In this insightful episode, Bill Gunderson shares his expert analysis on the current state of the investment industry, highlighting emerging opportunities in defense and aerospace sectors. With a focus on innovation, Gunderson discusses the strategic shifts required for modern investing, from understanding the market implications of the Trump tax bill to identifying next-gen market leaders like NVIDIA and Uber.
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 Gunderson Capital Management. Here is professional money manager Bill Gunderson.
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And welcome to the Wednesday, May 21st edition of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management, a nationwide fee-based only firm. And speaking of nationwide, we are in Cleveland for another day today. Having a really, really good time here. A lot of good folks here in this part of America, as there are all across America. We meet a lot of really good people. I really like getting out of the office once in a while and meeting face-to-face with the folks. Well, we had a little bit of a down day in the market yesterday. Dow was down 115 points. The NASDAQ was down 0.5%. That ended that six-day win streak that we had. Let’s not forget that the market has now gone positive for the year after that 4,800 close that we had back on March 8th of this year. And here we are clear back almost to 6,000. And we do have a down day going on here today. with the Dow down mostly on UnitedHealthcare. Man, that has really become a troubled company as they have more issues. Another investigation taking place. The Dow’s down 324. The NASDAQ is down 34 right now. NASDAQ doing a lot better than the Dow. I think UnitedHealthcare’s down over 5% today. The S&P 500 is down 22 points. It also has UnitedHealthcare in it. That’s influencing it heavily. The small caps are down 1%. Why? Interest rates are going up. We had that downgrade by Moody’s. They were rather moody last Friday after the close and downgraded U.S. debt. And that has sent interest rates up to 4.54%. It’s also helping gold. Gold has resumed its rally. And Bitcoin is hitting an all-time high today, believe it or not, closing in on $107,000. So welcome to today’s Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. 25 years of radio and being a professional money manager. Hopefully I can have a few nuggets of knowledge and wisdom to share with you from my experience in the market. I did teach a workshop last night here in the Cleveland area. We had a really nice crowd last night to see the workshop. And I kind of went over a little bit the current state of the industry that I’m in. I don’t think the current state of the industry I’m in is very good. I think that it specializes in mediocrity from my point of view. And, you know, they’ve really steered and have continued to focus on these big, soggy stocks that have not done much over the last 10 years, the Dow-type stocks. Or you’ve got the asset allocation model, which is based on your age. Those are the two predominant methodologies that are deployed by the advisors at some of the bigger firms out there and at a lot of the smaller firms. That just seems to be the easy way out, the easy way to go, the easy way to manage money. I personally don’t care for either one of those. And I know Scott Besson, our Treasury Secretary, was not a fan of asset allocation, and I’m sure that he tried to find disruptors out there in the industry that are stocks of today and not stocks of yesteryear, which is my definition of a soggy stock, a stodgy old growth giant of yesteryear. AT&T immediately comes to mind. Kimberly-Clark immediately comes to mind. Kraft-Hines immediately comes to mind. You know, they’re good companies. I mean, they have dominant brands and whatnot. But as far as investing in them, when you have a limited amount of space in your portfolio to put stocks, to put players on your roster, why do you want to take up space in your portfolio that you need to grow with companies that aren’t growing? Without growth, you’re not going to get that capital appreciation that you need in a growth portfolio. So it seems to me it’s pretty hard to call a growth portfolio a growth portfolio when you have a bunch of non-growth companies in it. It’s not their fault. I mean, they’ve been around a long time. These companies, they’ve maxed out their market share. They really have nowhere else to go. I saw Kraft Heinz today announcing that they’re looking for strategic alternatives to unlock value from their stock. But, you know, how do you grow the Kraft cheese brand? How do you grow Heinz ketchup? How do you grow some of the other brands that they have when the world is saturated with their products? So it becomes kind of a mathematical problem. Well, we snapped six straight sessions of gains yesterday. which, you know what, nobody would have ever thought back on March the 8th when the S&P hit 4,800 and it looked like the tariff war was going to bring the market to its knees. Well, a lot of that was because of irrational headlines trying to scare people and I think trying to make the current administration look bad whether you like them or not. And a lot of tactics used out there today by both sides, and the investors were caught in the middle, and you have some panic selling today. And it was irrational selling. And I came to that conclusion on that day when it hit $4,800 that eventually this thing was going to turn around. This was unwarranted selling. And now here we are back near $6,000. Well, there’s still a lot of unknowns. There’s still a lot of things to be worked out. We take it a day at a time. We take it a stock at a time, a sector at a time, an earnings report at a time, and an economic report one at a