Join professional money manager Bill Gundersen as he explores the dynamic world of the stock market amidst a backdrop of global political tensions and economic forecasts. In this episode, Gundersen discusses the latest market turnaround, insights into Federal Reserve decisions, and the profound impacts of international events on oil and gold prices. Dive deep into the mechanisms driving earnings as Gundersen contextualizes current market strategies with historical performance.
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, Wednesday, it’s Wednesday, June the 18th, the version of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And we have a turnaround in the market going on right now. It opened down and there must have been some news here in the last 15 minutes. I’ll tell you what, you’ve got to be on your toes with the news feed these days. Right now the Dow is up. 120 points to 42,336. Maybe Powell will cut rates. I doubt it. But we’ll see. The S&P is up 19 points, 6,001. The NASDAQ is up 65 points to 19,585. Small caps up. A little bit today. Interest rates down a little bit today. We get the big Fed decision around 2 o’clock, 2.30. I think 2 o’clock, 2.30 is the press conference. And right now that 10-year yield is at 4.36, 4.36. Down a few bips. From where we closed yesterday, crude oil is having a big day. It’s up 1.5%. It’s clear up to $75.95.
SPEAKER 1 :
$75.95.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s up over $15 per barrel since this whole conflict began. And gold is up 10 basis points right now to $3,411. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show with Bill Gunderson, professional money manager. We’ll see if Barry joins us here during the show here today. We’ve been pretty busy down here in the Lakewood Ranch area. We had a fun workshop last night with a very lively, vibrant crowd. Good time was had by all, I hope. And I hope a lot was learned by all on just some of the simple concepts that I have found to be so effective today. uh… not only in looking at the big picture of the markets but also down uh… at the individual stock level and the importance of earnings play earnings earnings earnings uh… in the markets and uh… those of you who are involved in real estate know it’s all about location location location and uh… in the markets it’s earnings earnings earnings that’s what drives the bus now we had a pretty down day yesterday in the market There was a little bit of a flight to safety. There’s a little bit of an unknown factor right now as Trump gathered his war cabinet yesterday to discuss options. I don’t know that the U.S. wants to get involved, but at the same time… The Ayatollah Khomeini is not backing down, and he refuses to surrender, and he’s holding on to that last little bit of that nuclear enrichment deep under the ground, which would take some bunker-busting bombs to get down to that level. So that’s what the market is weighing here today. It’s really showing up in oil, which is now up above $75 per barrel. And I’m sure that’s going to impact the gas pump, probably already is. And he’s demanding a surrender by Iran. Give up your nuclear ambitions. And they refuse, absolutely refuse to do that. And that’s where everything stands. And of course, today is the Fed rate announcement day. Will they cut to rates or not? Gold is up a little bit here today. It’s currently at $3,411. I can remember not that long ago when it was 1700, back in the 08-09 time frame. It’s doubled since then. A lot of that has come in the last year with all of the turmoil, not only in the world, but here in America. And that’s where we stand. And, of course, those interest rates are pretty low right now on a relative basis, not on an absolute basis. We’re at 4.37%, 4.37% as we await the Fed decision today. There seems to be very little inflation. I mean, we’re at their target. probably target point in inflation of around 2%. I see Europe’s coming in. I saw one country come in at 1.7% today. So it’s definitely time for a rate cut, but I think not. I don’t think that we’re going to see one today. And a lot of people say that we may not see one until the end of the year. Now, in the meantime, Iran’s Khomeini, who rejected Trump’s surrender call warns of irreparable damage if the U.S. joins the fight. Well, I think the U.S. is already involved in the fight in the background. I don’t think Israel would have done what they’ve done so far to Iran without at least our wink of the eye or whatever it is, and also some help from us with some of the weaponry that they’re using. It’s the bunker busters. I guess that is the next big question mark. Will we get involved with dropping those bunker busters? I don’t know if Israel has the planes to carry those things. Those things are really heavy. It takes a special plane. Maybe that’s why the U.S. would have to get involved. And, of course, Trump ran on a platform of, no, I’m not going to get us into any war. So therein lies the conundrum. In the meantime, earnings have been going up since 2009. For the S&P 500, I had a few observers of my chart last night, of those earnings, of my bar chart, and he said, isn’t earnings growth accelerating? And yes, absolutely. This year, next year, and the year after that, at least the earnings estimates are. And what would you attribute that to? You know, I would just say more tools at the hands of CEOs these days. Whether it’s AI, whether it’s customer relationship management, CRM systems, whatever the system may be, they seem to be