Join Bill Gunderson as he dives into the complexities of stock valuations and market dynamics in today’s fast-paced financial world. The episode offers a detailed look at exciting growth opportunities in the AI space, boasting of companies like Palantir making significant strides. Bill also touches on the challenges facing more traditional sectors and the ripple effects of regulatory hurdles, using real-world examples. This discussion navigates through investments, highlighting both the potential pitfalls and upside in riskier propositions like high-yield stocks. With an eye on earnings reports and tech valuations, Bill provides his audience with actionable strategies for investing in
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 03 :
And welcome to the Tuesday. Guess what? I think there’s an election today on this Tuesday, November the 5th. This is Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management, a nationwide fee-based only money management firm. And we’re off to a decent start in the market so far. Everything so far is cautiously optimistic. And in the green. And right now you’ve got the Dow up 257 points. That’s a pretty big jump there out of the gate. And that’s a 60 basis point rise. The Dow is at 42,053. I hope you read my news over the weekend with an updated macro outlook. The S&P 500 is up 46 points. to $5,758. The NASDAQ is up $185 after some powerful earnings from Palantir, which is becoming a big, big AI stock. The NASDAQ is up $189. That’s 1%. The Russell 2000 is up a little bit, a quarter of a percentage point there. We’re watching the bond market today. Very quiet over there. Up a couple of points, 4.32. Crude oil is at 72.06. Gold is 27.56. It’s been stuck there for a while. And Bitcoin right now is up 14.74, 69.858. so welcome to today’s best stocks now show uh this is bill gunnarsson president of gunnarsson capital management and i’m here with barry kite our chartered financial analyst and uh yes we made it huh yeah i think a lot of people will be watching the tv today with their eyes glued on what we’re finally to that day i mean we’ve been debating this and rallies and News, and it just seems like that’s all they focus on anymore. Forget about, you know, yesterday there was a massive earthquake in Iran, a big volcano going off in Indonesia. I do watch the rest of the terrible flooding in Spain, killing a lot of people. Yet that pretty much all goes unnoticed. It’s all we care about anymore is, you know, I guess because of the ratings, this is what gets ratings, and this is where we go. So anyways, it is a big day. Will we get closure to all of this about 9, 10, 11 o’clock tonight? We don’t know. We’ll only see. I would just say this. The market is expecting a Trump win, despite what you hear about these last-minute odds changing. You know, a lot of times that’s just somebody placing a big bet, a few people. It doesn’t take much to move those odds. So anyways, the market is expecting a Trump win. Whether he wins or not, time will tell. And I think a Harris win might spook the market a little bit. So anyways, we’ll see. We’ll take it a day at a time.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think we’ll have to at least wait as long as last night, the Monday night football game went into overtime. My guess is we’ll have to stay up later than that to figure out where this is going.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I watched that game on the flight I was on coming home from San Diego. What a game. I mean, for Tampa Bay to come back and tie it up and then Kansas City march right down the field. Right down the field. Easy touchdown. I’m a big Andy Reid fan. One of the great coaches of all time. Okay, now let’s take a look. We’ve got a good start to the markets here so far today. They are cautiously optimistic, I would call it. And, you know, I mean, I don’t know if it’s an indicator or not. DJT, which is Trump’s media, it’s up 17.5% today. Wow, that thing’s been all over the place in the last few days. Yeah, you know, it kind of follows the betting odds, I think. And there was some talk that Elon Musk may be interested in buying it and incorporating it into X. I don’t know, but that’s just one of the rumors that is out there. We had a decent day, pretty flat day yesterday in the market, very cautious, wanting to see what happens. The Dow was down 259. The NASDAQ was down 60. Not a lot going on in the market yesterday. There was a lot going on, though, in the market after it closed. Some big earnings announcements. And tonight we’ll also get some very big announcements from companies. Oh, let’s see. Tonight we’re going to get, on Tuesday, Lumen Technologies. CRISPR, DuPont, Devon, some of these have already reported. Archer, Daniels, Midland, Emerson, Cummins Engine, Yum Brands, they’ve already reported. Tomorrow we’ll get CVS Health, Qualcomm, Gilead Sciences, Teva, Beyond Meat, Arm Holdings, that’s a big one. Novo Nordisk, that’s a big one. Not too long ago, Novo was the biggest company. uh… european company and has been supplanted by sap is a sap that’s not the biggest yeah i think it was yes i think sap yeah exactly yeah because uh… because lvmh has been you know was was up there and it’s uh… you know we have a time and asm lithography yeah yes and asm lithography so anyways There’s that. The Boeing strike is officially over as workers accept latest contract offer. We do own a few aerospace stocks that have done really, really well. They’ve kind of been on hold a little bit while this has all gone on, and I’m seeing them get healthy again. So that’s a good sign that we can get that back on track. The stock, that might be part of the Dow’s gain here today. Boeing is up. Actually, it’s down. But like I say, Boeing has put in a bottom. If you don’t like to lose a lot, I don’t think Boeing has much downside risk. But on the other hand, I don’t know how much upside there is. It’s going to take a while to get that assembly line back up and running, get their mojo back. I’m sure they’ve got a big backlog to roll out the door. They’ve had a cash crunch. So we’ll see. I thought one of the bigger stories yesterday was Amazon, the Constellation Amazon deal being denied by FERC, one of those federal agencies, the Federal Energy Regulation Commission. I don’t know how important that is. Maybe it’s payback against our friend at Amazon, the CEO Bezos, for not endorsing.
