Join Bill Gunderson as he navigates a turbulent Friday in the markets on his ‘Best Stocks Now’ show. With the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P all opening to the downside, Gunderson delves into the reasons behind these movements, focusing on precious metals and their reaction to Trump’s newly appointed Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh. Bill explores how parabolic movements in silver and gold are affected by fiscal policy changes, and shares his concern over the recent sell-off in these markets.
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 Gunderson Capital Management. Here is professional money manager, Bill Gunderson.
SPEAKER 04 :
And welcome to the Friday. It is a very eventful day in the markets today. It is Friday, January 30th. This is Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management, a nationwide fee-based only money management firm. And I’m not here with Barry Kite today. He has a well-deserved day off. And I’ll be flying solo, but boy, I got a lot of news. We got a lot of things to go over together here today. Right now, the markets have opened to the downside. The Dow is down 156, 48,915. The NASDAQ is down 69 right now. That’s a quarter of a percent. It’s at 23,625. We have the S&P down 20 points, 6,948. Looks like 7,000 is resistance right now. Every time it bumps its head on that 7,000 mark, it says, ouch. And backs off. We’re at 6,948. The small caps are down a half a percent today. The big news today, as far as I’m concerned, did I call a top in silver yesterday? Well, we’ll see. I did send out an alert. To people that own silver, I said, I don’t like the way this thing looks here. It’s down 13.6% today. A lot of that has to do with the new Fed chairman that Trump said is coming in, his pick. And gold is down 5.4% here today. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, President and Chief Investment Officer, Market Strategist at Gunderson Capital Management. And Barry Kite has the day off. Let’s pick up where we left off yesterday. I was very worried about the precious metals. I said, you know what? Parabolic moves don’t end well eventually. I don’t know if it’s a law of gravity, the law of gravity, or things snapping back to the mean, right? When something goes way outside, extremes. You know, a lousy baseball team wins six or seven in a row. They usually snap back to the mean. If we have weird weather like we’re having right now, we’re not usually 20 degrees in Charleston, but we’re going to be that on Sunday. Things have a way of snapping back to the mean, and that move in precious metals was really… unprecedented i i’ve never seen a move in that particular asset class like we’ve witnessed especially in silver and i did send out an alert yesterday we don’t own any silver or silver stocks but we do own some gold and gold stocks in our portfolios people have however transferred some silver stocks to me i’ve left them in those silver stocks yesterday i sold them and i sent out alert To all my subscribers, look, this is just me. I’m a guy that sits there and looks at charts every single day. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. As Bob Dylan said, it’s just a matter of time before this silver market. And I said yesterday was the day. Well, we’ll see. It’s down 14% today. It may pick up and resume its torrid rally again. But I think what’s happened here is you had a big change. You have Trump finally naming his next Fed chairman, which is Warsh, Kevin Warsh. That was the guy whose name we were trying to think of yesterday and couldn’t come up with it. And Warsh is an inflation hawk. He’s known for that. And that is not good for gold and silver. But I will say this. I mean, he’s going to be Trump’s man there. I mean, the Fed is definitely losing a lot of cash. You know, that separation between the president, the executive branch, and the Fed. I mean, Trump didn’t name somebody that’s not going to be kind of cooperative what he wants. So anyways, I just think that it was overdone. And that’s what is happening here today, a major sell-off in silver and a major sell-off in gold, which is down 5.7%. Now, yesterday, the equities markets didn’t react at all, really, to our current Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, and his decision to do nothing, which comes as no surprise on Wednesday. And I would say the big story yesterday for me is, And the equities market was the sell-off in the software stocks, and I’ve been warning about that for quite some time. It’s been showing up in the charts. The software ETF IGV, I look at that chart every week, and it’s in my newsletter every week. And if you follow along with the newsletter… That’s a pretty good place to go when you receive that newsletter is look at those charts. I just picked the major asset classes, the Dow, the S&P, gold, silver, Bitcoin, certain very important sectors in the market like gold and silver, like oil. I pick on charts of Bitcoin, and there’s a lot. A picture tells a very large story. You can’t hide from that picture. It is what it is. You can’t change it. It’s drawing out what the current attitude towards these asset classes is at any given point in time. And the attitude towards the software stocks has been downright nasty now for about five or six weeks. And, you know, I’ve been wondering why. And I saw a thesis today that makes sense to me. And we do have a lot of listeners there in the Silicon Valley where most of these software stocks