Friday June 27, 2025 - U.S. and China finalize trade deal
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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.

And welcome to the Friday. It is a record-setting day in the market. I don't know if it will hold throughout the day, but we have opened up to new highs here. All-time highs on the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ. This is Bill Gunderson, President of Gunderson Capital Management. I'm here with Barry Kite, our Chartered Financial Analyst and Certified Financial Planner. And right now we have the Dow...

leading the charge and that's because we have Nike up 16% today Nike leading the Dow we haven't heard that for a while Dow up 327 to 43,714 the

The NASDAQ, I've never said this before, it's at 20,283. That is an all-time high on the NASDAQ. It's up 115 now as it's starting to gather some steam after the open. It is up 60 basis points. The S&P 500, I've never said this number before about the S&P, 6,175. A new all-time high of 34 points.

The small caps up, no, they're basically flat right now.

A little bit hotter than expected inflation number, but nothing to worry about there. We have the bond market up a couple of basis points right now at 3.27. Gold has had a bad week and it's having a bad day. Gold is down 2.3% right now. So welcome to today's Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management Group.

I'm here with Barry Kite, our Chartered Financial Analyst. You know, Barry, with just today and Monday, those are the last trading days of the second quarter of 2025, we're hitting a new all-time high on the NASDAQ. We're hitting a new all-time high on the S&P 500, much to the chagrin of all of the pundits out there that were calling for a big sell-off in the market.

This year and tried to run it down as far as they could. They got as low as 4,800 before things started to turn around. And now here we are at all-time highs in the NASDAQ today and in the S&P 500. What a resilient market, I mean, right? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And what a week it has been. I mean, the week started with the ceasefire between Israel and Iran yesterday.

And, of course, their nuclear ambitions, their hopes being dashed. Whether they'll start those up again or not, we'll have to see. But I don't know. They may put their energy somewhere else or look elsewhere for that nuclear bomb that they've been looking for for so many years. We're seeing new highs once again. Gold is not – I think maybe we've seen the highs for the year in gold. That's just me, okay?

We saw $3,400 on gold. It really was the standout in the first half of the year while the market sputtered. Really the only true hedge. Troubled. Yes. And, you know, all of the various trade agreements and everything that were being worked out. Gold was the standout. But now you've got a lot of – you have the trade agreement finalized today with China. Yeah.

and they are going to start sending over rare earths. I'll believe it when I see it. So there's really not a lot for gold to like right now. It needs some trouble to break out somewhere again, and some standoffs between countries and things like that. That's what gold likes, and gold likes inflation, which it's not getting. Are you worried at all about the PCE number today, Bill?

which was, I think, one-tenth of 1% hotter than expected. I wouldn't be too worried about that. The Dow was up 400 yesterday. The NASDAQ was up 200. I called it a classic momentum day in the market yesterday with a lot of those market leaders in AI and nuclear and the Fabulous 7, which is probably the Fabulous 5 these days, but stocks like Meta.

And the big was Spotify breaking out to new all-time highs. Some of the nuke stocks breaking out to new all-time highs. What a week it has been.

And, of course, we came just shy of record numbers yesterday, but we're seeing those record numbers today. And the NASDAQ or the Dow is not hitting record highs today. It is having a good day. But Nike, it's pretty much Nike, which is up 16% this morning after a better than expected fall.

report from them and they're going to move a lot of their manufacturing out of China I don't know what percent they still have there and they're going to go to a lower tariff money moves where the tariffs flow and with 30% tariffs on Chinese goods manufactured there I would imagine they're going to look to Vietnam they're going to look to India they're going to look to other countries to

that are down in that 10% tariff range. So that's what's happening there with Nike. The biggest, I'd call it the stock of the day for a change. It hasn't done that in a long time. Nike's had a lot of headwinds. Well, and Decker's is up 3%.

