Bill’s wealth of experience is on full display as he delves into the historical evolution of NASDAQ, illustrating its journey from a fledgling tech-leaning exchange to a powerhouse of innovation, technology, and transformative growth. He candidly recalls past market crashes as lessons in valuation vigilance and discusses the present overvaluations that echo the past while highlighting the robust earnings seen today. Furthermore, Bill brings attention to geo-economic tensions, particularly between the U.S. and China, as well as the strategic struggles of auto giants like Nissan and Honda as they navigate an ever-changing industry landscape. This episode offers a rich
Here is Professional Money Manager, Bill Gunderson.
SPEAKER 04 :
And welcome to the Wednesday. It is the midweek Fed Decision Day version of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management, coming to you live. From Times Square, we’ll be headed over to the NASDAQ here in a couple of hours. The Dow, the market’s a little quiet today, which is pretty typical for a Fed decision day, although I don’t think there’s any question that they will. Give us that 25 basis point cut. It’s just a matter of what they say after that, probably. How many cuts next year are we going to get? Well, the Dow right now is up a little bit. The Dow is up 30 basis points. The Dow is at 43,574, trying to break a nine-day losing streak on the Dow. A lot of that’s been UnitedHealthcare. Ever since that CEO was murdered, that has not helped UnitedHealthcare. It’s up five points. I did notice that NVIDIA is having a good day. And over at the S&P, we’re up five points. It’s up 55 points.
SPEAKER 03 :
And it sounds like we’ve got a little technical difficulty with Bill. We’ll get him back in just a moment. But we’ve got the Dow up, trying to beat its nine-day losing streak that we’ve got going. But it’s in the green today, up 0.3% at 43,581. We’ve got the S&P up a little over just five points, pretty much flat on the day in the NASDAQ. It started up a little higher, but at the moment it’s basically dead flat as well, up three points at the moment. We’ve got crude oil just over $70 a barrel, up 1% today. Gold and Bitcoin, the digital version, I guess, both are down at the moment. Gold down 0.4%, and Bitcoin down 2.42%. Again, welcome to today’s Wednesday, the December 18th edition of the Best Docs Now show. We host Barry Kite at the moment. We’ll get Bill joining us here back in a second. We’re having some technical difficulties in the big city of New York, so he’ll be back on with us in a moment. Looking at yesterday, we had the Dow. Saw a bunch of stories in terms of where the Dow is. The Dow, I guess, is down just about nine days in a row that we’ve had that losing streak. It’s pretty interesting since we’ve had, I think, at least one or maybe two all-time highs in the S&P during that span. Certainly hit an all-time high with the NASDAQ. during that span as well and so uh you know it kind of went under the radar almost didn’t my wife came home yesterday and was like i gotta gotta note that the uh dallas had its you know biggest losing streak since 1978 or something of that nature and i was like okay your news sources oh we got them back hey bill all right yeah you know there’s
SPEAKER 04 :
We’re battling for bandwidth here in Times Square where it’s a lot of people in a small area. What can I say? And every ilk just about out there on the street. You know, let’s take a look here. Today is the day, right, that we’re going to get the Fed decision and that we are expecting 25 basis points. Then they’re going to be all about How much are you going to give us next year? Are you going to give us three? Are you going to give us four? Well, you know, I guess, Barry, that’s why I like to look at individual stocks on a daily basis. I think sometimes if you’re just up there at the top looking down, you know, you get caught up in the rest of what Wall Street is worried about. I’m looking at my holdings and looking for opportunities, et cetera. You know, I got to say… We had an account transfer in today. You know, all of a sudden I saw like 20 new stocks show up. And guess what? I saw Kimberly-Clark. I saw Procter & Gamble. I saw all the usual suspects. A lot of very dull utilities, you know, that haven’t gone anywhere in years. So anyways, that’s just the way Wall Street does things around here. That’s been my experience. Now, I’ve been coming back here to New York since I first got into the business. In the early days, back in 2000, the mutual funds were the ones that had all the money, Barry. And now it’s the ETFs, I guess, that have all the money. But along the way, they’ve really cut the expense budgets. I think the SEC stepped