time. Now we’ve got our attention on this big tax bill that Trump is trying to get through, along with a lot of other things that are in that tax bill. But the main item there would be to extend the tax cuts that came in his first term. they are due to expire and uh… they definitely want to keep those tax cuts in place keep taxes low uh… keep government lean as much as they can uh… and try to keep uh… you know be a little bit more have a little bit more efficiency in government and it does look like it is headed in a pretty good direction that big tax bill that would take some uncertainty off the table the market doesn’t like uncertainty And the more uncertainty that you have out there, the more nervous the market is. Another issue we have with the market right now, after this torrid run in the market, let’s not forget, we’ve had a torrid run. To go from 4,800 to 6,000, that’s over a 20% run in the market here in the last two months, or not even quite two months. Well, now you’re getting up to the loftier P.E. ratio. We’re at a forward P.E. of 22 on the S&P 500. when the long-term average is more in that 18 to 20 area. And we’re at the end of earnings season, and there’s always a little bit of a lull after earnings season. You know, the market needs catalysts to keep driving it higher, or the lack of catalysts, you can get a market drifting lower. That’s what I’m seeing a little bit right now. But I’m still seeing plenty of good stocks out there. I went over several last night at the workshop. I highlighted, I featured some stocks. I showed the folks how I separate the wheat from the chaff out there in the stock market out of 5,300 stocks in my Best Stocks Now app. I narrow it down to the top 10% or so. That means 90% of the market at any given time is a big old load of mediocrity. And why do you want to even concentrate on the mediocre? You want to go where the fish are biting, right, and where the action is and where the growth is and where the innovation is and where the new products are. And that’s the focus. You know, everybody said, well, I wish I had found Microsoft 25 years ago. Well, there’s Microsofts today that are in the early innings. of their cycle as a publicly traded company, whereas a lot of other companies are at the tail end of their cycle as a publicly traded company, and then you start to enter into that large cap, single-digit growth, dividend-paying stock, where you get mediocre returns because stocks follow earnings. And when earnings stop growing, the stock stops going up. And the same is true for the stock market, which I illustrated last night. Earnings for the S&P 500 have been going up since 2009. The market’s been following. That will eventually come to an end. That’s why earnings, earnings, earnings are key to the market. We’ll be right back. And welcome back here to the second quarter of today’s Best Stocks Now show. I added a new ETF to my Best Stocks Now app this morning that I wanted to bring to your attention. You know, there are so many. It’s hard to keep track of all the new ETFs and how many there are. And, I mean, it’s become a massive industry. And, you know, if you still own mutual funds, mutual funds really are a dying industry. as the world has gone and moved towards ETFs that have lower fees, and they trade throughout the day, which a mutual fund does not. And really, if you have a portfolio of mutual funds, you’re pretty behind the times in today’s world. Mutual fund companies are seeing massive outflows of money today, But anyways, there’s some pretty innovative ETF companies out there. I learned about ProShares a long time. I was probably one of the first investment advisors out there to use some inverse funds from time to time. I knew about ProShares in the early 2000s. We were recently invited by two ETF companies. First, I went in January to help ring the closing bell for the NASDAQ that day, and that was our friends where they have the single… The single stock ETFs, which is an unusual idea. It kind of goes against the, sounds like an oxymoron to have a single stock ETF. But there’s definitely a use for those, especially in hedging a big position you might have. And then, of course, Barry and Jeff went as guests of ProShares to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the largest, the best-performing ETF over the last 15 years, which is the NASDAQ triple, triple NASDAQ. Now, what is the top ETF this year? As far as performance, it is a non-leveraged. Well, it’s one that I’d never heard of, but I got an email today or yesterday from Tuttle, Matt Tuttle. He came up with the SARK, S-A-R-K, which is opposite Cathie Woods. I’ve used that several times off and on. But believe it or not, the European Aerospace and Defense ETF, has surged 55% this year, making it the best performing non-leveraged U.S. listed ETF so far this year. And there’s an article on ETF.com about it. Why would the European Aerospace and Defense ETF? Well, it has to do with NATO. And it has to do with the new administration saying, you know what, you’re going to have to kick in a lot more towards your own defense. We’re not going to foot the bill like we have been doing in the past. And so a lot of stocks over in Europe, which are hard to trade. I mean, it’s hard to trade Rheinmetall in Germany because it trades on the bulletin boards here in the U.S., And then you get into some of the smaller defense stocks in France and in Germany and in other countries in Europe. They’re very difficult to trade on the U.S. stock exchanges at Schwab or Robinhood or Interactive Brokers. But through an ETF, you can get exposure to all these because they have access to those stocks. So I added E-U-A-D. That’s European Aerospace and Defense ETF to my app this morning. