In this episode, Bill delves into the dynamics of the tech world and its intersection with energy innovation, highlighting intriguing developments like Meta’s commitment to solar power and the emergence of nuclear energy as a green option. He also sheds light on the risks associated with high-dividend stocks and the potential missteps organizations might face with revenue recognition issues. Gain valuable insight into the careful maneuvers required in today’s financial world, underscored by thoughtful analysis of current economic indicators and trends.
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.
Bill Gunderson :
And welcome to the Best Stocks Now show. It is the Halloween edition, and we do have a little bit of a scary, spooky market here today after a lot of earnings coming in last night. This is Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. I’m back in the saddle today. It was a travel day yesterday, Barry, and you guys handled the show just fine. We’ve got the Dow right now down 223 points. That’s a half a percent. The NASDAQ, on the other hand, is down even more than that. From a percentage point of view, it is now down almost 2%. 1.8% loss for the NASDAQ so far. It is down 346 points. Much of that Microsoft and Meta… And then there’s some winners on the upside. Also, the S&P 500 is down 64 points. That is down 1.1%. Small caps, Russell 2000 now going negative. They are down one-third of a point. We look over at the bond market and… Saw a little bit of a sell-off there this morning. The 10-year is at 4.32%, so that’s up two or three basis points. Gold is down 1.2% to $27.66, and crypto, Bitcoin, down $1,123 to $70,869. So welcome to today’s Best Docs Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. I was just doing the math, Barry. I’ve done at least 4,000 live radio shows. Have you really? Yeah, I mean just doing the math Monday through Friday for the last 20 years or whatever it is. It has been. I mean, I haven’t kept count. But somewhere in there, and I very rarely miss a show. I did miss yesterday as we were traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast. And there’s no easy way of getting here. It is a five or six hour. And, you know, the Internet is pretty sketchy, to be honest, on the flights. It varies from flight to flight, from airline to airline. But I was able to get through about 500, 600, 700 charts yesterday. while I was in the air, a little bit of nervousness. You know, I’ve seen a little bit of erosion in earnings, which I’ve been watching for for a long time because that’s usually the first sign that the market could be in trouble. Well, you know, I mean, it’s early on here, but I have seen some erosion in the guidance mostly. And, you know, that guidance is just as important, if not more important, than the earnings that have been reported for the last three months. So we’ll be definitely on top of that. We have hedges in place. Those are our best performers today, obviously, our inverse NASDAQ hedge and our inverse S&P, our inverse Russell 2000 hedge also doing well today. We’re in a very, very volatile time right now in the markets. with Election Day creeping up on us just a few days away now. And I do think the market would like to get some resolution, get a lot of unknowns out of the way. Whether that happens on Tuesday night or not remains to be seen. Whether it drags on for weeks remains to be seen. Whether it’s a surprise result remains to be seen. Whether how either side reacts to the results remains to be seen, and I think the market is a little bit nervous about that. But I think today is more about earnings, earnings and more earnings than anything else, especially when you’ve got one of the biggest earnings reports of the earnings season in Microsoft. Meta is certainly no slouch either, and several others. Well, yesterday we had the Dow down 92. The NASDAQ was down 105. It seemed to be kind of a mixed market. Couldn’t hold on to the gains. We were up in the morning. Google, I thought, had a pretty good report. You had some shocking news from Supermicrocomputer, which was down 32% after their auditor resigned. What is going on there? I’m glad we got rid of that. Amazon had a pretty good day yesterday. Does Apple report? I think tonight is Apple’s report. Let me just look at that.
Bill Gunderson :
so you think uh… we’re out of the woods well you know we could have more tricks or treats uh… coming tomorrow there are a lot of tricks there are uh… several treats also it’s always a roll of the dice you just don’t know what a company is going to report uh… we’ve had uh… a few that have uh… missed uh… and got hit and we’ve had a few that have uh… like booking today is uh… blowing up to the upside so you just never know
Bill Gunderson :
Yes, that’s right. And after the close of the market, it’s Apple and it’s Amazon that will report – their earnings. Well, before we dig into the earnings, there are some… Yeah, go ahead.
