The conversation shifts to the critical examination of the retail sector’s performance during Black Friday and the broader implications of inflation rates that remain stubbornly above the Fed’s target. As retail giants like Walmart and Target come under discussion, listeners are treated to insights into the pressures and opportunities in the consumer market. Gunderson also explores the geopolitical landscape, including tensions between the US and Mexico, and how these might affect future market conditions. Tune in for valuable insights and a glimpse into new investment opportunities, including how drones are becoming a pivotal part of defense strategies.
Here is professional money manager, Bill Gunderson.
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And welcome to the Friday Foodcoma edition of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. I’m rusted up, ready for a new day of trading, and we are off to a fairly good start here in the market so far. Right now we’ve got the Dow up, let’s see, the Dow is up 32 basis points. or 139 points. The NASDAQ is catching a bid here right now. The NASDAQ right now is up 108 points. That’s a 60 basis point rise in the NASDAQ so far. The S&P 500 is up 25 points. That is 41 basis points to the upside. The Russell 2000 small cap index is up 17 points. That’s a 70 basis point rise today. Meanwhile, the bond market, wow, the 10-year’s cleared down to 4.19. We have not seen that in a long time. We’re cleared down to 4.19 on the 10-year this year. And something else we haven’t seen, well, we’re getting there. We’re almost at a new all-time high on the – Bitcoin. Bitcoin is up right now $2,700. There goes the rally in Bitcoin to $98,146. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show. I am broadcasting today from a remote location on this food coma Friday. Well, the food coma’s worn off. Yesterday afternoon, though late in the afternoon, it was It was weighing heavily on my mind, but we had a very nice Thanksgiving Day. First time in my life we didn’t cook. My wife and I actually went to a buffet, an all-you-can-eat buffet. No dishes to do, no leftovers, all the sushi you could eat, turkey, raw oysters, you know, prime ribs. So anyways, it was a very nice Thanksgiving. And we’re off to a very good start in the market today after kind of a squishy, soggy Wednesday, which saw the market sell off. But we are at or near all-time highs across the board in all three indexes. It was the tech stocks that were under pressure on Wednesday. And today we’ve got a nice bounce in the tech stocks with the NASDAQ up over 100 points. We had that PCE inflation number come in on Wednesday before we went on vacation. The PCE number, it was in line, but still a little hot, I think. Headline PCE inflation was 2.8% year over year, which was up from 2.7% in September, which is a little bit concerning today. And it definitely is going to weigh on future rate cuts, whether or not we’ll get any. I think there’s one more, yeah, one more Fed meeting between now and the end of the year. And I don’t know what the odds are right now, but I think we’re still favoring a 25-point rate cut in the last meeting of the year. This is the last trading day of November, and we will enter the last four weeks of next year when we come back to work on Monday. The initial jobless claims fell more than expected on Wednesday. We are starting off a new month and it looks like we’ll be starting off a new year with a continued strong jobs market. If anything, I still see a labor shortage around. At various places, hard to get, especially quality help. I have a hard time getting quality help. I have a very good crew here at Gundersen Capital Management. We had GDP growth on Wednesday. It was up 2.8%. So we’re beginning. Trump’s going to get a pretty good start. I mean, the economy is still, it’s not roaring, but it’s still strong. And it looks like we’re going to have continued growth in earnings, at least for now. And I’ll be updating those numbers in my newsletter, which I’ll be doing tomorrow, just like any other weekend. I’ll be updating my macro outlook. And I saw a target price today. We’ll get to that in a bit for next year of $7,000. $7,000. That is the new record high target price for next year. I’m all for it. How many people would like to see 7,000 next year? Yeah, let’s do it. It was from one of the big firms out there. I want to say maybe Deutsche Bank. I don’t know. We’ll get to that in a bit. We had some disasters on this past week, a big disaster. I would say Kohl’s was the biggest one. That’s worrisome there. Cole’s question or not, whether or not it can survive. Best Buy kind of had a squishy earnings report on Wednesday. Dell had a terrible earnings report on Wednesday. Dell was down 12%. And Hewlett-Packard, which has just been, can’t somebody come in there, some kind of turnaround? I’ll take over that company, get it moving in the right direction again. Hewlett-Packard down 12% after disappointing quarterly sales. Autodesk was down 9%, not good. Nordstrom’s down 8.5%, as we continue to see a lot of changes, you know, across the landscape of tech and across the landscape of the consumer and retail here in our country and around the world. Let’s see, what else? We’ve got some… Some oil news here coming in here today. It’s Black Friday. We forgot about that. Besides Food Goma Friday, it’s also Black Friday. I searched this morning for some deals. I didn’t see anything that really jumped off at me. And, in fact, some of the purchases I made this past