Join professional money manager Bill Gundersen as he navigates through the current market landscape in this episode of the Best Stocks Now show. With a Santa Claus rally underway, we explore the explosive trends in precious metals and evaluate market performances, providing insights into the factors driving these movements. Bill and co-host Barry Kite share expert analysis on the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500, along with a detailed look at the market’s reaction to recent tariffs and their global economic implications.
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 03 :
Ho, ho, ho, and welcome to the Best Docs Now show. We do have a little bit of a Santa Claus rally taking place. This is Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. I’m here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial advisor. Analyst and certified financial planners, the best stocks now show we have the Dow up 107 points. That’s 22 basis points, 48,242. The NASDAQ is up 121. Tech is finishing off the year strongly here so far with the NASDAQ now 23,427 and the S&P 500 up 30 points. to 68.64. That is 334 points above my 12-month target price that I set at the beginning of the year at 65.10. And we have just an explosive rally in the precious metals again today. Wow, what a year. You’ve got silver at $69.02. That’s an all-time high. And you’ve got gold at $4,461. That’s an all-time high. Meanwhile, the small caps up about 80 basis points right now. Bitcoin is up $1,825. to 88 697 and oil another tanker seized in venezuela oil’s up 2.35 percent so welcome to today’s best stocks now show with the professional money manager bill gunderson president and chief investment officer and head market strategist at gunderson capital management and yeah you know every year this time we hear uh oh there’s going to be will there be a santa claus ralph Well, you know, if you look at the stats, more often than not, you do get a rally in the days leading up to Christmas. I don’t know if it’s that we’re in a ho-ho-ho giving kind of mood or there’s something seasonal about it. But we are having a decent day today here so far. And really, it’s quite stunning. Gold and silver. How many gold ads have we watched on the TV over the last… They’ve been right for once. And gold is just sizzling.
SPEAKER 1 :
4,461.
SPEAKER 03 :
You can figure that out how much per pound that is. About the same as a prime rib. You know, I was surprised that the prime ribs over at Publix weren’t behind the locked counter, Barry. They were out in the open.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s where I ended up finding. That’s where our prime rib is going to be from this year is Publix. They had a pretty good price on them. And I tell you what I’m also finding is finding bone-in ribeye steaks everywhere. I don’t know if they have, like. I guess if they have some of these prime ribs, I guess, that don’t sell, and so they go ahead and chop them up into a more economical way to purchase the prime rib instead of that big old piece of meat. You just get a few at a time, but they’ve been on sale for two weeks in a row now, and I’ve had the best bone-in ribeye steaks.
SPEAKER 03 :
Maybe I’ll buy a couple for the freezer. As an investment. You can list them on your balance sheet of your net worth. And everything hitting a new high today, including the price of ribeye steaks. Okay, well, let’s take a look at what we’ve got going in the market here today. There’s actually quite a bit of news. I think it’s a half day on Wednesday. I know Thursday we have the day off, okay? That’s one of the few days that I can say with certainty. We have the day off, and then I think probably Friday’s a whole day or a half day. I don’t know, but we will be here. I’ll be doing a show here on Friday. We look back in the newsletter, and our prediction at the beginning of the year, my year-end target price was… $310 times 21 equals 65.10, and we are at 68.50. So along the way, the earnings stayed the same. You know what? I predicted 310 at the beginning of the year. Now, this is next year’s earnings, actually, 2026. And they’re still there. They’re 309.41. And I also said that the tariffs would have no impact on earnings. And there you go. There’s the evidence. I was within 59 cents of that earnings estimate, which is still there today. And I think it’s probably going to go higher a bit from here. I used a 21 multiple, which I thought at the time I erred on the conservative side, and that did yield that 65-10 target price. Well, the PE ratio right now, forward PE, is 22.2. So that’s why we’ve exceeded because we’ve seen multiple expansions. We haven’t seen earnings expansion. We’ve seen multiple expansions. We hit my target price in late September of this year, and then we have exceeded it since then as the market closed at 68.34 on Friday. But let’s not forget something. It was not exactly a straight line in the market over the last 12 months. Back in early April, late March and early April, the market swooned to 48.35. Yes, 48.35, a 21.3% drop. And we were forced to take a little bit of invasive action on many individual stocks that we owned at the time, just in case. But I remember going home from work on April the 6th when the market hit an inter-year bottom on that Friday. I found that interview between Tucker Carlson and Scott Besson that gave me conviction that the market would recover and that the tariffs would work. Well, it’s hard to argue that they didn’t because here we are at 6,800, and the tariffs have had absolutely no impact whatsoever on the earnings of the S&P 500. I wrote a very gutsy article on that gloomy Monday morning, and I don’t remember anybody else out there saying, hey, this is the bottom. It’s time to really load up. And that’s what we did, and we ended up having a pretty good time since then, I would say. From $4,800 back to $6,800, that’s a huge move in the S&P 500. Of course, the NASDAQ also has had a huge move. We finished last week on a high note.