are headquartered. What about this theory that AI, artificial intelligence is eating software that makes sense to me you know just take sales force for instance how much can you now do through applying AI for instance we have a very large database that have listened to our radio show over the years it’s in the tens of thousands what would AI do for us I’m sure it would do a lot and saying, look, these might be the prime suspects here to see if they’re interested, you know, whatever. It may help a lot, and you may be able to go around what, you know, Salesforce does, and you could say that about a lot of software programs. Not only that, how about the programming itself? It’s made the programming a lot easier. So anyways, this comes from Ben Reitz, head of technology research at Mellius Research. He says that infrastructure software companies are outperforming as artificial intelligence disrupts the traditional software businesses. I’m totally on board. I think that he has nailed it. AI is eating software, he said. You’re seeing it in an interview on CNBC. This is what we’ve been saying for a couple of years now, and this is an infrastructure software company that has stable recurring revenue streams. That’s some of the companies, but others are being clobbered by this move in AI. AI is disrupting a lot of industries. AI is going to disrupt a lot of industries. We’ve talked about disruptive companies many, many times here on the Best Stocks Now show, and the bottom line is you want to own the disruptors and not the disrupted. Think of how Amazon, how many industries, how many companies, how many sectors, how many retail stores has Amazon disrupted? There’s a perfect example. And now you’ve got AI coming along, and it’s going to disrupt a lot. And you have to be quick on your feet, quick with your mind to think, wow, you know what? I don’t want to be in the companies that are being disrupted. And I can just tell you, it’s across the board in the software sector. Obviously, it’s Adobe. It’s Microsoft. It’s the Palo Alto Networks. It’s CrowdStrike. It’s CloudFlare. Pretty much across the board, the software stocks are selling off. They’re being disrupted, according to this analyst, and I think he may have something there. Okay, well, we’ve got a new federal return. We don’t have a new one, but Trump names Kevin Warsh as his pick. For the Federal Reserve, and that’s disrupting the precious metals markets today. They are selling off. They’re pairing their losses a little bit, but they’re down considerably from their recent highs. Could the run in precious metals be in trouble? And could the sell-off in the software sector infect the entire NASDAQ? We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 04 :
And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. We have a brand new article out on Seeking Alpha. It went live. They turned the lights on it about an hour ago. You can go to seekingalpha.com. Look up Bill Gunderson. You can choose to follow me. You’ll be alerted in the future when an article comes out. But one of my goals… Isn’t this the time that we set goals and New Year’s resolutions and everything? One of my goals is to try to… Get a couple articles per week. Yes, that’s a lofty goal. But I’m one for lofty goals. I like lofty goals. And hopefully, if I could get 50 to 100 articles out this week, this year, I’d be happy. I’d probably be one of the number top writers there. I’ve had so many ideas that have turned out into big winners that I never wrote up for Seeking Alpha. But I’m going to try to do better this year. uh with my public persona there on a seeking alpha and also the tweets that i send out whatever you call them now the messages on x i’m going to try to be a little more prolific there on x also But just go to seekingalpha.com and type in Bill Gunderson. Follow me, and you can then see the articles that are published. Now, the other thing I need to bring up here is the upcoming live workshops in person on February the 23rd at 6.30 p.m., at sun city west i’m going to have the address for you by monday i haven’t had time to look it up it’s an auditorium there at the retirement community and i’m speaking to an investment club and they’ve said it would be okay for me to announce this on the air we are heard on uh on Salem’s Big News Talker there in Phoenix area. And we will be there on February the 23rd of Monday at 6.30 p.m. Okay, and then two days later, we’ll be in Houston. Let me get around. at 7 p.m. at the Westin Galleria teaching a workshop. I do the workshops. I love getting up in front of a group and trying to teach and show you what I’ve learned, whether you like it or not. Those are the things I’ve learned over the years of being in the business, the good, the bad, the ugly. And during those two days, the 25th and 26th, keep in mind, my number one gig, I go quiet. I go dark after I’m done with the show. And I manage money until the market closes. I’m looking at the charts of things we own, looking at things that I’m considering, looking at things I might want to sell, things I might want to buy. That’s one of the things that I enjoy most about this industry. is being a professional money manager and we will be meeting with folks one hour appointments available the 25th and 26th with me and barry and the rest of the team reserve a spot now gundersoncapital.com or call ed at 855-611-BEST 855-611-BEST. Okay, I like this guy that Trump picked. I was hoping for Waller. We got the other W, Warsh. And