more nimble and able to read their business and be able to make quick changes, more quick, faster than they ever have before. And, of course, the pace of the new inventions that have been coming along in the markets. I think that has all added to that. But that doesn’t mean that Wall Street is on board. I saw the headline on Yahoo Finance today, Wall Street hates this rally. They say Wall Street isn’t exactly buying it. You know, if they can find anything negative, it could be the brightest, sunniest day outside. It’s 89 degrees with the light breeze, but hot and humid. It’s a hot and humid, almost unbearable kind of day. That’s the way our media seems to handle it. So do you hate this rally? I guess raise your hand if you hate this rally. If you’re in it… And riding this thing since back in March 8th of this year when we hit 4,800 and now we’re at 6,000. Do you hate this rally? I suppose if you were wrong and were predicting doom and gloom and a recession and a market crash because of the tariff issues and didn’t participate in the rally, I suppose you would hate this rally. But nevertheless, Wall Street hates this rally, according to Yahoo Finance, which does, you know, they take the opposite side of the coin, very much so. Not a supporter of Trump, as is CNBC, not a supporter. Most of the big media firms in Bloomberg, in the financial industry, not supporters. So any kind of… Any kind of bad headline they could put out there, you know, they do it. Euro. Okay, there it is. Euro area. That’s the whole euro area. That’s the European Central Bank area. Their inflation is 1.9%, down from 2.2%, and dipping below the ECB central target for inflation of under 2% for the first time since 2024. And let’s not forget that the euro area has been cutting interest rates. I want to say six or seven straight rate cuts. And guess what? Inflation continues to remain low. You would think Jerome Powell would take a look at that and say, you know, while they’ve done six or seven cuts, we haven’t done any. And their inflation continues to go down, even with the rate cuts, Jerome. But I think he’s going to stand firm. He’s going to be data-driven. You know, we’re data-driven here. We’re waiting to see the unemployment lines climb. Well, why not take a preemptive strike here and lower those rates and keep the economy going? It comes down to pride, I think, and ego, things like that may be impacting them. Jobless claims dipped by 5,000 in the last week. That jobless line is not growing, therefore probably won’t get that rate cut. We ended the week with 245,000 initial jobless claims, which is a little bit higher than it has been, but still very, very low overall. We’ll be right back. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Docs Now show. Rare earth seems to be the tip of everybody’s tongue these days as it becomes really, I mean, China, if they didn’t have those rare earth deposits and supposedly 70% of the world’s rare earth that has been discovered at least, That has been a big, big bargaining chip for them. And, you know, the world is clamoring to get a steady supply and guarantees of supplies in the future because it’s in so many different things. And I was reading here this morning that China’s rare earth exports at a five-year low amid magnet export curbs. These are high-powered magnets. which are used in many, many applications. May’s export volume of rare earth products fell by 61% from a year earlier. That’s because China is holding back. While these negotiations are taking place, the data for last month shows the extent to which export controls and what export controls in place since early April, how they’ve curbed the shipments before this recent U.S.-China meeting to resolve the restrictions. But, of course, last Wednesday, President Trump said the trade deal with China was done, subject to final approval by him and Xi, and full magnets and any necessary rare earths will be supplied up front. So they can’t play games and say, oh, no, you know what, we’re holding back. He wants them up front. And that seems to be the agreement right now. And now, in the meantime, the rare earth stocks are, MP Materials is up another 7.4% today. You can look at the chart of that. And they do have sales. I mean, MP Materials has about $220 million in sales per year. A lot of that’s lithium. But MP looks to be the most promising rare earth stock here in the U.S., headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, the rare earth capital of the world. That’s hitting $38.17 today, and that’s one we own in our emerging growth portfolio. That’s where something like that belongs. Viasat joins the list of the salt typhoon cyber attack victims. Now, this is another thing. You know, these are Chinese government-linked hackers out there. And, of course, Viasat is a big satellite company headquartered in Carlsbad, California. Maybe it’s in Virginia now, but it had a big plant out there in Carlsbad, not too far from where I live. They say they were breached by the Chinese government-linked hackers Salt Typhoon last year during the U.S. presidential elections. They discovered the attack earlier this year and have been collaborating with the government in the aftermath. The list of salt typhoons attacks are now Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile. Spectrum, Lumen, Digital Realty, Fortinet, Cisco, and others, Consolidated Communications and Windstream, have also been listed as victims of the cyber attacks. so far. And they’ve even, Chinese