SPEAKER 03 : 0:00

He’s been seen on CNBC, the Fox News Channel, and the Fox Business Channel. His articles can be found on MarketWatch, Seeking Alpha, TheStreet.com, and many other places. He’s the author of the weekly Best Stocks Now newsletter and the inventor of the Best Stocks Now app. He’s president of Gundersen Capital Management. Here is professional money manager Bill Gundersen.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:26

And welcome to the Monday, Tuesday. It’s the Tuesday live edition of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And we are off to a mixed start in the market. That means we’ve got one index up and the other major index is down. The Dow is the one that’s up. The Dow is up 213 points right now. And that’s going to be mostly Home Depot, which had a pretty good earnings report here this morning. On the other hand, the NASDAQ, I’m seeing some of the high-tech stocks, the usual suspects selling off here today. But the NASDAQ is only down a quarter of a percent. That’s down 63 points to 21,565. The S&P is up five this morning to 6,454. That could be a new all-time high. I know we’re right there. Close to it. The Russell 2000 is flat right now. We’ve got the bond market pretty much flat right now with the big speech by our friends at the Fed at Jackson Hole this week. The 10-year is at 4.31 this morning. Gold is up just a skosh. Oil is down 1.2%. And last but not least, Bitcoin, which has come down pretty hard off of that recent high. Bitcoin is up today, 251, but it’s down at 115,000 now. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And I think I’m here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial analyst. Barry, are you there? Come in, Barry. No, okay, so we’re still having a little bit of technical difficulty there on his line. We’ve got a lot of macro news today, obviously. That was pretty riveting yesterday to watch the big meeting in the White House with all of these dignitaries coming in, leaders of countries all over the world, mostly Europe, obviously, all European, in fact. meeting with our president president Trump first in a conference room look like a really nice conference room I like that table a lot nice and shiny looked like some good seats and then they moved to the Oval Office did they accomplish anything well we’ll find out I do know that Ukraine is committed to buying Yes, buying a package of U.S. weapons worth $90 billion. Where is he getting the money over there? I can’t imagine their economies bringing in much right now. But Waldemar Zielinski said that he’s committed to spending $90 billion in a weapons package from the U.S. And, of course, up until now, the last administration was giving them money. those weapons. So that’s quite a change. And the other news that came out of that meeting yesterday was that now we’re looking at a trilateral meeting between Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. I don’t know if they’ll be in the same room. That could get a little testy. I think a Zoom call. I’d rather see a Zoom call there, I think. But, you know, at least that’s progress. At least there’s an attempt being made to stop the dying and the killing and the bloodshed over there in Ukraine. How does it impact your portfolio? Well, a lot of people have been buying the European defense stocks. That’s been one of the leading ETFs here in the market this year. E-A-U-D or E-U-A-D, I believe. E-U-A-D. And it’s been sliding here on Trump’s push for peace talks. I always like to see, that’s good news when the weapons talks are selling off. That means maybe there’s peace coming. We shall see. But it does impact portfolios. It’s definitely impacting oil prices. Oil prices have been moving down here in the low 60s. And, of course, that’s Putin’s currency. Is his oil, 80% of that Russian economy, dependent upon oil, oil products? And, of course, the U.S. not happy with India. It was Navarro, Peter Navarro, calling out India yesterday for financing Putin’s war. How? Well, they’ve been buying liquid natural gas from Russia. And so they’re kind of on the outs right now with Europe and with the U.S. And, of course, their tariffs went way up in the meantime until they quit buying that oil and that natural gas. From Russia. Now, our defense stocks could be on the beneficiary side of that $90 billion spending package that Zelensky is throwing around. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls, L3, Boeing, etc. All of the usual stocks, our defense stocks. But Ukraine does have, you know, that is a big part of their economy. Their economy is basically based on defense and weaponry. And, in fact, I didn’t know this, but Ukraine has the second biggest army in the Europe area, you know, second only to Russia. And they have quite a robust defense industry along with that. Earnings today, well, we’ve got Home Depot. We’ll get to that in a bit. Medtronic. X-Ping, which is a Chinese EV maker. We’ve got SQM, which is a big basic material chemical and mining company. Toll Brothers, tomorrow we’ll get Baidu, we’ll get Target, Lowe’s, TJ Maxx, Analog, Estee Lauder, and on Thursday we’ll get Walmart, Intuit, Workday, Ross Stores, and a few others. And the reason why all of these retailers are reporting this week, and Barry can weigh in on this, Their year end is January 31st. We’ve said this before. Because they have to get the full impact of that Christmas season, which is so important for them. You’ve got to give the folks a chance for returning that sweater that you got for one of your grandkids, or whatever the case may be. They have to not only add up all the sales from the holiday season, but the impact of all the returns.