week were already under Black Friday pricing. Okay. But it is expected to be a big day today of retail, biggest day of the year, I think. The stock market will close down early today at 1 p.m. The bond markets will close one hour later. And then we’ll come back and start a new month on Monday. The Consumer Discretionary Index has had a pretty good year. What are some of the leaders? Deckers Outdoors had another good year. The cruise industry has had a really good year. Royal Caribbean. Walmart continues to hit new highs. So these are the companies that are on the right side of that retail street. Costco has been hitting new highs. Kelanova. But then you’ve got Target and Kohl’s and others that are really, really struggling. So while we’re running at about 3.3% inflation, the euro area is running at about 2.3%. We still have some of the hottest inflation. No, it’s not 9% or 10% anymore, but it’s still running at over 3%, which is above the Fed’s targets. And it continues to be some of the hottest inflation in the world. You go to France, it’s 1.3% right now. But we have better GDP growth. France’s GDP growth, 0.4%. And, of course, you’ve got Europe bracing for the Trump tariffs, which he’s already put a 25% tariff on Canada, the border. countries, and on Mexico, 25% tariff. And, of course, the new leader of Mexico, which is a woman, is vowing to fight back. She’s not just going to take it. She blames America for the drug problem on the border. She says, we’ve been arming the drug cartels, whether that’s true or not. That’s her claim. And they’re having to deal with it. And also our appetite in America, the demand for fentanyl and other drugs is fueling the smuggling of drugs into our country. So she takes a different stance on it. Not Mexico’s fault. It’s America’s fault. Well, I don’t know if I like this idea or not. But, you know, I remember when the 50s and 60s, you could rock around the clock. Now they want to trade around the clock. And this is an effort by Steve Cohen, billionaire Steve Cohen, who owns the New York Mets, wanting a 24-hour exchange. And the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, they’re watching very closely as the SEC approved the first U.S. stock exchange that would operate most hours.
SPEAKER 03 :
of every weekday i mean where would you set the closing price for the day i guess they will still go by the old rules but now you can rock around the clock and you can trade around the clock coming soon to an exchange here when we come back we’ll talk about that 7 000 points that uh we’ll be right back
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And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show.
SPEAKER 01 :
And yes, it is Deutsche Bank.
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Deutsche Bank sees 7,000 for the S&P 500 by 2025 year end. That’s 13 months from now. Now, the consensus is more in the 6,500 to 6,600 range. Of course, there’s all kinds of macro events. There’s all kinds of economic events that can occur between now and then to change that. But based on what we know, what they know today, they’re calling for 7,000. And I was just looking at their math on that because that’s, that’s pretty lofty. They see 16.5% upside from the current level. They see steady, robust momentum continuing into 2025. They think that EPS growth will be in the low double digits, which is pretty much the consensus. The market, the S&P 500, is looking for about 12% growth in earnings next year versus this year. They’ve got next year’s EPS estimate at $282 per share. Put that in perspective, we were at $60 per share back in 08, back in 09, March of 09. So earnings have grown since 09 from $60 to $282. And they have an upper end of that saying that they could see the S&P 500 EPS get to 295 next year. I don’t see that, but they do, and I’m all for it. Maybe they see something. I don’t know. Earnings growth could rise 17% to 295 by next year. This year we’re going to do about 245, somewhere in there. record earnings this year record earnings next year, but I was looking at the math on that. They’ve got to use a multiple on that high end of about 24 x when the long term average multiple of the S and P 500 is moved in more in the 18 range. So they’re using a very premium multiple on some of the highest earnings expectations on the street out there to come up with a $7,000 target price. They’re the first ones. That’s the highest one that I have seen. Now, one of the sectors that I’ve been sending out charts on because it’s been very weak is the semiconductor sector. Now, having said that, the semiconductor sector is having a good day today. It’s up 2.45%. And there is an article out there that the new us chip curbs on China could be coming soon. And that has probably been one of the main reasons that the, uh, the software or the chip stocks, the semiconductor stocks have been soft because China’s a big market for memory and the AI chips. But there’s going to be more restrictions placed on the sale of chip equipment and AI memory chips to China as the battle continues to deepen among the world’s semiconductor powers. Now, the Biden administration, which is in its lame duck term here with about 55 days to go, something like that, they’re going to roll out additional curbs next week. according to Wired, which would include controls on the sale of high bandwidth memory, which is HBM, which that would be Micron and Hitachi and companies like that, typically used in high performance GPUs or customized AI chips. In fact, they’re part