Friday Mar. 21, 2025
40:05 Share

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 triple witching hour, triple witching day, which always creates volatility in the market version of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunnarsson, president of Gunnarsson Capital Management. I'm here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial analyst.

And we are off to a rocky start here so far in the market. The Dow being hurt by Nike. Nike down big today. Nike is leading the Dow to a 467-point drop. That's 1.11%. The NASDAQ is down 122. That works out to 70 basis points to the downside. The S&P is down 48%.

That works out to about 90 basis points to the downside. And the small caps are down 1%. The bond market is pretty quiet. The bond market, I see, is down one basis point. And we are down right now on that 10-year at 4.22%. Gold is a little soft today, down 40 basis points. It's at 30.30%.

And we saw this past week an all-time high on gold, that 3056. Crude oil is down 0.5% to 6,775. And Bitcoin is down 2.5% today, down 2,180 to 83,678. So welcome to...

Today's Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And I'm here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial analyst. And we started the day with the wind in our face.

And we'll see if we can cut through it here today without too much damage. But today is Triple Witching Day. Four and a half trillion dollars worth of options set to expire today. Okay, so explain to the folks, why does that make for...

a volatile and kind of unpredictable day, Barry? Well, you've got, you know, kind of today is that, you know, essentially all these contracts come due and then, you know, everything, a lot of things get rolled over to, you know, the next set of contracts. There's a lot of, you know, whether it's indexes or certain strategies, right, that are tied to these things. And so it just naturally creates volatility. You've got a lot of

It all kind of shakes out in the end, but you can see some weird stuff. I'm kind of in the middle of this today. You've got NVIDIA, I think, kind of made a bit of a death cross, I think. And so you've got that happening in the middle of Triple Witching Day. Believe it or not, the S&P 500 is close to making a death cross with that 50-day crossing below the 200. Now, that's not an automatic sell signal.

I've seen a lot of death cross this year, only to see them turn around. Europe had a death cross late last year, only to turn around and lead the market here in 2025. But triple witching is almost always a very kind of a nervous day. Now, add on to that a big Dow component. Maybe it's about time they get kicked out of the Dow. I don't know. But Nike is down 7.7%.

They blamed everything except toe fungus, I think, on why their sales were soft. They blamed the economy, of course. They blamed Trump's tariffs, of course, which haven't even been put in place. I think it's just more people are working from home in their socks, Barry, and they don't need Nikes to get around. I don't know what the case is, but Nike has not been a very good stock.

For quite some time, maybe it's time to kick it out of the Dow. It's under $100 billion. It's at $98 billion right now in market cap. And, of course, when a big Dow component is down 7.6%, that's going to impact the rest of the Dow. And FedEx has also been a troubled company for quite some time. It is thought to be a bellwether company.

stock because you gotta take into account they deliver a lot but not like they used to i mean amazon delivers way amazon is a much better indicator these days for the consumer than either ups or fedex but fedex is down ten point seven percent today so it's pretty hard there's the wind in your face fedex the memphis tennessee company

Nike, the Beaverton Organ Company, and Triple Witching. Well, who knows? Maybe I'll see something that's pulled back here today to a more attractive price. I have done some buying here this past week. It should be a pretty good newsletter this week. You're going to see what we did. Since we feel like the NASDAQ did a bottoming formation, at least technically,

No guarantees that it's going to hold. And then a lot of individual stocks also have put in a nice bottoming pattern after about a 15% sell-off.

In the NASDAQ and in the AI stocks, it's more like a 20% sell-off here. To greet the new year, the quarter ends in 10 days. Companies are scrambling right now to try to meet their numbers, try to get those sales closed because the bell will ring on March 31st.

And then it's over. It's all over but the shouting. The numbers will be counted. How much did we bring in? How much went out? How much was left over? And how does that compare...

with the same quarter last year, and how does that compare with what the analysts were expecting? We'll be back to earnings season. Yes, back to earnings season. So we'll rest up the next couple, about three weeks, four weeks, earnings season begins again. Yesterday the market was a little on the soft side the day after the Fed decision. Oil and gas stocks had a decent day.

