In this episode of Best Stocks Now, Bill Gunderson takes listeners on a journey through market trends and forecasts. Discover why AI is shaking up the software stock sector, and why NVIDIA stands tall amid market uncertainties. With tidbits on jobless claims and geopolitical factors affecting oil prices, this episode is a comprehensive guide to the financial markets.
00:35:08 Investment Analysis and Strategy with Bill
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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. It is 2-26-26. There’s your numerology for the day, the 26th of 2026. And this is Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. It’s the Best Stocks Now show. It’s the Nope, Not Good Enough edition of the Best Stocks Now show. The NASDAQ right now is down 210 points. It’s at 22,943 after NVIDIA’s blowout earnings last night. The Dow is up. 134 points to 49,616. We’ve got the S&P 500 down 28 points, four-tenths of one percent. It’s at 6,917. And the Russell 2000 is absolutely flat at the current time. The bond market is pretty quiet. It’s low. The interest rate’s 10 years down at, what, 4.02 today, 4.02. Maybe we’ll crack that 4% mark here. Gold is down 1.1% today. Brent crude, or crude oil, let’s do the crude oil. It’s down 1.93% today at 64.16 on an inventory build today. And we’ve got Bitcoin in a little bit of a rally mode. How about that? Bitcoin’s up $657, and it’s back up to $67,000. six hundred and fifty so welcome to today’s best stocks now show with professional money manager bill ganderson president of ganderson capital management a nationwide fee base only money management firm and uh… i am uh… those reporting today to the show doing the show from beautiful downtown houston We’re having a great time here. We’ve met a lot of great folks. One more day in Houston. And then we start planning our next trip, which more than likely will be Sarasota, Florida. And we’ve got a lot of news in the markets today. Obviously, NVIDIA is the biggest news, and we’ll get to that later. They had blowout earnings. I mean, they couldn’t have been any better. But you know what? The market’s like, wow, is that all the better you can do? I mean, we wanted something even better than that. And I think NVIDIA is down a couple of percent right now. We had a decent day in the market yesterday. The NASDAQ was up 1.26% on Wednesday, and the Dow was up 63 basis points. And we finally had a huge day in Bitcoin. It was up $4,980 yesterday to $69,000. I’m thinking, I didn’t listen to Trump’s State of the Union speech. I was busy here in Houston, but he must have said something about crypto. I don’t know. Maybe that’s what spurred it. But crypto did have a good rally yesterday, 4,980 on Bitcoin. And then it’s tacking on a little bit more here today. And gold down yesterday and today. But they’ve had a pretty good year and a half run here. in the precious metals markets. We get our Thursday initial jobless claims, which I always say when we start to go into a recession, this will be one of the very first signs of a recession. Those initial jobless claims will start to rise. Well, no big rise here today. Initial jobless claims rise less than expected in the past week. They come in at 212,000, which is a very low number. The consensus was 215,000, at least looking at that one barometer of the economy. No signs of a recession at the current time. Last night at the workshop, I always like to begin the workshop with the big picture of the market. I always say it’s the big E, earnings. Actually, there’s three big E’s in the market. It’s earnings, earnings, earnings. I showed the chart of the earnings of the S&P 500 companies and what that chart looks like. Especially, you can compare it to the chart of the S&P 500. And you can see that it kind of tags right along with the direction of those earnings and earnings estimates. Oil futures trade sideways ahead of U.S.-Iran talks. Crude oil futures finished little change on Wednesday. There was a much larger than expected build in U.S. crude stockpiles. Meanwhile, a third round of nuclear negotiations is scheduled to start Thursday in Geneva. That’s today, but President Trump laid out his case for a possible attack on Iran. That’s part of his deal-making strategy, I guess. In the State of the Union speech, he laid that out, calling Iran by far the world’s biggest sponsor of terror. and saying that he would not allow the country to possess a nuclear weapon. It’s probably a good idea to not let them near a nuclear weapon, even though countries backing Iran, like Russia and China, do have nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia reportedly has activated a plan for a short-term surge in oil production. and exports in the event a U.S. strike against Iran disrupts Iran, Iran, Iran. disrupt shipments of oil from the Middle East. So that’s your biggest story on the world stage right now, obviously, as one-third of our Navy is positioned in the Mediterranean around that area. The World Economic Forum CEO, he steps down. After Epstein ties examined, okay, Borge Brende, which is a Norwegian, on Thursday decided to step down as president and CEO of the World Economic Forum. Which at one time, you know, made a lot of news with the Great Reset and all of this kind of talk and climate change and everything. But the Economic Forum is going to open up an