SPEAKER 05 :
You take that out, right, that period out, and it’s odd. 2025 looked a lot like 2024, I mean, bumping up against all-time highs as we kind of went through the year and kind of a continuation of the bull market from coming out of 2022 where we stacked basically three years on top of each other. The only difference is, obviously, you had the tariff tantrum in 2025.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, the tariff tariff. And, well, you had a very, you know, a total euphoric market after Trump was elected and sworn in on January. But from the time he won the election up until that big swoon, the market was on fire. It got ahead of itself. And then, of course, he started going after countries with the big tariff. We weren’t putting 100% tariff on China until further notice, and, you know, one after another, which really, really spooked the market. And now here we are. Getting ready to turn the page. We’ve got nine days left in 2025, and I will have my official 2026 12-month target price for the end of next year in the newsletter when I send it out this Saturday. Got some work to do between now and then. And then our top conviction pick, I’ve got to look at what date. I’ll look that up. It was in the newsletter. It was the title of the newsletter, our top conviction pick, which was Palantir. It was the biggest winner in the S&P 500 this year. What will be our conviction pick this year or picks? Well, we’ll see. We start the day with the S&P trading at 22.33%. Times forward earnings. And as we’ve said before lately, 23 has been the top. Whether we go through that or not, the five-year average is 20. The 10-year average is more like 18.5, so you can see we remain in rarefied air right now. It helps to have a Fed that is in cutting mode, not hiking mode. I think Japan’s going to have a tough year in the market because they finally are having to raise interest rates. They were at negative rates at one point in time, and now their rates have soared this year on a relative basis. And I don’t think the Japanese stocks will do real well because they’re one of the few countries in the world that’s hiking. their interest rates. All right, so we finish the week again on a high note. When we come back, there’s news on Nvidia. There’s news on copper. There’s more news on gold and a couple of gold stocks. More trouble in Venezuela. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 1 :
We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 03 :
And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Stocks Now show. Actually, the Santa Claus rally covers the last five trading days of December. So starting Wednesday as well as the first two of January. That’s kind of weird. We’ve had two straight down Santa stretches last year and the year before. We’ve never had three Santa slumps in a row. So the bulls are optimistic.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, at the end of the year, a lot of times you’ll have some portfolio window dressing. You’ll have some tax loss harvesting. This year is one of those different years where there’s not a lot of red in the portfolio, so you don’t have as much opportunity to do that tax loss harvesting at the end. We’ll see. Some of it I would think intuitively, I think you might have some added selling pressure during that period.