But, you know, oil is kind of stuck in that $66 to $67 per barrel area. I am reading that demand in the U.S. is pretty strong right now. We did have the Fed decision this past week, which was standing pat. But the hope for at least two...

rate cuts sometime this year and once again today we have a 4.5 trillion dollar options test today as those contracts are expected are going to expire and that's always creates a lot of volatility oh and there's one more thing heathrow airport which is the busiest airport in europe

is shut down for the entire day and not sure when it's going to reopen no other part that's impacting the travel uh stocks the airlines the european airlines the booking.coms of the world i mean that's the gateway i mean that's a gateway uh a huge uh number of huge amount of traffic and

I mean, it sounds like it was, what, some kind of power issue? Substation. Yeah. Substation fire caught fire and caused a massive power outage. Now, I don't know if it was sabotage. I haven't heard anything. What caused it, a lightning strike or just old equipment? But it shut down London's Heathrow. So if you're flying into Sarasota, from Sarasota, leaving out of Heathrow to see us on Tuesday and Wednesday...

You may not get there in time. We'll see. But we are pretty full. I think we are full. But we'll work it out. If you still want to meet with us, that's a rare opportunity. I'm just there for a couple of days to visit my sister at some point in time, I guess on Monday when I get in. And we'll be at that Westin Hotel, the big behemoth on the corner there.

of Sarasota. If you want to reserve a spot, call Edie

She will be there also. We decided to have her come because we had so much response. You never know how many people, time of year, spring break, all kinds of different things. She's the queen of the schedule. She runs a tight ship. Yeah, she runs a tight ship. She says, I'm on five-minute warning. 855-611-BEST, 855-611-BEST. Okay, Piper Sandler.

I like to keep track of these target prices. They're sticking to their S&P 500 year-end target of 6,600. Well, that's 1,000 points higher from where we are right now.

And I don't have a problem with that outlook. But, you know, there's two things that have to happen. Companies can't be lowering their earnings estimates too much in aggregate. You're always going to have the Nikes and the FedExes of the world that are going to lower their expectations. But there's 500 companies in that S&P 500. And we look at that aggregate number here.

But it's refreshing to see. The only one that's lowered their forecast was somebody last week, maybe UBS or one of those, lowered their forecast to 6,200. But Piper Sandler is at 6,600 right now.

The CDC vaccine meeting is delayed, but now that RFK is in there, they'll be holding that, and they are going to take a good, long, hard look at studies and do more studies on whether or not the vaccines have anything to do with the big rise in autism and other maladies. We'll be right back. ♪ music playing ♪

And welcome back here to the second quarter of today's Best Docs Now show. NVIDIA to open Quantum Computing Research Center in Boston.

I guess during his speech on Tuesday, he did mention once again that they're nowhere near close, the quantum space of having big products and big earnings. We saw a big jump in D-Wave and some of the other quantum stocks, but Jensen Wang kind of threw quite a bit of water on them once again.

But, you know, they're obviously, it's out there, but it's down the road. That's the problem. It's long duration. And NVIDIA is going to open a quantum computing research center in Boston. And I see that one of the stocks reported today, and it was getting hit pretty hard. Let's see. It was QUBT.

Q-U-B-T. No, I guess not. It's actually just down a half a percent. So anyways, like I say, those are long-term, speculative, maybe someday investments. General Motors meets with the U.S. Secret Service Director to discuss new innovations. Well, keeping the president safe. We've come a long way since John F. Kennedy's convertible.

driving down the busy streets of Dallas and of course we've seen all of this data dump on just what happened and it's pretty hard still to tell. I was listening to an interview Barry with, I'm trying to think of the guy's name, he's a political junkie, he's ran a lot of, Stone, Roger Stone.