SPEAKER 01 :
He didn’t endorse either one.
SPEAKER 03 :
So they send the FERC after him, the FERC police. I don’t know. You just don’t know. There’s a lot going on in the background, all right? But having said that, CEG plans to pursue data centers at power plants. They’re going to continue to pursue deals to develop data centers on the sites. Isn’t that weird? There’s a power plant and there’s a data center on the property?
SPEAKER 04 :
I mean, I guess at some point, is the data center going to be, I mean, a utility? I mean, essentially, right? I mean, if we’re running all these models through stuff all the time, right, I guess it’s, you know, we’ll begin to be the next form of utility, I guess, kind of like the Internet has become.
SPEAKER 03 :
So if you don’t think that AI is not a big thing… Think about it. I mean, you’re going to drive by a giant power plant. There’s going to be data centers all around it getting their juice directly from the utility. Like we’ve said, we’re treading new ground here that we’ve never gone down before.
SPEAKER 04 :
It reminds me of those high-frequency traders when they started moving their trading rooms closer and closer to where the source of connectivity in the Internet. They were plugging in directly.
SPEAKER 03 :
They had a pipeline going under the Hudson Bay, the Hudson River, and they paid for it. That’s how important bandwidth, power is. electricity is. And even though the nuclear stocks were down a bit yesterday, Constellation had a little bit soft earnings report. I just don’t see where else they’re going to turn. I mean, they’re going to have to figure this out. And I think they’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not going to be wind and solar. They’re not going to put a data center next to a solar power plant. Because they can’t have any downtime. They can’t have two weeks of clouds. So, anyways.
SPEAKER 04 :
The only benefit to solar is, I guess, you can build those projects out and begin producing power faster. The deal with some of these nuclear power plants, as I’ve seen in the past, where, number one, the people who actually build them, the engineers, are booked up right around the globe.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, it takes a long time.
SPEAKER 04 :
Not to mention, right, if you’re doing any kind of hoops, you’ve got to jump through from a legislature standpoint. And you’re talking 10, 15, 15 to 20 years sometimes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you know, I think they’re going to speed up the process. I think maybe the smaller, modular power plants. Don’t forget in Idaho, in Idaho Falls, they’re working on portable power plants, nuclear power plants. I just don’t want to tailgate that guy. You can power an aircraft carrier. Yeah, I mean, I don’t see why it can’t be done. Okay, when we come back, there’s some more accounting issues. There’s a lot of earnings coming in here today. This is the Best Stocks Now show. We’ll be right back. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. You wonder where we’re at, Barry, with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk swinging election results. We’ll see. We’ll see how much impact they have. How many followers does Joe Rogan have?
SPEAKER 04 :
I mean, a lot. He’s pretty much carrying Spotify. Yes. He’s kind of the Howard Stern, of course, with the XM series deal years ago and obviously still on XM, and he made a lot of money on the stock at that time. Joe Rogan’s been kind of very similar in terms of pushing – Pushing Spotify instead of just a music play into a place where you’d go for podcasts as well. His deal has paved the way for a lot of other big deals that Spotify has done.
SPEAKER 03 :
They’re turning profitable. They lost $3 last year. They’re going to make around $6.38 this year and $9.16 next year.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I guess if he gets a job in the Trump administration, I don’t know if that will happen. I mean, who knows?
