Join Bill Gunderson as he unpacks the exciting developments in the stock market with a special focus on how the Dow and S&P 500 have hit new highs. Witness the fascinating dynamics in the commodity market, as silver and gold rise to unexpected prominence against the backdrop of a shifting economic landscape. Additionally, Gunderson sheds light on the competitive global market with insights into China’s advancements in the EV and aerospace 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 Gunderson Capital Management. Here is professional money manager Bill Gunderson.
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And welcome to the Monday, Light Trading Day Monday. This is Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management, the hardest working guys in the industry. We’re doing a live show on this Friday. Well, everybody else is playing a tape from Monday, you know, Barry, but we’re doing it live here today. We’ve got kind of a little bit of a… Drifting market here this morning. The Dow is down 28 points after hitting a new all-time high on Christmas Eve. It’s at 48,703. The NASDAQ is now down 15 points at 23,598. It’s still about 300 points below its all-time high, but maybe, who knows, by the end of the year we get there, another new high. The S&P hit a new all-time high on… Christmas Eve. It is up one point today on very light volume, as most people were in the Poconos, the Hamptons, you know. 6-9-3-3, 6-9-3-3 on the S&P. Russell 2000 down a half a percent right now. Last I looked, the bond market was behaving itself. The bond market is at 4.12. How about gold? Another new high today, 4,561, the second best asset class of the year behind silver. which has had a sizzling year, and Bitcoin is up $1,140. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And I hope you all had a Merry Christmas yesterday. at a great Christmas Eve. We’ve got a full day. As far as I know, it’s a full day in the market today. Yeah, I think it’s a… The volume’s going to be really, really light. The bond market might close early. They were trading at about 25% to 30% of their normal volume. I’m going to guess today it will be even less than that, maybe down around 20% of their normal volume. But the market is open, and I will be going through charts of all of our stocks today and go through the A-plus momentum list, go through the best stocks now list, which it has grown to over 900 stocks with a grade of B-plus or more. That shows you the breadth, right, of the market. We’re a little bit overbought right here. We have had a pretty decent couple of weeks, and it doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to go higher. But when we get up in that 900 range of B-plus or better ranked stocks, that’s a little overblown. Normally we’re at about 400, 500, somewhere in there. We finished off the day Friday, again, with the new record highs on the Dow and a new record high on the S&P 500. All-time highs. Not 52-week highs, not five-month highs, not three-month highs. All-time highs. And we’ve got that… Forward P.E. ratio right now on the S&P at 22.8. That was 22.8. All right, it’s getting up there in that rarefied air. Okay, are we live? Okay. Well, you know what? The gremlins. In the Internet here today, in the Internet line to Dallas SRN Studios. I’m here. I’m live. This is Bill Gunderson. It’s Monday, December the 29th. We’ve got a profit-taking session going on on Wall Street today. And as I was saying before my line disconnected here, The silver markets are just so overheated, it’s ridiculous. Silver hit, I want to say, $80 per ounce over the weekend. And on Saturday, I was doing the newsletter. I go, that is the most vulnerable chart in the entire market. ZSL. I looked it up. I said there must be an ETF on silver by now. Of course, you wouldn’t have wanted to have been in that thing for the last couple of months. You would have been crushed. ZSL is two times inverse silver. It’s having a good day today. Gold is also being dragged down a little bit, about 3.5%. It’s also been on a tear. The metals in general. The platinum, aluminum, steel, iron ore, all overheated here at this point. Metals grabbing the spotlight last week and getting a pretty heavy round of profit taking here today with silver down almost 7%. Okay, China EV exports jump 87% in November. Where did that come from? China obviously taking a big chunk of the world EV market share. Well, we know who’s buying. Shipments to Mexico skyrocket. So Mexico not buying Teslas, Mexico buying Chinese electric vehicles. They reached a major milestone in November with worldwide exports surging 87% year over year to a total of 199,836 units worldwide. according to data from China Customs. Well, I hope Mexico has a good infrastructure system for charging the electric cars. I’m sure Mexico City and some of the big areas probably have a pretty. But you get out there on the road on a trip, I don’t know how robust their infrastructure is, being that our infrastructure here in the U.S. is not that robust. But anyways, Mexico, you had Mexico up 2,367%, as China is the major factory to the world. Their EV sold to Asia up 71%, Europe up 63%, Latin America and the Caribbean up 283%. So what are all those ships leaving China? And going to Latin America and other, and to Europe, et cetera, they’re loaded with electric vehicles being made in China, which BYD, you’ve got, what are some of the others? There’s about three or four of them. NIO, you’ve got BYD, NIO, N-E-N-I-O, right, NIO. Oh, and a couple others that are grabbing a lot of