And his theory is LBJ had a lot to do with it. He had a lot of motives, I guess. And Roger Stone also believes strongly that the CIA was involved. And he finds it unusual that Lee Harvey Oswald was not that great of a shot. Okay, this is all speculation here.

that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't have any powder burns or anything like that from the gun on him.

after it all took place. So maybe someday, maybe in the next life. Maybe in the next life. The more information the mercury gets. I'll never forget that day, though, in 1963. Look, I was in kindergarten, first grade, and we heard the news that the president had been shot and Walter Cronkite crying on the air that he had passed away and everything. But anyways, new innovations occurred.

They're going to talk to Trump about it. And, of course, General Motors has got some innovations for the –

for the, you know, the, what am I trying to say here? Oh, with the NVIDIA, with the cars. Well, you've got, what, Boeing still working on what the new, on a new Air Force One that's been kind of delayed. Yeah, you know, they can't even get a guide to the space station. I don't know about them. But anyways, these are armored vehicles for the U.S. Department of Defense, specifically for diplomatic security service.

Elon Musk rallies the troops. Record level of trade-ins. I've got to believe that the trade-in value of Tesla has decreased quite a bit. He's saying, hang on to your stock, don't sell it. He pointed to a future that's extremely bright and exciting.

In the meantime, they continue to burn. Maybe they've got it under control. I don't know. But Tesla's year-to-date auto deliveries mostly are below expectations. And the reason you're seeing a sell-off today in the Chinese EV stocks is NIO. NIO came in with a little bit lighter than expected numbers, deliveries, and that's hitting BYDDF. It's hitting...

ex-paying and the others. And in the meantime, more Elon Musk. Federal judge temporarily halts Musk's doge from tapping Social Security records. Well, you know, I have a real problem with this. And something's got to give because this really is a constitutional crisis when one judge can step in and block a president's

and the will of the people that elected that president. We're hearing about all these people where there's fraudulent checks going out. Why not get to the bottom of it? I mean, really? Are we sending checks to 120-year-old people and 130-year-old people and 140-year-old people? What's wrong with looking into that and finding out? Well, he's getting their personal information. Well, too bad.

They're getting money from the government that's coming from the taxpayers. Somebody's got to look into it. If not him, who? Okay, who's ever looked into it in the past? Anybody? No? Okay, we've got somebody willing to look into it. And one judge, Ellen Hollander in Maryland, found that the Doge team had unjustified access to sensitive SSA, never mind Google, the access they have and other people's,

But I have a hard time with these judges. I really have a hard time with it, by the way. So anyways, let's get to the bottom of this and find out if there's checks going to people that are dead. All right. And somebody else is cashing them. What's wrong with that? NIO. NIO misses Q4 top line, bottom line estimates and initiates a Q1 outlook. Okay. So they were underwater a little bit.

And that is impacting these Chinese Li Auto, Zeker, X-Ping, BYDDF. Okay, it looks like Apple's next big breakthrough, this is the one I'm waiting for, I think, Barry, would be the hinged. Unhinged, hinged. Maybe you come unhinged when you see how much it weighs. But it's going to be the first foldable phone. I mean, look.

Huawei's had one out there for a long time. It could come as soon as next year. Samsung. Right. Samsung has one, I believe. I would not mind having a little foldable phone in my pocket and being able to open it up and maybe set it on my desk and...

and do some other things with it, I think that could be a big product for them. I mean, at least something that gives you a reason to go out and get the latest Apple. So anyways, that is on the drawing board. It's coming while Florida is weighing a proposal to end property taxes. How about that?

As the cost of the taxes has to come. Where's the taxes going to come from? Well, you know, I'm sure they'll shift it to sales tax or auto registrations or...