SPEAKER 04 :
Did I see that right where he just endorsed Trump today? No, about last night.
SPEAKER 03 :
I was on the plane and I saw this Joe Rogan endorses. And the guy who talked him into it was Elon Musk. Elon made an argument for him. And I think Musk has had a lot to do also with… with this election. I mean, he’s got a pretty big mouthpiece there in X. So we’ll see where it all ends.
SPEAKER 02 :
And a checkbook.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, yes, a big checkbook. Last time it was Zuckerberg that had a massive impact on the elections from Facebook. Okay, well, we’ve got earnings, earnings, earnings. For me, the earnings report… There’s actually two. We actually have two huge winners today. And one is in our ultra growth portfolio and one is in our emerging growth portfolio. Before we get to that, there’s another accounting issue. I think SMC, I think Supermicrocomputer reports maybe today. Now, we sold the stock a long time ago, but that’s become a disaster, just a disaster.
SPEAKER 04 :
They report today.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, they’ll report tonight, and that stock was $122 down to $25. nothing has been proven yet about the accounting issues but i mean everybody’s fleeing the stock including the auditors uh…
SPEAKER 04 :
I will say, I guess if you’re going to report on a day, today’s not a bad time for them to report, right? Maybe they can go under the radar a bit.
SPEAKER 03 :
You’ll be lost in the headlines.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, but the interesting thing would be to listen to that, or I’ll be reading the transcript, but it’ll be interesting what kind of Q&A they take from analysts, because who knows what that could turn into, because you’re going to have a lot of mad analysts on the other side of this conversation.
SPEAKER 03 :
I’ll bet their legal team is surrounding them and telling them to be careful what they say. The other one that has a problem is Archer Daniels Midland. I mean, look, this is just a commodity, wheat, flour, Chicago, Illinois. This stock is down another 8.6%. They have accounting issues also. So if you’re a publicly traded company, you don’t want to be messing around with those reports that are filed. Every quarter, ADM, not AMD, ADM is going to postpone their earnings report. They’re going to amend results amid more accounting errors. I mean, how can you be the CEO or the chief financial officer, the chief tax, and get the earnings wrong?
SPEAKER 04 :
You never get an error. You never get an error. The old monopoly, you’ve got an error in your favor. In this instance, you never get an error that says, oh, we reported earnings too light. It always goes from we recognize too much earnings and we’ve got to bring it back down.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, it’s always the other way. Okay, now, we’ve been pounding the table on Palantir. It has entered into AI territory with a bang. Of course, it was already there. We bought it at $29.98 in the Ultra Growth Portfolio. That’s the chart of the day. That is just a rocket ship. It is up 21% right now. Palantir is one of… I want to say 18 stocks that we currently own in our ultra-growth portfolio. So it’s a fairly large position. And they had an earnings report that just absolutely knocked the ball out of the park. You know, I’m on Twitter or X, and it seems like every other message was Palantir-related. It was crazy. They had an eye-popping quarter as Wall Street praises their AI initiative. And they kind of have a bit of a folk hero kind of as the CEO. I can’t think of his name right now. doctor or something. He looks like a mad scientist or something like this. But Palantir, you know, right in the middle of AI, tremendous growth, phenomenal growth in sales, phenomenal growth in earnings, and they get a lot of government business, 40% year-over-year growth in their U.S. government business. So anyways, it’s pretty hard to say anything bad, and that is the chart of the day. Wow, man, straight up. That’s a $113 billion company today. They’re making about $25 billion. I think the stock’s up about $25 billion. Now, I did my valuation. I’ve got it recorded on my chart back in early September. 132% upside potential is what I had over the next five years. That’s A+. 132% A-plus upside potential. I cannot emphasize enough how important and how much those earnings estimates and those target prices influence my decision-making process here at my firm. Plethora of companies that don’t even come close to meeting our valuation. And you say, well, how can a momentum stock like Palantir? Well, because it gets a richer multiple than Archer Daniels Midland. It gets a richer multiple than Realty Income. and other slow-growth income-producing stocks like that. So anyways, that’s a knock the ball out of the park. I still love the stock. I still think it’s a major player, and now it’s big enough to maybe go into our premier growth portfolio as it crosses the $100 billion mark.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, I mean, you had 30%, you know, 30% year-over-year growth in revenues. I thought the interesting stat was they had, you know, I think over 100 deals, I think it was 104, 105 deals, over a million dollars that they signed. And so, you know, it’s telling you that they’re, you know, they’re using that, building data, you know, databases and, you know, actual use cases for uh ai for companies going forward so yeah in a big player in the government space which is you know each i’ve heard where each you know basically each country is going to have to end up with their own ai model at some point yeah all right well the most popular stock on seeking alpha bar none
SPEAKER 03 :
reported earnings last night i got two seeking alpha stories i still like they have the best news department in the entire marketplace by far they have the best financial news by far but the guys that write some of the reports and some of the popular stocks i question we’ll talk about that when we come back and then another blowout earnings this is 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 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.
