SPEAKER 03 : 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 : 0:26

And welcome to the Thursday. It is Thursday, the April 9th edition of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson. And I’ll be flying solo here until the bottom of the hour. Then Barry will be joining us. And we do have a very fragile ceasefire right now. And that’s reflecting in the markets here today. It didn’t take long for You know, the ceasefire, they violated the ceasefire, la, la, la, la, la. We’re closing the straight again, and that’s kind of overhanging the markets here today. The Dow is down right now just 132 points, however. Now it’s only down 60, so it’s not doing too bad there. The NASDAQ is down 48 points. We’re actually up a half a percent today. There’s some pretty good action in the memory stocks and in the fiber optic stocks. The NASDAQ is at 22,586. The S&P is down 6 to 6,776. Gold is up 30 basis points. But the elephant in the room again today, oil. Oil up 6.35% to $100 per barrel after just a huge dive yesterday. And we’re also seeing interest rates trickle up today on a little bit warmer than expected inflation report. The 10-year is at 4.31%. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show. with professional money manager Bill Gunderson. And it is getaway day from Sarasota. We’ve had a great time. Great dinner at Owen’s Fish Camp last night. That’s a good place. That really is a good place, especially the one here in Lakewood Ranch. So that was kind of our celebratory dinner. I put in a plug for Owen’s Fish Camp when I come down here. They do a good job. And Minnesota will be next. We’ve got it on the calendar five weeks from now, more than likely at the Radisson Blue once again at the Mall of America, the Mall of America. And it’s been a while since we’ve been up there to Minneapolis. We’ve got a very fragile ceasefire taking place right now. Who knows what today will bring. I know J.D. Vance, he’s trying to get a little bit in the limelight here. He’s kind of been in the background with Rubio and Witkoff and Besant. He’s the vice president. supposedly the heir to the throne, I don’t know, but he’s over there in India or Pakistan. He’s in Pakistan trying to hammer things out, and they’re standing tough. And, of course, yesterday it was Israel attacking Hezbollah. in Lebanon, and they’re crying foul in Iran, saying that’s a violation of the ceasefire. Well, that seems to me like that’s a separate deal. We have our deal, and Israel has their deal, and that’s what Vance is claiming, and right now it looks like the Strait of Hormuz is pretty clogged up. It is pretty backed up right now with almost 800 ships uh we need that helium to make those memory chips we need that oil some countries are really getting desperate for oil including the the country of california out there on the west coast they’re going to be in a big pinch because they get a lot of their oil from uh overseas uh They’re sitting on a bunch of oil in the Bakersfield area and offshore, but they buy their oil from overseas, and they’ve pretty much closed most of their refineries or sent them packing or their refineries up and left because of all the issues that you have in California. But, okay, that’s… They’ve traded one thing for another, and now the consequences are higher gasoline prices and a shortage there of fossil fuels. We’ve got interest rates up today. You get a little bit warmer than expected. PCE inflation report. But it really was bad. It came in as expected. The inflation was 3%, and of course now we’re including the gasoline prices, and whether it’s impacted food prices or not, that doesn’t seem to be the case yet. But anything that gets transported by truck or rail or air freight or whatever, they’re paying higher prices and that may show up eventually in the inflation numbers. We’re also getting the GDP numbers here today. Yeah, you know what, 0.7% is the initial look at that GDP number, under 1%, but that’s pretty much what was expected. And GDP does not really reflect that. The earnings picture of the S&P 500, which that’s what I’ve been emphasizing here recently, and that’s pretty much the most weighty evidence that I can find, the one that influences me the most, and I’ve emphasized it starting maybe three weeks ago. I did a couple of shows talking about how good the earnings picture looks right now. and how cheap the market has become. I wrote a newsletter saying, is this a bear crisis that we’re getting into, or is this a major opportunity? That was a couple of newsletters ago, a couple of weeks ago. conclusion was we’re getting up here on a very, very good buying opportunity. And then I actually declared that buying opportunity before yesterday, before the $1,300 day to the upside on the Dow. We had a huge day, obviously, yesterday. we