Yeah, that's good. It's dragging deckers along. I don't see Nike moving their production back to Beaverton, Oregon, but I think they'll go to more favorable tariff countries. It seems to me that Vietnam seems to... Who would have ever thought, I mean, after the Vietnam War and blah, blah, blah, and now Vietnam is becoming the manufacturing hub for...

for the whole world and we have favorable tariffs on them of just 10 percent and of course india is also just 10 so you're seeing a lot of manufacturing i gotta believe it's hurting china i gotta believe that china is kind of the big loser in all of these tariff wars from my perspective

I mean, their rare earths were not enough of a bargaining chip to get those 30% tariffs down. And it seems like there's going to be a lot of manufacturing that's going to continue to drift out of China into greener pastures. And China can't be too happy with that. And in the meantime, China's going to spend a lot of money trying to catch up with us

in the semiconductor race, which we currently have a big lead in that area. But you can't count China out. I mean, they're a very industrious, very intelligent nation, and they probably will at some point catch up with our superconductor, our semiconductor capacity, or the speed of our semiconductors, which they so badly need.

for a lot of their initiatives. But again, Nike to reduce China production as tariffs threaten $1 billion cost increase. So if they keep that production there in China, it would cost them a billion dollars.

in profits with those tariffs added to it. And of course they finalized the agreement. We've got 10 key partners still to go. Apparently we're pretty close on a deal with Europe and a few other countries. India looks like it's going to be later this year, but it looks to me like they're going to extend the deadlines once again

But wasn't China the elephant in the room, really? I mean, that was the elephant in the room, and now you've got China settled, and the other ones are now lined up. China's industrial profits fell 9.1% year over year in May. That's a big drop. I mean, they've got to be feeling that.

And in the meantime, we're still looking for a few more details on this finalized deal between us and China. Another casualty of this week's action, oil. Oil got up to $75 a barrel. Now it's back to $65 a barrel. There is strong demand out of the U.S., but with geopolitical fears easing,

Commodities, gold and oil are going to be the big losers here from all of this. And that's good for inflation, I guess. Maybe that was part of that tick up in the PCE was energy costs. So anyways, what a week it has been.

Okay, we are lining up our dates. We should have some by Monday or Tuesday for Detroit and the Bloomfield Hills area. Anxious to get there and then to California.

out there in the Central Valley in the Bay Area. That will be our next trip. After that, I'm really looking forward to getting back to California also. Okay, a lot of robo-taxi, energy, nuclear in the news once again today. We'll be right back. ♪ music playing ♪

The order of today's Best Docs Now show is,

Well, the gap that China has to make up, and I suppose it's going to be Huawei that will be the major player there, but they are investing $50 billion, China is, in a chip fund. Here's where they lag behind, lithography. Lithography, of course, is dominated by a company out of the Netherlands, right?

which is ASM lithography that does make the equipment that go into the Taiwan semiconductor factories to make the NVIDIA chips.

So that's one of the areas that China lags behind in, lithography and semiconductor design software, which we have some excellent companies in that. Synopsys comes to mind and a few others.

So anyways, they need to overcome those export curves, just like we're feverishly looking for rare earth under the sea and around Las Vegas, wherever we can find it.

they're looking to catch up and I do see that ASM lithography is down a little bit here today with now now it's back up a little bit but they dominate the world in this design and of course or in in the lithography part the designers that we have are Cadence and Synopsys those are our two biggest ones

So anyways, China wanting to catch up with us, and those are the two areas that they're going to work on. It might take more than $50 billion. Yeah, I don't think they're going to get there with $50 billion. Just saying. You know, they need SoftBank and a trillion dollars, maybe half a trillion, maybe ten times what they're going to spend.

But don't count China out for sure. I mean, Huawei is a formidable contender. I think competition is good, okay? Competition is good. It pushes everybody to – I guess they're up against Jensen Wang at the end of the day, who's from Taiwan, or Taiwan descent. He was actually from Oregon.

