Join Bill Gunderson and Barry Kite as they delve into the complexities of the current global market environment, against the backdrop of escalating geopolitical tensions. With oil prices fluctuating and markets responding unpredictably, today’s discussion embraces these uncertainties, analyzing the implications for both international relations and your investment strategy. Amid a shifting economic landscape, Gunderson examines the significant moves of markets, particularly in commodities, semiconductors, and emerging tech sectors.
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 05 :
And welcome to the Monday morning, another newsworthy morning on this April the 13th, 2026. This is Bill Gunderson, professional money manager, and I’m here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial analyst. And believe it or not, after all the news over the weekend, we actually have a mixed open. I was shocked to just look over at the NASDAQ. And it actually has gone positive right now. The Dow, however, is down 226 points. That’s about a half a percent. The Dow is at 47,693. The Dow is up about 8% off of its recent low, however. The S&P just went positive. It’s up two points. After being down here not too long ago, the S&P is at 6,818. And the NASDAQ is now positive by 65. I noticed some pretty good action in SanDisk, CoreWeave, Palantir, Halliburton, the natural gas stocks, etc., The NASDAQ is up 65 right now, despite all of the dramatic news over the weekend. The NASDAQ is at 22,964. Interest rates are not budging at all here today. Oil is budging. Oil right now is up 5.5%. It’s actually pulled back quite a bit. And oil is at 101.88. It was up at like 108 last night. So we’ll have to see what’s going on here in the news. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson. President of Gunterson Capital Management. I’m here with Barry Kider, Chartered Financial Analyst. My headline over the weekend in my newsletter was, oil is down 14.8% for the week, and the semiconductor sector is breaking out to new all-time highs. So what a bifurcated, almost a… Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, kind of mark it. On the one hand, you’ve got the big Dow stocks and those that depend heavily on gasoline and oil prices. And on the other hand, you’ve got the AI stocks and the chip stocks, which continue to march on. And that’s what we’ve got here this morning. And then I said the headline also ended with oil down 14.7, semiconductors break out to a new high, but… I ended with that because we had just got the news that Vance and his team had left Pakistan with no deal in hand. And it was pretty obvious at that point that something’s going to, the hammer’s going to fall in one way or another somewhere.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, the Iranians are known for, I don’t know if you call it tough negotiators, or just they don’t seem to be big on compromise.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, Pharaoh of Egypt was the same way, and Moses finally got the best of, or God finally got the best of Pharaoh, who was very hard-hearted and stubborn, eventually losing all the firstborn there in Egypt. Oh, God. History repeats itself again. And they dig in. And look, when you’ve got an economy like Iran, how dependent is Iran? What do they have besides oil? I don’t know, weapons, I guess.
SPEAKER 06 :
Very commodity-based. I mean, some of their brightest minds left Iran long ago.