market share away from the other EV makers, especially those here in the U.S. China has an answer to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Well, they seem to have an answer to just about everything. The iPhone, which Huawei now makes more iPhones than Apple does. You’ve got China now making more electric vehicles than Tesla does. They’re trying to catch up with NVIDIA. They’ve got DeepSeek, their own AI. They’re a formidable competitor. There’s no question about it. China’s land space, a private rocket company advancing its reusable rocket technology. Where have you heard about that before? If you’ve never seen the video of Elon Musk rocket landing back on the space pad, that’s an incredible deal. China has their own answer. However… Their three rocket tests that they did recently failed. The company aspires to compete with SpaceX in reusable rockets, giving a boost to China’s space industry, which has long been controlled by risk-averse state-owned companies. Beijing-based Landspace was founded in 2015 and is one of the first startups, after China opened its space sector, to private investment. That’s interesting. I mean, look, there’s an interesting lesson there that the Chinese Communist government has to open up things to private enterprise to get anything done. And, you know, it’s that profit incentive that will do it. China is providing substantial support for it. So we’ll see. They’ve got a long ways to go before they catch up with SpaceX. But maybe someday we’ll have Chinese rocket ship companies in our emerging growth portfolio. Silver retreating Monday with some profit taking at the end of the year. That saw it eclipse major asset classes. In fact, do you know that silver is now the third most valuable asset in the world? Okay. The third most valuable asset, number one, is gold. Number two is NVIDIA. Yeah, right behind gold. All the gold in the world right behind NVIDIA. And then silver is third. Then you’ve got Apple, Google, and Microsoft as the most valuable assets in the world. We’ll be right back. Welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, since the beginning of the year, silver is up 170%. Now, who saw that coming? I did not predict that. I don’t know anybody that did. I’m sure there’s some gold bugs out there or some of the precious metal guys. They’re the guys that usually wear a hat with a flashlight on top. Some kind of little boots. And they got a little pick and shovel on their belt. They’re gold miners. They’re gold bugs. It was fun to go to the money shows. I used to go to some of the money shows. I went to the one in San Francisco. I went to the one in Las Vegas. And there was always a good share of gold bugs at those shows. You could spot them in the crowd. A good share of gold bugs traveling through the audience. Silver up 170% this year. Let’s take a look at gold, GLD, how it’s done this year. It has been probably the most steady performer. 2026 spring, I find that no two years are alike. In fact, very seldom, very rare. Over the last, well, year to date, gold is up 72%. So silver, you’ve all to gold. And you’ve also seen the inverse that the metals have had with the markets over the years not be in effect this year. And I think you also have to compare the precious metals, which are tangible. I can hold a silver coin in my hand. I can hold a gold nugget in my hand how they’ve performed versus cryptocurrency. Big difference there here. Now, as I said, there is a silver XSL. If you want to hedge your silver collection, it is up 21% today. And here’s what I wrote in my newsletter over the weekend when I was looking at the charts. Silver is one of the charts that I give a little commentary on each week. I said silver is still in a parabolic number two uptrend. It has been one of the best, if not the best, asset class during 2025. Support is at $54.88. And then I said it seems to me that silver is vulnerable to a big correction at some point. Well, I didn’t know that it would begin today, but it doesn’t surprise me. I suppose I could have bought some of that ZSL over the weekend. And, man, 21% today. When I saw it coming, I just didn’t act on it. But, anyways, we’ll see how the precious metals do in 2026. Let’s look at what else is going on in the markets here today. Quite a bit, actually, for a Monday, the day after all of these holidays. Get my notes back up here. We’ve got, let’s see, we’ve got the Chinese answer to Elon Musk. Good luck with that. We’ll see if they can catch up with him on that. Let’s see. We’ve got a company being bought out. Not too bad. Actually, SoftBank is buying out a digital infrastructure company. We’ve got, let’s see, China’s Rocket Company. Silver prices easing back. Apollo Silver announces upsized private placement offering. Well, I’d hate to be buying into that private placement at this point in time. I hope it didn’t close on Friday because whoever bought it on Friday. Now, you know, that’s another thing. When an asset class is roaring, we saw crypto, Bitcoin, all of a sudden. all of these little Bitcoin stocks sprung up, IPOs, all of the existing crypto stocks offering more shares, floating any kind of they could and diluting the shares. And that too can be the sign of a top or an overheated market when you see that kind of activity. the secondary offerings. You’ll see that in the biotech market a lot. When a company has any kind of good on a drug candidate that they’re working on and they’re up 22%, they have the papers ready to do the secondary offering. and debut all the people that currently