But anyways, that's where that is. Trump mulls executive order to boost energy supply for AI growth. The problem is, Barry, an executive order does not build the power plant. It may grease the skids and all of this, but it does take time. The move being considered included making it easier for power generating projects to connect to the grid and

and providing federal land on which to build the data centers needed to expand AI technology. Now, we used to drill for oil on federal lands, and now we're looking to build data centers on federal lands. But anyways, the government will introduce an AI action plan and schedule public events to draw public attention to the initiatives involved

And, of course, we were talking yesterday about the nuclear company, which is headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina. You know what? If I was a kid going to the University of South Carolina, if I was a Gamecock,

I'd be studying nuclear energy. South, that college. Barry, you tell your kids, man. When you graduate from college or high school, kid, I want you to go into the nuclear field. South Carolina seems to be a hub for all of that between the Navy facility we have where they send Navy people to study and to learn and to become proficient at it right over here on the Cooper River.

And, of course, now with this big private company, which is making a lot of waves, the nuclear company, and that is right next. That's where the University of South Carolina. Now, I grew up with USC in Southern California, the Trojans.

who put some pretty good football players into the NFL. We refer to them as the real USC in our house. Yeah, that was my father's school. He was a big USC fan. He hated UCLA. But, you know, we saw O.J. Simpson, the juice guy.

and many others, Anthony Davis, et cetera, there at the University of Southern California. Tony Dorsett? No, Tony Dorsett was Pittsburgh, right? Yes, Tony Dorsett. There was a Tony, though, Anthony Davis. Anthony Davis. There were some good ones that came out of you. It was called Tailback U for the longest time, Mike Garrett.

Marcus Turner. Marcus Allen. Yeah, Marcus Allen. So they were not quarterback U. Quarterback U was San Diego State and Brigham Young and colleges like that. Alabama put some pretty good quarterbacks like Joe Namath and Kenny Stabler into the NFL. Kenny Stabler, yeah. Oh, the snake. Oh, man. Yeah, those were the days.

Okay, so anyways, he's going to go full speed ahead. Action plan, action plan. Instead of setting up agencies of regulators to slow things down, the EPA, et cetera, which, look, it's a necessary evil. You've got to have that. These are sensitive lands. I'm all for that. But at the same time,

You can't block progress. We're going to run out. There's no question. There's going to come a crunch time here in the U.S. We're headed for some kind of a collision with, I know the Bay Area is already begging for more nuclear, more nuclear. I never thought I'd see the day. In the meantime, the U.K., I'll tell you one area that they're ditching.

UK, Morocco was going to build all of these solar and wind generators there in the Sahara Desert in Morocco, build a pipeline under the ocean to supply the UK government, or the UK, the United Kingdom with energy. They're scrapping. The UK is rejecting that $25 billion plan to bring power undersea from Morocco. But imagine...

Putting up solar power in the Sahara Desert. I know, look, we went through this hot period of time here, Barry, on these hot sunny days. My solar panels were just cooking. I was at 100%. My batteries were, man, my lights were bright. It was something to have that bright sun. They definitely do better on sunny days than they do on cloudy days.

I just think it's interesting in that story. It's like if you think about it, right, they've got this, you know, they basically just took a big extension. We're going to take a big extension cord and just plug it in from Morocco to UK. Where the Sahara winds blow.

And sometimes the sands, I know the sands were in Florida a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, they get blown. They come over here via hurricanes and also just wind travel. I think they were getting some Sahara sand down in Texas, if I'm not mistaken, a little bit ago. Yeah.

Well, the economy can't be too bad. Toyota's May sales hit an all-time record despite trade pressures. They had a 6.9% jump year over year in global sales for May. I mean, that bodes pretty well for the global economy when Toyota has a record month in their car sales. Okay, when we come back, what's up with Uber and Pony?

