Join professional money manager Bill Gunderson as he dissects the trends shaping today’s stock market. From Apple’s strategic investments in the U.S. to emerging discussions on the benefits of nuclear energy, Bill provides an in-depth look at how these factors influence investment opportunities. Highlights include a discussion on the evolving role of nuclear energy and its players like Constellation and Vistra, marking a potential renaissance in the sector. Tune in to gain a clearer understanding of how these developments could impact your investment strategies.
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 Thursday. It is the Thursday, August the 7th, live edition of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. Our last day here in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Going home later today. But we’ve had a great time. Right now we have an up market. Wow, it’s really starting to gather some steam here. The Dow is up 80 points right now to 44,273. The NASDAQ is up 211 points. Apple, Tim Cook kisses the Trump ring and Apple is bouncing pretty hard to the upside. The NASDAQ is at 21,380. That’s a new all-time high for the NASDAQ. The S&P 500 is up 33 points to 6,378. The Russell 2000 up a half a percent. Bond market is quiet. It’s up one basis point on the 10-year to 4.23. And we have gold is up today. Gold is up 34 basis points right now. And Bitcoin is up 2,300 points right now. And Bitcoin is trading above 16,000 again. Oil is also up a little bit today. So pretty good start to the market today. Welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show. with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And Barry Kite is in meetings. I just came from a meeting myself right from the fire into the frying pan here to do the live show. There is a lot happening in the market. You know, this has been a really, really busy week for of earnings. A very busy week. Many earnings reports coming in and we have a lot more today. And I would just say that the trend continues to skew to the upside. As I said before, we were looking at about 4.8% increase in earnings this quarter when all was said and done versus the same comparable quarter last year. And as of last Friday, that number was up to 10.8%. And I’m going to guess by the end of tomorrow, when a lot more companies have reported, I’m going to guess we’re going to see an even higher number on the earnings. We’ve even had a few companies, including Shopify, which was up 20% yesterday, say they have not seen any impact from the tariffs at all. But yes, there are a lot of things where the tariffs are going to be passed through and the consumer is going to pay. that tariff on whatever that it is. Today I also see that Taiwan Semiconductor is getting an exemption from the tariffs, being a Taiwan company, and that’s our biggest winner in the market here today. We’re off to a very good start once again with a couple of big winners in the market. We had three big winners in the market yesterday. That doesn’t happen all the time. And we’ve had our share of companies that have missed earnings this quarter. That always is going to happen too. There’s no way around that. That’s why you never want to make any one stock, in my opinion, more than 3% or 4%. of your overall portfolio so one or two big earnings misses can’t hurt you too much now yesterday which was another big day for nasdaq and the soggy dow for instance was down like 20 18 basis points yesterday which isn’t much the nasdaq on the other hand was up 80 basis points yesterday. So it has been, it continues to be, a technology-driven advance in the market. Yesterday, we were up 1.75% yesterday because Shopify was up 22%. Astera Labs was up 28.7%. And Arista Networks, which has been the number one ranked stock in our app off and on for the last few weeks, It was up 17.5% yesterday. So we had some really nice winners across the board in our portfolios today. And today I would point to Taiwan Semiconductor, which Trump is singling out. favoring them he’s not uh you know he’s not scolding them and hitting them with a huge penalty instead he is showing them some uh some kind treatment here exemptions from the tariffs and uh seeking or a taiwan semiconductor last time i looked was up i think over six percent let me take a look here where it’s at right now taiwan tsm is up 5.7 percent right now Robinhood is having a good day, up 5.5%. AMD is having a good day. After a little bit of a sell-off here yesterday, AMD is up 5.4% today. So a good start to the market today. There’s a lot of things to talk about today, especially in the way of earnings. But we always kind of begin with the world and the globe. As the world turns, as they say, Kremlin says that Trump and Putin are to meet in coming days. I