SPEAKER 06 :
And welcome back to the second half of today’s Best Stocks Now show.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I’m going to just talk very quickly here about a couple of big dividend stocks that are very highly favored by the readers over at Seeking Alpha. The one that caught my eye this morning was the number one trending stock when I logged into Seeking Alpha. It said Aries Capital, one of the safest. Okay, that’s the word that caught my eye. Safest. High Yielders, Your Money Can Buy, Rating Upgrade. This is by Brad Thomas. I think Brad Thomas writes excellent articles. I mean, he basically, I think this is what he does full time. He’s able to put a lot more time into his articles than, you know, we’ve got to kind of make a quick pass because we also manage money. All right. So anyway, but having said that, he does a really good job. But I take umbrage to the statement, one of the safest high yielders. Well, okay, put it in perspective. If you’re going to line up all the high yielders, maybe it is one of the safest, but I don’t consider any of them to be safe. I mean, consider the fact, and I did comment on his article, I said, I said, you know, I’m just being honest. I looked it up in my app. I said, Brad, ARCC was down 76% during the last bear market of 08-09, which was obviously the financial crisis. And yes, financials were in the center of that whole mess, but down 76%. You know, putting that in the same, using safest in the sense, I have a problem with owning BDCs, retirees owning BDCs. Barry, describe what a BDC is.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, well, I mean, you’ve got, you know, in terms of, you know, we own the Aries bond. We own the bond, but I wouldn’t… We own the bond. Yeah, but in terms of owning, if you want the yield, right, the bond is the way to go versus owning a… Absolutely. You know, owning the… In this sense, you’re really owning that stock not for, you know, capital appreciation. You’re owning it for the yield. So, you know, you could own the bond and be further up the capital structure, right? And so it just seems like, you know, you could get there with a bond versus getting there, you know, getting there through the, you know, through that, through an equity vehicle. But, yeah, BDC, it’s a business development company. High risk. Yeah. Right. Essentially, they’re a bridge lender. You think of it as kind of taking the place or kind of shadow banking, if you will, in terms of they’re giving companies that may be building some piece of property, can’t go get a normal finance or normal bank loan, right? Exactly. They can’t get a bank loan. They’ll come up with higher yield, and also a lot of times they’re taking an equity piece in the business itself, so they have some upside there. But yeah, they’re very much a company that’s doing the credit analysis in terms of being From our perspective, you want to be further up the capital structure. And so the equity side is much more – it also doesn’t have a finite period, right? So you’ve got much more duration risk inside of a stock than you do for a finite bond.