Sounds like Uber is going to pony up. 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 GundersenCapital.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. Call out the instigator Because that's something, yeah

And welcome back here to the second half of today's Best Docs Now show. Well, the former CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, who I think he was deposed around 2017 or something like that. He resigned recently.

over a few publicized scandals. But he's back in action here. You know, Pony is one that we follow, and we own it in our emerging growth portfolio. In May, Uber and Pony announced a strategic partnership to deploy Ponies. Now, that's a Chinese company, AI's autonomous robo-taxis on the Uber platform. And Uber has partnered with a lot of companies, not just Pony.

starting with the pilot program in a key Middle Eastern market and plans for broader international expansion.

Well, now Uber is considering purchasing the technology here in the U.S. from Pony. Pony was up about 12% yesterday. It's been an extremely, extremely volatile stock, but it is a $5 billion company, and they do seem to have very legit technology for the robo-taxis.

And I think you're getting a little nod on that today, that it works well because of Uber's desire to maybe invest. Now, how about a new EV model? They're breaking the record here as far as a low price in this category. Show me.

which is the smartphone company, XIAOME, which does trade on the pink sheets, X-I-A-C-F. That is another formidable Chinese company. They have rattled the electric vehicle market again with a new low-price electric vehicle model.

Notably, Show Me said it racked up more than 200,000 orders already for the EV model in just the first three minutes. That's bigger than a concert by Taylor Swift.

Sold 2 million tickets, I think, in the first two minutes. Sounds like a beanie baby, yeah. Yes, imagine EV or Nintendo has had tremendous sales of that thing. Platform. New Switch, yeah. Third bridge analyst, Rosalie Chen, weighed in on the aggressive pricing by Xiaomi. Now, we don't know. I mean, the Chinese government a lot of times subsidizes this.

for their new YU7 model that was introduced to the market yesterday.

It has a competitive starting price, $35,000. But this is an upper-end EV. This is not a low-end one. It comes in at a much lower end in the anticipated range, which was said to underscore ShowMeStrategy to aggressively price the model against rivals like Tesla's Model I. Now...

As I look at Tesla, if this is such a big threat to Tesla, Tesla's stock is not even budging today. It was down two days ago. It had a little bit of a sell-off. But Tesla's actually up $1.52 today, back above $1 trillion. But, you know, Tesla already has issues there in the Chinese market today.

with all of the competitors that have entered into it, between BYD, Show Me, Li Auto, X-Ping, the list goes on and on. But this is really an aggressively priced EV that got 200,000 orders in the first three minutes online. You buy them online. I guess they deliver them, you know, along with your lunch.

from the local Chinese restaurant. Tesla fires head of North American and European operations. You know, this was a big dude over there at Tesla, Omiyad Afshar, who's one of his main lieutenants, Elon Musk's main lieutenants. He began his Tesla career in 2011, rose to become one of Musk's top lieutenants. He's being held accountable.

Now, we haven't heard that in a while. He's being held accountable, right? Merit, I guess, and the performance for the poor showing of Tesla in Europe and in China. So heads rolling over there.

Mostly European sales, which they've been off 50%. Right. 30%. Horrible. And part of that was kind of the backlash against Musk and Doge. So it's interesting. I guess somebody's got to take the heat for it, right? Yeah. Musk isn't firing Musk. He's firing this other guy here.

But their European sales definitely suffering. I sure see plenty of Teslas in our neck of the woods. And, of course, when I was out in California, like every third car it seemed like was a Tesla. I saw people without their hands were not on the wheel. I don't know if I trust that, but I saw plenty of them doing it. Okay, Texas Pacific. Who's the biggest landowner in Texas?

No, it's not Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys. It's Texas Pacific Land, which has quite a story over the last 100 years. Guess what they're going to start doing with their land?

Same thing Trump's going to do with federal land. And data centers. Yeah. I mean, trains, planes, and, you know, oil and all of this, that's valuable land out there. Cattle, they're going to de-risk. They also have a desalinization project out there. But they're making progress on at least one power or data center venture by the end of the year.