whether Jerome Powell stays on, I got to believe he’s going to leave. I think he’s got some pretty sour grapes. He might just stay on to be a no vote. Everything Warsh wants, everything Trump wants, because there’s no love lost between those two. And what can we expect from Warsh? He’s known as an inflation hawk. But he’s recently aligned with the president by publicly advocating for lower interest rates, which I think is the right thing to do. Whether Trump wants them or not, I think interest rates are too high at 4.25. Makes it difficult for people to buy a home, a new home buyer. The average new home buyer is now 40 years old. That’s not good. That’s one of the American dreams. If nominated and confirmed, Warsh would succeed Jerome Powell, whose term at the helm ends in May. Okay, the other subject I want to mention here, this loss in Bitcoin is disturbing. It is now set for its longest monthly loss streak since 2018. It’s down over 6% in January. Maybe all this money leaving gold and silver will go back to Bitcoin. We’ll see. But it’s certainly not doing that today. as Bitcoin is selling off. Personally, I think there’s a confidence crisis. You know, at the end of the day, there’s going to come a time in every asset class when it tests the nerves of investors. And deep down, do you really have the conviction in this asset class? And do you think it’s priced appropriately? And do you think in a pinch that if uh if if the us dollar failed would bitcoin pick up the pieces and be the substitute for that well there’s a confidence crisis right now going on i’ve never been a fan of bitcoin myself i might be infamous or famous whatever uh for having that opinion I kind of go along with the late Charlie Munger thinking I just don’t see the intrinsic value. I know a lot of people disagree with me. Well, when push comes to shove and you need a loaf of bread, is Bitcoin the answer? Well, no. Crude oil climbs to its highest since summer as growing bets of a U.S. strike on Iran. Well, that’s the big question out there right now. The armada is headed that way. The oil stocks have been perkier than I’ve seen them in a long time. Oil made a big move. But what if we don’t strike Iran? What if it’s just a quick take out a few important things and warn them, you better quit killing the dissidents? like the strikes on their nuclear sites. Then would oil start to fall back again? Because the demand hasn’t changed. The supply hasn’t changed. There’s too much supply out there. So we’ll just have to see. But I will say this, with the activity in Venezuela, with the activity in Iran, oil has seen a pretty good little move here. uh lately now earnings earnings earning oh american airlines plans to be the first major u.s carrier to resume flights to venezuela You know, I think I’ll wait until things settle down. I definitely don’t want to book a fishing trip with one of those pongas with four engines off the coast of Venezuela fishing for mahi-mahi with the fear of being shot down or whatever else. But they have resumed. And let’s not forget Cuba. Cuba is in big trouble. They’ve got 20 days left of oil. Something’s got to give there. What was the big earnings last night? Well, you could take your pick. There were a lot of them, but I think Apple probably. was the most important one, seeing as how it is a member of the Dow and it is a member of the S&P 500. And while Apple projected 13% to 16% revenue growth for this current quarter we’re in, demand is driving record results as far as iPhone sales. Is that translating to earnings growth for the stock Apple, which has been pretty stodgy recently? 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 are going to analyze and put Apple under the microscope. And it doesn’t take very long to do that because we’re going to use the Best Stocks Now app. And we’re going to type in AAPL. And we’re going to look at two major criteria here. that I wed together as man and wife or husband and wife that I like to see in a stock. I like to see good, strong performance, and I like to see valuation. In other words, first we’re going to look backwards at the track record, just like we would with a horse running at Santa Anita. We’re at Aqueduct or at Churchill Downs or a baseball player coming up to the plate with the bases loaded and two out in the ninth inning. What’s his batting average? What’s his RBIs? How many home runs has the guy hit? What’s his on-base percentage? Oh, they’ve got so many stats now it’s not even funny. Let’s take a look at Apple. Apple’s had a pretty good decade. But a lot of that performance is built into the company’s performance a while back. In other words, they’re still kind of living on their past performance because you have a 10-year average that has actually beat the S&P 500. The company does pay a small dividend. My average annual returns do include that dividend, so you get a total return. Apple has delivered to investors, happy investors, by the way, 28.39%. That’s the average total return. of Apple over the last 10 years, which I think it’s safe to say that Tim Cook has been at the helm that entire time. It’s been a while since Steve Jobs, the late Steve Jobs, was running the company. Now, by contrast, the S&P 500 has delivered 26.9. So Apple has beat the S&P 500 by a couple of basis points. 200 basis points, actually. Okay. Over the last five years, it’s been a lot more choppy. A lot choppier, I should say. 14% average return. Diminishing returns.
SPEAKER 1 :
14.1%.