were up like 2.6 percent i think on the day well all the bears remain in their caves in hiding in the shadows in the darkness they refuse to come out and see the light that’s just they’ve always been around they always will be they’re perma bears they’re negative and they refuse to look at facts which you see a lot of that in today’s world facts are facts numbers are numbers I kept saying in my articles, $372 in earnings next year for the S&P 500. Just stick a 20 multiple on that and you’re back to $7,400. Can’t anybody see the light there and the facts there? And, of course, we’ve been trading at PE ratios higher than that recently. We’ve been up as high as 23. Put a 23 on those $370 in earnings and see where that gets you. So the Dow was up almost 3% yesterday. The S&P was up 2.4%. The NASDAQ was up 2.96%. Oil was down 16% yesterday, 16%. That just tells you a couple of things. The underlying fundamentals of oil just aren’t that good. I mean, you take away the war premium, and if we were in a normal world right now, oil would probably be trading at about $60 per barrel, maybe the low 60s. and instead it’s trading at $100 per barrel. All of that is this temporary war premium that has been tacked on to the price of oil. But underneath, the fundamentals are terrible. Now, let’s go to the market. When the market was reeling and the market was diving on the rising oil prices and the rising interest rates, the underlying fundamentals were actually getting better and better and better. I’d put up the fundamentals of the S&P 500 any day against the fundamentals of oil, and yet you’ve got oil rocketing higher and the market kept dropping, something had to give eventually. Now, that risk underneath the market, that temporary risk, is still out there, obviously. It’s a very fragile thing. But I think at least Iran has the message of the consequences if they don’t keep that Strait of Hormuz open. And I do think that Trump, he’s not even going, he doesn’t even want them charging a toll. He wants free passage. So, well, you know what, that’s negotiations. You start low, you aim high, and you finish in the middle somewhere. And, of course, they want exorbitant fees on passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which I think are international waters. I don’t know how they see it. It seems to me like nobody really owns the Strait of Hormuz. They do within so many miles of their country, but anything beyond three miles is supposed to be international waters. And I honestly, I don’t know how that works through that distrait of Hormuz, who claims what, but I know that there always has been a dispute about who really kind of runs that distrait of Hormuz. So more negotiations today. Vance is on his way, seeing if he can do anything. In the meantime, Trump is warning of an escalation. Just in case, the ships, the aircraft, the military, they’re all in place in and around Iran. The heat is on. And in the meantime, you know, you’ve got a little bit of a setback yesterday with what took place in Iran with Israel’s attack in Lebanon, rather. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. U.S. Q4 GDP estimate further revised down to 0.5%, less than 1%, from the second estimate of 0.7%. Now that compares with 4.4 in Q3. And you say, what’s the big difference? The big difference is investment. Do you remember all those companies that were announcing investments in the U.S.? You had the Japanese SoftBank listing all those investments they were going to make in the U.S. And they did. I mean, there was a lot of that going on and a lot of other companies out there committing to large investments and that that fervor you know has kind of died down and there’s the big difference between the two quarters one included a lot of that investment and this one obviously things have cooled off if we look at the states uh 3.8 percent gdp in north dakota minus 8.3 in the District of Columbia. That’s kind of interesting. I think there’s a few less government jobs there in the District of Columbia. And North Dakota is probably on the receiving end of population, which obviously we’ve seen some mass migrations. I can’t tell you how many people we met with here while we’ve been here that are from New York. And that’s a mass migration taking place across America. And a lot of states are seeing major outflows, California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, a lot of the eastern seaboard states. And on the receiving end of population, Florida, big time, obviously, just go drive the freeways here or try to get across town here and see the increase in traffic. I mean, there’s just no comparison from when I first started coming here to Sarasota and where it’s at today. It’s an entirely different city. Most people don’t care for the for the growth