hackers targeted data from phones used by Donald Trump and JD Vance during their election campaign trail. So that’s another issue with China. And, you know, I suppose we have espionage on them too. But cyber attacks on private companies, that’s what’s been going on here. Argentina moves closer to energy self-sufficiency as the Vaca Muerta hits record output. Well, I would just compare what they’re doing in Argentina with what they’ve done in Venezuela. I mean, Venezuela’s oil fields basically have crumbled, even though they have all of that oil. I mean, they’re way behind the times in technology. They can’t get the oil out of the ground. The people suffer. That’s a lot of money that could be coming into the country. On the other hand, Argentina’s got, you know, the Elvis Presley look alike running the country and very much a capitalistic system that he’s pursuing and installing. And they’re coming close to energy self-efficiency and getting record output from their oil fields while Venezuela’s continue to crumble. And Dural and Rheinmetall to build military drones for the European markets. Well, you know, Europe has woken up to the fact that Putin is a big threat. and that the U.S. is not going to pay for and finance their defense as much as we have in the past over at the NATO nations. And Enduro is a U.S. company, kind of a creepy kind of company. They did a special on 60 Minutes on it. They’re kind of linked a little bit with Palantir and whatnot. And Dural and Rheinmetall, that’s that European defense. There is a European defense ETF that I brought to your attention a couple of times. It’s one of the top performing ETFs in the market this year. But they’re discovering that military drones are a very important and efficient way of defending yourself. And I’m still a big believer in some of the drone manufacturers of drones. And in that emerging growth portfolio, we got back into aero environment, AVAV, which is the third biggest builder of drones in the world. But that brings up another subject here. Iran is supplying Russia with a big drone supply that Russia is then turning around and using against Ukraine. So there’s definitely some loyalty there between Putin and Iran’s leader. And, of course, you’ve got Iran doubling down today saying, no, we’re not going to surrender. And now I think that Russia is starting to come forward and starting to warn the U.S., about any involvement in an attack on Iran because there’s that link between Russia and Iran there with those all-important drones which are swarming into Ukraine and doing major damage. So that’s just something else you’ve got to think about on the world stage. And I think probably a lot of those ballistic missiles are coming from China, maybe North Korea supplying Iran. So what do you do about that, okay? Do you take the leader of Iran out? He has been a pariah. Most of my life, the Ayatollah Khomeini and the people, he is about a 20% of the people like the guy in Iran, the hardcore folks. And that’s the conundrum right now that’s going on in the world. And in the meantime, our cybersecurity stocks have been doing very, very well. Needham is out with a list of their favorites a couple of them are my favorites and I don’t see how in this world today a 2025 portfolio cannot have some exposure to cyber security stocks what are the best we’ll be right back Now, back to the second half of the show. And welcome back here to the second half already of today’s Best Docs Now show. A couple of charts are jumping off the page at me here. This morning so far, I mentioned MP Materials. Look, it’s a very aggressive stock. Yes, they have $120 million in sales annually so far, but they’re looking under the ground for rare earth minerals. I haven’t really heard. I would have to read through one of their transcripts of a recent article earnings report of just how they’re doing as far as finding rare earth minerals, elements actually, in that part of the world. But that one is definitely a nice breakout here today. And another one here that’s catching my eye, I really like this concept of relative value. I really do. You know, I mean, it’s different. It’s a different concept from buying pure value Benjamin Graham type stocks with low PEs and low price to book and low price to sales and all of that. Instead, I’m looking for stocks that are trading at low PE, low price to sales, on a relative basis. They’ve been trading at much higher ratios in recent years. And when they get down to what I consider to be relatively inexpensive ratios, I swoop in. And I started this thing on April the 1st. I separated out an account that I funded with $100,000. I don’t pool the money. Everybody’s account is separate, but that account is the model. And that way I’m able to track the performance. I’m able to track the dividends that come into it. I’m able to track every little nuance, the interest earned on the cash that we have sitting there, the interest earned on the money market fund that we have sitting in there, SNOX, S-N-O-X-X, which pays a little over 4% with our idle money. But I have found 23 stocks so far in that portfolio. When it’s fully invested, I want to have about 40 stocks in there. Try to make it low volatility because I’m buying them when they’re, from my perspective, relatively inexpensive. I’m spreading it out a little bit more. And I would just imagine by the nature of the beast that there’s going to be more long-term capital gains in that portfolio, which could really help over the long haul. So