A consumer of VAT taxes. The cost of owning a home in Florida has soared. Certainly with insurance costs. Yes, the state's lawmakers have put forward multiple bills aimed at easing the burden, including reducing property taxes and even ditching them completely. State Senator Jonathan Martin, Republican from Fort Myers this week,

filed a bill calling for an official study to establish a framework for eliminating property taxes in Florida. Which, there are other states that do not have property taxes. The framework should aim to replace property tax revenue through budget cuts, sales-based consumption tax, there you go, and locally determined consumption taxes.

There you go for all of our Florida folks. We have a lot of them that listen to our show daily. 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. The Instigator Because there's something in you

We've got to get together sooner or later. And welcome back here to the second half of today's Best Docs Now show. On this triple witching Friday, it's a little spooky out there. You had the substation blowing up and creating a fire and shutting off all the power to Heathrow Airport this morning. You had...

Rough earnings from Nike and rough earnings from FedEx. And other than that, it's all hunky-dory out there. So a little bit of a spill in the market today. But, you know, the consensus is still 6,500, 6,600 for the S&P 500. Now, that's just based on the earnings estimates that are out there on the street right now, which have been ratcheted a little bit lower recently.

And we'll see this week. I'll be looking at those numbers again and be producing them in the newsletter tomorrow. And, of course, I publish my target price each week. And what we're really on the lookout for constantly is a lowering of those estimates, a consistent lowering, significant lowering of those estimates, which has not happened yet.

And CEOs are pretty good. They've navigated some dicey situations over the last few years. Yeah, and the tariffs. Like corporate America or not, they do pretty good at navigating some of these things. They have to. I mean, that's why I get so mad at the government. Why don't they report every quarter? Put out a quarterly statement.

That's what I'd push for. If I was your congressman here, Barry, in District 1 of South Carolina, the Gunderson bill, a quarterly report, the day after J.P. Morgan reports there, what they took in and what they spent, and it's all itemized. It has to be itemized, right? Where did the money go?

Is that asking too much? Earnings per tax dollar, right? Yes. When will we ever be profitable again? Never. Trump signs executive order to boost U.S. critical mineral production. And there's a couple of stocks there. We've talked about antimony stocks in the past, PPTA, which is Perpetua, and

There's U.S. Antimony, which is U-A-M-Y. And I also like Mountain Pass, which probably has the most promise, biggest company out there in the U.S. that is actually now getting rare earth there on that California-Nevada border.

Super Micro. I always think of the Incredible Hulk when you go through those names. Yes. And Rare Earth. Canada's got Rare Earth. I don't think the deal in Ukraine, I don't think that's going to happen. I think that was just a bargaining chip or something. But that's another thing that happened this past week. I mean, at least there is some progress being made. At least Putin's not blowing up power plants and everything.

infrastructure right now as everybody regroups licks their wounds and decides where they're going to go from here I do not see a pathway at all for Ukraine to beat Russia back and something has to give super micro in focus as JP Morgan upgrades as filing uncertainty passes I don't know I mean

I have never gotten back into Supermicro, but look at that. It's up 3.8% today. They still have huge earnings growth, huge sales growth. They're still building infrastructure for data centers, which is a hot area to be in.

But, yeah, I don't have any SMCI at the current time. Yeah, they never showed any signs of, you know, usually when you hear accounting issues, right, there's smoke, there's fire. But, you know, you still haven't heard anything else in terms of what the issue was and everything.

I mean, I guess they kind of dodged a bullet there. Yes. I mean, that big short report and everything, and it looked really bad. Their auditors resigned. Their auditor left, right? It looked really bad. But so far, I haven't seen anything. There was a lot of smoke, but I haven't seen any embers from a fire. Nike is blaming everything. Yeah.

Under the sun. You need to blame HOCA and OnCloud. Well, they are blaming inventory challenges, tariffs, volatile foreign exchange swings, geopolitical dynamics, and weak consumer spending trends are all headwinds for their upcoming quarter. So they have warned...