that’s happened. I’m the same way. You know, the same things happened to my little home there in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, which was a pretty sleepy little, you know, bedroom community of Charleston. And now it’s a major bedroom community with some very narrow bridges to get across that need to be widened sooner rather than later and i remember when there was nothing out here hardly in lakewood ranch and now people roll their eyes when we mention the lakewood ranch and and the traffic that is out here but at the same time you’ve got ruth chris steakhouse you’ve got uh you’ve got owens fish camp you’ve got a lot of nice things you got the grove out here You’ve got some shopping malls, and it’s a pretty nice area. It must be because it continues to attract people. Now, what’s causing the mass migration? I would say 0% state tax. I know they get it in other ways, but still, when you compare that 0% state tax versus California, which is 12%, you’ve got New York. which is extremely high. They even charge a city tax. Hence, you see the mass migration, and it continues to take place. Initial jobless claims rise more than expected in the past week, but 219,000. and that you know what that’s a good uh… that’s a very good report that comes out every thursday because it’s in real time and it keeps us it’s current it’s not once a month it’s every week and it keeps us on top of the hiring and firing uh… trends in america and the jobs market and uh… i’ve said it many times that will be one of the first places that uh… a recession will start to show up, even though the talk of a recession shows up almost every day in Seeking Alpha by guys and gals that are trying to get page reads and clicks. It’s clickbait. This reliable indicator says that we are on the verge of an imminent recession. I see stuff like that all the time. And yet that’s all I’ve got to do, just from a logical point of view and a level-headed kind of view, is look at the jobless claims every Thursday. That’s pretty simple. We’re seeing no trend upwards in those initial jobless claims. And I don’t know what reliable indicator this person is talking about. But, you know, you can find any indicator, really, to support your argument. You can find almost any chart that will support your argument. There’s a guy on Seeking Alpha. How can you always be negative? The world isn’t always negative. The market has been going up since 2009. This is the longest bull market in history. It began in 2009. This is 2026. How can you be negative for 17 years and throw water on it? I mean, you know, you’ve got to like, at some point you have to admit you’ve been wrong. And, you know, and yet their headlines constantly are negative. And the latest one, I don’t know how long he’s been a bear, but I’ve never seen him be a bull. He’s talking about all these massive markets that are just getting slaughtered right now. Where would those be? I don’t know where those would be, but he points to some things. Here’s the top trending article right now. Bear market setup. Nine signals are now aligning for a bear market. So somebody spent hours and hours and hours putting this article together on the bear market setup and finding nine signals that back up his theory. I don’t even want to take the time to look up what they are. When that’s all he’s got to do is look at the earnings estimates for next year, $372, and where the earnings were this year and where the earnings were last year. That’s not exactly a bear market setup. But, you know, people eat this stuff up because it’s the number one trending article on Seeking Alpha right now. And then here’s another one. Top three REITs for reliable income in volatile markets. You know, the REITs have done horribly. And if you think about it, a real estate investment trust has got office buildings. Some of them have office buildings. That’s not a good area to be in. Some of them have strip malls with bricks and mortar retailers. That’s not a good area to be in. I could make the argument that apartment REITs, with everybody moving to apartments these days, but I would not be buying three REITs for reliable income. I would be buying individual bonds for reliable income. You’re getting the same income, somewhere in the 5% range, and you’re going to get your money back at the end of the term, where REITs are extremely volatile. They have a lot of market forces that you’ve got to deal with and interest rate forces. And if you’re holding a bond to maturity, why would you be buying REITs for reliable income? That’s just me. Maybe you disagree. I just try to tell you what my observations are. 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 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. Call out the instigator Because there’s something in the air