investigation into Bjorg, his relationship. with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein which is a little bit more you know he was more deeply entwined in that whole thing than he originally let on and there are some people caught up in this tangled web that are falling some big high-powered attorneys of course some folks over in the UK and now you’ve got the CEO of the World Economic Forum which is a pretty big deal Okay, the software stocks. There’s a lot of talk that has been surrounding these software stocks. They’ve been under the microscope here recently. Number one, you have them going to the private credit markets to do a lot of borrowing. And then that private credit being turned around and sold to individual investors. So, you know, that’s going around the banks and floating bonds, instead going to the private credit markets. And that’s also putting some strain on those private credit markets. This drop in software stocks, there’s prices. you’re kind of creating a perfect storm there in this whole private credit mess that is kind of coming unwound, starting to unwind a little bit. And it’s leaving a lot of the CEOs in the software stocks confused. Tech CEOs are completely perplexed by the recent AI-driven market sell-off in software stocks, which also our friend Jensen Wang at NVIDIA said there’s really – this is being overdone. These software companies are not going to be put out of business by AI. And that’s been the theme here on Wall Street recently. In an interview on CNBC, lead edge capital managing partner Mitchell Green shared that despite strong earnings reports and fundamentals, software companies have seen significant price declines following concerns sparked by what he characterized as an unremarkable source. which I agree with that. I think it’s being way overdone. And you take a look today, you know, Mark Benioff at Salesforce is claiming that they had the best quarter that they’ve ever had, and yet you look at the stock of CRM, Salesforce, actually it’s turned around now. Salesforce is up 3.2% today. After a pretty good quarter, maybe that will help put in a bottom. I have been seeing that software sector starting to put in a bottom. But having said that, there’s only a few really healthy software stocks out there in the market today. We’ll be right back.
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Thank you.
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And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Stocks Now show. A little bit more on the software sector. NVIDIA’s Jensen Wang pushes back on AI cannibalization fears. in the software sector. Last night, as I always do at the workshops, I talked about, number one, I look at the track record of a company. Number two, I look at the forward earnings, the valuation of the company. So now I’ve looked at the last five to ten years, and I’ve looked ahead to the next five years. And then I look at a chart of the stock. I consult a chart of the stock to see what that one-year technical pattern looks like. And I talked about the simple concept of 1, 2, 3, 4. It’s either in a sideways trend, which is a 1. It’s either in an uptrend, which is a 2. Topping out, which is a 3. Or a downtrend, which is a 4. And I would just say that Almost every software stock right now has been in a number four downtrend for the last several months. And now it’s starting to land and catch a bid and starting to build a base. Whether it holds or not, that remains to be seen. But most of those software stocks are back into a number one sideways trend after a steep Number four downtrend. The beginning of a number one sideways trend, while it’s good, it’s healthy. It’s not exactly the best place to be adding stocks from the software sector to your portfolio. I generally like to wait and see that. Well, number one, it has to meet my past performance record criteria and my five-year valuation criteria. Then I like to see that number one trend. I like to wait for some kind of a catalyst trend. to see it start moving back in the upwards direction once again. Jensen Wang says that the markets have misjudged the impact. that artificial intelligence will have on software companies. I’ve been saying the same thing, that the market has it wrong once again. Speaking just hours after the chip maker delivered an upbeat sales forecast driven by strong AI demand. You’re saying, well, why is the stock down 4% right now? Well, obviously the market had already built in and expected those results That exceeded analyst expectations, but it would seem that the market figured it out that they were going to beat the analyst expectations, and that was already priced into the market. But they did have just a blowout quarter, which we’ll get to here in a bit. And instead of focusing on what the stock is doing today, I like to refer to the five-year valuation on the company, which you can find in the Best Stocks Now app. You continue to see tremendous selling and weak charts in stocks like Forex. Microsoft, Cadence, ServiceNow, SAP, Adobe, etc. And like I say, there’s only a few good, buyable, in my opinion, software stocks out there. Okay, if we look at Nvidia’s quarter, this is pretty interesting. nvidia for the quarter reported 68 billion dollars in sales that’s a lot that’s a lot of sales how does that compare with uh salesforce for instance well salesforce is about twice as big as nvidia because they have been around longer they have higher sales than nvidia does but $680 billion is a lot of sales for a company. And those sales compared to $39 billion last year at the same quarter. So their sales were up 73%. 