I am really – that portfolio is growing. We’re getting a lot of new accounts. We’re putting money into that strategy. You know, I have found that dividend-paying stocks, there’s just not a lot of inefficiency there. Everybody is playing the dividend-paying stocks game, and that makes it a very efficient market. In other words, it’s hard for me to find stocks that are relative values or underneath the surface, I would say, because by the time a company starts paying a dividend, it’s been around a long time. And so, you know, I rarely find any real new finds. And so we’ve kind of steered towards the value, relative value area instead of the dividend area. And, you know, to buy a stock just because it pays to qualify for the portfolio, it has to have a dividend yield. It sounds like a good concept, but I would just have to say it’s not easy finding inefficiencies in that aisle of the supermarket. Now, Marvell is a good case today of one we picked up recently, Marvell Technologies. I’ve said many times that in the semiconductor sector, you know I’m also not a fan of ETFs, A person that doesn’t really know stocks is going to buy you the semiconductor ETF, which has all the semiconductor stocks in it. But there’s some really bad semiconductor companies in there. You know, there’s probably 40 or 50 stocks in the semiconductor sector, maybe more, maybe 100. But there’s only a handful that are any good. It just makes more logical sense to me to go into the sector and identify the ones that have the performance, the management, the alpha, and the upside potential. And weed out the rest. Why do I want exposure to the duds in there? I would rather cherry-pick an ETF or an index. And I cherry-picked the semiconductor index. Obviously, NVIDIA is the dominant player in the semiconductor index. I’m going to say that Broadcom is probably number two. And then you’re going to start to branch out a little bit. And Marvell. I would say Marvell as far as having AI exposure. And AMD. Those are probably the only four. And maybe ASM Lithography out of the Netherlands. Those are pretty much the semiconductor stocks that I think are the cream of the crop. So you can go out and you can buy an ETF that’s going to charge you. I don’t know what the semiconductor ETF charges. You can look up the expenses on SMH or SOX, probably a half a percent, maybe even 1%. And for that 1% management fee you’re paying to the ETF company, they’re just going out and buying the index. They’re buying all the semiconductor stocks. And it’s going to just water down, number one, your performance, in my opinion. by having 90 bad ones and five good ones. Why not just own the five good ones? And why pay them a fee for creating this index for you? It’s really not managed. The semiconductor ETF index is not managed. It’s an index. They’re not picking the best ones and just investing in those, but that’s what I do. is I picked the best ones. Marvell is really catching my eye today. It is up 10% today. It got a big upgrade, and they’re giving some updates on their AI endeavors, and that’s one of the stocks that catches my eye. There’s a couple others here that I wanted to mention too. besides Marvell and besides MP Materials, Oscar Health. Okay, Oscar, I got back into that with the relative value fund because I looked at it and I said, you know, this sector is out of favor right now. UnitedHealthcare has just decimated the sector. And I just don’t have much interest in the health insurers like Cigna and Humana and UnitedHealthcare. But Oscar is a little bit of a unique animal. It’s got good management coming from the former CEO of Aetna, which was bought out by CVS. He came on board Oscar, and it also has ties. Whether you like the family that Trump’s daughter is married to, you know who I’m talking about, his son-in-law. It’s him and his brother that kind of started this company, Oscar Health. And look at that chart today. On a relative basis, When we bought it, it was trading at 15 times forward earnings. So it qualified for that relative value designation. And the Oscar’s up 7.3% today. 7.3% and a very good chart. And one other one I’ll mention here is Embraer, which I also own in the relative value fund. Embraer dropped down to 38 there recently during the whole tariff thing. Embraer is headquartered in Brazil. But Embraer builds all of the aircraft that are the commuter aircraft, you know, that if you’re going to a city that’s underserved, you’re not going to get on a big Airbus or a big… 737 Boeing you’re going to probably get on an Embraer commuter type of jet ERJ they had a very successful Paris air show it’s still trading at a fairly reasonable multiple of 17 18 forward earnings they’ve been growing recently by you know 17 to 20 percent somewhere in there and Embraer is having a nice breakout today it’s up four percent they got a big order That’s coming up as I go through my news items here. I think 40 planes or something like that from Frontier Airlines, I want to say. Well, we’ll have that in a minute. Now, in the cybersecurity area, I want to mention my favorites there, and then I want to mention a biotech that says if you combine Lilly’s drug with their drug, You won’t have the loss of muscle mass along with you. You’ll have quality weight loss, if there is such a thing, instead of muscle mass weight loss along with your fat weight loss. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 04 :
You’ve got to go where you want to go and do what you want to do with it, whoever you.