SPEAKER 09 : 7:42

I physically count that inventory.

SPEAKER 01 : 7:45

Yes, and that means that January 31st is when all that settles out. As a company goes public, you could name your year end. It doesn’t change your tax schedule. Your taxes are still due when they’re due. But your year end a lot of times will more than likely coincide with your actual cycle of sales, returns, etc. So that’s why we’re getting all of these big retailers, big box stores. reporting their earnings this week because they’re a month later than most of the other companies, which have a fiscal year end of December 31st. How about this? SoftBank is giving Intel a big vote of confidence. Now, there’s talk of the U.S. investing in Intel, but SoftBank stepped up to the plate in a surprise move and made a $2 billion investment into Intel. You know, Intel would fall in that category of deep value, contrarian, out of style, out of favor investment, okay? And I’ve said it before, it’s not exactly my cup of tea. You have to be very patient. There’s usually a lot of stumbles along the way. And sometimes the situation can actually get a lot worse before it gets better, as we’ve seen over the years. How many attempts were made, Barry, at GE, turning GE around by other leaderships, other activist investors that came in, and it just got worse and worse and worse?

SPEAKER 09 : 9:37

And IBM is a great example, right?

SPEAKER 01 : 9:41

Yeah, and UnitedHealthcare would be another great example in recent years where you had the activist investors come in, you had the deep value guys come in, and they got trimmed a lot further from where they bought the stock. Maybe when Buffett comes in, maybe you’re near a bottom. You’ve seen that big investment in UnitedHealthcare by Buffett recently. and also by a few other value guys, Intel would be a classic contrarian value play. Is it on my radar? No. I can’t make a case for the valuation, and I can’t make a case for a flourishing company right now. GE would be a good example of the most recent. I would say turnarounds are very difficult. Most of them don’t work out. But obviously GE did, and GE’s been a big winner here after many attempts at turnarounds in the past. So just not my cup of tea. We’ll be right back.

SPEAKER 05 : 10:46

I’m the train they call the city of New Orleans. I’ll be gone 500 miles when the day is done.

SPEAKER 01 : 11:22

And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Stocks Now show. You know, I was thinking here during the break that really an investment in Intel, it’s going to be up to the new CEO there, Lip Bhutan, who, you know, for a while there, Trump was calling for his resignation because of his supposed ties to China. Communist China, but apparently everything was okay. Trump met with him in person in the White House and totally changed his mind and is considering an investment by the U.S. government into Intel. And, of course, Miyoshi, son of SoftBank, It stepped up to the plate. $2 billion, not of his money, other people’s money that he gets to invest and invested into the company. And, of course, Barry, you talked about their foundry plans and particularly a massive hub in Ohio. You know, Ohio’s becoming a center for a lot of things, a lot of high-tech data center stuff, repurposing an EV factory into, what was it, AI? It was Foxconn. It was Foxconn building AI type stuff. So, hey, we’re in Cleveland, Ohio, and pretty soon the show will be in Columbus. And I didn’t realize how big Columbus has gotten. It’s like two or three times as big as Cleveland. So we’ll be all over Ohio, Barry. We’ll be going there a couple times a year. I really enjoyed my trip several months ago to the Cleveland area. I still got to see that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But I saw some good historic sites there. Had a great time. Can’t wait to go back. And I think Columbus is the home to some big university, isn’t it, Barry?

SPEAKER 04 : 13:23

The one that has the title this year in football.