don’t know where the guy Trump gets all his energy from. uh… he is constantly on the move uh… and working on this and working on that and working on and of course he’s got some uh… people underneath him that uh… do a lot also but they’re going to meet in coming days and uh… right now putin doesn’t want a three-way summit that would include zelinski also but we’ll see where that goes uh… trying to bring an end to that conflict between russia and ukraine at least there’s talks On the horizon, which it can never hurt to talk and try to solve this issue that has cost so many lives. Also on the global front, the Bank of England. Are you listening, Jerome Powell? The Bank of England cuts rates again. this time by 25 basis points as widely expected i think the chances are pretty high myself of a cut at the next fed meeting otherwise i mean he already looks pretty darn behind the curve and uh pretty uh pretty stupid i guess is the better word but it would really look bad if he didn’t cut at the next meeting Our rates are still too high, and the Bank of England cuts again by 25 basis points. Taiwan Semiconductor climbs to record levels as Taiwan says the chip giant is exempt from the Trump tariffs. Okay, well, that’s really good news. And don’t forget Taiwan Semiconductor is investing… A lot of money in the U.S. to build plants here. They’re not going to build the highest-end NVIDIA chips here, but a lot of other chips they’ll be making at their plant in Arizona, which is being built as we speak. Taiwan Semiconductor now up 5.3%. They make about 75% to 80% of the chips in the world. And the P.E. ratio currently is 26%, which isn’t that bad because you’ve had growth of around 30% to 40% at Taiwan Semiconductor. It’s still trading at a discount to its growth rate. It’s now a $1.26 trillion company. And Taiwan pretty much ruling the roost these days in the chip industry with Jensen Wang being Taiwanese and Linda Su from AMD being his cousin from Taiwan and building the chips in Taiwan at Taiwan Semiconductor. That’s one of our largest positions. It’s in a couple of our portfolios. Taiwan TSM also pays a dividend of 92, just under 1% per year. But it gets the tariff exemption, which is a good thing. Apple, on the other hand, let’s check that. I was wondering what was up with Apple yesterday because they don’t have anything new they’re announcing or anything. other than they’re going to be investing another $100 billion here in the United States. Will they ever build iPhones here? Probably not. The price of the iPhone would go up considerably if they were built in the U.S. But Trump, yeah, I guess the best thing to say is Tim Cook went to the White House and kind of kissed the ring of Trump, gave him a nice gift from Apple, and also announced some big investments in the U.S. And Apple is actually breaking out again today. It’s up 2.2%. It’s had a couple of good days in a row. Okay, when we come back, we’re going to talk about Eli Lilly, Constellation Energy, Vistra, Dutch Brothers, Restaurant Brands, Talent Energy, Celsius, ConocoPhillips, Datadog, you name it. A to Z. We’ll be right back. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. We’re going to start with Indianapolis today and go check out Eli Lilly’s earnings report here today. We don’t own Eli Lilly anymore. We owned it. And we made a lot of money in it. We got back into it. And then things started to kind of slow down in that GLP-1 weight loss sector. And Noble Nordisk, I commented yesterday that Noble Nordisk is just a terrible stock chart. It continues to sell off. And today you’ve got Lilly down, let’s see, 14.4%. We sold it maybe a week ago or so. I did not like the way it was trading. And, of course, you know, people always ask me, and it is, it’s more difficult to decide and make the decision to sell than it is to buy. Buying is easy, but the selling part is a lot more difficult. I actually sold two here within the last few days, actually, that are way down today. But to me, I’m at a big advantage just by seeing the charts every day. Nobody calls me and says, hey, we’re going to report earnings that aren’t going to be up to snuff. It just seems like Prior to that actually happening, you start to see deterioration in the charts. And I did not like Lilly’s chart, number one. And number two, when you have a peer stock, there’s really only two GLP-1 stocks, Lilly and Novo Nordisk. And you see a Novo Nordisk worn out. about a big drop-off in sales and you see the stock sell off, you’ve got to say, boy, I don’t know how Lilly can escape that themselves. So it’s always good to watch the other stocks in the industry. Now, having said that, this 100-year-old company had earnings growth. during this quarter of 61%.
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61%.