own the shares. Oil prices slide on renewed hopes for Russia-Ukraine peace deal. I know that Zelensky was in Mar-a-Lago on Friday, I think, or last Friday, or Saturday. I guess he was there on Saturday. Meeting with Trump, there’s still a couple of major hurdles to overcome, especially, I mean, they want a guarantee that we’ll fight Russia if Russia ever invades again. They want that guarantee for, like, the next several decades. I don’t know about that, but they are getting closer. I think Ukraine continues to take it pretty hard there. I saw that Kiev got hit really hard over the weekend as Putin just continues to pound and put the pressure on. Zelensky, oil is up a little bit today, 2.2 percent, but oil has been a horrible hit. horrible performer it’s good for the consumer who’s buying gas at the pump but if you’re an investor or if you’re an oil company exec or ceo you’re not doing very well right now oil is kind of at a break-even point on how much it costs to get out of the ground And there’s only been a few good oil stocks this year. The oil sector, as measured by the ETF IYE, it’s up like three or four, five percent so far this year. Very much an underperformer. If you’re a contrarian, you would short silver and you’d go long gold here in 2026. But You know, I wait until there are signs of some kind of momentum starting to take place. The crude oil asset class by itself, year to date, you’ve got to give Trump credit for this. Over the last 12 months, oil is down 7%. And year to date, it’s down 9.4%. So, you know, whether you want to blame world demand being soft. If you want a credit drill, baby, drill, whatever the case may be, oil is down 9.4% year to date. I keep watching the oil stocks, looking for some opportunity there. They’ll gather some momentum for several days or a week or two. Every rally in oil over the last couple of years, natural gas, you name it, has totally fallen flat. So all quiet on the oil front still as we look for opportunities ahead in 2026. When we come back, I see several opportunities that we’ll talk about. 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 GuntersonCapital.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.
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Thank you. Thank you.
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And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Docs Now. So here’s your creepy story of the day. You know, all around I find Sam Altman to just be a little bit creepy. Maybe one of the creepiest characters out there. I don’t know. MetaRom Healthcare partners with World Foundation to deploy World ID technologies across Japan. So Japan has agreed to this, and it looks like they’ll be one of the first countries. They’re looking to create a world ID for everybody. Proof of Human Technology is what it’s called. It’s a company co-founded by Sam Altman and Alex Blania. They formalized a strategic partnership with World Foundation and Tools for Humanity, the project to bring proof of human technology and world ID to the Japanese market. Well, they want to prove you’re not a bot, for one, okay, when you’re on social media and this and that. But actually, you go to a wellness center for this. I don’t know if you have a choice or not. That’s another question. But they’re setting up 300 locations in Japan equipped with advanced biometric cameras to take a picture of the iris of your eye. Just a little bit on the creepy side. Okay, New York is going to require mental health warning labels on social media platforms. They become the first state. Well, you know, look, the Surgeon General has determined. I saw that a few times in the billboard industry and all those big Marlboro billboards down at the bottom. Cigarette smoking can be hazardous to your health. Well, New York to require mental health warning labels on social media platforms. That’s our friend Kathy Hochul, Governor Kathy Hochul. up in New York. Johnson & Johnson pledges appeal following a record $1.5 billion U.S. jury verdict in a talc cancer case. Imagine being the person that got cancer from using talcum powder and getting an award of $1.5 billion. A woman who alleged that long-term exposure to asbestos in the company’s talc-based products led to her developing peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare cancer. So anyways, a $1.5 billion verdict. How many of those are sitting out there? for Johnson & Johnson. Okay, some of the big winners. I don’t see how the chip sector can’t do well again in 2026. It was a good winner here in 2025. If you’re a growth investor, you’re hard-pressed to find a sector that’s still growing by 20% per year. I know the railroad sector is not doing that. The oil and gas sector is not doing that. The building and construction sector is not doing that. Yes, I know the P.E. ratio of those sectors are a lot cheaper than the semiconductor sector, but growth costs. Why? Because the money you invest today growing at 20% per year, all things being equal, you’re going to have to pay more than a company growing by 2% or 3% per year. What was the top performing chip company in 2025? Believe it or not, it was ACM Research. You know, I watched that thing a little bit during the year. It kept showing up on my A-plus momentum list, but it’s had a pretty dicey history. ACM was up 165% this year. Lamb Research was number two. We owned Lamb Research. We continue to own it. We’re back in Lamb Research. It was up 145% in 2026. KLA was up 103%. Applied Materials had a whale of a year. It was up 60%. Of course, it’s