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see it at or near the top of the heap when we have enough stats on the ETF to be able to rank it. We need performance numbers mostly. And it has been around long enough now I’m sure that it has ample performance numbers that we can calculate a momentum grade and definitely a performance grade and maybe an overall ranking. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see it very highly ranked once we have that. EUAD is the symbol of this ETF. It already has $700 million in it. You know, ETFs, that’s a competitive industry. And if you just go out and say, I’m going to create an ETF, like I say, it’s a competitive industry. And you need at least $50 million in there, maybe $100 million to break even. This thing’s at $670 million already. So congratulations to Tuttle and their stocks, ETFs, for coming up with this one. Okay, six straight days of gains. Now we’ve got in focus the Trump tax bill. We’ve got a G7 meeting coming up in mid-June. The seven biggest economies in the world get together. It’s going to be in Canada. And, of course, I spent a big chunk of yesterday’s shows giving you updates on all of the trade negotiations that are taking place in Japan. India, China, the European Union. We haven’t heard anything at all from Mexico or Canada recently, but Korea, you’ve got Southeast Asia with Vietnam, etc. Still a lot of important countries. Important trade packages being worked out with one another. And it still seems to me that gold has been the best hedge. Gold has been the most consistent performing asset class here in 2025. And, of course, Bitcoin hit a new all-time high yesterday at 107,000, almost 107,000. It struggled for a long time after that initial Trump bump after he was elected. And now it’s back up and hitting a new all-time high today. You do have a crypto-friendly administration in place that can’t hurt it. Another reason that gold is seeing some good action, it had a good day again yesterday. We do have exposure to gold in our portfolios. That’s pretty unusual for us. Gold over the long haul has not been a very good performing commodity, but in this environment we’re in, there’s a lot of reasons why gold is a good place to have some of your portfolio at this current time, mostly as a hedge. But here’s the one that worries me the most. Reports of Israel prepping an Iran strike. Now, are they just jawboning and talking? trying to get Iran to the bargaining table, a nuclear Iran would not be a good thing. And Trump has said it many times, Iran is not going to have. a nuclear bomb but missile bomb whatever having said that they refuse to give up there uh… enrichment program for uranium so something has to give and uh… there are reports out there that israel is getting ready to attend now why do i bring something like this up Well, it could be a big, big deal, especially disrupting economies and stock markets and everything else all over the world. Part of my job is also to watch out for the what-ifs out there. And this definitely is a big what-if. On the other hand… There’s some companies involved in Trump’s vision for the Golden Dome missile defense that would protect us against such a strike. Who are the companies involved? 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. Thank you. And welcome back here to the second half of today’s Best Docs Now show. We all know that Israel has their Iron Dome. And I can still remember not that long ago watching on a Sunday evening on live news as that swarm of missiles and drones launched by Iran towards Israel and how the Iron Dome intercepted all of them. I think only one got through and did a little bit of damage. And, of course, Trump is proposing a similar system for a much larger mass of area. Therefore, it would cost a lot more than Israel’s system. He wants to call it the Golden Dome and protecting us from… nuclear attacks, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, the swarm of drones, etc., which is a real threat. This is a new ambitious plan to protect the United States from foreign attacks building on the newly established space force that was formed during his first term in office. And if you remember, Ronald Reagan had a similar idea called, I think they nicknamed it Star Wars. And the problem is the technology wasn’t there at that point in time. Now we have the technology through satellites, radio, software, semiconductors, all kinds of different things to bring together a sensor and communications network that could detect threats much earlier and take out enemy missiles with space-based interceptors. Space-based interceptors. Imagine within seconds of a missile being launched at us, launched towards us to be taken out by our own defense system. Now, the cost for such a system? Well, right now, Trump’s vision is priced at $175 billion. He formally introduced this yesterday and for the first time would incorporate U.S. weaponry in space. And Trump says that the system could be fully operational by the end of his second term, his second and last term in January of 2029, with capabilities that could intercept missiles, even if they are launched from space. This is a major turn in our defense system, but this is where the weaponry is too bad. I mean, war is a real thing. And we have to be prepared for the worst case scenario. At the end of the day, I mean, over the next 10 years, I mean, this could cost up to a trillion dollars as rising threats. Emerging missile technologies from adversaries like China and Russia could overwhelm existing U.S. missile defense systems. All right. Now, some of the companies. That would be involved, or potentially. None are involved yet in it, but there are some players that would be logical choices, and there are some that