Bill Gunderson :
Yes, it’s still a very, very tight labor market. There’s some interesting stories here that I want to go over before we get to some of these earnings reports. You know, while all of these big tech companies are seemingly signing up with nuclear providers, nuke providers for energy, Meta, now I’m sure this isn’t all of their energy needs, they signed a deal with with a big company out of France for a Texas solar plant, 260 megawatts of solar. So it would seem that maybe Meta is a little more, with Zuckerberg, a little more inclined towards the true, real green energy. You know, nuclear is now considered green energy. And we’ve seen a lot of deals there. In fact, there’s been some other companies that have risen up on my radar here. Maybe we’ll get to some of those. It seems this fuel, the fuel that they’re going to use in these new reactors is going to be a different kind of an improved kind of fuel. And we saw a deal with Bill Gates. And you know, this one has been showing up on my radar. I actually own just a few shares of it because I just found it showing up in the app several days ago. And it had that A-plus momentum, which, I mean, I looked at daily graphs. Marketsmith, they have a 99 relative strength. ASP Isotopes, which the symbol is A-S-P-I. I kind of remember isotopes from my college days. I’ve got to really dig down in the gray matter to remember what an isotope is. But anyways, I saw the keywords in there when I clicked on their website. You know, number one, when a stock shows up on my radar, that means it’s doing well, okay? Either it’s an A-plus momentum stock or a B-plus overall between the valuation and the momentum. And that’s just pointing me to the best stocks now every day. And I currently have about 600 or 700. Those are the ones I went over on my flight yesterday. I don’t want to ever miss anything. And ASPI was showing up. The second thing I do, this was about a week ago, is I check into what they do. And I go to their website, and it says they’re in the nuclear fuel. That’s one of their products is a new and improved fuel for nuclear reactors. I go, bam. There might be something there, but it’s a very small $458 million micro-cap stock, not even really suitable for our emerging growth portfolio. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, congratulations to the L.A. Dodgers winning the World Series. That’s the hardest sentence a San Diego Padre fan has to say is the Dodgers are the world champions. You know, we had them down two games to one. We just had to win one more game. It would have been us moving on instead of the Dodgers. But, you know, that’s baseball. There’s always next year. And, you know, the Yankees, I don’t know if you watched that game, but that inning where they were throwing the ball around like little leaguers and not covering bases, that’s pretty astonishing. They blew up, yeah. What an astonishing inning that was on defense in the World Series by some of the best players in the world. I’ve seen high school teams with better defense than that. Kind of embarrassing. And the money, think of the money those two teams have spent. How much money was on that field last night between those Yankee roster and the Dodgers roster? Okay, so a couple other. I was talking about ASPI, which that’s ASP isotopes. Okay, they make high-value and low-volume isotopes. with the separation process technology. This thing went public in 2021. It’s small. They’re splitting atoms. They’re splitting atoms, and Bill Gates is an investor in the company, and I saw it shot up. I caught it when it broke out. Maybe I got to start a Bill Gunnarsson desk drawer portfolio that people can invest in. In that desk drawer are my torn up lottery tickets, tickets on horses I’ve bet over the years. No, I’m just kidding. But, you know, look, I take some real stabs from time to time, and I’ve used the app for something that’s very early on moving. The other one is, I want to say LGO. Yes, Largo. Largo. I go, what is Largo? Why is that stock breaking out? Now, this is a $160 million company. this is almost under a micro cap a bottle cap but they mine vanadium okay now i had to rack my brain and then what the heck is vanadium again it’s there i think on the chemical chart somewhere and i read that oh oh it’s used in nuclear reactor uh like structures infrastructure And Largo, you know, breaks out on Friday, broke out, it might be Monday, no, Friday, broke out, no, that’s Monday, and then Tuesday it really breaks out, pulls back yesterday, today it’s down 1.2%. But you could do a little research and look into LGO for your desk drawer portfolio. But it seems to be involved somehow in nuclear. Yeah, vanadium has a melting point of 1910 degrees Celsius.