SPEAKER 05 :
They know how to enrich uranium, but most of those guys have been eliminated. But blockading a country that depends on oil will cripple that economy. and that you can’t do much in the way of sponsoring terror around the world without funds without money unless they get money from russia and or china uh… they don’t have a lot of sources of income and uh… that is really going so i mean trump in a more it’s gonna hurt the most bang we’re gonna do uh… uh… blockade you’re not going to sell any of your oil Now, there’s complications in that. Number one, the reason those meetings were in Pakistan, Barry, is Pakistan is basically a proxy state for China. And China wants that oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz because China badly needs that oil from Iran. And with the blockade, that’s going to cut off China. from accessing that oil from Iran. And that’s why China tried to use their proxy in Pakistan to work out some kind of a deal. But the problem is Iran is going to deal not in China’s best interest. They’re going to deal in their best interest, and they insist on enriching uranium. That’s a no-go. and other things, charging a big bounty for ships going through the Strait of Hormuz. And that was it. I mean, they got up, they walked out of the negotiations, flew home and planned. I’m sure they had a backup. I’m sure they had a plan B. And plan B is putting a blockade at 10 a.m. It just happened 12 minutes ago. U.S. Central Command announced on Sunday that it will begin enforcing a maritime blockade on all traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports. So it’s not really a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It’s the ports that the tankers have to go through to get out into the Strait of Hormuz, the harbors. etc., that some of these islands also that are off the shores there of Iran, and the blockade will apply to all vessels of all nations traveling to or from Iranian ports and coastal areas. That also means that Iran, whatever they bring in in the way of imports, They’ll be cut off. I don’t know how much food they produce there in Iran and how many things that they trade and do business with other countries with, but they’re cut off from the world via the shipping routes effective 12 minutes ago. A U.S.-led blockade on Iranian ports could effectively shut down the country’s economic model by cutting off its primary source of external income according to economist robin brooks brooks noted that iran’s large current account surplus driven overwhelmingly by oil and gas exports meaning they much more than they import, would be wiped out under a full maritime blockade. The bulk of Iran’s inflows comes from energy exports, which he argued would fall to zero. if shipping were halted uh so they’d have to cut off uh you know producing pumping the oil where would they put it uh you know those storage there’s only so much storage they’re in a heck of a mess well and it puts pressure on on you know china who who
SPEAKER 06 :
who essentially has been the primary buyer or only buyer of Iranian crude for an extended period of time.
SPEAKER 05 :
And that’s where you have to head next with what the fallout could be from this blockade. With this escalation in geopolitical tensions, he also warned Beijing that the U.S. would impose a staggering 50% tariff on Chinese goods. I’m glad I don’t need any more HO locomotives right now. I’ve got all I need. If Beijing provides military aid to Iran during the current U.S.-Israeli conflict. You just wonder, you know, Armageddon, how close are we really? Is it like a ticking time bomb and one little thing here, and all of a sudden you’ve got – it is a pretty tense situation there between major powers. And, of course, Russia is also part of that. Now, Russia benefits from all of this.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, they’ve been sitting back just, you know, collecting cash as this occurs, as they’ve seen prices go up, as they actually have seen us lift. some of the sanctions so we could get some get crude to the rest of the world. And we’ve also seen, I saw a story where Saudi Arabia has gotten their pipeline back online, and actually you’re having record exports now from the Red Sea. So we’ve switched waterways at the moment, and we’ll see how that keeps working out.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, so that’s where it stands. And, of course, I’m sure we have pretty good surveillance on the borders of Iran as far as weapons coming into the country. And if we catch any country, whoever it may be, North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan, whoever, importing weapons into Iran, they’ll be hit with a 50% tariff. And Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet next month in Beijing, but there are some high stakes going on right now. We’ll be right back. