SPEAKER 01 : 0:01

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 : 0:27

And welcome to the Wednesday, April the 8th Best Stocks Now show. Well, that boom that was supposed to occur at 8 p.m. last night, Eastern Standard Time, is occurring in the market this morning instead. Right now we have the Dow up 1,307 points. That’s 2.81%. It’s at 47,892. The S&P 500 is up 156. That’s 2.4%.

SPEAKER 1 : 0:51

6,773.

SPEAKER 03 : 0:51

The NASDAQ is up 616. That’s a 2.8% move. Sandisk is up 12.4% today. The NASDAQ’s at 22,663. If you’re an oil investor, if you had invested in oil futures, you’re not a happy camper here. Today, oil is down 17, 16% right now, and all of a sudden, just like that, Oil is clear back to $92 per barrel. And interest rates are dropping considerably here this morning. We’re at 4.24%. Gold is happy. It’s up 2.3%. Even Bitcoin is celebrating today. What is it celebrating? A temporary two-week ceasefire, which could disappear in two weeks. And we go through this all over again. Bitcoin is up 3,402 to 71,795. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of… Gunderson Capital Management. And we were talking last night about, well, you know, I was doing a workshop from 7 to 9 p.m. last night, and I said we could hear a boom sound around 8 p.m., and that boom sound could be unleashing the gates of hell against Iran. Instead, at about 7.30 p.m. or 7 p.m., Barry raised his hand and said, I’ve got news. There’s a ceasefire and the futures are soaring in the after hours. And this comes within days after we published our fifth macro outlook article. And now we’re five for five. If this follows through, we said this is a most compelling buying opportunity in the market right now. And at least… Today you could say Bill was right again. If we’re down 10,000 points next week, you could say, ah, I should have never listened to him. But right again, the S&P 500, the forward PE dropped to 19.8 last week. That’s the lowest in a long time. Earnings estimates have been drifting higher, way higher recently, and the market has not been drifting higher. Something had to give. You had a very compelling valuation in the market. over the last couple of weeks that we’ve been talking about here on the show. But I think I was outnumbered by the doomsday profits, once again, that were out there in mass. I saw plenty of them, but I did see some that, you know, agreed with our assessment. And so far, it looks to be a pretty good assessment. Now, the market traded pretty nervously yesterday. You can’t blame it. I mean, markets don’t like uncertainty. There was a lot of uncertainty in front of that 8 p.m. deadline last night. But as I got ready to, late after the market closed, I was checking the news. And it sounded like there was progress being made in the talks with Iran. Now, the two sides are still far apart. I mean, if you read where they’re at on these 10 points, I still see a lot of things that are not going to be tolerated by the U.S., especially that they can continue their enrichment program. That ain’t going to happen. So they’re still far apart on the two sides. The market was pretty quiet yesterday. You can’t blame it. We had a decent day yesterday, however. We were about a half a percent up. Today we’re up 3% so far this morning. It is dropping just a little bit from the all-time highs, but not too much, holding on to those highs for quite some time. You know, the other thing that, to me, It just seemed logical. That hyperbolic move in oil prices. over, what, $113, $115 somewhere that we hit here. That’s not sustainable. The fundamentals of the market just do not support that. The demand-supply equation, that supply has a temporary halt on it. We’re going to talk about the Strait of Hormuz and how many ships are backed up there right now. It’s kind of like when you’re on a vacation. I remember one time we were going to Pigeon Forge to Dollywood. And that’s a pretty narrow road there from Georgia, Atlanta, over into Tennessee. And it’s steep. It’s high up there. And there was some kind of block up ahead. And traffic was stopped. And I think of the Strait of Hormuz. And eventually they cleared the accident. They got it out of the way. And traffic started flowing again. But when you’re sitting there, you’re thinking, oh, this traffic is never going to clear. We’re never going to get there. We’ll turn around and go home. But eventually it did clear. The clog was cleared, and from what I understand, there’s 800 ships. And the toll gate letting them through one at a time, which was one of the concessions that Iran made, was to let the flow of ships… once again go through that Strait of Hormuz. And, of course, the logistics are a nightmare. Collecting the money is a nightmare. Checking who owns the ship, how much cargo they’re carrying, where is the load headed for. It’s going to be a big backup for those captains trying to navigate those big tankers in a very narrow waterway. There will be a line, but it sounds like it’s going to flow again. Brent crude down 15.7% right now. to 92.09, West Texas Intermediate, which is higher than Brent Crude right now. That normally doesn’t happen. We’re at $93.11 on West Texas Intermediate. It’s down 17.6%. If I wouldn’t have been so busy yesterday, I think I would have bought a little inverse fund on oil. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that was going to get. But then there was the chance, you know, as I asked people and polled different people during the day, I said, what do you think Iran is going to do? Are they going to back down? Is Trump going to back down? And I would say the consensus opinion was iran is not going to back down they’re going to stubbornly hang in there and uh you know risk uh blowing up their infrastructure there in iran but i mean then as the day progressed i saw something from rubio saying there will be news soon and i thought you know what he’s signaling that they’re making progress in these talks the talks are going on in pakistan Pakistan kind of brokered this two-week ceasefire. Two-week ceasefire. So, you know, we’re going to go through this again in two weeks unless they can iron out something a little bit more solid and more lasting. Gold likes the news, as I said. Gold is up 2.4% this morning. It’s back to $4,800. Gold was one of the charts that we looked at last night at the workshop. Gold is sitting on its support level, a very solid support level from a technical point of view. Personally, I’m not all that anxious to get back into gold. I think there’s better things to get back into right now. We took a 60% plus profit out of gold. That doesn’t happen very often. Normally it takes 10 years to make that kind of money in gold, which has been a slow-moving asset, 5%, 6% a year over time, historically. You take a big profit like that, you’re not real anxious to get back into that trade. But I see other trades. We bought two new ones yesterday, and we added to two. Our article went out Monday. Did it go out? Yes, there were 16,000 page reads so far. most compelling story on the S&P 500, most compelling buy opportunity. And as usual, the comments were mostly nasty. I’m used to it. I’m a big guy. I can take it. I’ve taken a lot of incoming over the years. But they just love to blow you apart and tell you why you’re wrong. And a lot of it, I can see, is politically motivated. And I’ve learned over time in the market, that you kind of have to set that aside and focus on earnings, no matter who the president is. We had great times during Biden in the market. We had great times during Clinton in the market. We have great times during Trump in the market. Really, it’s the earnings. It’s earnings, earnings, earnings. Those are the three most important factors in the market. More on that when we come back. From Sarasota, Florida, it’s the Best Stocks Now show. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, we had a full house. We didn’t have a spare chair at the workshop. Last night had a great crowd of great people from this neck of the woods. Even had one guy that drove clear up from Fort Lauderdale. And we have decided that our next trip will be to Minneapolis. It’s been a while since we’ve been there. That’s about five to six weeks out. We’ll get an official date. We usually stay at that Radisson Bleu. That’s connected to the Mall of America, and we will have more details on that. And then after that, it will probably be Cleveland, possibly Denver. We’ll see. And, of course, we’ve got to get back to the Bloomfield Hills area also. We’ve got a full schedule. The bus is resting. It’s fired up. Take us home tomorrow and get ready for the next trip. Now, what’s in Iran’s 10-point plan? This was leaked by Al Jazeera. They want a fundamental commitment to non-aggression from the U.S. Well, I would say that depends. Let’s put a little asterisk by that. If you’re good citizens in the world, there will be no aggression. But if you’re not, we can’t commit to non-aggression. Number two, controlled passage through the Strait of Hormuz in coordination with the Iranian armed forces, which in effect would mean that Iran retains its leverage over the waterway. And that means they could close it down at any point in the future. But they want to collect a toll from the boats going through there, much like the Panama Canal collects tolls. This is the one that ain’t going to fly. And this is coming from Al Jazeera. And Trump is saying that the one that’s printed in Al Jazeera, a lot of that has changed since this. An acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Uh-uh. No. Uh-uh. That’s not going to fly. You’re not going to get away with that one. The lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions and resolutions against Iran. Well, you know what? I don’t know. That’s a tough one also. The end of all resolutions against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency. Well, that depends. If you’re willing to give up the enriched uranium and the programs, maybe that would be a carrot