Bill Gunderson :
Well, if you’re going to send a capsule to Mars or the sun or something, you’d have to have it made of vanadium. So, yeah, that could be why it’s all of a sudden important. I’ve had a, you know, when I send out tweets, I’m just going to call them tweets because I don’t know what else to call them. x messages whatever i get a lot of people coming back to me and saying you know that that whole smr small modular reactors ah that’s the thing way down in the future probably never going to come to pass and then i look at their profile of the people sending me this stuff and they’re usually associated with the solar industry somehow, because I’ve got to believe that that’s a big threat. I mean, look at the power and the efficiency of nuclear. versus solar, but yet you’ve got Meta signing up with the big solar company there in Texas. But I’ve got to believe they’re going to need more than that. It is an interesting story to follow. It’s definitely one of the… themes right now in the market and i saw canadian solar signing two new arizona tolling agreements and they begin their texas plan operation but then i look at the stock of canadian solar which is csiq and it does not look like these nuclear stocks right now csiq is a very very dull uh… stock okay all right and then the third one natural gas you cannot discount natural gas amaran a e which is a big utility in missouri and that neck of the woods gets an approval to build a big nat gas energy center and it acquires a third solar plant. I think the bottom line is we’re going to need a heck of a lot more energy going forward.
Bill Gunderson :
Yes, and we have an abundance of natural gas. We were flaring it off in the Permian Basin we have so much. So I think that natural gas should play a big role also, which includes companies like LNG and APA and CNX and CQP and others, Chenier. So it’s all needed, okay? Elon Musk is ordered to attend a hearing in Philadelphia over his $1 million voter giveaway. Now, I didn’t, you know, I read what you have to do. You just have to enter a contest. I mean, maybe you have to be a registered voter. I don’t know. But he’s been given a million dollars a day to people, and they want to now investigate him for election, violation of election rules, which Elon Musk is kind of in the crosshairs now. You know, it used to be the left loved Elon Musk. I mean, he’s probably done more for green energy and the environment than any person on this planet.
Bill Gunderson :
Yeah, I look at it as maybe a business move. He was selling cars to one half of the country, right? Now he’s going after the other half with his move to the right. Probably a pretty good business move, really. I don’t know. Okay, that super microcomputer.
Bill Gunderson :
Yeah, $26 billion to his net worth in one day. He’s now selling to all of the country, but now I’ve got to believe that the – his his former clients and his former fans are not fans they’re clients anyway i don’t know where they’re going to go to get their their evs they got to go to tesla pretty much okay now the other Having a sell decision, you know, look, I mean, you’ve got to have a sell decision. Ask some of these, like, you know, ARK funds where you’re down 90% on a position. We did not like the way SMCI was trading. And it finally broke, you know, some important lines in the sand. And we don’t own SMCI. We sold it at $723. I’ve got to figure out, do the math, what kind of split it did. That thing is $39 a share right now. Man, did they cheat on their books? I can’t believe they would do that, but that seems to be the allegations.
Bill Gunderson :
We’ll be right back.
Bill Gunderson :
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.
Bill Gunderson :
And welcome back here to kind of a spooky day in the market here today. And I’m going to give a little bit of a rise in interest rates and, you know, a sell-off despite pretty good earnings from Microsoft and also a sell-off. in Meta and maybe a few others. I don’t know. We’ll look into that in the last quarter of the show. But I was looking at Super Microcomputer. We sold it on July 24th at a split adjusted $72 per share. Today it’s at $28 per share. So I would say we made the right decision. We took a 25% licking in that stock, which normally that’s a little bit beyond our range. But it got hit, I think, in one or two days, which you don’t have any control over. Yeah, it happened quickly. It happened very quickly when the auditor resigned. an outside accounting, and then I guess now it’s their internal auditor that resigned.
Bill Gunderson :
Yep, exactly. Well, I think probably the biggest reason for the sell-off today – I’m going to point to Microsoft – which we recently did trim our position in half. We cut our position in half. I just have not liked the way it’s been trading.
Bill Gunderson :
I mean, it’s not easy for a $3 trillion company like Microsoft to continue to grow their sales at 15%, 16%, 17%. That’s phenomenal. And they came in at 16% again in growth in sales. They came in at $65 billion in sales over the last 90 days.
Bill Gunderson :
Yeah, and their earnings were up 10%. But, you know, look, the last time I did evaluation, which I do them every day, really, when the app updates, but I still have it with about 85% upside potential. Not the best. but certainly a heck of a lot better than most large cap, mega cap stocks out there. But there just seems to be a backing off of the big tech right now for certain, other than Tesla, which had a big quarter. But you know what? Microsoft is down five point. That’s a big drop for a big company. That’s a lot of billions.