73% year over year. Not bad for a $4.5 trillion company. Their earnings came in at $1.62 per share, which compares with $0.89 per share during the same comparable quarter last year. So their earnings were up 82% quarter over quarter. Let’s just compare that with CRM, Salesforce. Salesforce’s earnings were up 37% quarter over quarter, and their sales were only up 12%. So NVIDIA is growing at about four times the rate. that Salesforce is currently growing at. And Salesforce is one of those stocks that has caught up CRM in this AI theory that is going to drive a lot of these software stocks. It’s going to hurt and cannibalize. a lot of these software stocks. But Nvidia’s quarter, I would say it couldn’t have been any better, really. And like I say, there’s been a lot of upwards movement in Nvidia over the last week, seven days of trading. It’s been upwards. and uh… obviously they were pricing in this quarter and uh… they must have expected even more i don’t know what more they could have done and that’s why you’re seeing right now the stock is down four point seven percent Back to this whole track record idea, and it is one of the requirements. It is something that I decided a long time ago in this business that I’m in, is I want to see the track record of a stock. Just like we look at track records of baseball players, just like we look at track records of of horses at the racetrack. We look at track records. We should be looking at track records of individual companies. I mean, that’s one of the key things that you look at. But as far as a mutual fund goes, they make a big deal about their one-year, their three-year, their five-year, their ten-year performance numbers. And if it’s a stock fund, mutual fund, you compare that with the S&P 500. Why shouldn’t that be kind of the same criteria that we look at an individual stock and grade it by? I think that track record is very, very important. So let’s just take a look here at Nvidia’s track record over the last 10 years. An investment in Nvidia 10 years ago has yielded to investors a total average return of 74% per year over the last 10 years. Compound that out. If you’d have put $10,000 in NVIDIA 10 years ago and it’s grown by 74% per year, build yourself a little spreadsheet. You can figure it out what that money has grown to. Now that’s looking in the past. We’ll get to the future here in a bit. And it has really, it’s pretty much almost tripled the returns of the S&P 500. which has been 26% per year. Over the last three years, NVIDIA’s return has been 103% per year versus the S&P’s 25%. And over the last 12 months, NVIDIA’s up 50% while the market’s up 16%. When we come back, I’ll let you know how that ranks and where that puts NVIDIA. against all the other 5,300 stocks and ETFs and mutual funds out there that I grade on a daily basis. 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 GundersenCapital.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. Thank you.
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Thank you.
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And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Stocks Now show. And we were talking about NVIDIA before we went to break. NVIDIA is now the biggest market cap company by far at $4.5 trillion. uh… where does it go from here well ok we gotta go back to that uh… that track record when i compare their one-year performance three-year performance five-year performance and ten-year performance and stack it up and compare it against the rest of the companies in my database my Best Stocks Now database, Nvidia gets an A plus performance grade. It’s one of the greatest stocks of all time. And of course, past performance, no guarantee of future results. And that’s why the next step that I do in the process, and I tried to explain to the people at the workshop last night, it’s a simple process. People make the market too complicated. I’ve seen you know I’ve seen different strategies that folks use to screen the market or newsletter writers or money managers they look for a high return on equity they look for little debt they look for increasing dividend whatever the criteria are sometimes they’ll put in ten criteria and into their filters and come up with this list that meets all of their criteria. I have really just two criteria. The track record going backwards of the stock and the valuation going forward. And then, of course, that visual look at the chart, and that makes my life a lot easier. You know, everything in my book is pretty much reflected in earnings. That’s where you’re gonna find return on equity reflected, return on investment reflected, and a lot of these other profit margin, a lot of these other factors that you can throw in there But it always comes back to earnings, the big E, earnings, earnings, earnings. Okay, so it gets an A-plus performance grade. It’s at the top of its class, valedictorian, Jensen Wang. Now we look ahead. And you look ahead by the analyst estimates for next year. Let’s see. Let’s see what NVIDIA’s got estimates for. I’m sure they got 2020. Yeah, they got 2027 and 