of those NVIDIA chips. An entity list of around 200 Chinese companies is also being drawn up. It would require the firms to obtain special licenses to supply them with U.S. software or products. Dozens of Chinese companies and several chip manufacturing plants may additionally face sanctions and restrictions. And, of course, China is firmly opposed to this, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to have a choice. we’re trying to keep that high tech away out of China’s hands. And that has been affecting the chip sector here recently. We currently own one chip stock, and you can probably guess which one that is. OPEC, well, they’re going to cancel their meeting in December. I think they need a little more guidance, a little more feedback, you know, uh, answers to the Trump administration and how much. Uh, drill baby drill. Now I’ve read various articles on this subject. Uh, some have said that, uh, we are going to amp up, uh, our production here in America, uh, which OPEC would obviously not like that means they would keep their production, uh, at a lower level, uh, because the demand is just not there. Oh, there’s plenty of demand, but it’s not like it’s red hot demand. And it looks like oil is going to kind of remain in the $70 to $80 area. And OPEC totally cancels their meeting for December, wanting to get a little more color as to what the Trump administration. Of course, our new energy secretary is the CEO of Liberty Energy, one of the biggest frackers in America, especially down in that Texas Permian area. base scenario. Well, the social media stocks have also been kind of soft here recently. Obviously, Google is under watch for being a monopoly. The U.S. government is coming after them, and it looks like Microsoft is next. These are all actions that are being taken by the Biden administration in the last few months of his presidency. that has been pretty soft here recently snapchat etc what will they do with tiktok will trump ban tiktok or let it continue well australia has taken a drastic measure australia passed a social media ban for kids under 16 years old there will be some exceptions but uh You’ve got YouTube, Google, Meta, Facebook. You’ve got TikTok, Snapchat, all of these being banned. Now, I don’t know how they’re going to enforce it. They’re coming up with some kind of platform that will check your age before you can log in. The Australian government is trialing an age verification system. to determine how best to enforce the social media ban. I’m not a big fan of social media for kids, nor am I a social media fan for adults. Yes, there’s some good stuff on there, but I think there’s a lot of bad that comes along with social media, and I think it should be used sparingly. That’s my own opinion on social media. Okay, here’s your weird stock of the day. I’m going to save this for when we come back. This stock is skyrocketing. It’s a drone stock, okay? Why is it skyrocketing? It’s named Donald Trump Jr., a member of the company’s advisory board. We’ll talk about this one when we come back. This is Bill Gutterson. It’s the Best Stocks Now show.
SPEAKER 06 :
This is Bill Gunderson.
SPEAKER 02 :
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.
SPEAKER 08 :
We’ve got to get together sooner or later.
SPEAKER 02 :
And welcome back to the second half of today’s Best Stocks Now show. Well, here’s a stock I’d never heard of until this morning. Unusual Machines is the name of the stock, of the name there. Unusual Machines, okay? What’s the symbol? UMAC. U-M-A-C. It’s headquartered in the drone capital of the world, Orlando, Florida, of all places. It’s a really small company, okay? It’s $113 million in market cap. That makes it a micro-cap stock. They’re a development stage company which engages in the provision of drone solutions. Well, obviously, we’ve seen a huge increase in the use of drones in warfare. Well, you know, you cut down on the casualties if you’re on the attacking end because there’s nobody flying those drones. On the other end, you’re kind of at the mercy of your air defense systems when they try to flood the zone with drones like Russia has done to Ukraine recently. Iran tried it on Israel. It didn’t really work. Tried it twice on Israel. Didn’t work. But obviously, drones are going to continue to be a big part of future defense and weaponry. Unusual Machines was up 70% on Wednesday. It’s up another 40% today. Actually, they make parts for drones. They said that Donald Trump Jr., Don Jr. had joined the company’s advisory board. He said that the CEO, Alan Evans, said that Trump’s connections would be helpful in securing certain government approvals. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that Trump Jr., who joined venture capital firm 1789 Capital as a partner earlier this month, would recuse himself from investments. involving companies with government business. Okay. Well, we’ll see how that works out. But, uh, Trump jr owns 331,000 shares in the company. A large majority of drone parts in the market are still made in China. And, uh, the CEO Evans down in Orlando, Florida told the wall street journal, uh, that Trump’s business connections would help the company and it’s pushed to meet demand. for drone parts made elsewhere. So that is unusual machines. I added it to the app today, UMAC. Earlier this week, I added three quantum computing stocks to the app that were in play when Amazon announced that they were making big investments in quantum computing. So that’s how I roll with the app. When I see something new, I