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Stocks Now show. Well, China strikes back. I mean, they have their big stick. Their biggest bargaining chip seems to be the rare earth minerals. And they have hiked prices on rare earth by 44% for Q2. And, Barry, you know, I mean, one thing that I see coming out of all of this, I think we’re going to get some pretty hot inflation prints going forward between oil, between gasoline. Aluminum prices are way up right now. And now you’ve got rare earth, which goes into a lot of different things. And petroleum products, don’t forget. I see a little inflation ahead.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, don’t forget all those plastics out there. They have oil in them as well.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, exactly. I mean, even I used to buy albums. Abbey Road. I think, I don’t know, somewhere someone asked me, what’s the first album you ever owned? I think it was Abbey Road and the White Album. And they were made of vinyl. They were on vinyl. And that was mostly a petroleum product, believe it or not. And any plastic has got a lot of petroleum in it. So now there’s those that say, and of course there’s always pundits. The market has rebounded quite handsomely since it got down to those levels when I said this is a compelling buy. And there’s different outlooks on where oil is headed. We have Trita Parsi from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, whatever that is. Yeah, what is that? In an interview with CNBC, the expert, they’re always paraded as experts, argued that Iran currently holds escalation control in the conflict. meaning any U.S. escalation can be countered by Iran in a way that hurts Trump even more. Well, I’m not so sure about that. You know, I listened to an interview. Well, I listened to the news conference by the head of the CENTCOM. about all the damage, I mean, he quantified all the damage that we have inflicted upon Iran, upon their air defense systems. Eighty-five percent of their air defense systems have been knocked out. Their missile launchers, now they’ve got no money. I mean, that money’s going to dry up unless somebody, you know, gives them money. I don’t really agree with that, that they have the upper hand. And he is claiming that an American blockade would send oil much, much higher because of what the fallout would be from Iran and the escalation and what they would do to strike back. And then Goldman Sachs, who I feel is much more level-headed and probably not as political as this previous one was, they see in a chart shared by Mike Zaccardi, he said Brent is still expected to peak around April. Okay, this is what, April 13th. before easing to $80 by the fourth quarter of 2026. I see much more that scenario than this scenario being floated on CNBC by probably somebody who has political bias. I don’t think Goldman Sachs has political bias. I think they’re pretty straight shooters. And once again, I would not be buying oil futures here, hoping to make a lot of money on the previous forecast that we just went through. that Iran strikes back and that oil prices surge and go up to the $150 per barrel area. I don’t see that scenario. I agree with Goldman Sachs. I think the top in oil is around here. I don’t know where the exact top is, but let’s just say 115 to 110 or whatever, somewhere in there. I don’t see it getting higher than that. And I think the blockade is going to work. Because now you have control over the ports. There’s still a lot of landmines. I talked to some of these kids in the Navy and some of the Citadel kids. It’s not any denomination of the military, but they’re kept up on military things. They all said that there’s a lot of landmines floating, or sea mines, floating in the Straits of Hormuz. But with the embargo… A blockade, we’ll be able to get our Navy in there and clear those landmines. And they won’t be able to get out of port to plant more, right?
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, and they’ve got actually, I mean, they have smart mines. I always think of the old Flipper episodes with the mine just rolling around and buds about to run in the skiff. But they have smart mines. In other words, these mines are at the bottom of the… bottom of the ocean and can basically determine, hey, is this a ship we want to attack or not? So they’re not just the old minds, if you will. You hit it and you’re blown to kingdom come. Right.
SPEAKER 05 :
No matter what.
SPEAKER 06 :
They’ve gotten a little more sophisticated.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes. Okay, and the torpedoes are getting more sophisticated. They act more like drones these days.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, sea drones, exactly.
SPEAKER 05 :
Than torpedoes. I’m sure when my father, who was on a submarine in World War II and was the chief torpedo man on a diesel sub, I’m sure he didn’t have a whole lot of – once the captain said fire, they didn’t have much control after that. They had to be right on with their calculations. Came a long way. They’re not going to change the course of that torpedo, right, with GPS. No.