more in chip equipment. And another one that did well, which we also did well with, ASML Holdings, which is the company that makes the equipment. for those high-end NVIDIA chips. Now, just for fun, let’s go to the app. I see a couple companies missing from this list that was compiled by Seeking Alpha. I want to say that Intel had a huge year in 2025 because of all the hoopla around it. Not because they had any new product or any kind of major technical breakthrough, but you had an investment by the U.S. government in Intel, and you had a big investment by NVIDIA. Yet, Intel, year-to-date, is up 80%. So it’s for whatever reason it’s missing from this. You know, everybody, the sectors are a little bit different according to the source, you know, of the members of that sector. And I want to say that AMD had a pretty good year in 2025. Let’s see how AMD, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t continue. Intel I’m skeptical about. I’m not as skeptical about AMD. AMD was up 78% this year. Not bad. We did very well with AMD. We picked it up back after the big swoon when the S&P went down to 4,800. That was one of the stocks that we went all in on. And then NVIDIA. Probably underperformed those two. Year-to-date NVIDIA. Boy, I like having the app. It was up 42%. 42% this year. Oh, I’ve got to do one more. Let’s see how Broadcom did. Then we’ll look up Taiwan Semiconductor. I still like the chip stocks. We still hold several. You know, got to watch them closely. But right now, they have a hard time keeping up with the demand for a lot of the chips. Broadcom was up 53% in 2026. And last but not least, Taiwan Semiconductor, TSM. which makes most of the chips out there, was up 55%. So you had anywhere from 55% to 150% return on the semiconductors in 2025. And just for fun, let’s look up the sector itself. SMH, you could have bought the whole sector. SMH is an ETF that covers that sector. SMH over the last year to date, 51.5%, not bad, not too bad. Of course, it’s dominated by about three or four stocks in that ETF. Personally, I would rather own the leading stocks in an ETF than the ETF itself. But I know it spreads the risk around. You don’t have the single stock risk, but it also waters down the returns. I see no reason why the nuclear sector can’t continue. Japan is going back to step one in reigniting all of their nuclear reactors. I think they have about 30 across the country. They shut them all down after Fukushima. And I saw that the major one in Tokyo is expected to come back online here in the next couple of weeks. UUUU out of Utah checked in today. They say that their U.S. uranium production and sales exceed guidance. They have exceeded their guidance and sales for their finished uranium production. Mine uranium ore production and uranium concentrate sales for fiscal year 2025. This is their pinyon plane mine in Arizona. and LaSalle Complex in Utah. You ought to go on a little camping trip out that way and dig around. Maybe you’ll find some uranium nuggets in there. I don’t even know what they look like. But they’ve mined more than 1.6 million pounds of uranium year-to-date, exceeding the top end of previously reported guidance. And it’s currently mining at the rate of 2 million pounds per year of recoverable uranium contained in ore from that main zone at the Pinon Plain and LaSalle in Arizona and Utah. I think, you know, if you’re looking for one of the most promising rare earth uranium stocks, I think you, you, you, you, because they have sales and earnings now, which a lot of the rare earth stocks don’t. A lot of the rare earth stocks are hoping to have sales and earnings someday, whereas UUUU already is mining a million pounds of uranium on an annual basis. Okay, top performing information technology. And I see no reason why we’re still in that trend. The trend is considered to be in effect until the trend breaks. The trend is your friend. The leading internet technology stocks, information technology stocks, 2026, Nebius Group, 229% return. CrowdStrike, 39.4, a big drop between number one and number two. CyberArk, 35.6. Oracle was only up 18.5, and Microsoft up only 16% yearly. to date it was a big underperformer along with oracle in 2026 but i think crowd strike and i think palantir will continue to do well you gotta go where you want to go do what you want to do whoever you And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Stocks Now show. Well, on the newsletter on Saturday, I established my official 12-month target price on the S&P 500 based on the earnings projections, the growth projections, the current interest rate environment where the P.E. ratio has been recently on the S&P 500, which is pretty elevated. But nevertheless, that’s what it’s trading at. So last year I had a target price of $6,510. And we’re currently at 6,900. So I was 400 points under. I lean towards the conservative side of my target prices, not only on individual stocks, but on growth rates, et cetera. I try to be reasonable. But we did see the earnings come in a little bit higher this year than my projected earnings for the year. But I was pretty darn close. Where we saw the biggest change was the multiple. I think I was using about a 20 multiple. If I’d have used a 21 multiple, I’d have been really close. But I didn’t. I remained on the conservative side. And, of course, the market did trade over 20 times earnings for most of the year, although it did dip down there in the big sell-off back in March and April. As we begin a new week, the forward PE as of Friday is 22.48.