to dangle. End of all resolutions against Iran at the United Nations Security Council. The withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from all bases in the region. Full compensation for damages suffered by Iran during the war? I don’t know about that either. The release of all Iranian assets and properties frozen abroad? and the ratification of all these matters in a binding United Nations resolution. And Trump has already said, no, their nuclear stockpile will be taken care of in any peace deal. It will perfectly be taken care of, or I wouldn’t have settled on this two-week delay. And, of course, Iran says it’s not seeking to build nuclear weapons, which is not the truth. but says it’s willing to negotiate limits on its nuclear activities in return for sanctions relief. Well, you know what? Let’s just keep you people away from your country, away from the enrichment of uranium. Okay, will the U.S. accept it? Well, we’ve got two weeks now to iron out the devils in the details, obviously. In the meantime, European gas futures plunge 20%. We’re down 17% here. This is natural gas futures. So that play in natural gas, we’ll just have to see how that plays out because there was a lot of damage done to the infrastructure. in Dubai of the liquid natural gas facilities. So there may still be a play there in the liquid natural gas stocks, but we’ll have to play that by ear Obviously, your big oil stocks, your Exxon Mobils, your Chevrons, etc., are down pretty heavily today. Let’s just look at one, Exxon, see the kind of damage. It’s down 6.2%. But there is a little buying in it. Exxon came down to its support level at 150, and I’m seeing some buying coming into it. Those are the skeptics. that are reading some of these things that I’m reading and saying, boy, there still seems like there’s some real prickly issues here that need to be settled. We better not sell our oil stocks yet. That’s what I’m seeing at least today. But they are down. Exxon is down 6%, which is a pretty heavy hit here today. Ship owners, I escaped for 800 vessels as the Hormuz reopening looms. And that has been obviously the ground zero. The Strait of Hormuz, that’s the one that finally came to you either open it up or else. And at least for now, I mean, that’s the big concession, really, where we are today. And this big rally in the market is that they made the concession to let the ships go through, but under their auspices of the Iranian Revolutionary National Guard, and collecting money from those ships. But supposedly the strait is open. Once again, how fast it will take to clear 800 ships through that narrow waterway, I guess we’ll find out. Now, gold. Well, there are some fundamental reasons. Technically, we looked at gold and silver last night. I said silver is not a very good chart right now. It’s come down hard from that parabolic move. Parabolic moves in stocks, in commodities, they’re not sustainable. Eventually, a parabolic move is going to see profit-taking, heavy profit-taking, and a lot of settling back because a parabolic move is almost always built on temporary news situations. You’ve got to be very careful of those parabolic moves. It’s kind of good to get out. It’s about as parabolic as it can get. Don’t be afraid to walk away from a parabolic move if you invested in something that went on one. And then gold settled, and I said last night at the workshop, and by the way, the next workshop we do in Minnesota, we’re going to start something new. Hopefully we’ll get this all figured out and all the bugs worked out. We’re going to broadcast the workshop on the Internet for people all across the world to watch the workshop. Instead of that little group of people, it’s a significant group of people, but they got to see my current take on the market last night up close and personal. They got to ask questions. They got to see current charts of the market, current earnings estimates of the market. They got to see my methodology. My whole thing is I want you to walk away here having a very simple way of looking at the markets and looking at individual stocks, a simple way that makes sense from a mathematical point of view. So when we’re in Minnesota, We’re going to get it up and running to televise, I guess you could say, that workshop for everybody to watch. And that should be fun. I really look forward to that. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time. I will close with this. On gold, China’s central bank buys the most gold in a year. As Iran war slashes prices, they bought the dip. We’ll be right back. This is Bill Gunderson. Thank you for tuning in to today’s Best Stocks Now, Best Inverse Funds Now show. I put several hours of research in during the wee hours of the morning each day to bring you the very best cutting-edge stories that I can. To get two free weeks of my newsletter, go to GundersonCapital.com. To talk to us about our fee-based only money management services, call us at 855-611-BEST. Now, back to the second half of the show.