SPEAKER 03 :
We stuffed a lot of short-term capital gains into folks under their tree this year and in their stockings. You know, we had to book some there, or there was a spell. So anyways, it is what it is. I would love to have all long-term capital gains. Not that it makes that big of a difference at the end of the day. But, you know, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. NVIDIA looks to start shipping H200 GPUs to China by mid-February. I’m going to take a look at the app right now. The current status of the largest publicly traded company in the U.S. at $4.5 trillion. This year, NVIDIA, year-to-date, let’s see, where is it? Right there, 34.8%. NVIDIA is up 34.8% year-to-date. which is double the S&P 500, which is up 16.2 as of Friday. Last year, NVIDIA was the biggest winner of the year, one of the biggest winners, and let’s not forget, we called it the best stock in the market. I’d have to look up that. That was a couple years ago, and it responded in 2023. It was up 239%.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it was 2023, really March of 2023 is when you picked it up.
SPEAKER 03 :
I said it’s still the very best stock in the entire market. In 2024, it was up 171%. And this year, just a paltry return of 34.8%. Now, as we look at, so the performance grade on NVIDIA is A. Let’s see, no, it’s got to be an A+. Where did that go? Let’s see, A. Yes, A+. Top of the class as far as performance goes. Now, the performance measures the short. It’s a combination of the short-term performance, the intermediate-term performance, and the long-term performance. And that gives it an overall performance grade. The momentum grade right now is C. It’s pretty neutral. It’s a pretty neutral stock. You’ve had a lot of things. You’ve had… Their market share in China going to zero. That’s cost them this year. You always worry about competition from somebody, Huawei, or there’s a couple of other Chinese chip companies that are chipping away. Will it be AMD? Right now, they’re still king of the hill. And the valuation on it would be the other big thing here. The performance is an A+. It doesn’t get any better than that. The momentum grade, however, is a C. It is a pretty kind of flat stock right now. Now let’s look at the valuation. I’m using an 18% per year growth rate over the next five years, and I’m way below the consensus on the street. I have a pay ratio of 1.31, which is not all that bad, 1.31 on a company this size and with the kind of product that it has and the kind of growth that it’s had. I come up with a $368 target price, which is more than double where it is right now, which would put the stock at $9 trillion today. Five years from now. Now, a lot can happen between now and then. I think the biggest threat is competition. The situation in Taiwan is another threat. Those are two major threats. And maybe the AI money starts drying up, you know, because a lot of investing going on in AI right now. Will it reap benefits? Will it be a good return on investment? That’s still questionable. That’s still up in the air.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, and we’ll see. I mean, I’ve heard, I guess they’re preparing a shipment of chips to China in terms of NVIDIA. And, you know, that zero that they’ve kind of penciled in there in terms of zero revenue from China is going to no longer be zero. The question is, you know, is that something that is going to move the stock? It seems like it would be built in a bit. But who knows what that ending demand ends up being.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, it doesn’t seem like China’s that interested in the H200 chips. But we’ll see. Okay, now. With all of that being said, when you look at the valuation, when you look at the performance, the thing that’s kind of dragging NVIDIA down in the ranking right now is the momentum. Because I do weight my performance a little bit. I tilt it towards the most recent three months, which is the momentum side of the equation. NVIDIA is currently ranked at number 671 out of 5,181. It’s a weak buy, which I think that’s about right. I’m not overly excited to go in and buy it for new clients right now. I’d like to see the momentum pick up. I’d like to see maybe the China situation improve. I’d like to see the chart improve. But that’s where NVIDIA is at right now. And I’ll tell you what, the app comes in so handy to evaluate a stock. I have people write to me, should I buy this stock in here right now? I say, well, why don’t you look at the app? and then look at the chart and make your own decision. I’m not going to make that decision for you. You’re going to make it by these concepts and principles that I teach here on the air. Okay, the next story we’re going to cover here is copper roars towards $12,000. I think that’s a ton. It’s definitely not per ounce. It takes a lot of pennies to make up $12,000. In a record rally in 2025, the stock’s riding the boom. Texico Mines, TGB, up an impressive 183%, followed by Hud Bay Minerals, which we’ve owned in the past, HBM. That rose 137%. And then you have the diversified miners like Rio Tinto, which was up 32% this year, and Freeport-McMoran, which is 29% up to the upside so far this year. So copper also a huge year. A couple others, London Mining, Lundeen Mining up 129%. First Quantum Minerals up 90%. And Southern Copper, which is down in Peru, up 64%. Okay, when we come back, will the gold rally continue in 2026? 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.
