’ve got a stock that’s worth $16. That’s what a secondary offering does. Now, the caveat to that is, If that secondary offering lets them juice their earnings and they get a good return on their floating of those shares, what are you going to do with the new money, right, is the key.
SPEAKER 04 :
Are you going to use that money to pay off something? Are you going to use it, hopefully, right, to invest, buy more NVIDIA, whatever your business is, right? Invest in ROI, positive ROI projects, right?
SPEAKER 07 :
Or give the CEO a big raise. That’s not a good use of the money. So they do need money and they do need capital to keep expanding the company. So a fast-growing company like this one, you would think they do need more capital to keep growing at this rate, but at some point in time you would think that would turn into a profitable company. Okay, now we have a few others reporting earnings here. Okay, so let’s just go to the other side of the street here, the boring stocks, Macy’s. Okay, Macy’s, if we go back to their earnings just five years ago, it was $5.31 per share. Now they’re at $2.20 per share. So you see the earnings are going the wrong way. And the stock is going the wrong way. Stocks follow earnings. If earnings are descending, the stock is going to descend with that. More on that when we come back. This is The Best Stocks Now, where we try to make things really simple to analyze the markets in individual companies.
SPEAKER 02 :
And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. I was just looking at Macy’s on the Best Docs Now app.
SPEAKER 07 :
And here’s where this comes in, very, very useful. If I look at the 10-year track record of M, symbol M, the S&P has delivered 23.2% per year over the last 10 years. That’s the average. That course has been a very good run, obviously, way above the 50-year average of the S&P 500. While the S&P has been going up by 23.2, if you take a look at where Macy’s was 10 years ago today and where it’s at today, that compounds out to minus 1%. 4.9, call it 5%. It’s lost 5% a year for the last five years. That’s not good. And over the last five years, it’s basically dead flat. And over the last three years, it’s basically dead flat. And so far this year, it’s down 22.4%. Now, the number that jumps off the page for me, do you remember the year 2021 coming out of the COVID year and all of that money was sloshing around way too much? I mean, we’re going back to the roots of the inflation that kicked in that was unabated. And I think Jerome Powell can be held accountable to a great extent here for keeping interest rates too low. For too long, and of course, the administrations at that time putting so much money into circulation. Throwing around a lot of money. Way too much. They totally blew it. Macy’s was up 136% in 2021, which just indicates the kind of speculation that was taking place. And why we got this hot inflation and why the Fed had to come along with all of those draconian interest rate hikes in 2022, which sent the market down.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, you can see it peaked out around November 20th or so of 2021. It peaked out around $30.48 and then trading at $17.60 at the moment.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, it was just when you flood a lowland, if you flooded Charleston, if it rained here for 10 days in a row, it would fill every little nook and cranny. out there, even Macy’s, right? And that’s what I saw happen. There was so much money sloshing around for too long. That’s the other issue. And there is the root. I mean, there should be books written about this. This should be taught at the Harvard Business School. And, you know, what not to do, what creates inflation. And now, you know, of course, they want to blame it basically on the current administration. Well, Definitely Trump bears some responsibility for his first time around because he was part of putting a lot of money into the system there.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, under some odd circumstances with the backdrop of COVID.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, but I would just say that Biden threw gasoline on the fire. And he just kept putting gasoline on the fire. And the Fed kept gasoline on the fire, and they blew it big time. One of the biggest boneheaded mistakes in the history of economics. I mean, you’ve got to go back to the 08-09 crisis, which was a much, much bigger crisis. It impacted the markets in a different way. It was all about credit. This was excess, excess. And any time you provide excess, and of course there was excess credit in 08 and 09, way excess, which created excess demand for homes. And this time around, really the same mistakes get repeated all the time. It’s just a matter of time, maybe 10 years from now, whatever. You know, there will be another crisis. And they’ll throw money at it. And they’ll throw money at it. And they’ll throw money at it. And then inflation. And to undo, inflation never really gets undone. No. No, it just piles on top of each other.
SPEAKER 04 :
It just piles on top.
SPEAKER 07 :
Compounds.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, compounds. I did hear something, a great comment this morning from someone who’s talking about oil, right? They said the one thing in terms about stimulus or no stimulus, he said you can’t print molecules, which is pretty interesting, meaning you’ve got to have the oil in some form or fashion. You can’t print it at the… At the central bank, which is kind of interesting.
SPEAKER 07 :
And now, I mean, I look at prices on, you know, items at the grocery store, and it’s just mind-boggling how much some of these things are. You walk into a butcher shop. Walk into the New York butcher shop, Barry. Oh, yeah, I know which one you’re talking about. And look at a prime ribeye. How much per pound? That ain’t coming down. I mean, it’s there to stay. And you can go back and look at stocks like Macy’s that were up 136%. 2021 was the huge mistake that created the inflation monster. that you know once it’s there it’s there and it’s all you can do is get it to moderate but to get prices down you’d have to have a depression contraction yeah you have a huge right people stop buying there’s no there’s no all of a sudden meat is piling up in the freezers and they got to get rid of it and whatnot and they’re you know they have too many cows out there So that’s just economics 101 right there, and that’s what creates these excesses. What we’ve got going on right now, and it hasn’t been in the news for the last few days, but you’ve got this private credit excess. People getting greedy, wanting double-digit returns. and buying into private credit and wall street is the one that cook this stuff up and it’s not going to have a good ending okay well this is a good ending i guess uh… we’re out of time i’m ready to go to work here today on a down day in the market a little bit with the hot p p i but that might create some opportunity here as i go through my best stocks now list of charts And analyze them. I was very active and busy yesterday. Very active and busy in the markets yesterday. Yeah, a few buys. I’m sure the folks at home are going, wow, Gunderson. What got into Gunderson all of a sudden? He’s been on a buying spree. We’ll see what today brings. To get four-week trial to the newsletter and the app and the live trades, go to GundersonCapital.com to set up an appointment with us and get away from Wall Street. 855-611-BEST 855-611-BEST Have a great day everybody.
SPEAKER 06 :
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.