Now, it does go up and down with the price of oil, and TPL has been a great stock over the years. It's been a phenomenal stock over the years. It's been under a little pressure this year because of the low oil prices, but

But it is definitely a major player. It's one of the largest landholders in Texas. Okay, I thought it was the largest. But they could play a key role in data center with larger ranches in the Permian Basin expected to come to market over the next few years. Now here's the deal everybody's watching, Barry. We finally have a deal between the U.S. and China.

even though I don't think China's got a very good deal out of it with those 30% tariffs in place. In some places, 55% because of the fentanyl. France is trying to strike a cognac deal with China. Oh, my. Oh, with China. If you buy French cognac, it's 39% tariff right now. If you're Chinese and you're buying French cognac, you're paying a 39% tariff.

That's hurting France. I guess China is a big consumer of cognac. They're trying to work out a deal to get that 39% drop. I'm sure they'll toast to that when they get that lowered with a little bit of cognac. Here's your biotech of the day. INMB. INMB is up 74%.

on early mid-stage, they're at the mid-stage trial right now, for an Alzheimer's drug, which is one of the holy grails. I mean, Biogen has come, they've come close, but it's pretty, you know, it's not really a game changer. And then Lilly came up with their drug, which isn't really a game changer either. In fact, the UK didn't even approve it.

But along comes INMB out of Boca Raton, Florida. You know, there are so many companies and people there. And Boca Raton is the destination. We had a radio show there in Boca Raton for a while, and they sold the station. I don't know what the programming is now on it. It could be all country music. I don't know.

But we did have a station down there. I hated to lose that station, that show in Boca Raton. Yeah, there's shorts. I mean, there's 26% short interest in INMB. They're crying today. Yeah.

as they have pretty good success in mid-stage. Okay, they're in the mid-stage trial now, so they're moving along. I didn't even know we had any biotechs in Boca Raton, Florida. Anything that can help with that, I welcome it. But, you know, the flow of people out of New York City, especially Manhattan, where they're going to have a communist mayor, that'll be interesting to watch.

I think there's going to be more talent and more money and more wealthy people leaving New York City. But then again, I mean, the number one constituency for that guy that recently won the primaries there was college-educated people, whites, white college-educated people. We'll be right back. Bird in a golden cage

On a winter's day. You gotta go where you wanna go. Do what you wanna do. Live it the way you gotta do.

And welcome back here to the final segment of today's Best Docs Now show. I'm hearing that the sound quality is not too good today. I don't know what's going on. Someone said it sounds like I'm under the sea, Barry. I think in the first segment, but you sound great on my end since. Well, if I'm under the sea, I'm looking for rare earth minerals to help out with our supply.

Or a big flounder for dinner or maybe some blue crabs, make some crab cakes tonight, you know.

Hey, NVIDIA hitting a new all-time high today, 157.09. That puts it at 3.83 trillion. Wedbush making the bold prediction that it will hit 4 trillion this year as the AI revolution rolls on. And, of course, they're the ones that basically China is trying to catch up with. I mean, they're not trying to catch up with Intel, right?

Or it's NVIDIA that has caused this giant headache for China and given us a competitive advantage in the world, thanks to Jensen Wang in a major way here. They also are predicting that Microsoft will hit $4 trillion this year. Let's see how close it is. They're the two biggest right now. Apple has fallen way behind. Microsoft is $3.69 trillion.

And NVIDIA is $3.83 trillion. So they've pulled ahead pretty good. Apple was once the leader. They have really fallen from grace. They're almost under $3 trillion now. They're right at $3 trillion. So they were head and head for a long time, and now they have fallen far behind Microsoft and Apple.

And NVIDIA, who would have ever thought NVIDIA? Oh, man, I'll tell you what, unbelievable. Okay, Meta gets another price target hike. And like I've said before, you may not like our friend Zuckerbucks, but the analysts at UBS give a triple-digit price target hike.