SPEAKER 08 :
And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, let’s put gold under the microscope. Performance of gold versus the S&P 500.
SPEAKER 03 :
Over the last 10 years, the S&P 500 has averaged, delivered 24.1% per year. It’s been a good decade. What can I say? That’s doubling your money every three years. It’s been one heck of a decade. Why? I’ve said it many times, earnings have been going up for the last 10 years. Not only the last 10 years, earnings have been going up for the last 17 years, all but the COVID year. And that has driven the market to a record decade. While the S&P has been going up 24.1% per year, gold has been a bad laggard over the last 10 years. If you go back 10 years ago today, gold has averaged 14.6% per year, certainly well above inflation, certainly a great return, but quite a few basis points behind the S&P 500. But wait, let’s look at gold lately. Well, over so far, year to date, just the precious metal, GLD, is up 64.8%, which is quadruple what the market has done. The S&P is up 16.2, and gold is exactly four times. It’s 64.8, exactly four times the returns of of the S&P 500. And of course that’s impacted that 10-year return, which was not as good until this year. That’s improved that 10-year return quite a bit. And the three-year average on gold has been 33.7. The S&P is 25.8. You get a performance grade on gold of A-minus. We can’t do a valuation on gold. You can do it on a gold stock.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s got a negative yield because it costs money to store it, so we know that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, so let’s just take a look at what the app says. The app does not need a valuation to calculate a stock grade and a, you know, I don’t want to say recommendation, but guidance, okay? The Gunderson stock rate is A. Which makes it a strong buy. That’s just the precious metal alone. It is currently ranked at number 29 out of 5,181. Number 29 out of 5,181 in the app. Three months ago it was ranked at number 30. And it’s done pretty well over the last three months. It is up, let’s see, over the last three months, sizzling up 40%. So anyways, it’s still at a strong buy as gold. Now silver. And silver is way more volatile than gold because it trades at a lower price. It also has industrial uses that gold doesn’t have, which makes it more commoditized. We can’t do a valuation on silver, but we can look at the performance of it. Over the last 10 years, silver, about the same as gold, 16% per year. A little bit better than gold, actually, because this current year is really pumping up that 10-year performance. 16% per year over the last 10 years versus 24% for the S&P 500. Now, year to date, the precious metal silver is up 131.4%. I think it’s fair to call silver the number one asset class of 2025. And we certainly did not predict that at the beginning of the year. And we haven’t had any exposure to silver in the portfolios, but we have had quite a bit of exposure to gold and gold stocks, both of those in 2025. Silver is currently ranked, well, you know, there’s 14 different possible grades on your report card, Barry. You can get an F- all the way to an A+. There’s 14 in between, so I rank, I divide the market up into those 14 different.
SPEAKER 05 :
A few of them have a trophy that you gave them over the years, which is pretty, I like that one of those pops up.