SPEAKER 03 :
You’re getting a 9.1% yield in the stock, and I think we’re up around 6%, are we, with the bond? Is it close to 6?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, where we got in in terms of yield, we look at yield to worst or yield to maturity. If we hold it to maturity, I think it was just over 6 whenever we –
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so for that extra three points, think of the beta. I mean, to go down 76% during a bear market, it’s not bear market proof. Now, I’m just going to say, if you’re a retirement person and living on your income, You don’t want to own something that went down 76% during the last bear market. That’s not a good income idea. So anyways, he did respond to me. I think he probably doesn’t like me very much, but that’s okay. I like him. He says, analysts reply to Bill Gunnarsson, most financials were down during the Great Recession. Many cut their dividends, apples to apples with a question mark. I don’t know quite what he means by that. I’m just giving him a fact that I don’t call it safe. I just do not call it safe. Okay, then the other one that everybody loves, reality income report. Now, the reason I bring this up, there’s a lot of dividend investors out there. For some reason, I don’t know, that has just captured people’s imaginations that you’re collecting all of this money. But you also have to look at the principal side of the equation. And, you know, looking at realty income, which I did an update on it here this morning. Now, realty income has had a good 12 months because it was anticipating… the uh… the pivot by the fed but leading up to this pivot by the fed it’s been a serious under performer in fact if you go back over the last three years you’ve made nothing five years five years minus one percent per year You’ve been sitting in realty income for five years, and the only reason it’s at minus 1% is because of the last 12 months have brought that number way up to a better number. But that’s the total return, which nobody seems to care about. They seem to just throw that out the window, which is a pet peeve. that i have so i’m going to be a little bit more active on uh on seeking alpha maybe replying to some of these guys i saw another guy write about agency again and collecting money from your neighbors well yeah you hope you collect the money from your neighbors and you hope that those bonds don’t that has been a terror that stocks is down 12 15 over the last month since we wrote that article Okay, now, another big winner for us, Astera Labs. Yes, it’s high risk. Okay, it’s probably as high risk as the one that Thomas writes about. But what kind of upside potential do you really have on a BDC? I mean, obviously, if you’re going to take on that kind of risk, you want way better than average upside potential. You’re not going to get that in a BDC. You’re just not going to get any capital appreciation. It’s interest rate sensitive. It’s the only way you’re going to get capital appreciation. Now, Astera Labs is in the same line, the same area as Palantir is in, in a way, because they are very much focused on AI. And A-Lab is a small company, very small, not very small, but small. It’s $14 billion now with this move today. This stock is up 30% today. Okay, I found it. Oh, let’s see, pretty recently. If you’re one of the subscribers, you got an alert back on, I can tell you exactly when we sent it out, October 24th. Two weeks ago, I had just found this stock. It’s a fairly recent IPO. I’d have never found it without the app. It was showing up on the A-plus momentum list. And I put it into the app. I had to add it to the app because it was a fairly recent IPO. And when I crunched the numbers on them.
SPEAKER 04 :
Too young to show up on the valuation side.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, but then I did the numbers.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s why you had to look at the momentum side, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, but they do have earnings. They’re going to make 68 cents this year, $1.07 next year. The earnings are just starting to ramp like a jet aircraft taken off of an aircraft carrier. It’s amazing. I come up with 104% upside potential at my very first valuation that I did on the stock. I said, wow. Here you’ve got a momentum stock that’s in the AI space with connectivity, kind of like an ANET, kind of like an Arista a little bit. It’s got a little bit of NVIDIA sex appeal to it. That stock’s up 31% today, a nine times normal volume. It’s one of the only 15 stocks that we own. in that emerging growth portfolio, which is having one of its best years ever, second, third best year ever. And so anyways, these live trading subscribers are getting some pretty good stocks. Not all of them work out, but you can see how selective we are. We only own 15 stocks. in that portfolio and of course we’re setting up we’re not quite there yet but we’re going to be offering out four weeks four weeks free of my live trading subscription. We’re just getting the website set up, we’re changing a few things, we’re tweaking a few things here and there, and then we’ll be offering that out to the general public. Okay, another one that’s doing well for us today. We don’t own the bond on this one. I imagine they have a good one, but we own the stock, Apollo. Apollo Global Management is a big private equity firm, venture capital, mostly private equity. They’re very much like a BlackRock or a Blackstone or whatever. That stock’s up 8.3% today. And it’s one of only 19. Let’s see. How many do we own in our dividend portfolio right now? 15 stocks. 15, that’s how selective we are. Actually, we’ve got only 12 stocks in that, and one of them is Apollo Global Management, which is having a very good day, breaking out after earnings to new highs. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 1 :