SPEAKER 09 : 13:27

I think it’s the Ohio State University is the proper moniker. But SoftBank’s investment into… Intel is pretty interesting just because, you know, they still own, what, I think 90% of ARM. They took them private a handful of years ago and then IPO’d them a few years ago. And so they’ve got some experience in the chip business, so that’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

SPEAKER 01 : 13:57

Yes, definitely will. Okay, I’m looking at the housing starts. You know, that’s not one of the big indicators, but I do see that the housing starts are a little bit better. We still have an issue with that 30-year mortgage being where it’s at. But the chart of the home builders, I was just looking at XHB here. Actually, that’s a pretty good chart. Maybe the thought is it can’t get much worse for the building sector. And you’re starting to see some buying there. Let’s just look for fun. Let’s look at the XHB ETF here and the performance of it thereof. The performance of the housing sector, which obviously is quite cyclical. Over the last 10 years, it’s averaged 11.4% per year, which trails the S&P 500 by a long shot. The S&P has averaged 20% per year. And the housing sector is pretty much down and out over the last 12 months. It’s down 13%, you know, while the S&P’s done a whole heck of a lot better than that. And year to date, you’ve got the XHB down 2%. So not a very good sector to be invested in for sure. You’ve got to kind of pick your spots there in that housing sector. I bring that up because I have a bunch of ETFs transfer in from some accounts to Gundersen Capital Management. I always look. Some of those ETFs are doing okay. I stay with them. My theory on ETFs is I prefer to cherry pick the ETFs. A lot of times the ETFs will have 25 stocks when only two or three are any good. And I would prefer to own the individual stocks as opposed to spreading my risk out, so-called. But you’re also watering down your returns by owning that many stocks in a sector. But, you know, to each his own, and everybody manages money a little bit differently. And I’m not the biggest fan of ETFs. But housing starts do rise more than expected in July. Building permits dip, however. What about gold? Man, gold has cooled off big time. Gold liked the tariffs. Gold liked the tariff talks. You’ve noticed how that tariff talk has really gone to the back burner here. other than him punishing certain countries like India with some stiff tariffs for buying Russian oil. The tariff thing has kind of pretty much settled in. The big question is, who shoulders the burden of the tariffs? And gold definitely, which was one of the beneficiaries of all of the volatility, coming with the tariff news on a daily basis. That’s really settled down, which tells me that the worries over tariffs have really settled down. UBS, however, I don’t know how you forecast gold. I really don’t, Barry. That’s not something that’s beyond you. It takes a specialist to forecast the U.S. dollar, Bitcoin, gold prices, wheat prices, soybean prices. That’s a special animal, and that comes down to the rain. It comes down to India’s wedding season and all kinds of different weird indicators. But UBS is raising their forecast. They’ve got 3,500 for this year. That’s not too good. It’s at 3,400 now. They have 3,700 for next year. But all in all, I mean, the chart has really leveled off. in gold. I wouldn’t have more than a 5% exposure right now to gold. We were up a little bit higher than that earlier this year. Got close to 10%. Yeah, we cooled off and backed off a little bit as the tariff situation started to cool off. Okay, momentum. This is pretty good. Seeking Alpha listed the top ten large caps that are beating the benchmarks. And, Barry, as I read through this list, there’s only two that we don’t own. So I’m pretty happy with that, okay? I think we were in the right place and still are in the right place at the right time. The app has done a pretty good job of finding the strength in the market. Here’s your winners, large cap winners so far. Robinhood up 209%. Palantir up 130%. GE Vernova, which is the nuclear side of GE, it’s up 90% year-to-date. GE Aerospace up 61%. Here’s the first one we don’t own. Amphenol is up 60%. Amphenol is in the chip sector. Then you’ve got DoorDash up 51%. Oracle we don’t own. That’s the second of the ten that we do not own. But Oracle’s had a pretty good year cashing in on AI, 49.4. AMD up 45.8. Constellation Energy up 44.3. And Interactive Brokers up 44.1. That’s a pretty good list of stocks right there. We own eight out of ten of them. We’ll be right back.

SPEAKER 04 : 19:38

This is Bill Gunderson. Thank you for tuning in to today’s Best Stocks Now, Best Inverse Funds Now show.