SPEAKER 03 :
If you’re above strong buy, I call it best. That’s an A+. Silver gets an A-plus stock rate. It’s been there for quite a while. Just the precious metal silver is ranked number six in When you compare it against AI stocks, cloud stocks, rare earth stocks, nuclear stocks, it’s ranked number six overall out of 5,181. One year ago it was ranked at number 41. That’s pretty good out of 5,181. The app was pretty accurate on it. The app currently says it’s the best. And it’s still, that obviously means that in my book, at least with the algorithms in the app, it is still a strong buy on silver. And it has been for weeks now. And it just continues to hit new all-time highs. There’s going to be some big corrections at some point in time. There was one here recently, maybe, what, two months ago or so, where we saw a pretty stiff sell-off. And both of those, silver and gold, are going to watch the Fed very closely. Precious metals love a friendly Fed. And right now it looks like the precious metals are building in two rate cuts in 2026. I would hope we would get more than that, but that’s what they’re counting on.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it depends on, I guess, the economy, right? I mean, you have probably two cuts. I think two cuts are going to kind of be built in, and we’ll see what happens from an economic standpoint. But certainly if you have any slowdown or sustainable slowdown there from an economic standpoint, then you could warrant more cuts, certainly.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, the best case scenario would be a weakening job market, but not too bad, and inflation continuing to go down. That’s what’s going to bring continued rate cuts if we get those things. If we start to get big employment cuts and job cuts, that would also be a catalyst for the Fed to cut rates. There’s one more catalyst for the Fed. There’s going to be a change at the top. I think it’s May when Jerome Powell’s term is up. With all the interviews that Trump has done, he’s going to put in the most dovish guy. Right now, I would think it would be Waller or Hassett. Oil has been a terrible investment in 2025. To drive oil higher, you need supply disruption, unfortunately. I’ll tell you who’s got supply disruption. Two places have supply disruption right now. Cuba. Cuba depends on Venezuela oil. Cuba’s economy has already been sputtering for years. Coming to New York soon, I guess, under communist rule. We’ll see. Maybe New York will blossom. under Mondovi. But anyways, we’ve got Cuba dependent on oil and Venezuelan oil and they’re running out very quickly. And they have blackouts all the time. Which leads to my next subject. Guess what came to a screeching halt all across San Francisco on Sunday, Barry? Yes, Waymo.
SPEAKER 05 :
My guess is the Waymos. Yeah, it would probably have to be the Robocars.
SPEAKER 03 :
They had a massive blackout. They had a fire at a station downtown in San Francisco, PG&E, knocking out power to the Bay Area. Would that be a prediction for 2026? A squeeze? Will the data centers be gobbling up too much of our power and squeezing the rest of us in 2026? But how would you like to be in a Waymo going up one of those streets?
SPEAKER 05 :
I wonder if they get locked in the car because of the power. I don’t know.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think they’re controlling it from Grand Central. And I think they shut down the Waymo cars. Because the Waymo cars are independent, really, of the grid. But I think it was the communications going to the Waymo cars. I mean, the trolleys would definitely come to a halt because they’re fed by electricity into those rails. San Francisco, big blackout on Sunday. And of course, Dallas, Texas has had its share of blackouts on hot days in the summer. And there’s a lot of data centers being built in Texas right now. Could that be a prediction for 2026? Rolling blackouts across America. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 06 :
On a winter’s day You gotta go where you wanna go Do what you wanna do With whoever you wanna be You gotta go where you wanna go Do what you wanna do With whoever you wanna be
SPEAKER 03 :
And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Stocks Now show. Back on July the 14th of this year, we bought a stock in the emerging growth portfolio called Rocket Labs, trading at $42.20. Really and truly, Rocket Labs is kind of the publicly traded version of SpaceX, right? I don’t know how it compares in size. I think Rocket Labs is a lot smaller than SpaceX. I mean, after all, SpaceX is getting, what, a $100 billion valuation right now? Or $800 billion. Almost a trillion dollar.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, $800 and some change, I think.
SPEAKER 03 :
And SpaceX has all of those satellites in orbit.
SPEAKER 05 :
Starlink satellites, right.