SPEAKER 06 : 20:34

And welcome back here to the second pan-off of today’s

SPEAKER 03 : 20:51

Best Stocks Now show. Well, we announced on Friday, I guess, and yesterday our clients are getting news that I have merged my company with a nationwide firm. I finally found somebody that says, we want you to keep doing what you do. We don’t want to change anything. We want you managing the money. And so a succession plan obviously is necessary in life. And my brother wrote to me this morning. He said, it sounds like you’re going to have a little extra time on your hands. I said, nope. I’m going to keep doing the same thing I do every day. I love it. And I’m going to train others to carry this on. I’ve always wanted to be a disruptor. Wall Street is just so stodgy and so bland and so blah and so mediocre. uh… you know i’d just if i’m a thorn in their side at all i don’t know if they even care i don’t know but i want to do things differently from the way they do things because i just think that uh… that’s it it’s an industry that’s right for disruption it honestly is the not every industry is right for disruption but i see this industry uh… the financial service industry that pretty much looks out for itself Instead of the people that it serves, I see it ripe for destruction. Not destruction. That might be a good idea, too. Disruption is the word with a P in there instead of a C. And that’s what I aim to do and teach as many as I can. I have an army underneath me. So it’s a good thing for everybody. Nothing changes for my clients. I’m still at the helm managing the money. But I’m going to train others to do what I do so we can grow and become even bigger than we are today. The Trump administration eyes $80 billion. Oh, and by the way, we merged with a company out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte is becoming a major financial hub. hub they’re leaving the bay area wells fargo they’re leaving new york city i think bank of america and they’re moving to charlotte north carolina it’s becoming a major financial hub and now you’ve got gunderson capital management teaming up with gcg partners backed by private equity Who knows, by now maybe some teachers’ pension funds have a piece of Gundersen Capital Management. But I’m very happy with who I teamed up with. And I want to make them happy that they teamed up with me. We’re off to a good start here so far. We’re hitting a record high this morning in our assets under management. And we made our fifth 5 out of 5 major market call that was right again based on numbers. Now, it’s tenable. We’ve got a tenable agreement out there. And it could be wobbly. But the numbers have not changed. The earnings picture has only gotten better during this whole crisis. In fact, remarkably better. Consider that a record number of companies, it’s a five-year record, it’s been five years since this many companies have raised their guidance before the earnings season. That’s incredible. That’s an incredible number. And I showed this chart last night of where earnings guidance for 2027 was a year ago, three months ago, six months ago, one month ago, and you can see a steady climb in earnings expectations. And you know the mantra here on the Best Stocks Now show. Stocks follow earnings. Indexes follow earnings. But even more importantly than that, they follow earnings expectations. And the expectations continue to rise as the market continued to drop. That creates opportunity. In fact, so much of an opportunity that I use the word compelling. I had more conviction this time. I had conviction in the others. But like I said, there was a lot of doubt during COVID, but it worked out. There was a lot of doubt during the tariff crisis. It worked out. We were very much almost near the bottom when we made those major market calls. And we made our fifth one recently on the air, I think, a week ago. And then in print on Seeking Alpha, that came out on Monday with a lot of nasty comments, as usual. AI startup perplexity revenue soars 50%. Their ARR hits $450 million. And you’re saying, who’s perplexity? Well, it’s another one. And I think eventually, just like search, you know, at the end of the day, there were a lot of search engines in the early 2000s. Ask Jeeves, Yahoo had a big share of the search. Microsoft was trying to get in on it. But who walked away with it was Google. I mean, it became a verb. Just Google it. Find out the answer. They took over