in. Remember those 12B1 fees? that allowed the mutual funds to charge investors in their funds advertising expenses and taking care of the brokers and whatnot. And they finally cut that out. But in the day, I mean, they put us up in the Plaza Hotel for several days, and we went to the finest steak houses. It’s not quite like that anymore, but there is still a lot of – activity that goes on back here in the way of trying to make guys like us aware of different products and whatnot. Okay, how did you see the quantum computing stocks again yesterday? QUBT was up 51% yesterday. Rigatoni, oh, not Rigatoni, Rigetti, Rigetti Computing was up 32%. IONQ was up 5%. uh some of these meteoric rises among quantum computing stocks i think it’s a fad right now i think it’s going to be short term i think you got to be very careful and i kind of handle this more as a uh a trading opportunity right i mean yes there’s money being spent on quantum and it is all the rage right now and there’s only about four or five stocks in the center of all of this and Amazon lit the fire about two weeks ago. But I think you’ve got to be really, really careful here. I don’t see these as long-term investments, at least now, maybe someday down the road. But I’m sure, Barry, you’ve seen plenty of fads. come along in the markets over the years.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, a bunch of different ways to get to, a lot of times, to a similar place. It’s just sometimes some place might charge more inside that mutual fund wrapper to get there. I saw that list come in this morning, too, and I was waiting for your message. And, of course… You sent a text out and said, whoa, where did this stuff come from? Thankfully, we have the opportunity to see a lot of those kind of stodgy names that end up in these portfolios, which gives us kind of a different perspective sometimes on the industry as a whole.
SPEAKER 04 :
And you’re in the heart of that industry today. I trim the garden, you know, the first thing I do is get rid of those weeds that are clogging up the portfolio. Now, back to this quantum computing just for a minute. I call that hot money. You know, the hot money moves around, chases this fad, chases that fad. AI obviously has been on the receiving end of a lot of hot money. Believe it or not, the space exploration, you know, Rocket Labs and others, they’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of hot money. And the hot money does move around. I don’t consider that to be really investable. Some cases it is. But in other cases, you know, it provides trading opportunities. And the app actually comes in very, very handy as far as finding where the hot money is. and new companies that are on the receiving end of that hot money. And I kind of look at this quantum computing as hot money right now. Okay, China continues to be a big story. The Biden administration plans to investigate Chinese semiconductors. Of course, they’re investigating NVIDIA. And, you know, this Cold War basically has Taiwan in the middle, and it has the chips. It has the semiconductors in the middle of the Cold War between us and China. We’re mulling a ban on China TP-Link routers, which we use here in the U.S. There’s holes in those that allows them to spy on us. And so we continue to fight China in a lot of ways. And, of course, China is fighting their own country, their own selves with their economy right now. But you always have to keep that in the back of your mind, is that situation in Taiwan and the technology that Taiwan has as it relates to semiconductors that China sure would like to get their hands on. You know, we remember Hong Kong, how it just kind of disappeared over a couple of months, and now you hardly ever hear about Hong Kong anymore as China took it over. We’ll be right back. and welcome back here to the second quarter of the best thoughts now show well after the show a little bit after this show i headed over with my wife to uh the nasdaq headquarters which is just a few blocks away from here and we will be part of the closing bell ceremony at 4 p.m today i have had a long history with the NASDAQ, both good and bad. You know, when I got into the business in 1999, the NASDAQ was roaring as tech was really starting to take hold. And it ran up to 5,300 by March of 2000 and then went on quite a sell-off of 79%. But if you go back further than that, it’s now taken the NASDAQ, it took the NASDAQ 49 years to get to 10,000. The first trade on the NASDAQ, the first close above 100 points, was back on February 5, 1971. Where were you in 1971? I think I was in the 6th or 7th grade around that point in time. Actually, no, junior high school.
SPEAKER 03 :
I don’t have an answer for that one.