Bill Gunderson :
That’s like $300 billion or something.
Bill Gunderson :
Yeah, I mean, people say, well, what do you do after the half that we still own? I mean, we kept one half of our position. And we do have it as one of the anointed ones in the premier growth and the dividend and growth portfolio. I just wait to see the numbers settle, do level-headed analysis. And then, of course, that chart, the chart says a lot. You can say, hey, these fundamentals look great and we can defend it. But the chart usually knows at the end of the day, the chart wins out. And that’s really the reason why I sold half of it is I did not like the way it’s trading. And of course, it’s going to have a key test at about $400 a share. If it holds that, it’s fine. But if it pierces below 400, I’d be very nervous. It’s at 407 right now. It’s coming down very close to that support level. Now, Meta, on the other hand… which is one of the great growth stocks in the entire market. I’m not too concerned there. I think it’s being brought down maybe in sympathy. It’s kind of a negative day in the market. Now, Meta, my valuation is 100% higher. Microsoft’s 80, mid-80s. Meta is 100% higher. It’s not easy for a $1.5 trillion company to come in with 19% sales growth. Now that’s their first time under 20 in a while. That may have something to do with it. Eventually math catches up with you somewhat. And… It also has an earnings growth of 37% in this latest quarter. And, you know, advertising, more and more people, digital, turning to digital advertising. You have to basically play in Meta’s playground if you want to do that. So, anyways.
Bill Gunderson :
Absolutely. But I think Meta is a little stronger than Microsoft, and I will make a decision. I’m going to watch the chart on Microsoft. Maybe it’s entering into that soggy territory. It’s one of the companies that has stayed out of soggy sneakers. But we’ll know here in the next week or so as the new numbers come in, the new estimates and whatnot. Okay, the one that’s disappointing me the most here is Uber. But I think it’s okay. Uber’s down 9.5%. I did read an article yesterday coming from Google, and they say that the robo is here. And they were talking about how many paid rides that they’re currently providing every single day in driverless cars. And maybe this is finally the inflection point for robo-taxis, which I think will be a big breakthrough. I mean, the day will come. I mean, I’m not seeing any yet in my neck of the woods. I’m here in Southern California this week. I haven’t seen any driverless cars running around yet, but I think that’s coming.
Bill Gunderson :
Exactly. That’s a mind-boggling number that’s taking place in a small geographic area of the world. And Google had a really good report yesterday. G-O-O-G-L is the one I track. Google was up pretty sharply. I show Google with about 78% upside potential. And it’s not quite in my wheelhouse, but maybe it will be after a while. The numbers adjust.
Bill Gunderson :
Well, Google came in 15% growth in sales, 28% growth in earnings. When we come back, how about a stock that is up $227 per share today? Actually, $344 now per share. One of the greatest stocks of all time. And I’ve been writing about it since 2013. It was in my book back then. We’ll be right back. On a winter’s day.
Bill Gunderson :
You got to go where you want to go. Do what you want to do, baby.