have come forward saying that we want to be a part of this. Start with Lockheed Martin, LMT. They announced their readiness to support the Golden Dome project. Maybe Tuttle should come up with an ETF. Golden Dome. Call it GLDN or something like that. He’s got the European Defense ETF. How about one that would invest in these companies that are going to be a part of this? Well, if we look at Lockheed Martin, it has not been a very good stock, but they definitely have the technology capability to be a part of this. The stock has not really reacted much yet to any of this announcement. Another potential big player… and he’s sitting in a pretty good spot with his relationship with Trump would be SpaceX how many times have you heard Trump talk about those those booster rockets returning to the launching pad and the launching pad catching them and putting them back into the launching pad that’s pretty remarkable uh… the things that Musk has pulled off of course SpaceX is not a publicly traded company but He is emerging as a frontrunner to insist in developing the Golden Dome missile defense systems. That’s the satellites themselves. I mean, how many satellites are up there? I want to say 30,000 that Musk has put up into space. for his uh… internet his starlink linking all internet all over the world bringing it in from these satellites in space that technology has come a long ways i use uh… i use it at my home as a backup just in case uh… and i use it for other purposes it works great uh… the starlink palantir would be collaborating with space x And with defense company Endural, which was featured on 60 Minutes recently, about how artificial intelligence and other things that have been developed, the high-speed chips, etc. Palantir and defense company Endural are there to build crucial components of the system. The plan includes launching 400 to more than 1,000 satellites for tracking alongside a separate fleet of 200 attack satellites, potentially armed with missiles or lasers. I had a friend in San Diego. She was a PhD and worked as a civilian. Out there in Point Loma, where I grew up, we have the Naval Electronics Laboratory. where a lot of these phd quantum scientist types i had several of them that went to my church they were uh… they were out there but they were smart guys And she happened to be, her specialty was laser weaponry, lasers from space, which is now becoming a real thing. Another player in all of this could be AV, Aero Environment, which I’ve talked about many times, A-V-A-V. They are a big government contractor. especially in the drone and different types of defense capabilities. Northrop Grumman could be a player, NOC, General Dynamics, which had a big presence in San Diego, could be another player. So that’s something to think about that’s going on. in the background, and a lot of money is going to be spent, and there will be a lot of companies that will benefit from this, and hopefully America will benefit from this. UnitedHealth slips after report on nursing home kickbacks. Can it get any worse for United Healthcare? Now, I know there’s contrarian investors out there that are licking their chops at this 12 PE company. But, you know, a lot of times it’s like Intel. Once you uncover some problems at a company, you find out that there’s a lot more problems underneath the surface. And at some point, I mean, until they’re all, they need a change of management at UnitedHealthcare. They need to get all of these problems behind them before any kind of a turnaround can ever take place. But on Wednesday, today, the Guardian out of the UK reported that managed care giant, the UnitedHealthcare, secretly paid, secretly, that’s not good, that’s bribing, secretly paid nursing homes that helped it to win Medicare enrollees and cut hospital transfers for sick patients. This is not good. I mean, this is becoming a very dishonest, underhanded type of practice that this company was involved in in many areas. of the industry. The CEO has resigned, obviously. The shares ended an eight-day losing streak recently, but now it’s back in that losing streak. And now you’ve got a criminal probe against the Minneapolis-based company. NVIDIA praises Trump, says prior curbs on AI chips to China were a failure. Well, I mean, Jensen Wang wants access to China. He says, you know, if we don’t provide them with the chips, they’re going to come up with their own chip. Huawei is very close to having their own chip. And Trump has backed off of what the Biden-Harris administration put in, the artificial intelligence diffusion, where they could only get lower technology chips. The Trump administration has noted that it would end the AI diffusion rule as part of a broader plan to alter semiconductor trade restrictions. I would just say this you know we talked last night about good stocks in the market along with some soggy stocks in the market and I said I’ve got to have two things I’ve got to have performance numbers from the stock and I have to have valuation numbers and I said you know Nvidia still meets both of those criteria is still trading at about 25 or 26 times forward earnings which is not that unreasonable For really what is only the good, the only good semiconductor stock in the whole sector is really NVIDIA at the current time. We’ll be right back. And welcome back here to the final segment of today’s Best Docs Now show. You know, one of the hallmarks of great companies is the ability to kind of keep reinventing themselves and keep adding new capabilities and growing with the times and with technology. And that’s also not the hallmark of soggy companies they have have the inability to do that i used as an example last night netflix which is still the great company today i mean it started out with an