SPEAKER 01 : 20:03

Now, back to the second half of the show. Thank you. And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Stocks Now show. I was just looking at another ETF here, Barry. The aerospace ETF has actually done quite well. over the last 1, 3, 5, 10 years. And, of course, that’s a lot of defense stocks. You know, here’s where ETF… If you’ve got a small amount of money, right? I mean, you’ve got a $15,000 Roth IRA. Well, there… To me, you know, aerospace, good sector. AI, good sector. Semiconductors, good sector, et cetera. I think it makes sense there. But to spread your money around, you’ve got like a hundred grand portfolio. I just think you’re better off. The components of the aerospace sector, believe it or not, you’ve got some smaller ones. Kratos, defense and security is a 5.5% position. Rocket Labs. which is pretty out there on the edge. It’s 5.2. And then, of course, the drone stock, Aero Environment is up 4.2, is 4.2 position, percentage position. Northrop Grumman, 3.8. Huntington Ingalls, which is submarines, 3.8. General Dynamics, 3.7. Boeing, 3.5. L3, that’s L3 Harris, that’s 3.5. And Hexel, 3.5. So me, personally, I would rather cherry pick that sector. And, of course, there’s a lot of other holdings in it. I think there’s about 70 or so. You get down into some pretty small companies like Redwire. Even Burna, Burna Technologies, which makes the non-lethal weapon. So there’s quite a bit in there. You’re getting a lot of exposure across the board to that sector. And it has done pretty well over the years. It’s been a good performing sector. Okay, who shoulders the cost of the tariffs? You know, I hear a lot of different things. At the end of the day, and we heard this from a client in Cleveland, right? He was talking about, you know, at the end of the day, it goes to the consumer. I mean, we have to raise our prices when we’re paying tariffs. on certain goods. Now, you know, Besant was touting a different number. I mean, studies have shown that it gets spread around pretty well between the manufacturer, maybe the raw material suppliers, the importer, the exporter, the company, obviously. They absorb a lot of that tariff. And then on down to the consumer. Now, this guy from Pantheon Macro, he’s the chief U.S. economist, he says that absolutely it comes down to the consumer. And he says what Washington is telling us is not quite true. He says President Donald Trump’s assertion that foreigners would pay for his sweeping new tariffs on U.S. imports always was and still is nonsense. That’s Samuel Toombs, U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. I saw a bond here. In fact, over the weekend, I did a big comparison of buying individual bonds versus bond funds. And there’s another area of controversy. I’m one to wax controversial, but I’m a numbers guy. I look at the numbers. And I look at the numbers of the bond funds, which are also ETFs, and they’ve been 1% or 2% over the last 1, 3, 5, 10 years. That’s not very good. Whereas owning the individual bond. So here’s an example today. Charter Communications is pricing a $2 billion senior secured notes.

SPEAKER 1 : 25:05

5.85.

SPEAKER 01 : 25:05

Okay, so that goes out to 2035. That’s a 10-year. If you want to go shorter than that, you’re probably going to get somewhere in the mid-fives. But if you hold that thing to maturity for five to seven years, a bond fund during that period of time has averaged about 2% per year. If you hold that charter communications bond to maturity and they don’t go out of business, you’re going to get 5.5% somewhere in there per year. Barry, where am I wrong? Is my thinking wrong there? I mean, the numbers are the numbers, right? Sounds like we lost Barry again. Maybe we’re having a little issue with our technology here. NVIDIA said to develop a new AI chip for China that beats the H2O. Or is it the H20? I’m not sure. I’m sure somebody in Santa Clara could set me straight on that. And by the way, it’s going to be the Marriott in Santa Clara. That’s the one I had chose when I drove by it. I go, hey, that looks like a nice place. So when we get there on August 15th, 16th, and that workshop Tuesday night, 7 p.m., we’ll be at that big Marriott there right there in Santa Clara. Not too far from the stadium, and you’ve got the amusement park, which I think they closed down right in that area. But anyways, you’ve got NVIDIA just down the street, one of their headquarters, I guess. But anyways, they continue. In fact, yesterday afternoon, late in the day, this may have been why NVIDIA had a burst higher late in the day yesterday. We went from being down a little bit overall in the market with our portfolios to up. And I looked at why, and it was NVIDIA. NVIDIA had a late day rally, and I got to believe it was that news that they’re working on even a higher tech version. They’re probably getting very, very close to the Blackwell, which they’re not allowed to sell to China. But I see NVIDIA is down 2.2% today, 2.2%. And in fact, high tech and AI is down today. It’s very weak today. Palantir is down, let’s see, Palantir is down, it was down about 7%. It is, 7.3%. Well, it’s got a PE ratio of 328 that makes it very vulnerable today. to any kind of sell-off in tech. And that’s where I’m seeing the weakness in the market today is in that AI area.