They're one of the companies. This is also warning season right now, and they give a pretty big one here. During the call, they actually also reported earnings. During the call, CEO Elliot Hill indicated that much of the pressure on the Oregon-based company will ease after Q4, which I guess that's the one that they just reported, so...

They're kind of like, I think they're throwing everything in there into this quarter to get rid of it all. And then hopefully things will start to smooth out for Nike going forward. I would say they're a little bit on the bubble as being a Dow component. You know, there's no other, you're not going to put Deckers into the Dow, that's for sure.

You'd almost have to put some other retailer. I mean, other than Walmart's already in there and Amazon's already in there, I can't think of another retailer that would be worthy of the Dow. It'd have to be some kind of consumer discretionary. So I think they'll just leave it in there. FedEx lowers guidance on continued economic weakness. You know, a lot of these companies, they report bad earnings.

A lot of them blame it on the economy. We get mixed signals. I mean, the Fed's obviously not worried about the economy or they would have cut interest rates a quarter of a point.

And in fact, they're still worried that things are still a little bit elevated and overheated. Well, and it could be a veil, too. I mean, don't get me wrong. You think about UPS and FedEx, right? Is it as much about the economy or is it about the fact that Amazon is delivering more packages? I rarely get anything from FedEx or from the U.S. Postal Service other than junk mail.

That's what they're in the business in, is delivering junk mail or bad news, right? One or the other. Right, official bad news. Yes, your check is overdue, blah, blah, blah, you owe us interest. Micron, how about Micron now? Let's check into Micron. NVIDIA definitely said we're going to use a lot of these HBM products.

processors that come from the likes of Samsung and Micron and SanDisk and others. Micron actually had a pretty good report, but it's going south. Their guidance topped estimates on strong memory demand, but they kind of picked a bad day to report earnings. The stock is down 7.6%. Let's look at the semiconductor ETF. SMH is down 1.7%.

And let's look at the king of semiconductors, NVIDIA. It's down 1.9%, kind of mired in that 116, 117 area has NVIDIA been. And then we've got the weight loss stock that combines a gastric balloon effect.

with the GLP-1 treatment, which really gets rid of the weight. I mean, you're a skeleton in about six months. You're full all the time. Yeah, you're full all the time. ALUR is that company. It's up 43% today. It's gaining a lot of weight. After posting preliminary data associated with weight loss,

using its gastric balloon in combination with novorodisc semaglutide. Wow, a gastric balloon. Man, you don't want that thing to pop in church, do you? That would be embarrassing. Anyways, stock's up 43%. That's not too bad.

Okay, well, you know, I start to work on the newsletter here today, and the macro outlook is all roads in the newsletter kind of lead to that macro outlook. Earnings have been going up since the year 2009. This is 2025, 16 years of increasing earnings other than,

2020, which was in accounting terms an extraordinary event. That was COVID. And there was one other year where the earnings were down just a little bit, like $0.03 or $0.04 from the previous year. But if you draw a line from 2009, which was about $60 per share in earnings, to this year, $250 per share in earnings,

Draw a line and you've got a pretty good slope upwards in earnings increases over the last 16 years. And nothing explains why the S&P has gone from 660 to 6,000 during that period of time as indexes and stocks follow earnings and even more importantly, earnings expectations. We'll be right back. You've got to go.

And welcome back here to the final segment of today's Best Stocks Now show. This triple witching Friday, this day when FedEx and Nike disappointed the street.

uh and uh and heathrow airport shut down uh over in london other than that it's all rosy i just looked at about oh no 25 charts or so during the breaks in the show pretty nondescript so far not nothing nothing worries me nothing too bad and nothing very attractive yet either at the same time so uh

We'll see what happens. I have 592 plus another about 600 charts to look at here today, which is about average. It takes several hours, you know, to go through and do a good thorough job, make sure I don't miss anything. But you've got to remember now, I don't just look at charts to be looking at charts. These are charts that...

either A+ Momentum or they have a combination of that juicy valuation along with Momentum I also look at a lot of Bellwether stocks just to see where they're trading at like an Apple that's a Bellwether stock so about 600 charts to look at today which is about an average day that's about four hours I would say to do that properly

and writing the newsletter today, which will be going out this weekend. Updates in the Premier Growth Portfolio, there were buys this week. Updates in the Dividend and Growth Portfolio, there were buys this week. Updates in the Ultra Growth Portfolio, there were buys this week. Updates in the Emerging Growth Portfolio, there were buys this week.