SPEAKER 06 : 20:44

We’ve got to get together sooner or later.

SPEAKER 01 : 20:48

And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Docs Now show. And we’ve got Barry with us now. He’s going to do the last 15 minutes of today’s show as I’ll be headed to the airport in 15 minutes in a nice little quiet airport in Sarasota. sleepy the kind of like the charleston airport uh… you don’t have to deal with laguardia today or or uh… you know o’hare or dallas fort worth we do have to deal with atlanta however on the midway part of that but uh… we did get uh… i don’t know barry i saw the the inflation report p c e pretty much reflective of the oil prices right now

SPEAKER 08 : 21:36

And it came in as expected. I mean, the other thing is, I mean, we know the market’s built around expectations and any news that deviates from those expectations, right, moves price. And in this sense, I mean, it’s almost, you know, it came in as is. You know, a lot of some, you know, some of the most recent oil prices obviously aren’t fully reflected into that. Jobless, we had the weekly jobless claims today came in around 210, 214,000. Still a benign number. And, you know, I think it continues to push the same narrative that’s in the article that you had come out this Monday. Yeah.

SPEAKER 01 : 22:19

Yes, exactly. Okay, we got also, we talked about the GDP, and the big difference between last quarter and this quarter is investment. You know, we had 4.5% GDP last quarter. This quarter, it’s under one. And the difference I see, and the article is pointing to, is investment. Remember all those companies that were announcing new investments here? In the U.S., building plants, building factories, bringing manufacturing. Of course, that was one of the goals of the tariffs was, okay, you want to avoid the tariffs, build here in the U.S. And it did bring in a lot of commitments to investment. And, of course, that goes into your GDP. Now let’s talk about the S&P 500 for a minute. This is always interesting. Here’s a breakdown of just some analysts recently on Seeking Alpha. You’ve got Peter Schiff all the time, always. I don’t even, I’ll just close my eyes. I’m not going to even look at it. I think he’s probably a sell. Oh, I was right. He says, ignore the unexpected positive job growth this month. The full data shows a very negative picture. You know, like I say, you can twist words. You can find graphs that back up your theory. I’ve seen people show me 25-year charts and say, we’re right back to the support line. A 25-year chart is useless, right? You know, you can’t use that. You’ve got to use maybe five-year at the most. He says that the household survey recession level is ugly. The full data shows a very negative picture. And here’s the money line. This is a sign of an economy hanging by a thread. That comes from Schiff Gold, and I’m pretty sure that’s Peter Schiff. Okay, and then here’s another guy. He is always negative, always negative. His rating right now is a hold. Headline job gains mask weak labor participation rates and tepid wage growth. You can point to anything. He says it’s a muddled picture out there right now. Well, thanks for that. I’m glad it’s a muddled picture. Maybe you got muddled on the brain. But that’s, you know, look, one of the goals, and when I start the workshop, I say, let’s just keep it simple. You can go down so many rabbit holes. You can go down return on equity. You know, I know that, for instance, Peter Fisher’s, not Peter Fisher, Kenneth Fisher, Ken Fisher, Fisher Investments, he’s a big proponent of price to sales. I don’t know if you know that or not. There was a big study by O’Shaughnessy, Mike O’Shaughnessy, many years ago, looking at every single valuation ratio, price to book, price to cash flow, price to sales, price to earnings. And he found that price to sales was the most reliable, buying those stocks that have reasonable price to sales ratios. And that’s pretty much what Fisher did. uh… bases his investment strategy on and that’s all i can tell you is i’ve seen what’s in his portfolios in you get a lot of the eight by p m some a t and t’s in the horizons in the procter and gambles in the disney’s

SPEAKER 08 : 26:09

Well, naturally, you get the companies that, number one, have a low price, and you get companies that tend to be low growth, which is why they’re commanding a lower price-to-sales ratio.