2028 is out there right now. This year, 2026, they’re looking to make $4.77. Next year, they’re looking to make $8.01. That would be 68% growth in earnings. And in 2028, the estimates are for $10.58 in earnings, which would be another 32%. So in other words, over the next two years, earnings are expected to double. Well, what are those earnings worth? We extrapolate those earnings out at a growth rate, what I think a five-year, an achievable five-year growth rate is for a company like Nvidia. I think I’m using about 18%. Let me just see where that number is for me right now. Yeah, about 18%, okay. And they just came in at 82%. in the last quarter. The last three quarters have been north of 50%. And their annual is going to be 68% this year. So I don’t think raising their earnings, growing their earnings by 18% per year over the next five years. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable assumption. And then on top of that, then we apply a multiple to those earnings that I think is appropriate for a company like NVIDIA. And we come up with a five-year target price. for the shares, which I like to do. It takes a lot of emotion out of the equation. And my five-year target price on Nvidia is currently at $398.29. And when you compare that to where the stock is trading at right now, that gives it 103% upside potential. Potential. Not guaranteed. Potential. That gives it a value grade of A and a performance grade of A+. Then I look at a chart of NVIDIA. Is it in a number one? Is it in a number two? Is it in a number three? Is it in a number four pattern right now? I would say it’s in a very solid number one, sideways, maybe number three. No, I’m going to call it a number three because it went on a massive run. that began in april of last year when it got down below a hundred dollars per share what was going on in april of last year when nvidia got down below a hundred dollars per share the tariff thing when the s&p five hundred went down to forty eight hundred and when i wrote my article uh… right at that bottom of the s&p five hundred and the nasdaq i said nvidia would be one of my top uh… candidates at this point in time well it was under a hundred then and now it’s at a hundred eighty six it’s up eighty six percent since bottoming out in april of last year about nine months ago uh… it got up as high as two hundred and twelve in fact in fact it got as low as eighty seven and then from there it went to two hundred and twelve so it’s another pretty good call that that i made not only on the market but on the stock nvidia And then from 212, it started to consolidate. And it’s been consolidating in a sideways trend ranging between 170 to 200 ever since. And it’s been in that sideways number three trend since late October of last year. Now, a number three after a number two uptrend It can go one of two ways. It can roll over and start going down into a number four downtrend, or it can break out and begin a number two uptrend. And I would just say that looking at this chart, I think the odds of it breaking out and forming another number two uptrend are much greater than it rolling over and going into a downtrend. And I also think that the valuation… supports that thesis with 100% upside potential over the next five years. So we remain very bullish on Nvidia, which is now down 4.75% on the day. Okay, let’s put CRM under the microscope. It’s a Dow stock, so it’s a very important stock. CRM is tiny in contrast to NVIDIA. CRM is a $185 billion company. I kind of wonder why it’s in the Dow, but it’s in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. NVIDIA is what? How many times bigger? NVIDIA is five times the size No more than that, 25 times the size of Salesforce if you’re looking at market cap. Salesforce has been growing really fast. in the single digits. But it had a good quarter here. I mean, their sales were up 12% year over year. That kind of defeats that AI is going to kill them theory. And their earnings were up 37% year over year. That’s the best quarter they’ve had in a long, long time. Again, it kind of defeats that AI is going to crush Salesforce uh… mantra that we’ve heard here uh… over the last several weeks now salesforce has been a very poor performing stock we do not own salesforce uh… it uh… let’s take a look at the same three criteria on salesforce that we just looked at for NVIDIA. Okay, so let’s look at the one year, the three year, the five year, and the 10 year track record on Mark Benioff’s powerhouse company. Over the last 10 years, Benioff has delivered results to investors very subpar, 12% per year. NVIDIA was 75% per year. Benioff has delivered that during a time when the S&P has delivered 26% per year. He’s delivered 12%. Over the last five years, Salesforce has been going down by 4% per year. That’s right. Five years of that. Minus 4% per year. The S&P has been going up by 15. It’s improved recently over the last three years. He’s positive, 6.1% per year. But the S&P is 25. Now here’s the real bad number. Over the last 12 months, Salesforce is down 37%. Ouch! Is it a value now? Well, when we come back, we’ll look at that five-year valuation. And C, it’s as simple as 1, 2, 3. We’ll be right back.
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Golden age on a winter’s day. You got to go where you want to go and do what you want to do with whoever you are.