SPEAKER 06 :
Right, came a long way since run silent, run deep.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, but I do know that they put down a little bit of tonnage of Japanese ships down there in the South Pacific. Oil could spike to 150 if U.S. proceeds with Hormuz blockade. Okay, this comes from Onyx, a veteran oil market executive. And once again, I don’t really agree with that assessment. In the meantime, I’ll tell you what’s having a good day again today, European gas. We’re not talking oil here. We’re talking gas, natural gas, liquid natural gas. Their prices are going way up. Natural gas futures leap more than 9% on Monday. And, of course, the natural gas stocks are doing well. You wanted to sell them a couple of weeks ago or last week, but I held on because I feel like this is a very, very, very, very fluid situation. And you’re seeing good action today in Devon Energy, DVN. You’re seeing good action in LNG, which is Chenier Energy. You’re seeing good action in VG, which is Venture Global. Those are kind of three of the main natural gas stocks. Other ones would be APA and EOG and several others. But those are kind of the main ones. And Europe refuses to get involved. The one that’s very outspoken, well, obviously, Spain’s probably the most outspoken. They’ve condemned Trump and the U.S. for invading, for attacking Iran. And the guy in the U.K., Stormer, he’s not going to support the blockade whatsoever, even though they’re on the receiving end of higher gas prices. Because of a lot of the decision that they’ve made. And Trump is now saying that gas prices could stay high through the November midterm elections. So this whole thing could have a big impact on those midterm elections. 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. And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, we have Minnesota, Minneapolis penciled in either the week of May 13th This is a month out, four weeks out, maybe May 20th, we’ll see, or the week after at the Radisson Blue Mall of America, attached to the Mall of America. And if you know of a better place or would like to suggest another place, we would like to hear from you. I’m not obviously from that area, but I’ve been there many, many times. And the way we’ve been doing it lately is a workshop on Tuesday night and individual meetings with clients and with people that are interested in hearing, talking to us about what we do for a living on Tuesday and Wednesday. with the team so that’s uh may 13th or may 20th okay they got that got that good walleye at that restaurant i know that much that’s a good uh yeah the uh fire lake yeah that’s it yeah fire lake i just like the bob seger song fire lake there must be a fire lake up there somewhere Okay, let’s get back to business here. There’s a lot going on here. The ports have been blockaded. The UK will not support the Strait of Hormuz blockade. Starmer says oil jumps 8%. Aluminum climbs to four-year high. Now, what is aluminum in? A lot of things. A lot of food, cannery, et cetera, cars, different things. There’s another inflationary pressure. And that also stuff comes through there in that Strait of Hormuz. Emirates Global Aluminum, the Middle East top producer, has invoked force majeure clauses on some contracts after its Al-Tawili plant sustained significant damage in an Iranian attack. So there’s that. We’ve also got some stocks in the news here today, and I find several of these stories quite interesting. And by the way, it’s in my early morning trip, my journey through the market. I spent two hours preparing the show before you ever hear it, an hour and a half to two hours every morning before the show. where it’s very quiet and it’s peaceful and i curate the show i am the producer the editor of the show i picked the stories and put them in the order that i think would flow the best And I find a lot of my ideas in those research hours in the morning, or I find stories that fortify my holdings, my belief in things that we already own. Or you find a narrative.
SPEAKER 06 :
Sometimes you find a narrative that you get the same stories a handful of weeks in a row, and it’s like we have a trend.
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, and I would just say things show up in the stock market, the news, a lot – They don’t ever show up on the nightly news or in the major news. A lot of it’s in the financial. Halliburton wins a multibillion-dollar contract from YPF. That’s Argentina. And Argentina has some large oil fields. Vaca Muerta. vaca morta i know america means dead and i think vaca means life doesn’t it dead life uh haliburton is up two percent in the pre-market let’s see where it’s at right now and don’t forget haliburton has exposure to ai data centers just like schlumberger does they are helping companies build data centers Halliburton right now is up less than 1%. But between the Vaca Muerta and Argentina, you’ve got the big fields off of Brazil where Petrobras is. You’ve got Venezuela to rebuild. And now whatever happens with Iran, if we take the oil like Trump wants to do, That’s going to create some