SPEAKER 03 :
And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. We’re headed home later today from the Sarasota Lakewood Ranch area. And next up on the calendar will be Michigan, Detroit, and the out there in the suburbs. I’m trying to think of the name right now. Great area. We really love visiting Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and the good folks back there. It’s always good to hear the state of the auto industry when we’re back there. And, of course, the Detroit Red Wings, and they’ve got a pretty good little baseball team these days. The Tigers under A.J. Hinch. who has a lot of Padre connections, San Diego Padre connections. So we look forward to that trip. We’ll have the date probably by early next week, but we’re looking sometime mid to late July for our next trip. Okay, now, the cybersecurity stocks, I like CrowdStrike still. Palantir and CrowdStrike are probably, in my opinion, the two dominant players. Needham also likes CyberArk. You know what? I’ve watched CyberArk. And Varonis, VRNS, I’ve watched that a little bit. To me, they’re second tier. And Zscaler is another one. To me, it’s a second tier company. I think the big dominant ones. Palo Alto, a little disappointing lately. I still think that it’s a crowd strike. And Palantir are the two biggest and best companies. And you can buy, there’s a lot of cybersecurity ETFs. There’s BUG, B-U-G, and I don’t know, several others out there that cover that. But you’re getting all of them, and you’re watering down the returns. of the really good ones, in my opinion, by buying an ETF on that sector. Okay, Scholar Rock. I don’t know why they named the biotech Scholar Rock, but that’s the name of it, S-R-R-K. And it’s the one that says they’ve done tests, they’ve got some drug that they add to the ZepBound And you get a higher quality weight loss that does not include losing your lean body mass, which has been one of the negatives on both Zepbound and Wagovi. Scholar Rock is up 14.8% today. 14.8% today on that news. Alibaba, we talked about China coming up with another deep-seek-like company called Minimax. If you want exposure to Minimax, you can’t get exposure to deep-seek. It’s a private company. But Minimax is backed by Alibaba, B-A-B-A. And on a relative basis, I mean, you could definitely make an argument that most of your big Chinese tech companies, Alibaba, for instance, has a PE ratio of 13 right now. It has a forward PE ratio of about 11. And it does have exposure to this mini-max, which is said to be right up there in potency with our AI, open AI, and also with the deep seek, which upset the whole market here earlier this year. The state of the bond market, Under Armour prices $400 million, 7.25%. until 2030 so if you want five years seven and a quarter percent and if Under Armour remains in business and is able to pay back your bond at the end of the term seven and a quarter percent is elevated and that tells you that you know Under Armour is struggling these days as is Nike but that’s I look at all these bond offerings. We have some people that they’re happy with that, okay? They can own 10 bonds that are yielding in the 5.5 to 6.5 range. They’ve done really well this year, by the way, those bond funds. That’s your safe money, and it’s liquid. It’s not like you’re paying a big commission to get in. There’s no commission to buy those. We charge a management fee to manage that bond portfolio. You get the yield, and, of course, if interest rates go down, the value of your bonds goes up. So it’s been a pretty good performer as far as our alternative investment in something very, very safe. from our point of view axon scottsdale headquarters boy they’re causing a little bit of a feud over there they want to build they have a giant campus axon is the old taser you realize that’s a really good stock by the way they never changed their uh yeah they did change their symbol or did that yes they changed the symbol it was taser t-a-s-r And now it’s Axon, A-X-O-N, headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. But they want to add 1,900 apartments to their headquarters. It would be the city’s largest ever housing project. Well, they wouldn’t have much trouble amongst the tenants. I mean, if they’re late on their rent, just tase them, you know. Hey, buddy, you’re late on the rent. Pow. Guy’s rolling on the floor. I mean, don’t tase me, bro. But anyways, they’re having a big fight over there. Scottsdale, you know, look, they’re anti-growth. They don’t want all of a sudden a bunch of apartment buildings coming into a pretty upscale neighborhood. But anyways… That’s what Axon is up to over there in the Scottsdale area. And by the way, that’s a very good stock. Now, oh, I’ve got one minute. I won’t be able to get to that story. I mentioned Marvell. SkyWest is the company that’s buying 60 new Embraer aircraft, E-175s. And that stock is having a good day. There’s a couple of companies reporting earnings here today. One that I find encouraging is, Nucor had a pretty good report. That’s a steel stock, and that’s a bellwether of the U.S. economy. And we have a big presence by Nucor in our neck of the woods in Charleston. We had Vance, J.D. Vance, out there not too long ago visiting. And that’s encouraging to see Nucor up 3% today after a pretty good earnings report. Okay, we’re out of time. I had someone ask me last night, Bill, if I want to learn about the market and what you do, what books do I read? Well, you know what? I have always said my newsletter, that’s 100 pages every Saturday times 52. That probably in my book… is the best education you can get on the stock market because it comes straight from somebody who’s in the trenches every single day and has refined their methodology over the years to try to do methods that are better than coming up with Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark and all of the rest. And also my big macro outlook, which takes a look at the M of the market, the market M. Get the newsletter, four free weeks of everything at GundersenCapital.com. And to have us manage your own money, interview us, 855-611-BEST. Set up an appointment, 855-611-BEST. 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 SIPC and FINRA.