SPEAKER 04 :
The S&P 16.8%. So it’s underperformed the S&P over the last five years. Okay. Over the last three years, it’s also underperformed, the S&P 500, by a little, although it’s done pretty well. 21.5% per year returns. Average, no guarantees going forward. This is past performance. The S&P is 24%, Apple 21.5%. Underperformed. Over the last 12 months, this stock has come almost to a screeching halt. And we don’t own it. We do not own Apple. I just don’t feel like it’s a double-digit grower anymore. It’s trending down towards that single-digit. stodgy growth because they really don’t have any other irons in the fire it’s not like you know tesla that has ai tesla has autonomous cars robo taxis all kinds of different irons in the fire apple’s really kind of a one-trick pony and for their ai they’re having to reach out and use others uh Over the last 12 months, Apple’s stock is up 8.8%. The S&P is up 15%. I don’t know. I would think as an investor I’d be getting a little bit restless. Now, having said that, let’s take a look at this quarter that Apple reported. They gave some pretty good guidance, I think. But overall, and this is one of their better quarters in a while because it is that double-digit numbers again that they haven’t seen for quite some time, both top and bottom line. Their sales were up 16% year over year. That’s a good quarter. Obviously, a lot of people, I’m one of them. I had an aging iPhone that I finally upgraded to the latest model, which I’m happy with. But I can’t say there’s a lot of capabilities in this new iPhone that I didn’t have before. It just, you know, it charges a lot faster for me. It holds the charge a lot better. The volume’s a lot better. When I listen to my Grateful Dead station, you know, while I’m looking at stock charts, I can hear Jerry Garcia’s voice a little better and that bass guitar from Phil Lesch and other artists that I grew up listening to like Bob Dylan and the Doors. You know, I’m a creature of the 60s. Apple stock is down, after this sensational report today, 1%. I always look at how the stock reacts. Their earnings were up 18%. And I think what the market is saying, this may be a good quarter for you, but what have you got? for the coming quarters and the coming years. And yes, I will agree that it was a pretty good quarter, 16% and 18% growth, when lately they’ve had high single-digit growth. And the bottom line is they’re looking for 10% growth in 2026 versus this year, 10%. And then they’re looking for 11% growth for 2027. And what does that do? That compresses the multiple. You’re not going to get those 40, 45 multiples anymore on Apple. The PE is currently 33, which is pretty rich. Apple does have its following. It is a popular stock. and its forward PE is 30. Now when you put 30 forward PE up against 10% growth, you’ve got a PEG ratio of three. That’s rich. Yesterday we mentioned Meta, which PEG ratio, the forward PE and the growth rate matched, one to one. So you have a PEG of one. So when I compare apples to oranges, pardon the pun, we’re comparing Apple to Meta here. Meta is a much cheaper stock. Meta has more irons in the fire. Meta is still growing a lot faster. And Meta has more users, I’m going to say, worldwide, a lot more than Apple does. So now, all right, so the last, the track record, not very impressive as of late. Let’s take a look at the five-year valuation. For me, this is the critical number, okay? And I’m going to try to be as generous as I possibly can as I do my valuation. Now, the valuation is current as of yesterday’s close. I show Apple with 55.8% upside potential. I’m using annual growth of 10%. And I’m just taking that consensus earnings estimate, which is right now $9.12. Take that $9.12, extrapolate it out over the next five years at 10% per year growth. That’s an easy little thing you can do. You can do that on graph paper, you can do it on the back of a napkin, or you can do it in a spreadsheet. I use a spreadsheet. Sometimes a back of a napkin if I have one handy. The five-year target price for me is $397. Apple pays a dividend yield, 40 basis points, nothing to write home about. 55.8. That’s a D minus value grade. Now, what would change that trajectory? One, if those earnings estimates start to ratchet higher, they might go higher after this earnings report, but I doubt they’re going to move too much. If the growth rate all of a sudden increases from 10%, I don’t see that happening. Or if you see multiple expansion, you’re already trading at a very rich multiple. It’s a peg ratio of three. I can’t make a case for Apple on my valuation. Therefore, when I combine the past performance… With the five-year projection, Apple comes in with the rank of 3,316 out of 5,194. It gets an overall Gunderson grade of C. That’s just average. And actually, I have a weak sell rating on the stock. That’s the bottom line. I own 23 stocks in my premier growth portfolio. Apple would belong in that or maybe in the relative value portfolio right now. But at 30 times earnings, I can’t make a case for it. I still have seven openings. Apple’s not going to fill up one of those. It falls way short as far as valuation goes at the current time. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 01 :
And welcome back here to the final segment of the Best Docs Now show. Well, we’ve got other earnings that came in yesterday. This memory thing, I think, is probably…