SPEAKER 04 :
No, you don’t have an answer, but that was the very first close at 100 points. Okay. And, of course, the NASDAQ has always leaned very heavily towards technology, and yet Wall Street still pretty much has the same recipe, it seems like. And, by the way, Barry, as I was going through our holdings today, there it was, Procter & Gamble in the portfolio that came over. They’ve been using the same recipe for the last 35 years, it would seem like, the big Wall Street firms. But I have always found the NASDAQ to be a lot more innovative. Now, it took 49 years for it to get to 10,000. To get the next 10,000 to hit 20,000, which it did this past week, it only took four and a half years. I think you call that quantum, right? Quantum computing, they’re a big advance, which is the powerful nature of the advancement in technology today. And the dominant role in our lives today. Okay. From 1971 to 1991, uh, it settled at 500. So it went up four or five fold in 20 years from 1971 to 1991. And I’m thinking companies like Intel came along. Microsoft came along. Amazon came along more in the mid-’90s. Apple was in that initial phase. Hewlett-Packard, which was once a powerhouse. Stocks like that were the core, the beginning of the technology revolution that we’ve seen. Then we saw the NASDAQ close at 1,000 in 1995. a time when the popularity of computers and web browsers were exploding, leading the U.S. into the information age. And if you remember before that, you know, I mean, the only ones that had access to computers were the big IBM computers, and you had to have a direct link to those big mainframes, etc., And then along came the web browsers. Yahoo was one of the very first web browsers coming along and others competing for Ask Jeeves. I remember Ask Jeeves and some other web browsers back then.
SPEAKER 03 :
Ask Jeeves, yes.
SPEAKER 04 :
And then I remember the PCs coming along. My first PC was a really heavy PC, weighed about 70, 80 pounds. And, you know, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. In March 10, 2000, I was there. When the NASDAQ peaked at a level just over 5,000 points, 5,300, we didn’t know it at the time. I had a sense that something was not quite right. The dot-com bubble burst. And a lot of those people that were around then, you had literally superstars during that period of time. The stars on Wall Street were the technology analysts that were covering the tech stocks. Everybody wanted in to the tech stocks. The NASDAQ was exploding. But then over the next two years, obviously, you had a significant crash of 79%. That’s the worst I’ve seen during my career. And a lot of the people that I worked with at that point in time, they were just gone. They were baristas at Starbucks. They were running, working at golf courses, all kinds of different things. I soldiered on through it all. and had some good mentors that helped and learned a lot about valuations along the way and hung in there and survived. And then you had another peak in 2007, October 31st, when along came the great financial crisis, okay? That was the second worst bear market that I saw. and that took 53% out of the S&P 500. I think the NASDAQ was down about 49 or so. It wasn’t hurt as bad as the financial stocks because the NASDAQ does not have as much exposure to the financials. Nowadays it has a little bit more with the fintechs, the PayPals, the squares of the world. And then the NASDAQ finally bottomed, I remember this, March of 2009. Within days, I said a new bull market has been born. And guess what? It hasn’t really looked back since then. 15 years. Why? Earnings, earnings, earnings. Earnings have been growing every single year, except for the COVID year. And I think there was one other year in there where it was just down a little bit. We’ve gone from $66 in earnings to about $230 this year, maybe $250 next year. Then the NASDAQ finally got back to $2,000. That was 2015. It took a long time. Then we closed at $10,000 on June 10, 2020. Despite the COVID-19 panic, we called another bottom in March of 2020, I believe, or was it 20? Yeah, 2020. Almost hit the bottom within a week or two. And then we hit the bottom. On August 24th, we called another bottom in January of 23rd. And then, of course, on December 11th, 54 years after its launch, the NASDAQ hits 20,000. And, you know, the NASDAQ is different. If you go to the Dow, if you go to Wall Street, if you go to the New York Stock Exchange, there’s people all over the place on the floor. I don’t know what it looks like now. And there was trash everywhere on the floor, torn up tickets and whatnot. It looked like a day at Santa Anita race track, you know, with all the torn up tickets. But the NASDAQ obviously is much more electronic. And I’ll have a report from there. I’ll be over there in about two hours. All right. When we come back, we’ll talk about some individual stocks, including an update on Aquo. a very interesting nuclear stock. This is the Best Stocks Now show. 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 1 :