SPEAKER 09 : 27:48

And not really any news bringing it down. There’s not really much news there bringing it down.

SPEAKER 01 : 27:54

No, there was the news yesterday on NVIDIA, but today the whole sector is down. I’m going to call it valuation. valuations matter exhaustion i mean everybody that wants it owns it by now maybe i don’t know it seems like the institutions are still coming into it x ping okay they add ev market share i’m sure that’s a tesla’s expense as delivery soar in Q2. Now, where are those deliveries going? A vacant lot in Shanghai? I don’t know. But look at Xping. That’s a pretty good move on that stock today. They are a thorn in the side of Tesla. How many years did Tesla have it all to themselves, really? China has become a formidable, a formidable competitor, even though they can’t sell the Chinese EVs here in the U.S., They are selling them in Europe and of course the Chinese are buying them like hotcakes. They’re not buying those more expensive Teslas anymore. And Xping stock is up 4.2% today. On that news as their deliveries soar. And I also see BYDDF, BYD company, has been firming up here recently. So that Chinese EV market is pretty strong. And, you know, that’s not helping Tesla any. Here is a rare earth development today. We’ve mentioned this stock in the past, AREC, which is American Resources. It’s kind of funny. Some of these stocks were coal mining stocks, and now they’re being repurposed. Hey, while you’re down there looking for coal, see if you can find some rhodium, boys and girls, and some of those other rare earth stocks. How about a little scandium? See if there’s some scandium down there. American Resources is one of those companies. They’re in Indiana, Fishers, Indiana, but they finalized a deal with Vulcan Elements for rare earth oxides. So there must be something down there. DoorDash finalizes its deal for Deliveroo. DoorDash is becoming the player. You know, you had Just Eat takeaway in Great Britain. You have Uber Eats. But I think DoorDash is the major player in delivery of restaurant food. DoorDash has been a big winner this year, one of the top ten performing large cap stocks, and it is one that we own. We like the valuation. We like the momentum. The valuation’s up there. But hopefully it can grow into that evaluation. Dash finalizing their deal to buy one of their competitors. We’ll be right back with some more news on Tennessee. How about a small nuclear reactor? Google picks Tennessee as the site for the first small nuclear reactor. We’ll be right back. And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. A lot of weakness in the NASDAQ today. I think it’s a valuation issue. And the NASDAQ is now down 212 points. That’s 1%. You know, you’ve got to take it a stock at a time. I’ve been talking for several weeks here about some of the rarefied air that we’ve entered into here. And I’ve seen over the last few weeks some comparisons with the year 2000. I don’t see it that bad. But it definitely is very richly priced right now. And, of course, some stocks more than others. And probably that top ten list that I read just a little while ago, those are the stocks that are under pressure. uh… today uh… as we get up into uh… you know some very high and you know that’s one thing i do in the newsletter every saturday as i show you the charts here’s the last ten years of price to book ratio for the s&p five hundred where we act compared to the historical price book value here’s the historical price to sales ratio Here’s the historical price to earnings ratio. Here’s the historical price to cash flow ratio. Those are the four major valuation metrics. And, you know, some people try to justify like they did in the year 2000. Well, we’ve entered into a new paradigm. People are going to have a lot less overhead. They’re not going to need stores. They’re going to sell everything online. Therefore, multiples can go higher. The market can support 50 multiples on the market. No. You know what? I mean, they can adjust, yes. They can get better as productivity increases and things like this. But, you know, at the same time, you’ve got historic growth. uh pe multiples and we’re we’re not only at the high end we’re above and in some cases we’re hitting all-time highs in some of those multiples as i showed you over the weekend and so you have to have that in the back of your mind as a backdrop that’s the macro And at the last couple of workshops, well, I’ve done three now this year. I did the one in Lakewood Ranch. I did the one in Cleveland. I think we did a workshop there. Yeah, we did one in Cleveland, and then we did one in Bloomfield Hills. And then our fourth workshop this year is going to be in Santa Clara, the Bay Area there. And I see from Edie we’ve already got about half of it is full already. So if you’re wanting to see that workshop Tuesday night at 7 p.m., you better call our 855-611-BEST. I know it’s still four weeks out, but the workshops are pretty popular. 