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They did 3.9 billion in sales last year, same comparable quarter, and this year they did 6.3 billion. That’s a phenomenal sales growth for a quarter for a large pharmaceutical stock. which is probably still the best big pharma stock out there. The rest are pretty bad right now, Merck, Pfizer, et cetera. And their sales were up 38% year over year. They had $11 billion in sales last year’s quarter. And this year it’s $15.6 billion. 38% growth in revenue. Then why is the stock down 14.8%? Well, they also announced earlier today, before their earnings announcement, that they weren’t seeing the results that they would like to see from the pill, from the weight loss pill, which doesn’t exist right now. There is not a pill version of semaglutide or of Zepbound or of Wagovi. It all has to be administered by a hypodermic needle that they provide with little vials of their magic formula, the magic elixir that you shoot into your stomach once a week. I’ve been told by people in the industry that it’s very difficult to create a pill to mimic what these drugs do, to do as well as the shot directly, the liquid shot directly into the stomach does. And for that reason, You’ve got Lilly down 14.8%. Now, yes, that does make it much more… The valuation on Lilly now is quite low. I’m looking at their earnings estimates of $30 per share next year, which would be 37% higher than this year. And I’m looking at a stock that’s currently trading at $6.37. That means that Lilly is only trading at 21 times forward earnings right now, which is pretty cheap. I mean, historically, it’s been trading recently at a much higher rate, much in the 40 to 50 range. And now you’ve got a forward PE ratio that is a lot less than it used to be. It’s actually at 22 right now on the forward PE ratio, when it’s been a lot higher than that. but uh… the charts not good this sentiment is not good and uh… it’s pierre uh… noble nordisk is also under heavy pressure right now so that’s the story right now uh… we dot out of you like lily after noble nordisk uh… bad report and we had a very very small position uh… in noble nordisk like seven hundred shares or something like that overall at our firm And we also got rid of those here recently. And Novo Nordisk is actually up a little bit. It’s up 6% today. But it’s not a very good-looking chart at all. So do the weight loss drugs not work? No. I think they work fantastic. I have seen so many people. lose 40 to 80 pounds. And I don’t think they would have done it any other way were it not for the GLP-1s. Maybe the issue is the cost of the drug. Maybe all the people that could afford it that were overweight have already got the drug and they’re running out of people to sell it to. I don’t know, but there seems to be some kind of a slowdown. It is $500 to $600 a month. The knockoffs are like $200 a month, and that could be another issue. There’s still ways to go around these drugs from the big pharma and get off label drugs that do the same thing. So there’s a couple things working against these two stocks right now. Okay, the other one that we sold here two days ago, I did not – this is an example – I did not like the way Fortinet was trading. It’s a software, it’s basically a cyber security stock. It’s a $54 billion company. We owned it in our ultra-growth portfolio. It’s been growing by 38% per year over the last five years, their earnings. And, you know, I think it was two days ago, maybe three days ago, that I sent out an alert. I’m saying I’m selling all my 40 net today for like a 3% or 4% profit. It’s been going sideways for quite some time because I started to see the chart kind of break down, right? I mean, it’s kind of rolling over from a topping out trend. That’s a very dangerous chart. I did this a lot at my workshop on Tuesday, showing you the different stages. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s the way I do charting.
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1, 2, 3, 4.
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Sideways trend, uptrend, topping out trend, or a downtrend. And Fortinet, which has been kind of a topping out number three trend, sideways trend, started to roll over a few days ago. I sold it. It’s down 26.3% today after they came up short with their latest earnings report this morning. 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 uh half of today’s best stocks now show well you know we’re in a very fast moving market it’s a very much of a news driven market and It looks like there may have been some news here in the last five minutes or so. The markets, they haven’t given up all their gains, but the NASDAQ is only up 140 right now. It was up 221. And the Dow has actually gone negative now. It’s down 123. And the S&P 500, which was up about 45 basis points, is only up 17 basis points. And it’s even hard to keep up with the live news feeds that I see all day long. It’s hard to keep up with what it was that just caused a little bit of a drop here in the market. But there was definitely something. Usually it’s something that Trump says. Usually that’s what it boils down to. Anyways, we’ve got other stocks in the news here today. We just talked about Lilly. I don’t know what to say about Lilly. I don’t own it. I have done well with it. We got out of it, got back in it, and then got out of it after Novo Nordisk reports there. So we’ll just have to kind of see how it all plays out. But I can tell you that the drugs work. The drugs work. They’ve changed a lot of people’s lives, to be honest with you. But I guess maybe the cost of the drug, I don’t know. Other stocks in the news here today. Constellation Energy. Today is nuke earnings day. We didn’t have Nuke Earnings Day here recently. This has become a new phenomenon. And it all began, really, this whole nuclear explosion, pardon the pun, to the upside, really began when ChatGPT came online. from Microsoft and made artificial intelligence available to the masses. I would say that that’s what kind of started it all. And then along the line, they started to map out data centers And, you know, the different