search. Now, search is being disrupted. by ai and i think there will be room for maybe two uh i think right now i think google gemini has a heads up i think there will be a lot of secondary players i think uh anthropic and of course you’ve got open ai which is chat gpt And now you’ve got Perplexity, which is out there. That’s backed by Bezos and NVIDIA. And maybe they’ll have little niches that they carve out. Maybe some will cater to more of the individuals and more will cater to big business. So maybe there is room. But the money, just think about the capital spending that’s required by these companies today. And whether or not they’ll ever be cash flow positive, let alone earnings profitable. Okay, that’s a whole different thing from cash flow positive. But you’ve got another major player. they have a little bit of a leg up. Perplexity will be used by Amazon. So just something to think about as these companies are lining up to land on the runway with their IPOs. And the first one that’s going to land will be a startup that has dreams of building data centers in space. And that’s going to be SpaceX. And then probably next to market, I would say probably at this point in time, it looks like it’s going to be maybe anthropic. And OpenAI looks like they’re probably going to be later in the year, maybe early next year. And then you’ve got Perplexity. And then don’t forget you’ve got Elon Musk with his Grok. All of those lined up on the runway. And in the meantime, they’re challenging NVIDIA. China is desperate for those high-speed chips so that they can also compete in the AI. Remember DeepSeek disrupted the entire AI industry for about a month. totally sunk the AI stocks and the AI sector and it’s still out there but you don’t hear as much about it but they have their AI ambitions it’s almost like the race to the moon back in the early days the space race and you have that going too these days and of course we just said astronauts further than any other astronauts have gone around the moon and back Fly me to the moon, said Frank Sinatra. Well, it’s happened again, but this time beyond the dark side of the moon, as the Pink Floyd song said. And now they are headed back to Earth with some amazing pictures from what it looked like to see a sun on Earth rise from behind the shadows of the moon. alibaba unveils a 10 000 card ai cluster as china ramps up u.s tech race and you know i mean that’s the biggest threat to nvidia obviously is somebody finally catching up with them with the compute power of those nvidia chips and you’ve seen nvidia really stall out uh $4.5 to $5 trillion market cap. It was a remarkable run by NVIDIA. I personally don’t think NVIDIA is done yet. They’re not slowing down. They’re not resting on their laurels. They’re going to come up with the next generation and try to stay ahead of the competition, always moving forward. And that’s also the hallmark of a great company. Think of all the great companies in the early 2000 that missed out on the whole Internet thing, really. Hewlett-Packard, Intel kind of missed out on the AI, and NVIDIA is going to try to keep ahead of the competition. I have no doubt about that. We’ll be right back. and welcome back here to the uh final segment of today’s uh best stocks now show well just looking at the charts i’ve probably looked at several hundred here so far this morning The best moves, bar none, is being made in the chip sector. The AI infrastructure, but in particular, the chips. You can look at a chart, for instance. Let me just pull up a couple here. This SanDisk is having a huge day today. SNDK, one of the four companies. Memory chip makers it’s up seven point eight percent right now. It was up twelve point seven So there is a little bit of profit taking coming into this huge rally But still we’re not going to sneeze at a seven point eight percent move The other one Intel for some reason has got some life to it today. It’s up seven point two percent right now Broadcom is up three point one percent. They got that big order yesterday and From Anthropic, NVIDIA has been pretty flat recently. It’s only up 1.6% today. Remains in a number one sideways trend. But in my book, it’s dripping with value. When you look at that PEG ratio and a forward PE of about 16 right now, that’s way underneath the market. The market’s forward PE ratio is 19, 20, around in there. And NVIDIA’s at 16 right now. Let’s take a look at Micron. Micron is up 