business for companies like Halliburton, obviously. So that one, that’s a pretty good story out there today from this morning’s news feed. Multi-billion dollar contract. And YPF is the national oil company of Argentina. And Argentina is blessed with a lot of oil, offshore oil, under the water. Okay, another one. I’ve been watching this. It’s a smaller chip stock. The semiconductor sector broke out to a new all-time high on Friday, or actually last week. And the stocks leading the charge, SanDisk, NVIDIA. NVIDIA finally really perked up on Friday. Some new life. Broadcom very strong right now. AMD very strong right now. And there’s a small one, Aluma, A-L-M-U. They secure a $4 million. This is a pretty recent IPO. They secure a $4 million U.S. government contract for a semiconductor platform. And it has not done hardly anything since kind of becoming a thing, A-L-M-U. Today, however, the stock is up 44%. five percent on this news very that’s a significant haha that’s a significant obviously this is a significant contract that the silicon valley company got and uh let me just see what they do for a living if there’s engages in research and development of infrared optical sensors it’s all about optical i mean optics is what we’ve been talking about at the end of last week and they’re in goleta california which i know uh just north of santa barbara that’s also where uh The shoe company is Decker’s. Decker’s Outdoor is also in Goleta. But Aluma gets a big contract from the government. Stock up 45% today. It seems like ever since I’ve been in the business in the late 90s that the semiconductor sector has been the… I know it has. I don’t even have to go back and do the math. There has been no better sector in the market over the last couple of decades than the semiconductor sector because it’s behind everything. It’s behind the Internet, the www.com revolution that we had, the semiconductors behind the PC revolution that we had, the networking revolution, the telecom revolution, which kind of knocked AT&T out of the water. It’s involved in the iPhone revolution, the chip sector. And now obviously heavily, heavily, heavily involved in AI is the chip sector. So there’s one, Aluma, which is on the smaller side, $193 million in market cap. You put that into perspective. That’s a micro cap stock, so you have to keep that in mind. But that is news worth bringing your attention to here on this Monday. Okay, let’s go to the next one here, Vertiv. We own Vertiv. I don’t know. We got backed out of it. I think we took a profit on Vertiv, VRT. But that stock’s been breaking out, too. Vertiv is more of an infrastructure play. Let me pull up the chart of Vertiv. And it is very much an AI stock. Vertiv Holdings is breaking out to a new all-time high once again today. Vertiv, this is how they build themselves. They provide data center management products and service. And they’re in Cleveland, Barry. So when we go to Cleveland later this year, we’ll have to drive by Vertiv. and see what’s going on there. See how full their parking lot is.
SPEAKER 06 :
I don’t think we realized it was there last time we went. I think we owned it last time we went.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, and we should have drove by it and checked on it because it continues to do very well. Now, why are they in the news today? Because they’re buying a company. which can be a good thing or a bad thing. Usually it’s a good thing. It means they’re expanding their capabilities. And what is the industry, what is the bit that they’re buying that they have interest in? They’re buying Bmarco Structures, a U.S.-based provider of custom-engineered structural fabrication equipment. BMARCO recently expanded its engineering and fabrication facility to approximately 560,000 square feet. And this Bemarco facility is also in Cleveland, and it’s all about AI. It’s all about AI. They build AI infrastructure, even in Cleveland. Okay, now, Wedbush has got their weekly stocks out that you’ve got to own in your portfolio. I look at them with a big, big grain of salt. But when we come back, we’ll talk about that. And we’ve got earnings. Welcome to earnings season. It’s official. We have two big ones in today. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 03 :
And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, you know, the software sector…
SPEAKER 05 :