Bill Gunderson :
And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. Barry, there was a guy that worked for me for quite some time, and he printed up some shirts. Bill was right again. B-W-R-A was the hashtag. Didn’t we just write an article warning people about the mortgage rate agency, A-G-N-C, which is one of the better known mortgage rates. I always say, what good is a 13% dividend yield if the stock goes down by 13%? That’s what it’s down easily since we wrote that article. And I would also point out that the dividend, let me think of the right word for this, not the dividend mafia, but the trolls. The dividend trolls came after us on Seeking Alpha in the article and turned us into management for making misstatements, which we didn’t. We said agency has credit risk. Obviously, any mortgage has credit risk. And they took down our article. All right, whatever. I mean, they pander over there to the dividend writers. Well, Bill was right again. Doggone it. Look at the chart of that stock. That just looks horrible. but you can swim in those dividends you know uh coming in every month never mind your principles getting clobbered i just have said for a long long long time and i won’t change my thinking on it i’ve seen too many people get clobbered with high dividend paying stocks if you’re paying a high dividend i mean anything over three four percent in today’s world You’re taking on a lot of risk. There’s something wrong there, you know, and they have to pay that kind of dividend to attract you to invest in the stock. So anyways, I hope you don’t fall for the high dividend scam that I see taking place in a lot of the, you know, the sites out there. Okay, Booking Holdings is the one that I’m going to mention. They pay a dividend. Now there’s a better stock, okay? They don’t pay a 13% dividend. Their dividend yield… 0.59 is what I’m calling it. Yeah. And you know what? There’s been several times when I said, we already own it in our premier growth portfolio. Now that it pays a dividend, it qualifies for our dividend and growth portfolio. But it’s never pulled back. It just keeps going. Well, we have a big position in it, and I want to add it to the dividend and growth portfolio. That stock is up $209.95 right now, 4.7%. It’s hitting an all-time high. This is the former Priceline.com. Earlier this week, I was interviewed by CFA Michael Gayette, who’s also a writer on Seeking Alpha and doing a little work for Granite Shares ETF. I had the CEO of them interviewing me on my channel or my space, my profile. If you go to Bill at GundersonCapital.com, right? What’s my… I’m trying to think of what my handle is on Twitter, at Bill Gunderson. That’s what it is, at Bill Gunderson. And I brought up the point of, number one, the high-dividend stocks, and number two, what a great stock Priceline has been over the years. And he said, I’ve heard that Michael Shatner made more money with the Priceline stock than he made during his whole acting career. That’s absolutely true. He did. He cleaned up. He paid in some stock, yeah. And now here it is. You know, the name has changed, but the game is the same. A new high, another new high. It’s now $4,674 per share. Unbelievable. Okay, another one, DoorDash, which would greatly benefit, obviously, from robo-taxis. So would Uber, obviously. DoorDash had a good earnings report today. Their sales were up 25%. Their earnings were up 300%. Now, my issue with DoorDash, Barry, and Uber Eats, man, you order a couple of sandwiches or whatnot, and they add in their fee, and you pay a tip to the driver and everything. I mean, you’re paying like $35 for a couple sandwiches from Jersey Mike’s, right? It just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, I can’t do that. I like to be a good steward over what the Lord has blessed me with. That’s an expensive way to go.
Bill Gunderson :
Yeah, I go pick them up. I order them online. Get it just the way I want. I try to avoid that spicy pepper relish there. My wife likes it, but it gives me indigestion. And, you know, I’ll go pick it up for that. I can’t. I can’t. But I will say this. A lot of times you get a little thing. Hey, today only, no fee delivery. Yeah, no, right. Okay. All right. So DoorDash, I believe in DoorDash. And we own DoorDash, and it started slipping and not looking good from a chart point of view. But they are now flipping, too. And I want to say this is the first quarter of profitability. They’ve been losing money since they came public back in 2020. They’ve never been profitable. I’m going to say this is their first quarter. They made 38 cents this quarter. They’re expected to make $1.77 next year. And the stock’s trading at 155. This is a good idea, DoorDash. $64 billion in market cap. They came public in 2020, which was a pretty good year to come public with the delivery service when you couldn’t go out to restaurants. So anyways, that’s a pretty good report from DoorDash. Now, the other one that just defies gravity. I never could bring myself to buy this stock. But you gotta say, Carvana is Nirvana, right? How does this Carvana, it must be a meme stock. This thing is up another 17% today. It’s hitting $242 per share. Their sales were up 32%. They had a record quarter for selling used cars and, of course, delivering them to your home. It’s an online use. Instead of going down to the local used car lot, and getting the hard sell and the high percentage on the loan and selling you all the extras and the bells and whistles and everything. No, Carvana does it in a completely different way. I never really believed in the business model to my detriment because look at this. This is one of the biggest performing stocks this year. And it’s hitting another new high today, which tells me it must have some kind of meme. Because the P.E. ratio is nosebleed. Compare Carvana’s P.E. ratio. We’re out of time. 999 is their P.E. ratio versus Ford or GM. All right, well, we’re out of time. Get the newsletter. You get so many ideas in that newsletter every week at GundersenCapital.com. Set up an appointment with us to look at your portfolio, what you’re doing. 855-611-BEST, 855-611-BEST. Have a great day, everybody.