SPEAKER 04 :
The second most important earnings reports from yesterday. Look at SanDisk today. Unbelievable. The shortage, the critical shortage in memory is impacting the entire computer industry. But it’s AI that is driving the demand for these memory chips. And we don’t own SanDisk. I wish I did. I wanted to buy it, and I kept waiting for it to pull back a little bit, and it never did. It just kept going, and it’s still going and going and going. But we do own Micron. And Micron is up today in sympathy with SanDisk. Micron’s up 1.5%, hitting a new all-time high. Micron is now a half a trillion dollar company. I can’t even believe that. You know, usually, usually in a normal world, which this is not due to data center, this phenomenon known as data center has created tremendous demand for these memory chips. and micron which normally like I say it’s a commodity flash memory has been a commodity most of the time over the last decade but right now it’s going through the roof now this has been a parabolic move too don’t forget in these memory chips and there will be a comeuppance at some point in time on them but for now the squeeze is on mostly from a supply point of view and uh sandisk earnings let’s just take a look at this quarter let’s just let’s just put let’s just put the numbers to it sales at sandisk s and dk which was spun off by western digital It is headquartered in the Silicon Valley, Milpitas, California, where we’re headed this year, probably in the spring. I love to see the wildflowers there and the hills. Beautiful. California really is a beautiful state. I spent 60 years there. We’ve got the sales up. For SanDisk, 61% year over year, SNDK. The earnings, now these are NVIDIA-like numbers from maybe, what, a year and a half, two years ago? The earnings come in 404% higher than the same quarter last year. SanDisk made $6.20 in the fourth quarter of 2025 versus $1.23, same quarter last year, 2024, same comparable quarter. That’s a 404% increase. Now, SanDisk is looking for earnings to increase this year. If you’re a CanSlim aficionado, I just mentioned the C in CanSlim. That’s the quarterly comparisons. The C stands for current earnings. Current earnings, $6.20 versus $1.23. You thought Apple’s 16% growth was good. How about 404% by SanDisk? Now, it’s not sustainable. I mean, this is peak-type earnings coming in a tremendous squeeze and shortage in this particular sector, important sector of the tech industry. SanDisk is looking for 590% increase in earnings this year, 2026. which is now underway, obviously. We’re almost one month done with the first month of 2026. They’re looking for $21.13 in earnings versus $3.06 last year. That works out to 590% increase in annual earnings. That’s the A in CAN SLIM. The A is annual earnings growth, 590%. Wait, we’re not done yet. We have numbers out there for 2027.
SPEAKER 1 :
$41.83.
SPEAKER 04 :
That would be another 98% increase on top of this year’s. No wonder the stock is hitting $613.78 right now. Where did it begin the year?
SPEAKER 1 :
300.
SPEAKER 04 :
This stock is now a double since the beginning of the year. When Western Digital spun this thing off, it went private for a long time. It came public last August at $25 a share, last August. This is probably the biggest winner in the entire market over the last, what is that now, six months? It came public at 25. It’s now 610. How high can it go? Well, right now it’s trading at 15 times forward earnings. $41.83 times 15 is about where the stock is right now. It’s probably pretty well done. If it were a filet mignon, it’d be pretty well done right now. We shall see because this extreme shortage in memory is still very critical and it’s not going to be solved anytime soon. But having said that, a lot of that has been built into this stock at this level. It is up 13% right now. It was up 20%. We’re seeing some selling into this and some profit taking. in SanDisk right now, and the rest of the sector, to be honest with you. Okay, well, Fridays are a fun day. You would think, ah, Gunderson takes it easy, probably just, you know, does hobbies and stuff. No, I’ve got to start writing the newsletter. It’ll be an important newsletter because we had a lot of earnings come in this past week. And that all fed into that number, S&P total earnings estimates for this year, 2026. We know what SanDisk is, $41.83. It’s not a member of the S&P 500. But a lot of the S&P reported this week. I will have a very important update on the target price for the S&P 500 for this year. And well, the 12-month target price is the critical one. And I’ll have a look at this software sector and if it’s infecting technically the entire NASDAQ, which the NASDAQ could be in for a little bit of a correction here, maybe. That’s why you want to get the newsletter this week. Go to GundersenCapital.com. I make a very generous offer for weeks. Or, if you’d like to have us… If you’d like to look at the portfolios that we manage, give us a call. Set up an appointment. Reserve a spot. The workshop’s coming up at 855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. Have a great day. Have a great weekend. And don’t slip on the ice this weekend. Take care.
SPEAKER 03 :
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.