It has been pummeled. And really, there’s only one good stock in the software sector right now, and that’s Palantir. And it has been bouncing after breaking support last week. But these others that Wedbush is their favorites, I can’t, not me, I disagree. CrowdStrike. Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Checkpoint Software, Rubrik. And while I agree that these are the major players in the industry right now, the charts look horrible on these stocks right now. And in addition to that, I would not say that the valuations are all that compelling because they’ve always been expensive stocks. And if you take it a step further, all of most of this issue in the private credit markets is do is software related a lot of it is software related and not only do you have uh you know questionable loans being made to these companies as far as the you know the fundamentals look these stocks are also reeling right now their stocks are reeling and when the stocks reel The private credit goes down in value, too, on these companies. If you own a pool of private credit on a bunch of software stocks, probably mostly private software stocks, they’re even worse off, Barry, than the CrowdStrikes and the Palantirs of the world. And so you’ve got a double whammy there in that private credit and their exposure to the software sector. McDonald’s to roll out new energy drinks. That’s the new fad. You know, we’ve got in our neighborhood, we have a new Dutch Bros. I didn’t know it was Bros. Someone told me, corrected me. It’s not Dutch Brothers. It’s Dutch Bros. And they get more afternoon traffic than morning traffic. Why is that? Everybody needs a shot of energy about noon. And now, you know, that’s Dutch Brothers’ biggest thing. Now you’ve got Starbucks offering energy concoctions, craft-made energy drinks. Now McDonald’s is going to roll out new energy drinks, specialty sodas this year. Yeah. New beverages include Red Bull Dragonberry Energizer, Dirty Dr. Pepper. I didn’t know that guy was on there. Yeah, I didn’t know Dr. Pepper was like that. And Mango Pineapple Refresher. Now, that sounds good. But it’ll also give you a little dose of to get you through the rest of the day. Oh, here’s Kathy Woods. I always like to see. She’s buying Palantir, Tesla, more and more Tesla, and Robinhood. Robinhood looks terrible. Tesla’s chart looks terrible. And we should have two articles out this week. I just was thinking of Elon Musk because one of them is related to Elon Musk. Earnings snapshot, Goldman Sachs. Okay. Why is this significant? Bang. The gun has been fired. The race has started. We’re now in earnings season on this April 13, 2026. We had two today, fast and all. and Goldman Sachs. And we’ll do the math on Goldman Sachs here in a minute. But as of right now, this quarter, we’re looking at 12.6% growth in earnings versus the same quarter last year, which was a phenomenal quarter. But now we’ve got another phenomenal quarter, and that double-digit growth continues. We’ve had six straight quarters of double-digit earnings growth for the S&P 500. And that’s why even with all of the tension in the Strait of Hormuz, you’ve got the NASDAQ positive right now on the back of earnings and earnings expectations. Now, if we take what earnings have done in recent quarters, the earnings season, they have come in way above where they started. And if we apply that math to the current numbers, we could get as high as 18 or 19% growth in earnings versus the same quarter last year. even though right now we’re pegged at 12.6%. So Goldman Sachs comes in. They beat by $1.16. They’re an S&P 500 company. Their earnings will be a part of the calculation of overall S&P 500 earnings. Their estimates will also be a calculation of forward estimates. We closed Friday at 20.4 times forward earnings. We got as low as 19.7 times forward earnings. 19.7 when I put out the compelling buy call on the S&P 500 and on the market. And now we have Goldman Sachs reporting just for fun. Let’s take a look at how Goldman Sachs stacks up. I’ve owned Goldman Sachs in the past. I would say if the banks are doing well and the financials are doing well, it’s the one you want to own. Having said that, there’s a Paul cast over the financial sector right now. A lot of that’s coming from private credit. But having said that, it has been a good performer over the years. You could do a lot worse than Goldman Sachs. GS over the last 10 years has averaged 22% per year, which is basically what the S&P 500 has averaged. But… Over the last three years, it’s averaged 45% per year. And it is on the periphery of AI because they’re funding a lot of these private companies. They’re doing a lot of debt financing, etc., etc. And Goldman Sachs actually has a performance grade of A. So you could do a lot worse than GS. But now we’ve got to look at that all-important five-year valuation. Looking backwards is where I begin. Looking forward is where I go next. And then, of course, I look at the current one year chart of the stock. But right now, the five year valuation on GS is not that good. OK, and that would steer me away from it. I need to get that valuation. We’re down to our last 30 seconds of the show here. The valuation right now on Goldman Sachs, upside potential 75%. You could do a whole lot worse. I like 80. Goldman Sachs is currently a weak buy in my system, and it’s ranked at number 405 out of 5,213. Okay, we’re out of time. To get a four-week trial to the newsletter, the app, the live trades, go to GundersenCapital.com. We continue to have a very good year with our portfolios. To discuss management, financial plan for you, customized for you, give us a call at 855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. Have a great day, everybody.
SPEAKER 02 :
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.