Call out the instigator Because there’s something in the air
SPEAKER 04 :
And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Docs Now show. Well, I don’t think the market’s going to make any big commitments here one way or another until that Fed announcement comes in in about four hours from now. In the meantime, the Dow is up 191 points. NVIDIA is helping Dow today. Let me look at NVIDIA real fast. It’s having a good day because Microsoft gave an update on how many of those AI chips they bought. They bought a lot of them. They’re the biggest buyer of the NVIDIA chips. And NVIDIA is up 4.2% today. That’s the best day it’s had in quite some time on that Microsoft news. And that is helping the Dow. The NASDAQ is just barely up today. It’s up 25%. And the S&P is up 13 points right now. Okay. So, yeah, looking back on the NASDAQ, what a long, strange trip it’s been from 100 to over 20,000. And I just think of the advancements in technology, the world that I live in today, the difference between Wall Street when I came back here originally and you know, 25 years ago compared to where we’re at today with all the technology. It’s really remarkable. We have lived in the information age, and we’ve seen all of these revolutions, and there are still revolutions taking place in autonomous cars, robotaxis, flying taxis, artificial intelligence, weight loss drugs. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, stocks in the news today. How about Nissan and Honda getting together to compete? I mean, they’ve both fallen on hard times. Now, I remember when Nissan and Honda first came here, really, many years ago, the Japanese invasions. with their cars and trucks really putting a huge dent into our Motown. And now they’ve kind of fallen on hard times. Nissan was Datsun, Datsun back in the day. And Honda has been a big seller of cars, but it’s a tougher world out there. It’s tough to compete. And now there’s talk of Honda and Nissan getting together to form a joint company.
SPEAKER 03 :
Some pretty ominous words there, too. I heard something where basically they’ve got the next 14 months are going to determine if they survive, which is pretty ominous when you’re looking at Nissan and Honda, right? I mean, drive around…
SPEAKER 04 :
A lot of dealerships.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. And you’re going to see a lot of those cars on the road, too.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. And, of course, you also have Stellantis in big trouble, deep trouble right now. Okay. Roth analysts caution about extreme market optimism going into 2025. Well, you know, going over the history of the NASDAQ, And the two huge stumbles in the market, one was devastating. I mean, the 2000 bursting of the tech bubble, it was devastating. You know, 79%, a $100,000 account became $20,000. A million dollar account became 200,000, which in many, many cases, that was the case. of people that were all in on the NASDAQ. And that’s why I have always that stamped on my soul to always be, you know, vigilant and always looking in the rearview mirror. And, you know, really the way you watch that is valuations. Valuations is really the only quantitative analysis. You as a chartered financial analyst, Barry, know that. that valuations do matter, and how much of the CFA course and getting that designation involves valuations on companies and on indexes, Barry?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, probably 98%. I mean, there’s a very tiny, tiny section on technical analysis, right? But the rest of it is kind of that pure fundamental analysis, whether it’s kind of the Graham-Dodd school of years ago, right, which Warren Buffett, of course, took and ran with. But the long-term valuations, P-E ratios, expected P-E ratios, right, You know, what, you know, the apps analysis, right, is taking into account. And then, of course, you know, the other side of that coin is the technical analysis side or momentum. But, yeah, it’s a huge portion. And, you know, like you said, eventually, right, while your biggest worry recently has been valuation is, you know, those PEs eventually, right, go down. back towards the mean, right?