speeds of these chips and how many chips we’re using in AI and how much energy those chips need. They consume a lot. You’ve got to keep them cool. You’ve got to have space for them. They’ve got to talk to one another through networks. We’ve got to put a lot of stuff in the cloud. But when it comes right down to the bread and butter logistics, you have to provide the power to these data centers. We learned recently that a data center being proposed in Wyoming would consume more power than all the homes in the entire state of Wyoming. So that just gives you some kind of an idea of the energy crunch there. That’s going to take some time to catch up. We’re behind the curve on this. And the interesting part of this whole story is how we’ve gone from these renewables, the green renewables, which are solar and wind and even hydrogen to some extent, to nuclear. It always was considered a renewable energy, but at the same time it’s always been in disfavor over the years with certain groups of people. I mean, you go out to California and they’ve decommissioned a couple of nuclear power plants. Now they’re backing off from that. They were going to decommission Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant there off of Avila Beach. which I fished in front of that power plant, caught some nice salmon trolling around that area in some big swells. We got in just in time before the swell really came up, but we were fishing right off the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, which is kind of in a remote area, really. It’s not like there’s a popular beach around there or anything. But they were planning, and they did decommission the San Onofre nuclear power plant down in northern San Diego up near Camp Pendleton. I thought that was a big mistake myself, instead relying on other sources of energy. And they were on a real war path, the decommissioning. A lot more in California and in other states. And now all of a sudden there’s been this massive about face. You’ve got a 180 degree turn towards nuclear energy of all things. The second shoe to drop was when Microsoft came in and signed a contract with Constellation Energy, which is headquartered in Baltimore and the home of the infamous Three Mile Island. And they signed a big contract with Microsoft to provide them with the energy they need in that part of the country for their data center needs. And then, of course, a couple other companies made deals. Apple made a deal. And I believe Meta. Meta made a deal also. So you have a whole new dynamic out there. because of this need for energy and all of a sudden nuclear is in the spotlight and you’ve got all the big nuclear players uh… reporting earnings today so let’s begin with constellation energy which right now is basically flat It’s down just less than 1% right now, but it’s probably the one that started it all with the deal with Microsoft, and then people started looking at other of the companies in that same sector as Constellation and realizing that there were some other big players in there, which we’ll talk about those also. But if we look at this performance, and you know, if you compare it to a traditional utility, just your standard electric utility, they’ve done poorly. They’re very interest rate sensitive and they’re non-growth for the most part, maybe low single digits at best. But you’ve got Constellation now, which over the last three years has delivered 67% per year to investors, while the market’s up 17.7%. And over the last 12 months, Constellation’s up 100%. It’s doubled over the last 12 months. while the S&P is up 22.4. And, of course, that’s looking in the rearview mirror. But if you look at the valuation, I’m going to take a look at my valuation here currently on Constellation Energy, which is basically flat today after their earnings report. I have a five-year target price of $600. on constellations currently at three thirty six so that gives it almost eighty percent just under eighty percent upside potential i’m using a growth rate of fourteen percent per year which i think is possible because of them being in a very enviable position as it relates to nuclear energy. So it is one that we do own, Constellation Energy. The symbol is C-E-G. It’s currently ranked number 133 out of 5,115, and it has been ranked higher than that in my beststocksnowapp.com. But Constellation, all in all, is down $2.34 today after their earnings report. And in that report, they did beat the top line and bottom line estimates. They also reaffirmed 2025. But the stock basically flat on the news. It’s not cheap. I look at Constellation. The PE ratio right now is 38. You say that’s high for a utility. Yeah, but this one’s a little bit better than your average utility. The sales growth is starting to accelerate and the earnings growth is starting to accelerate. Is there a dividend involved here? I think there is a little bit of a dividend. Yeah, half a percent dividend on Constellation out of Baltimore, Maryland. But that is one that we have a pretty big position in. The stock is flat today. Okay, the second one that we’ll talk about is Vistra. Vistra is more in the southwest, while Constellation, I suppose, is more in the northeast. Vistra is headquartered in Irving, Texas, which is becoming kind of the tech capital of the world there in Texas, especially in Austin. And Vistra is actually up there. 4.2% today after reporting earnings sales that were up 11% earnings were only up 2% but I think Vistra is in the very early innings of the exposure that they have to nuclear plants going forward they’re in a very sweet spot in the market and are going to be a major player going forward and expecting really good growth going forward we also have a big position in Vistra And Vistra also reported earnings here today. And they reaffirmed their current outlook. So everything looks good. When we come back, I’ll give you my target price on Vistra VST. And again, it is one of our other big positions in this sector. We’ll be right back.
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And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, I made a big deal out of it.