6.5% today. Let’s see, one more. If I were to look at one more, well, we’ll look at the Korean, the South Korean memory makers. The ETF EWY, which owns Samsung and SK Hynix, is up 7.6% today. So that’s part of us having a very good day today because we have a lot of exposure to these stocks. I’m also seeing good action TSM, Taiwan Semiconductor. is up 4.5% today. How about ASM Lithography? ASML is up 6.6%. No wonder we’re having a good day today. Now, on the downside, obviously, it’s the oil stocks. BP down 4.5%. But what I’m seeing right now is buying coming in in the sell-off in oil and a little selling coming in to the big rally in the AI stocks. As people think about this whole two-week thing, get more details on it, and you have to wonder whether or not they’ll come to buy you know, compromise on some very, very tough sticking points here. ExxonMobil right now is down 5.7%, but it’s bouncing off of its support level. Chevron is down 5.5%, and the energy sector in general is which is IYI is the one I use. That’s an ETF that corresponds to the Dow Jones U.S. Oil and Gas Index. It’s down 4.5% today. On the other hand, inverse oil, let me see if I can find that. I want to say Doug, D-U-G, is inverse oil. Yes, Doug is up 8.7% today. Doug is twice the inverse of this energy index that I just named. Ultra short, up 8.7% today. An inverse fund against the oil stocks today. And then there’s a few others that I’m not quite sure. There must be some news in the steel industry, but maybe it has to do with tariffs. But Nucor is breaking out today. And the steel ETF, which is steel is SLX. Let’s see if it’s SLX. Yes, SLX. SLX is up 4.4%. For some reason, steel’s up today. Cameco is having a good day. CCJ is up 4.9%. And that’s the old Westinghouse that has a lot of nuclear ambitions and a lot of contracts going. for new nuclear power plants across America in the coming months and years, really in the coming years. But chemical is having a good day. It’s up 4.8% today. Let’s just take a look at NRG. I noticed it’s having a nice breakout. It’s up 3.7%. That supplies electricity in Texas. where a lot of data center building is taking place. So those are kind of some of the hotspots in the market here so far this morning. And then we take a look at other news. I see Apple did kind of figure out their issue with the foldable iPhone. I think that’s going to be probably a pretty big seller. I really do. And now they’re saying later this year. It will come out in 2026. Of course, they’re way behind the competition. Huawei already has a foldable iPhone. And Samsung already has a foldable iPhone. Apple was having some engineering problems. A couple of the suppliers of the glass just did not work. They’ve agreed to a three-year exclusive supply deal with Samsung Display for foldable OLED panels for its planned foldable iPhone. So imagine you can open up your iPhone like a book and have a much bigger screen that will be like a small little computer. I think I have interest in that myself. the cost will be somewhere in the twenty three hundred whoever thought we’d pay twenty three hundred dollars for a phone but it’s much more than a phone it’s your music collection it’s your camera it’s your compass it’s your flashlight uh… i mean what do you want twenty three hundred probably a pretty good deal it’s also your little personal computer it’s your navigation system pretty remarkable nano nuclear advances proposal for uranium production plant in argentina and there was a story yesterday ohio is going to start uh… having some enriched uranium plants uh… there in ohio well we’re out of time uh… i’ve got a full day of meetings lined up but while i work i made four buys yesterday while we were meeting Of course, there’s several of us sitting in on the meetings to cover each other, which is a nice thing. And get ready in Minneapolis. We’ll have a date soon, five to six weeks out. be in Minneapolis, and we will broadcast that workshop to the world. To get a four-week trial to the newsletter, the app, everything, the live alerts, GundersenCapital.com to set up an appointment with us to talk about our five portfolios, mix and match. GundersenCapital.com or 855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. 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. Gunderson Capital Management is a fee-based registered investment advisory firm. All accounts are held at Charles Schwab. Schwab is a member of SIPC and FINRA.