SPEAKER 04 :
Exactly. And right now we’re way above the mean. And, you know, the reason that, you know, I employ technical analysis as the third leg of what I do, valuation, momentum, and technicals, is that’s where the trouble starts to show up first is in the technicals. That is your early warning. Now, unless you have a black swan event, there’s no warning of that, okay? But obviously, the year 2000, there was plenty of warning from a valuation point of view, and there was technical warning. And back in 2008 and 2009, same thing, and just watching the news headlines. You know, you could just tell that that bubble in the housing market and in the mortgage market in 2008, 2009 was not going to end well. I have the same feeling this time about certain industries in the market. certain vehicles such as Bitcoin. I have that same feeling that I had back in 2000 and I had in 08 and 09. Now, Roth MKM analysts point to the Buffett indicator, which is the S&P 500 to dollar GDP. That has risen to levels only exceeded in 1929 and 1936. Okay, that’s going back a ways. There is simply not much room priced into the risk markets if things begin to go wrong. And that’s the other thing that you have to worry about. And that’s why I watch the weekly jobless claims. We watch the CPI, the PPI, the unemployment. And we watch around the world because we’re so connected. And that’s why I’ve been saying, hey, you know, Europe, really weak. China, very weak. You know, different Japan, very weak, weak economies. And, you know, we depend on at least decent economies around the world to sell our goods into. So anyways, all of these come into play. And I’m a guy that is always looking, you know, at these charts and looking for weaknesses. I have seen recently that A lot of topping out action or cooling off action. We had the huge rally after the Trump election. That exploded the valuation ratios. The NASDAQ went up to 35. I want to say it got up to 45 or 50, although we weren’t doing forward PEs and PE ratios on the NASDAQ back then. But that’s my recollection is that there were a lot of stocks trading at 100 times earnings and 10 times sales, pay ratios of five. So I know that we were a lot higher. We were a lot higher during the dot-com bubble than we are today. The difference is we have real earnings. Yes, exactly. We have better earnings now, which helps, but still. We’re at very lofty levels from a valuation point of view. And yet most of these big firms have target prices of $6,500. $7,000 seems to be about the consensus now for next year by the end of the year. Merck enters into the obesity drug race in a pact with the Chinese pharma. That’s another area that’s really cooled off, the weight loss stocks. But I still think that that’s an investment. Okay, that’s not a trade. That’s an investment in probably the world’s biggest health problem, which is obesity. Lilly’s Alzheimer Therapy approved in China. I don’t see much of a move out of that stock here today. Of course, everything’s pretty quiet right now on Wall Street. Salesforce, they seem to be doing okay. CRM, they’re in the Dow. They’re hiring. How many of those Dow stocks are firing and laying people off? I think of Intel, where Salesforce is hiring. And Salesforce actually looks pretty good right now. They’ve also got a big product coming up, AI Agents. Maybe I’ll hire a few of those, Barry. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 07 :
And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show.
SPEAKER 04 :
with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management, broadcasting live from Manhattan, downtown Manhattan, Times Square. We’ll be headed over to the NASDAQ here in about an hour or so. And a lot of interviews taking place over there with our little party here. And I’ll let you know, I know I’m going to be on some live broadcast there on, I think, on X. And I’m sure they will be archived. Some stocks that stand out to me today, Uber. Uber having a very good day. I didn’t see any news, but there’s got to be news there on Uber. We obviously took an Uber from the airport. That’s a problem. It took longer, Barry, to get from LaGuardia Airport to our hotel in Times Square, I think, than it took to get from Charleston to New York. Or at least as long. That makes sense. I mean, the traffic is horrendous from the airport, especially this time of year because of the Christmas season and everything. It’s a $110 Uber drive. Uh, from there and plus the tip, which, uh, I’m pretty generous guy with the tipping, but Uber’s having a good day today up 4.2%. Uh, it’s been kind of a battleground stock here recently when GM dropped out of the, uh, of the, the robo taxi race. And that’s who Uber happened to be, uh, linked with another one, obviously today and video, which has been a battleground stock here. It’s up 4.1% today. on that Microsoft news on how much Microsoft has spent and how many of these chips. I haven’t bought any of the chips. I don’t have any chips. I don’t think