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at the workshop on Tuesday about looking in the past at the past performance of a stock, which I think is critical. I think it’s absolutely critical. Why would you buy something before you know how it has performed? I mean, you wouldn’t buy a mutual fund that has done 1% per year over the last 10 years, I don’t think. I mean, would you buy a Fidelity growth fund that’s averaged 1% per year? And yet people buy individual stocks all the time that have averaged very little. We gave the example of Disney over the last 10 years of a less than 1% average gain over the years. It makes a big difference in your portfolio. I looked up some bond funds yesterday in someone’s portfolio. I’d like to do some work on the rest of the funds in that portfolio. There were a lot of bond funds. And I saw the total return over the last 10 years of a couple of the big bond funds, 1% per year over the last 10 years. Of course, you had a very bad year in there in 2022 when the Fed was raising interest rates. And you saw about a 15% pullback in the bond funds during that time. But still, the last 10 years, you’ve averaged just over 1%, maybe 2% per year over time in those bond funds. And bond funds are very, very prevalent in today’s world. Very prevalent. I mean, if 90% of the firms out there are using asset allocation models based on your age… And let’s just say the average client is 60 years old. That means 60% of that asset allocation is supposedly supposed to be in bonds. And they don’t buy individual bonds, which is another thing that sticks in my craw. with wall street and said they buy bond funds which are totally uh… you know at the mercy of interest rates yes an individual bond is too but if you hold that bond to maturity You know, you’re going to get your principal back, meaning if you bought it for $100, it’s going to pay $100 at the end, and you’re going to get your 5, whatever, 5, 5.5, 4.5% along the way. And that’s decent growth. I mean, for a very conservative investor that doesn’t want to take stock market risk, and there are some people like that, But you should take stock market risk because it has been a very much superior vehicle to bonds over the last decade, the last 20 years. And the bond funds, there is no maturity on those, right? I mean, there are always bonds coming and going in those things, different maturity dates. And at the end of the day, it worked out to maybe 2%. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. Over the last 10 years, 2% gain. And when that makes up 60% of your portfolio, you see what I’m talking about? I mean, do the math on that. That really slows things down. That’s like going on vacation in a nice car that will do 60 or 70 and dragging something very heavy behind it or something, weighting your portfolio down. So that’s my take on that. Whereas the individual bond fund, owning individual bonds would have done a lot better. But anyways, I’m not a fan of bond funds at all. Talent Energy is, oh, no, we’ve got to do the valuation on Vistra. It’s one thing to look at the past and the track record, but it’s another thing to look at the projections of the future, and that’s where the five-year valuations come into play. Vistra has a phenomenal track record right now over the last several years, but it also works out from a valuation point of view. I have a valuation over the next five years of $395, and I calculate that by looking at the earnings estimates for next year, which are $8.70. The consensus growth rate out there on the street for Vista, we’re talking about Vista right now, then we’ll get to Talon, is 17%. So if I take that $8.70 and extrapolate it out over the next five years by 17% per year, that’s real easy math. You get to a number that would be the earnings, potential earnings, five years from now. And then I put a multiple on that, depending on the stock. There’s not just one multiple. There’s a lot of different multiples that you can choose. But it usually is based on where the stock is traded historically, where its peers trade at, its growth rate, the industry that it’s in. And when I use that multiple on Vistra, I get 99% upside potential over the next five years. So it still fits. My valuation criteria, where I like 80% or more, and it’s got that phenomenal track record, Vistra does, of 54% average return over the last 10 years. Over the last three years, it’s been 105%. average return and no wonder Vistra, it was ranked number one recently in my app. It’s been number two within recent weeks and months here. It’s currently ranked number four. That’s as of yesterday in the app. Vistra is up just a little bit here today, but it hit a new all-time high just two days ago. It’s now a $17 billion company. The last one we’ll get to here is Talon. Talon is the third one in that trio of nuclear powerhouses. Talon Energy is TLN. and it’s headquartered in Houston, Texas, which we’ve got to get down to Houston here probably early next year to do a workshop and visit with the folks. Talon is up a little bit here today, but it has those same kind of characteristics as the other two nuclear stocks do, Vistra and Constellation. Talon’s track record, Looking backwards in the rearview mirror over the last 12 months, it’s up 231%. It’s more than tripled. And when I look at the next five years at the five-year valuation, this is valuable stuff. I see 65% upside potential on a 12% growth rate. So it’s a little bit ahead of itself. I think maybe the growth rate could be a little bit low there, but we still own all three of those stocks in the nuclear renaissance that’s taking place in America right now. All right, well, we’re out of time. We’re headed home from Bloomfield Hills here later today. Get rested up over the weekend. We’ll be back tomorrow doing the show. Markets doing very well these days. If you’d like to set up an appointment with us, a financial planning appointment, an investment, combine it all in one, give us a call at 855-611-BEST or get the four-week trial through the newsletter and the app and the live trading. GundersenCapital.com. Have a great day, 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.
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