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22.48.
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The good news is the forward PE has come down. Because the denominator in the fraction has come down or has actually gone up. So you’re dividing the current price of the S&P 500 by a larger number. Two weeks ago, the estimate for 2027 was $303.38, $303. We’re now at $308. Earnings projections for 2026 have gone up $5 per share. And consider that $308 in earnings for the S&P 500. We’ve never seen anything like that before. You go back to 2009 when this all began in March of 2009. We were at $60 per share in earnings for the S&P 500. Slap a 20 multiple on that, you get $1,200. slap a 20 multiple on 308, and you get somewhere above 6,000. And the fact of the matter is we’re trading at a higher than 20 multiple right now. So I do have my target price in the newsletter on Friday. If you did not get the newsletter or you’ve never gotten it before, you can go to my website, GundersenCapital.com, GundersenCapital.com. to get four free weeks of the newsletter, full access to the Best Stocks Now app, which I find absolutely essential in the markets today. It detects the moves, where the momentum is in the market. But at the same time, it weighs that value, that valuation, which is all important. So anyways, that is established. And in the newsletter this week, I’ll try to do a couple of conviction picks for 2026 like everybody else does. Last year I did one conviction pick, and it was Palantir, and it was the biggest winner in the S&P 500 at one point. I mean, late in the year it was up over 100%. I don’t know if any other stock beat it. I will check when the year ends. So anyways, the newsletter. It goes out every Saturday or Sunday morning, just depending. Sometimes there’s a lot more news during the week and a lot more to do, and I want to make sure I’ve got everything right and haven’t missed anything before I send it out. So sometimes it goes out Sunday morning. All right, let’s see. Now, we talked about the software stocks. How about I think it’ll be another good year for the storage stocks. stocks because We’ve talked about the critical shortage that there is in flash memory right now. If we look back on last year, Seagate was up 230%. It’s a leading storage stock. Western Digital was up 201%. It was a triple last year. And it’s arguably one of the strongest stocks in the market today. WDC, which is pretty amazing that it’s as relevant today… as it was when I used to pass that building in Irvine, California, back in the early 2000s, making those disk drives. Western Digital is as relevant today as it was back then because of AI. And Seagate also. I’ve watched Seagate since the late 1990s. And it’s still relevant. And, of course, Micron, with their flash memory, Boise, Idaho, is still relevant also. Those are really the big three. I mean, it drops way off outside of that. Well, there’s SanDisk. SanDisk is public again. SanDisk has been on a heck of a run. It’s very expensive right now. But it is the main competitor. to Western Digital. And Samsung, which makes a lot, is really not an investable company out of Japan. The shares trade very low volume. Okay, internet service. Top internet service stocks last year, Applied Digital, which we had in our emerging growth portfolio for a while. CoreWeave. Applied Digital was up 237% in 2025. It was one of the biggest winners in the entire market. CoreWeave was up 97%. CloudFlare up 88%. Mongo. DB was up 87%, and Shopify was up 59%, Snowflake up 44%. As far as the current trends go, that’s still a very strong sector in the market. Application software, well, Palantir was up 157%. That was our conviction pick. How did we do in 2026? And then, you know, the rest of them were kind of bit miners. IREN, Bitmine, Cypher. And then some of the quantum stocks had a good year. But again, that quantum is out there in the future. Okay, well, that does it for this Monday. I expect a very quiet trading day. I will be going through my charts today. I will be sending out messages on anything that make my eyeballs pop out. I will be gathering information for this week’s newsletter, and I will be managing portfolios to set up an appointment with us. 855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. Have a great day, everybody.
SPEAKER 01 :
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.