I could carry it around. They look too heavy to me, those chips, and they might burn my house down with all that speed. I don’t have the air conditioning capacity. Okay, the other one, too, that is also I’m seeing a fresh breakout in ASM lithography today. You remember them? We made a lot of money in that stock, the Dutch manufacturer of lithography systems. And I’m sure they’re probably breaking out on that Microsoft news too. You know, it’s not like the demand for Nvidia chips have suddenly dropped. You just have to believe that a lot of that was already priced into the stock at some point in time. But we are getting fresh news today that demand remains very strong. for those NVIDIA chips. And, you know, ASM, which got cleared down, it went down 45%. We sold ASM a long time ago. And it went down a lot after we sold it. It finally bottomed at 645. And now it’s starting to rally. It’s up about 20% over the last four weeks. They still have powerful earnings, just like NVIDIA. And that stock today is breaking out through resistance. Okay, let’s take a look at the S&P 500 here. Well, the health care stocks are rebounding somewhat today. Well, I wouldn’t be chasing those stocks. That seems like a bad area for me. Cigna is up 5%. CVS is up 4.8%. Humana is up 3.5%. UnitedHealthcare is up 3.2% after several days of selling off. The AI stocks, other ones like Broadcom, kind of weak today. Supermicrocomputer, it’s all over the place on a daily basis. That one is very hard to predict. And I know that Granite Cares, this ETF group.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yeah, go ahead and look at Granite Cares. I want to hear that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, they have an ETF on SMCI. I think it’s juice two to one to the upside. I think I’d feel more comfortable with it juice two to one to the downside. Tesla has its first down day in a long time.
SPEAKER 03 :
50% to the upside, maybe.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, exactly. And then I look here over at the NASDAQ. NVIDIA’s biggest winner on the NASDAQ today at 4.3%. Western Digital, you know what, that’s a stock that has been around in the NASDAQ, I think, ever since I’ve been in the business. They had a big presence in Southern California. And back in the day, you know, the first revolution had to happen in storage. As computers got more and more powerful, storage became a big issue. And those great big disk drives that held 40 megabytes, and computers kind of came with 40 megabytes. That’s all you got. And if you wanted external, the next revolution that came along was the IOMega that were a peripheral that you attached to your computer, a big heavy thing. I should have saved my iOmega. I had one at one time. That was one of the greatest stocks I ever found. That was probably one of the first big winners that I found. That thing went up 142% in like three or four weeks with their invention. It was out of Utah. And you plugged them into your computer, and it gave you an extra 40 megabytes of storage. Then along came the flash memory, the sticks. And then, of course, now we’re in the cloud where basically you have unlimited. But you go back to the days of Seagate and Western Digital with the big clunky disk drives. And, of course, they had to get them a lot smaller to start fitting into the smaller PCs and then eventually into the phone. So it’s been a fun career. I continue to just have fun every single day. Seeing all of these developments and innovations and money-making opportunities, smart people, good managers, disruptors, just on and on and on. And I’ve seen a lot of bad companies, too, along the way. Okay, well, I’ll be reporting today. I’ll be looking at stocks. I’ve already gone through all of our holdings here. Oklo is our stock of the day, OKLO, which is one of our nuclear holdings. It is, well, it’s pulled back now a little bit. It’s still up about 2%, however, on the day. I’m seeing the quantum computing stocks kind of coming back down to earth here today, which I think that’s just hot money there pretty much. To set up an appointment with us, 855-611-BEST. Transfer your Procter & Gamble to us. We’ll get rid of it. AT&T, some of the other dinosaurs, soggy stocks of yesteryear. Four-week trial of live trading. I teach. I send out live trades along with commentary, with the teaching in that commentary. No, I don’t teach an official class. If each thing has been watching me, I’ve been doing this for 25 years now, go to GundersenCapital.com to sign up for those four free weeks. Have a great day, everybody.
SPEAKER 02 :
This show is not a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Bill Gunderson or clients of Gunderson Capital Management may have long or short positions in stocks mentioned during the show. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Gunderson Capital Management is a fee-based registered investment advisory firm. All accounts are held at Charles Schwab. Schwab is a member of SIBC and FINRA.