add it to the app, and it takes a day or two to get a ranking. And I will say that all three of those quantum computing stocks showed up in my top 300 once they were in the app earlier this week. The U.S. spirits industry is urging Trump to reconsider tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Well, Canada exports or we import a lot of Canadian spirits into our country. Canadian whiskey, for instance, would be subject to a 25% tariff. And obviously Mexico has a pretty robust tequila and beer business, exporting business. However, they will be subject to tariffs. In retaliation for illegal immigration and the flood of fentanyl coming into the U.S. through its northern and southern borders, Trump said he will introduce 25% tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico on day one. of his minutes administration. And of course the new Mexican president Claudia shine bomb warned that one tariff will follow with another and response and so on until we put our common businesses at risk. Mexican tequila and Canadian whiskey can only be produced in their country of origin. Imposing a tariff on these imports will not protect American jobs is the claim. as neither can be produced in the U.S. Well, I think that we could call, I think we could produce our own. I’m sure there’s a U.S. tequila, and I’m sure there’s U.S. whiskey, plenty of that around. But they plan to retaliate. And the U.S. spirits industry is urging Trump to reconsider tariffs. I don’t think he’s going to back off. So you’ve got stocks like Brown and Foreman, Constellation Brands, Pernod Ricard, LVMH, Mowat Hennessy, Remy Quantro wanting those tariffs to be re-hunk. Doximity could exit from RFK leading HHS. Well, one of the areas that Kennedy, RFK, wants to go after are all the commercials, the direct-to-consumer drug advertising. You know, you can’t even get through. You try to watch the news, and if it’s not the guy selling pillows out of your medicine cabinets, It’s, you know, these drugs with fancy names that they dream up and they help make your life just beautiful. And then they go through all the possible side effects and makes you kind of not even want to think about taking the drug, you know. But anyways, RFK, he wants to cut back direct-to-consumer drug advertising. Well, a company called Doximity does. DOCS, they advertise through a different network. They advertise through the physician network directly to physicians instead of directly to the consumers. The stock has been very strong recently. They offer a cloud-based platform for medical professionals and physicians with tools across 50 states. The stock’s been hitting new all-time highs. They’re out of the Bay Area. Uh, one that I’ve kind of had on my radar, it’s a $10 billion company. Uh, their most recent quarter, their sales were up 20%. Their earnings are up 36%. So keep your eye on D O C S docs, which says that all that’s who they market drugs to on behalf of the big drug companies, Microsoft slides after FTC launches an antitrust investigation. You know, there seems to be favors that Biden is doing in the last less than two months of his administration. Of course, Elizabeth Warren has been wanting the Biden administration to go after these companies for quite some time. You’ve got Google now with the FTC going after them. And now you’ve got Microsoft. which obviously bundles all of their office products, their browsers, their operating system. And the FTC has formally launched an antitrust. Now, you’re going to have a new FTC guy here come January. So whether or not they continue on with this, we don’t know. But now you’ve got a second company, second company here. joining Google with an FTC antitrust investigation. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an action against META in the near future here. Okay, LNG. That continues to be one of the better sectors in the market right now. That’s liquid natural gas. The Biden administration currently has a moratorium on us exporting natural gas. Instead, you’ve got some countries in Europe still getting their natural gas from Russia, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and a moratorium on us exporting our liquid natural gas. Well, that’s not stopping Chenier Energy, LNG, from producing their first product from their brand-new Corpus Christi LNG expansion that they did. And… So anyways, they are now starting to produce this, and they, I believe, are more than likely looking forward to a day in the very near future, maybe January 20th, to see that moratorium on LNG exports from the U.S. lifted. Now the question is, will they put tariffs over in Europe or wherever the destination of the LNG is on U.S.-produced liquid natural gas? When we come back, we’ll take a little peek underneath the surface of the market. It’s actually a pretty decent day in the market right now. This is the Best Stocks Now show. And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, our Black Friday deal is free. That’s right, and I’m going to continue it for now. You can sign up and get four free weeks of trade along or spend the day with a professional money manager for the next four weeks, Monday through Friday, even on Saturday from 7 a.m. until about 5 p.m. in the evening, Eastern Standard Time, as I go through the markets. I’ve already sent out an alert early this morning on this crazy stock, unusual machines. I sent out an alert on one of our little nuclear stocks that we own in our most aggressive portfolio. You know, I’ve had people say, you know, I’m more of a