855-611-BEST. But I’ve gone over the whole CAN SLIM methodology. Not so much that that’s the way to invest, but what does each letter in CAN SLIM stand for? which is basically a momentum theory on the market. We talk about current earnings that are exploding, annual earnings that are taking off, something that’s new, new product, new invention, new management, new highs. Then we talk about how many shares are outstanding. Is it a leader or a laggard? That’s where that whole ETF thing comes in. I like buying leaders in a sector and not having any exposure to the laggards in the sector. But that M is what I’m focused on right here, right now. M is the market. And you always have to have in the back of your mind the current market conditions. As it relates to, you know, the valuations are very critical in the overall market. The technicals of the overall market. I sent out a chart on the Dow this morning to everybody. Not that we’re investors in the Dow, but the Dow is one of the major indicators and one of the major indices out there that people watch. And that Dow keeps bumping its head on 45,000, and it can’t get through there. And that’s become technical resistance. And there goes an American bald eagle right over my yard. That’s pretty cool. Technical resistance, but you also look at that technical resistance, and it’s also where the Dow reaches a forward PE of 22. Okay, so technical resistance is not just arbitrary. Oh, well, 45,000, we’re not going to go above that. No, when you get to 45,000, you’re hitting that 22 PE level again, forward PE level on the Dow. And that’s been historically kind of a ceiling on the market. So I have to take all of that into account. As a money manager, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the semiconductor ETF or owning individual semiconductor stock. If you think you’re going to be safer in an ETF, I have news for you. It’s going to go down just as hard as the leading stocks. in that sector. So it’s not like you’re spreading your risk and you’re in a safer haven in an ETF than you are in an individual stock. Now, yes, it is possible an individual stock can get hit in one day after a missed earnings report and go down 30% or something like that, and the ETF only goes down 10%, right, because you have your risk spread out. But is it worth it to own… All of the lousy stocks in that ETF when things are going good instead of just focusing on the few good ones. So, hey, that’s up for debate. And each person is going to have to decide for themselves whether you’re managing your own money or you have somebody managing your money. I just find that in my experience, most people turn to ETFs because they can’t.

SPEAKER 09 : 38:08

pick or they’re easy it’s easy it’s a lot easier to just buy the whole thing all right now and the good news is for our clients is you know our clients and subscribers is you you’ve got your eyes on it even though we are in an elevated uh valuation piece you you’re you you’re you’re you’re you’re you’re standing watch and uh and ready to pull the trigger if needed

SPEAKER 01 : 38:30

Yes, and on some of the individual high flyers where we have huge gains, I have a note written on the chart to cut the position in half, cut the position by 25%, cut the position by a third. That’s another way to handle it is lowering your exposure if you have an individual stock that’s gone way up this year. The best stock in the market is up 200%. It was Robinhood. Is it time to trim? We already have trimmed once in Robin Hood. So anyways, that’s today’s show. And we do have that September 15th and 16th confirmed there for San Francisco Bay Area, mostly down in the Tech Valley, the Tech Center there in Santa Clara. at the Marriott and to make an appointment those are pretty you know valuable hours to come by to sit down with our team on Tuesday and Wednesday if you want one of those appointments you better grab one of those 855-611-BEST. Just sample the newsletter and the app and the live trades that I send out. GundersonCapital.com. GundersonCapital.com. Have a great day, everybody.

SPEAKER 02 : 39:44

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. Gundersen 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.