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And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. We had Salesforce under the microscope here while we looked at the track record, which has been pretty poor, very poor. Let’s see. I’m just going to see what grade of a performance grade that they get. A performance grade of D+. Was your mother happy if you brought home a D-plus on your report card? Maybe your mother was happy. I don’t know. D-plus, I know I wouldn’t have been very happy with a D-plus on my report card, but that’s what Benioff gets. That’s the performance grade of the stock over the last 1, 3, 5, 10 years, everything combined. I have a weighting formula that then measures that stock against everybody else in the database. Grading on the curve, it gets a D plus. Now, you might say, well, maybe there’s a screaming value there because of this sell-off recently. Well, I did the same exercise that I did with Nvidia. I take next year’s earnings estimates, which are nowhere near what Nvidia’s are. Their earnings estimates for next year are currently, let’s see, actually they’re $15.01. Okay, their growth rate, I’m using 13%, which is kind of the consensus out there on the street. That may be a little ambitious, but that’s what it is. And when I do the math on that, I come up with a five-year target price of $328 on CRM. That gives it 71% upside potential. which is a C+, a C+. I like 80% or more. So you’ve got a D-plus performance grade, a C-plus valuation grade, and a chart that is pretty dull. So, you know, look, I mean, I’m looking for the best stocks now. not average, not below average, not mediocre, and there’s just not much there. There’s no there there for me right now in CRM, even though they had a very good quarter. I congratulate them on their quarter. Their earnings were up 37% versus the same quarter last year, and their sales were up 12%, and the stock is up 4.1% today. But It’s got some major headwinds, and Benioff has not produced very good results, especially recently. It’s down 37% over the last 12 months, and the valuation is not exactly compelling here. So I take a pass on Salesforce. But the point I want to make, and I made it last night, is you can make the market really, really complicated. But I think, number one, just being able to look up the stocks that you currently own and just do that same simple exercise that I just did. It’s not rocket science to figure out what a stock has done. And don’t forget to include the dividend. what a stock has performed over the last 1, 3, 5, 10 years. Yes, some stocks don’t have 10-year track records. They only have 9-month track record. But that’s still a beginning. Some stocks have 25- and 30-year track records. But I definitely wait. Towards the recent five, one, three, five years, I give that a little bit more weighting than the 10-year average. And I think it’s really important to know if you’re at a firm, let’s say you’ve got a million and a half with Fisher. Why don’t you take a look at the stocks that Fisher owns in your portfolio and do that same exercise that I just did. You get four weeks of the app to look up your stocks, the track record of them, and the five-year valuation. And just write down next to each stock what their performance grade is, what their valuation grade is, and then from that, I create a final grade, which weighs those two. So it’s a quant system that not only looks at momentum and performance, but it also looks at valuation. And I think both are extremely important in every single stock that you own or are looking to buy. Those are the criteria. I mean, you can look at return on equity and return on investment. I’ve never seen any study. And I’ve done a lot of different screens and filterings and whatnot. And I’ve run screens, I just want companies with a return on equity of 20% or more. Here comes the list. Then you look at the track record of the companies that meet that criteria. And I have never really seen any correlation between stock price appreciation and return on equity, ROE. The correlation that I’ve seen, the most profound correlation has been earnings growth and stock price appreciation. not only for the index or indexes, but for individual stocks. There’s where your correlation is. So if you’re doing the screen, look for companies that over the last five years have grown their earnings by 30% or more. And over the next five years are expected to grow their earnings by 15% or more. That’s a good correlation there. And then look at the stock price performance in relation to that. That’s what I have found to be the most important factors, which makes my life a whole lot easier. And every day I take my list of top ranked stocks that my app has calculated overnight and I upload that list and I look through the charts of those stocks. I’m beginning garbage in, garbage out. I’m starting with good stocks and then I’m looking at the look, the current technical pattern of that stock. And as I’ve said many times, you know, we have four products, five products at our firm. We’ve made it very simple. We specialize in a few, try to be very good in a few things rather than mediocre at a lot of things. And those portfolios, in each one of those five portfolios, I strive to have the very best stocks or individual bonds as it relates to the bond portfolio that I can find in the market to populate those portfolios with. And a stock like Salesforce would not even come close to meeting the criteria that I require to be a member of one of my portfolios. Anyways, that’s how I do things. You may do them differently. You may disagree. I’m just telling you that’s how I do things. To get a four-week trial to the newsletter, the app, and the live trading alerts and all four portfolios on a daily basis for four weeks, go to GundersenCapital.com. And that will give you an opportunity to look into the app and look up the track record of your stocks. GundersenCapital.com to interview us about money management. 855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. 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 SIBC and FINRA.