SPEAKER 03 :
Rocket Labs doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of a market cap. Let’s just take a look. I’m bringing up Rocket Labs because I believe it’s one of the stocks of the day here. Yeah, it’s up 6.9. It was up higher than that. Rocket Labs is $40 billion. So it’s 1 20th the size of SpaceX. But SpaceX is probably getting twice the multiple that Rocket Labs is getting because it’s Elon Musk. That’s the way it works. Rocket Lab still has not turned a profit, but they’re up to $600 million now in sales. They’re approaching a billion. So you can see it’s trading at over 40 times sales. It’s a horrendous valuation. But, you know, I started to get nervous a while back when these kinds of out there in the hinterland stocks started to crumble. And I sold Rocket Labs for a small profit. Let’s see, we made Rocket Labs I sold for a profit of 26.5%. All right. Now, since then, I sold it at $53.39. Whoops. Now the stock is much higher than that, 53. It’s up to 75, so it’s gone up another 40% after we sold it. But it was threatening, Barry, to break down. I mean, it was getting close to a death cross. It went from 73. It really got cut in half. It went down 50% along the way, and I cut it way before it went down 50%. That’s my discipline. It’s rare that I ride something down 50% from the high unless it happens rather suddenly.
SPEAKER 05 :
It happens quickly, yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. I sold Rocket Lab when it cut support, and I took the money and ran, and it went way down after that. And then it started basing at $40 a share. I was watching it build that base. I watched it start to break out from that base back in late November. That’s not that long ago. That’s four weeks ago. And then it’s just gone on a tear. And there’s news on RKLB today. They completed 21 launches in 2025 with 100% success.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s always good when you get the 100% success, right? Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
They launched the 21st electron rocket of the year, deploying the QPS SAR-15 satellite for Japan-based Earth Imaging Form IQPS. This mission has a really weird name, the Wisdom God Guides. That’s the name of the mission. It was launched from New Zealand, the Wisdom God Guides. The launch marked Rocket Lab’s 79th Electron mission overall and set a new annual record of 21 launches in a single year with 100% mission success. The satellite will expand IQPS synthetic aperture radar constellation, providing a near real-time imagery across multiple orbits. So Rocket Labs, definitely one to watch in 2026. I saw an article here. Somebody texted this to me this morning, and it kind of backs up. Bill was right again. This is going to… Fun fact. Kathy Wood has lost investors the most money in ETF history. All right, so some people are always telling me, how can you pick on her so much? Well, because I don’t think she’s very smart or doesn’t make very good decisions. The fact is, somebody sent me this. This comes from a website. I mean, like $60 billion has gone up in smoke into orbit while she’s been at the helm of the ARC fund. So anyways, I do still have an inverse position against Cathie Wood. She’s still loading up, and every week they love her to follow what she’s buying and selling. She’s loading up on AI-driven biotechs. Furthest thing from the main harbor. I mean, this stuff that fills up during a 10-year flood. Recursion Pharmaceuticals is a big bet by Kathy Woods, which is discovering drugs using AI. It’s based out of Utah. In the cryptocurrency space, she’s doubling down, buying Bitmine Immersion Technologies, a Bitcoin mining infrastructure company. She’s buying Bullish, another Bitcoin, and she’s buying Circle Internet. And so anyways, and she’s also loading up on Square, which has been hitting new lows, and she’s buying Keras Life Sciences, Roblox, And Schrodinger, which is a German biotech. So there you go. There’s her hot picks for the week. Okay, well, we are out of time. And tomorrow’s a full day. And then, of course, Wednesday’s Christmas Eve. My two movies for this time of year, we watched our annual showing of White Christmas last night, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. Watch White Christmas with the masterful Bing Crosby. And, of course, what’s her name? George Clooney, Rosemary Clooney, who I believe is George Clooney’s aunt. Really? One of the great singers of all time. Oh, yeah, if you watch that movie, he looks just like her. I think that’s probably his mother. I don’t know. They claim it’s his aunt. And Danny Kaye in one of the greatest movies, Erling Berlin’s White Christmas. And then we watch King of Kings. We feel like that’s the best movie out there on the life of Christ. My wife’s in love with Jeffrey Hunter, who plays Jesus in the movie. I think that’s what she really likes about the whole thing. Those are my two movie recommendations. We never miss those two this time of year. All right, to get four free weeks of the newsletter and the app and the live trading alerts, 855-611-BEST or GundersenCapital.com to set up an appointment with us, to move accounts to us. Second Opinion, 855-611-BEST or GundersenCapital.com. 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.