SPEAKER 01 : 26:26

Doesn’t ground chuck cheaper than ground sirloin? I mean, there’s a big difference in price. The price per pound is a lot higher for quality companies that are growing. And that’s his main indicator. And I just, you know, I say, look, The market. Keep it simple. How many different things can you come up with as I read through these people’s arguments about the market? Labor participation rates, wages not going up, tepid wage growth. You can cut through all of that and just look at the earnings. forget about all this other stuff you know what all of these other factors are they not reflected in the earnings I mean that’s kind of the common denominator all roads lead to earnings at some point high oil prices it’s going to affect the earnings of some companies It’s also favorably going to affect the earnings at some companies. And the sum of the parts of the S&P 500 is $372 is the estimate for next year. And Schiff talks about 633,000 jobs lost in the first three quarters of 2025. He can never find anything. about the market, and they’ll point to some crazy thing. And you know what? They have their followers. Oh, they have their disciples that follow them around and lead them right over the cliff. And I don’t know. I’ve always said choose your gurus wisely out there. Here’s a big one. There’s no excuse whatsoever. uh to not now you have no excuse about oh i can’t put a shot in my stomach oh it’s too hard amazon is going to sell eli lily’s weight loss pill via same wow day delivery okay there’s no excuse now the whole world could be thin if they want to and uh you know uh i’ve seen just too many living testimonies of people that would have never ever lost the weight. and it makes it so easy it really is miraculous and you talk about disruptors over the years that have disrupted entire industries amazon probably the biggest disruptor of all time interesting that they’re also be selling a disruptive strategy for losing weight but this upends planet fitness it upends lean cuisine it upends sweating your butt off at the track running laps You can have the pill delivered to your house, same-day delivery, maybe a week’s supply. From what I understand, and this will be in nearly 3,000 cities and towns in the U.S., cash-paying customers with a valid prescription can access the once-daily pill at $5 per day or $149 per month. You’ll save that in the grocery store. With insurance, you can buy it at $1 per day or $25 per month, the e-commerce giant says. So let’s just look real quickly at Lilly. It is still my top pick along with Micron for the year. Lilly is up. No, it’s not up on the news. It’s actually down $2. It’s sitting at $951 per share. They’re going to make $42 per share. But I just think the addressable marketplace has not even, they haven’t even scratched the surface. And, you know, the Novo Nordisk CEO said the same thing here recently. So for 100, think of the things that you’ve subscribed to. over the years and here’s one that can probably have more benefit to your health than anything else and you don’t even have to drive down to Walgreens to pick it up it’ll be delivered to your door the same day so all you need is that little prescription Anyway, well, Barry’s going to bring it home in the last quarter. I’m going to head to the airport here with the junior analyst. We had a great trip, and we’ll be back to Sarasota soon. But we’re on to Minnesota in five weeks, the Minneapolis area. All right, we’ll be right back.

SPEAKER 07 : 31:27

You gotta go the way you wanna go, do what you wanna do, and do whatever you wanna do. You gotta go the way you wanna go, do what you wanna do, and do whatever you wanna do.