That's good, to social media and tech giant meta platforms. They go from $683 target to $812 target.

And a meta is one of our biggest holdings. It's about, what, a 20%, 25% jump? Yes, and meta is hitting a new almost. It's just shy of an all-time high. It's only 1.83 trillion. It's a mere baby. It's half of what NVIDIA is, Zuckerberg. Jensen Wang is eating your lunch. But, you know, it's had a good year, and the meta continues to grow by 30%, 30% per year.

That's not too bad, and of course it remains one of our biggest. Meta's kind of giving up a little bit on their Lama AI platform and maybe just going to ones that are way further ahead of them, like OpenAI or Anthropic.

He's been kind of courting a lot of AI talent, too. You know, the race is on for talent. Pretty sizable package, yeah. Well, this guy from Tesla is available out there that was running the European operations until yesterday. Maybe he can get a job with the Doge. I saw the 19-year-old. There was a young guy. I think he was 19 on that Doge team.

He's leaving the Doja team to go back to work wherever he's working. Now, how about this? Playing slot machines online. Caesars Entertainment announced on Friday the launch of a new online casino feature that allows players to engage with live slot machines from the casino floor via the Caesars Palace online casino app.

Now this is just me, okay? I don't know. To sit there and put money, of course you don't even put money in the machine anymore. You put your card in the machine and sit there and there's no strategy, there's no thinking. I

I'm not a big fan of... So you could just have, I guess, some machine. I guess you could be sitting next to a machine that just hits a jackpot and it's somebody from across the country, potentially. So if you've got that slot machine habit, you can do it right online on your iPhone. I don't know how that's the same experience. I don't know if they're bringing you...

You've got to get someone to bring you the free drinks and stuff like that. Less smoke. Less smoke. I guess that part would be nice. When I was in California, my buddy, he likes to play blackjack. He's a card counter. He's the programmer. He's a computer programmer. He's got that kind of brain, which usually makes you a pretty good blackjack player. And he is. He's a very good blackjack player. He usually wins games.

And we had a nice dinner at a casino there near Sacramento. Man, that's some beautiful country out there. But the smoke. I can't take the smoke. No. The Chinese restaurant was fantastic. It was beautiful. But, yeah, none of those people yelling at slots. I don't get it. UnitedHealth names a new CEO for the health services arm. I hope it comes with a security detail.

He's replacing the guy that was murdered there in New York City. So anyways, they're trying to get back on track, UnitedHealthcare. And then, of course, last but not least, Nike taps low expectations in Q4, signals bottoming of headwinds. So all of this talk about tariffs crushing companies in America is

Nike is on the front lines of that. Nike stock is up 15.2% today. The market is not as good underneath the surface because Nike is a big player in both the NASDAQ and the Dow. And as you look at other leadership stocks in the NASDAQ, like Palantir and those kinds of stocks,

They're pretty much lagging today. Nike is kind of distorting the surface of the market, making it look better than what it looks like underneath the surface. Well, I'll be working on the newsletter today. It will be interesting to see where the earnings are at. We had a big jump in earnings estimates about two or three weeks ago, not only for next year but the year following.

So we're not seeing the downgrades to earnings like were predicted. Instead, we've seen upgrades to earnings which weren't predicted, which make the situation in the market. But we do have a valuation problem. There's no doubt about it as we hit new highs in the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 today. I'll be out with the newsletter as soon as I get her done tomorrow. And, of course, if you want to play along, we've had one heck of a good month here in June today.

And quite a quarter, actually, as the quarter comes to an end on January. Our portfolios have had some really good days here recently. Get the four free weeks of the everything, you know, enchilada, everything on the plate. Go to GundersenCapital.com. And to get out of those stodgy old stocks, those dinosaurs of yesteryear, and have a look at

I mean, not way aggressive stuff, but stocks of today that are leaders today. Give us a call at 855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. Have a great day. Have a great weekend.

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.