idea instead of running the uh… the the the the video uh… the rule i can’t remember the names of these big old tapes that we used to have been and have to return them, and then it went to disk on a Sunday night to avoid the late fee. You know, it all began with the idea of let’s mail them. Beta, there was a couple of them. Let’s mail them back, okay? And from there, what has Netflix morphed into? A monster. And I see other companies today that are kind of doing that same thing. That’s how you got the Fabulous 7, because… They have other things than just their core products. They continue to invent. I mean, look at Tesla and look at Elon Musk and all the irons in the fire that he has. Yesterday he was talking about humanoid robots. He says, everybody’s going to want one here pretty soon. We’ve got to get armed and ready for this. Well, I think NVIDIA is a good example of a company. They made graphics cards for gamers on the computer. And they continue to add different products and get into new things. I would think that they would play a big role even in the Golden Dome here. I think NVIDIA has lots of room to expand into other areas. I think Uber is another company that I’m watching grow. You know, besides just the ride-sharing, which was pretty much a brilliant idea, upended the entire taxi industry. And now you’ve got Uber Eats. I mean, it’s in the restaurant business, delivering fresh, hot restaurant food to your doorstep. And, of course, the robo-taxis. But Uber Freight unveils a scaled AI logistics network. Which will take logistics to the next level. I mean, not only are we headed towards a day, I don’t know when, when we’ll have driverless trucks delivering goods, but it will be run by a… logistics platform with the latest advancements in it using AI to make it more efficient, to make it cheaper, to optimize the cost, mitigate the disruption, streamline decision-making at a global scale. This is just one of the areas that Uber is getting into and announcing that their latest Uber freight logistics platform is going to bring to market more than 30 ai agents automating execution across the shipment life cycle another big player that continues to grow and add other features uber which is one of the hallmarks of a great company They continue to reinvigorate, reimagine, come up with new ideas. Amazon obviously would be a good example of that. And that’s how great companies behave. And they’re very few and far between. I mean, you can eliminate 90% of the stock market, the companies in the market. I’ve tracked 5,300, which leaves about 400 or 500 candidates at any given time that are really superior companies. Here’s one that was a superior company, and I see they’re on the verge of bankruptcy. At one time… I remember when the LED light came from silicon carbide back in North Carolina by Cree Research. The problem was, you know, it never was a very profitable discovery or business. Now I see that the Durham, North Carolina-based company, they were formed by some guys out of North Carolina State, is planning to file for bankruptcy sometime in the next few weeks. The irony of all of this is in the chips act that Joe Biden passed in 2024, he slated $750 million to go to this failing company as part of the chips act. I don’t know if they’re ever going to see that money. They were one of the largest producers of silicon carbide technology, which is used in electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, battery storage, and other applications. The problem is it’s a very low-end technology. a technology semiconductor, and the company has never really been that profitable, and now they’re in trouble. It looks like it could be terminal. And, you know, we were talking, I… I talk about ETFs versus individual stocks. My biggest argument against ETFs, ETFs is like throwing up your hands and saying, you know what, I’m just going to buy all the semiconductor companies. There’s got to be a winner in there somewhere. Well, in my book, as I look at the state of the semiconductor industry today, from a stock point of view and an investment point of view, there’s only one. maybe two, maybe three at the most out of all the chip companies out there that are good investments and good companies that are on the cutting edge, and that would be Nvidia, maybe Broadcom, and maybe Marvell Technology. Why would I want to buy an ETF that has clogged arteries with 27 mediocre companies, and those three companies in there somewhere in that sausage as the good part of that industry. Barry and I looked at the components of the semiconductor ETF, and we saw what a small percentage of the overall ETF NVIDIA was, even though it is by far smaller the dominant company in the semiconductor industry today okay last but not least Kraft Heinz considering strategic options to unlock value that’s a good example of you know a company that is on the other side at one time they were a growth company and now they’re a non-growth company they’re trying to figure out a way of unlocking value i don’t know how you do that in a company that’s not really growing anymore still a good product not a good investment though Okay, we’re out of time. We have the four-week trial going on with the app. You can peruse the app. You can get the live trades on all the portfolios that I manage via email every day. Or you can just set up an appointment. It’s time-consuming. This is a time-consuming, labor-intensive methodology to find those best stocks now in the market and to manage those portfolios. Have an interview with us. Set up an appointment at 855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. Have a great day, everybody.
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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.