trader. Well, you know what? I have an incubator portfolio that I started in June. where I buy stocks that aren’t in any of our longer-term investment portfolios. And it’s definitely much more of a trading account. It’s an actual account that’s done very, very well since I started it. So, you know, it’s definitely not – we’re not day trading. But we’re buying stocks that we see break out that could have a very bright future. I call it the incubator portfolio. and it’s a real-life portfolio. So there’s something really there for everybody. If you’re a long-term investor looking to accumulate stocks and build a high-powered portfolio, hopefully it’ll be high-powered. You know, whether you’re into larger cap stocks, dividend payers, more of the aggressive younger growth stocks, or even these emerging growth stocks, And then underneath that, there’s the incubator account. That’s kind of the guinea pig, kind of the single A baseball team, I would say. And we found some pretty good winners in that area so far. That portfolio has done very well since I started it back in June. If you’re new to the market, I throw in teaching moments along the way. I say, here’s why I like this stock. You can look it up in the app. Here’s the valuation. It meets all of my criteria. Here’s the five-year target price. Here’s the past performance of the stock. And here’s what the chart looks like right now. You can learn a lot about reading stock charts because in almost every message that I send out during the day, I send along the stock charts. And I think you’ll come to realize that this really is Bill Gudgerson’s passion, is managing and looking for new finds, kind of being the general manager of my own little baseball team here, running a whole organization from signings of college players to single A to double A to triple A to the major leagues to the all-stars. I look at the stocks with the same perspective. than a money ball a general manager would be looking. They’re looking for staff. They’re looking for performance. And they’re looking for bargains. And they’re looking for momentum, hot players, hot stocks. And they’re looking to build a franchise and a team and a farm system over time. I liken what I do very much. And it is absolutely my passion. People always ask me, what are you going to retire? I said, what’s that? Is that a word in the vocabulary, in the dictionary somewhere? I have more fun. I don’t know how I would have more fun every day than doing what I do and sharing what I see, my observations, what I’ve learned over the years. I wouldn’t trade those 25 years. I’ve made about every mistake you possibly can. I’ll still make mistakes. But I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes in the market. I’ve honed in on my system. I’ve fine-tuned it. I’ve refined it. I use the app extensively. In fact, it’s underneath everything I do. Because there’s no way I could watch 6,000 different stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds and go through each one on a daily basis. I have to screen on a daily basis. I bring up every day the strongest stocks in the market. Today there’s about 400 that fit my momentum criteria. Then if they have momentum and valuation combined… they get a grade of B plus or better in my system. There’s about 600 right now of those stocks. We have a very high bunch of stocks right now because the whole landscape changed after the election just under two weeks ago. And then I have some of my bellwether stocks that I look at on a daily basis. And they come from every walk of life. I can tell you right now that overall, Believe it or not, the strongest sector in the market is the insurance sector. Progressive, Gallagher, MetLife. For whatever reason, the conditions are right right now for the auto insurers, the brokers, etc. And you can even trade some of those stocks. There’s a lot of smaller ones there, too. And then, of course, you’ve got the whole nuclear sector, which makes for a very good trading opportunity. Don’t If you’re a trader, you want volatility. You don’t want a stock that goes up 25 cents here, 32 cents there, unless it’s a dollar stock. You want stocks that vacillate heavily. These nuclear stocks like NuScale and Oklo and others make for very good type of trading opportunities also. And then, of course, you know, there’s the big ones. There’s some volatile big stocks. NVIDIA is a volatile stock right now, kind of vacillating in a trading range, you know, between a support level and a resistance level. So you’ve got it from all walks of life. It’s like getting a master’s degree in six months, right, at one of these universities. You don’t have the time to spend, so I really, it’s a master class in the investment using my 25 years of experience. So my Black Friday offer to you is I’m going to continue the offer. You can get four free weeks. What you do from there is up to you. It’s $89 a month to continue to get that education, to continue to get those ideas. And to continue to get those buys and sells that I send out almost on a daily basis. So happy Black Friday. Happy Food Coma Friday. Learn something. We’re making New Year’s resolutions. Sign up for Gunderson’s four free weeks of the live trading subscription. Go to GundersonCapital.com. Or you say, I don’t have that kind of time. I need someone to do it for me. Make an appointment with us. 855-611-TEST. 855-611-TEST. Have a great day. Have a great weekend, everybody.
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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.