SPEAKER 08 : 31:48

Good morning and welcome back to the April 9th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I’m Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital. Bringing in the last segment of the show for Bill today so we can get him a head start with TSA over at the Sarasota Bradenton Airport. So if you see… Three folks running through the airport getting there on time this morning. Give a shout out to Bill. Well, it looks like from a market perspective, pretty much a flat, pretty flat. We’ve got red on the screen, but Dow’s down about a quarter percent. S&P’s down eight points to 6,773. That’s a 0.14% pullback after yesterday’s rally. And then NASDAQ also down 16 basis points, down 36 points to 22,597. So pretty tame on the screen at the moment compared to the big up move yesterday. Well, as Bill’s probably mentioned, we had a great time, as always, here in Sarasota this week. We had 20-plus in-person meetings between Tuesday and Wednesday and had a full house for his workshop on Tuesday. So it’s interesting. Seems like every time we hit the road, something big happens in the markets. Of course, this time around, it was the initial announcement of the tentative or fragile ceasefire in Iran. Bill was actually presenting as the announcement came across. We were in the back watching the futures go up about 3% as Bill was talking. I think it took him a little while to figure out all the good news. There was probably a lot of smiling faces in the crowd looking at him. He was probably trying to figure out what was going on. But But of course, that led to a big day in the market yesterday. It was interesting with AI retaking the narrative. We were looking across at the AI names yesterday as we were meeting with folks and it seemed like anything and everything that was tied to AI in some form or fashion was getting a bump from the ceasefire announcement. Of course, as I just mentioned today, Markets giving back just a little bit of gains. Like I said, we’re down roughly about 16 basis points or 0.16% at the market level. I think tomorrow will actually be pretty interesting since tomorrow. Really, since the Iranian conflict began, we’ve seen the market sell off each of those last trading sessions of the week. So we had, I believe, three Fridays. We had sell-offs. Of course, last week we had the last day of the trading day was Thursday. given the Good Friday holiday on the following day. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the market tomorrow. We know there’s been plenty of news reports that it’s certainly a fragile ceasefire, but like I said, tomorrow I think will give us some insight in terms of investors’ gauge of confidence in the ceasefire at least holding through the weekend. So that’ll be, like I said, that’ll be an interesting thing to watch tomorrow when we get back to the Charleston area. Of course, yesterday, pretty interestingly enough, you had over 75% of the S&P 500 stocks are now trading above their 20-day moving average. What that means for the market out there is We’ve had market breath really, really making a big, big, big, big push. Now that we’ve, like I said, we’ve had the conflicts gone on at least three or more weeks at this point. So that 20-day moving average indicates or shows that it’s calculated during this volatile period that we’ve had in the market. And so 75% of the S&P trading above their 20-day moving average is a pretty, pretty, Pretty robust number. It’s something we haven’t seen really since November, I believe since early November. So what does that mean when breath is picking up? It means that essentially a lot of stocks are moving, number one, are moving in an upward direction. And it also just is a more healthier market. move for the markets in general versus just a small sector participating. But regardless of breadth increasing, your AI names have been, or AI-related names have really kind of driven the high end of this market over the last week. Some of the top weekly performers this week, number one is Intel, which that kind of snuck up on me there, up 33.5%. Lumentum, which is Lite, L-I-T-E, that’s one we own, up 27.5%. Sienna, that’s C-I-E-N. Bill actually just made a purchase of that earlier this week, up 27.25%. Some other names in here, there’s really nothing that is, got to go down, get all the way down to, let’s see, we’ve got really got to get all the way down to number 16 that doesn’t have to do with AI, that’s Humana. So we’ve got a health company in there at 16. Centene is 18. Every other name in the top 20 in the S&P 500 this week has been in that AI space. So that’s… know gives this uh gives us confidence so you know bill bill you know came out with the article on monday in terms of it being a good uh good buying opportunity or potentially in terms of how the market itself is valued and so um when we look at you know breadth is expanding uh to what 75 of those companies over their 20-day moving average it’s uh you know that that that gives you gives us confidence in that thesis for Monday, and we’ve seen that. It’s been a short time since the article came out, but it’s At this point, it’s holding up a little bit better maybe than the ceasefire, so we’ll see. But like I said, tomorrow will go a long way to giving us an idea of what’s going to go on and how the market continues to price risk, particularly over weekends where the market’s not trading and the news flow continues to come. But we’re… Looking forward, yeah, Bill said looking forward to getting out to Minneapolis here in a handful of weeks. Of course, we’ll get Edie, she’ll get her pen and paper out and begin to get her planning done for that particular trip as we wrap up here in Sarasota. Of course, if you want to stay up to date with our thoughts on the markets, get Bill’s newsletter at gundersoncapital.com or if you would like to have a discussion with us, About your portfolio allocations and more to what we did this week with folks here in Sarasota, give us a call, 855-611-BEST. That’s 855-611-2378. Have a great day, everyone. Bye now.

SPEAKER 02 : 39:48

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 SIBC and FINRA.