And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Stocks Now show. Well, a few other stocks in the news here today. Hims and Hers had a pretty good report.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s up 4.1% today. I’d have to look into how much of their sales were what percent of the sales were from the uh compound of the weight loss drug and uh i do see that the uh well this is an analyst on seeking alpha i wouldn’t really call them analysts i mean because anybody off the street can write an article for them if if you I guess you’ve got to pass some kind of a test. He says, despite recent investor concerns on how long the company will be able to produce and be competitive in the GLP-1 space, I like the fact that the share of subscribers using personalized products has now hit 50%, up from 42%. This improves the company’s retention and recurring revenue potential. So I guess you can subscribe. To their service. But it doesn’t answer the question. He doesn’t answer the question here. What if they can’t get access? And I see that Hims and Hers is going to launch a generic. for nvo’s older glp1 okay like the one they first started with and it’s been you know heavily uh improved since then maybe that one is off patent huh well yeah i’m sure the patent i’m sure the uh i’m sure the patent for the you know for the usage of you know say uh you know the one that was for you know diabetics versus you know the the newer version right which is you know specifically for weight loss it could be the same compound right could be the same exact medicine just a different use case well and they’ll challenge they could make it for that right nvo will challenge you know that it’s a patent infringement sometimes they can tie it up in court for a year or so right i don’t know i just think and i and i think somebody uh on on x asked me When do you think Lilly will resume? I just think if you’re patient, I really do. I mean, these are the two biggest drugs. And, of course, Lilly’s drug could be the biggest drug of all time. And even though they had kind of a slow quarter, I think they’ve got to knock out the knockoffs. Knock out the knockoffs. You know, and they’re infringing on their patents. And the only reason they’ve been getting by with that is because the drugs are under shortage. Shortage. Now, it would seem to me that that would only apply to, like, life-saving drugs. Maybe they must consider these life-saving drugs. I don’t know. And Viking Therapeutics, which was up big yesterday on their, you know… Oral… Yeah, their pill, they’re making progress. But then it ended up the day down 13%. So I don’t think that there’s much there, really.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, remember, they were the ones that came out, and I think it was end of July, kind of the same time. Some of the semiconductor names were pulling back. And Lillian Novinordis took a hit because it said they were having good results from their oral pill at Viking. But I think a couple weeks later or a month later, it turned out it was only… I think that there’s only six patients or something that they took the results from. And so, you know, it’s hard to tell until you’re actually doing it. And, you know, I’ve heard that. We’ve heard that it’s a couple years off. So you’ve still got a massive head start, you know, from Lilly and Novo.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. And the other industry that is struggling big time right now, the fast food industry. We finally pulled the plug. We made no money at all. We were patient. I think they got a good guy there, Patrick Doyle, who turned around Domino’s Pizza. But I think this is a difficult environment. I think the inflationary environment… And I think, you know, some of these states that have raised the minimum wage so much, the labor environment has made it almost impossible for the fast food industry. You saw a weak report from McDonald’s, probably the Bellwether, and today QSR, which is Burger King. You know, I was banking on a turnaround there. But I just think there’s some real headwinds there right now, and I’m glad we bailed on it. The stock is down today, as they disappoint. QSR is down 2.6%, and you can just see it’s been in a sideways trend. It got kind of exciting earlier this year, and I thought there was something going on, some momentum building. But nothing seems to be really working. Their sales were up 25%. I think that’s phenomenal. Something’s going right to get those sales up. It begins with sales. That’s a big deal for the same quarter last year. Doyle is doing something right to get a 25% increase in sales.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s huge.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right? For a long time. The company has been around for so long. But here’s the rub.
SPEAKER 04 :
You’ve got to have the top line number because that’s what’s going to scroll down to the earning side.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I think he’s got to build the audience. And, of course, they’re working hard on their digital like McDonald’s did. I don’t know. I would imagine a big percentage of McDonald’s sales are digital nowadays. And Burger King was way behind. Of course, they owned Popeye’s, Firehouse Subs, and what’s the fourth one? Oh, man.
SPEAKER 04 :
I’ll remember it in just a minute.
SPEAKER 03 :
Firehouse Subs. Tim Hortons. Tim Hortons. So growing sales by 25%, that’s big. Earnings only increased 3%. So I think what he’s doing is he’s building his audience again, which Burger King, you know, hardly anybody says, oh, God, there’s a McDonald’s, there’s a Burger King, I’m going to go to Burger King. But they’re ramping up their advertising a lot. I’ve seen that on TV. They got their Cajun turkey at Popeyes for Thanksgiving. And they’re building those sales, but now it’s got to drop to the bottom line. The top line’s got to drop to the bottom line. And their earnings only increased by 3%. I do think that he’s going to turn this thing around, but I think it’s way behind schedule because of the inflation issues that have hit. Okay, well, we are out of time. Who knows? Will we wake up to some kind of final decision tomorrow, or will it be worked out in the courts over the next several weeks? Will either side be unhappy and protest and cause trouble? We don’t know. That’s the uncertainty, and that’s why I just have a few inverse funds in place just in case. But we hope we get this resolved and get back to business as usual in the market. Because there’s plenty of opportunities out there. There really are. Give us a call at 855-611-BEST to discuss your portfolio, your retirement plan. 855-611-BEST. Try the newsletter out for a couple of weeks. See how we’re doing this year with our portfolios. go to GundersenCapital.com. GundersenCapital.com. Have a great day, everybody.
SPEAKER 02 :
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