Maybe a little teaser on the value portfolio that will be in the newsletter starting on April 1st. I've already got about 25 stocks. I'm funding an account. My money is going into it. You've got your cash ponied up. Yep. And that will be the official model.

that I'll be reporting on every week. And I made some trading moves this week in the trading slash incubator portfolio. This is not a portfolio we offer. It's for information only, FYI. Here's a little trading I've done here this week. And that newsletter will be going out as soon as I feel like it's ready.

It's usually Saturday afternoon. Once in a while it goes into Sunday morning if it's a big week in the market. This week was okay. It was a lot smoother than the last month. We had a month of really, really high volatility, big sell-off, a lot of trades.

lot of protection put in by you know taking profits and stocks taking money off the table that it kind of run their cycle you know you go back to January of 2023 when this all began when we put out a big buy signal on the Nasdaq and you've had these big runs from Nvidia and you've had big runs from you know meta and

And many others, AppLovin, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, Microsoft. And there was just a time there to cash in some chips and take just in case, all right? You don't want to take action when the correction's 50% down or 45% down.

like uh you know some well-known etf managers do they'll even write stocks down 95 before they sell you have to have some discipline in the market and you have to be vigilant i call it the big v along with value vigilance is also very important in the market and

uh... so that all goes into uh... account uh... with uh... with with with how we manage money here at gunderson capital management okay i'm gonna take just a quick look here to see if there's anything out there that is standing out i'm gonna check the s&p five hundred right now i don't imagine fedex or nike looks very good in there in that s&p five hundred the s&p five hundred you know

You probably learned this in your technical analysis course that you took, Barry. Let's just say support has been the 200-day moving average on the S&P 500. I mean, that's like the long-term support level. Well, once it breaches that and goes underneath it, that now becomes resistance. Your old support level is now resistance. And both the Dow and the NASDAQ, and probably the S&P too,

They're all bumping their head on this. They're below the 200-day, and that's now the ceiling. Yeah, and when you're on that, I mean, the other thing, too, is you create more volatility when you're on the cusp, right? Yes. Because, you know, you've got, whether it's program trades or, you know, just from a technical crowd perspective,

if you will. When you're on the levels, it creates even more volatility because you've got essentially two ways that you could go, right? Yes. And you're hitting those program trading buys and sells. You might be hitting them

A couple of times a day, you know, it just becomes a very volatile time in the market. So FedEx is down 9.1. Micron's down 7.9. Nike's down 6.9. And Nucor's down 6. And then your leisure stocks, because of Heathrow, Marriott's down 4.6%.

Caesars is down 4.6%. Hilton's down 3.8%. So there's a story here. There's a couple of stocks here.

with earnings, and then there's the fire at Heathrow. On the upside, there's not a lot, but Supermicro's up 4%, Lockheed's up 2.8%. Today's the day that the government's going to decide between Lockheed and I think Boeing on the new breed of fighter jets, and that's a big contract. And right now I'm seeing Boeing up 2% and Lockheed up 2.8%.

But I don't think they've announced who's getting that contract. Tesla's up 1.8%. Netflix is up 1.2%. Progressive Insurance is up 1.2%. Those are the winners in the S&P 500. And then over at the NASDAQ, Tesla, Netflix, Dollar Tree. Those are your leaders and Meta.

are your winners in the NASDAQ so far. Okay, well, the newsletter will be going out. Well, you get the whole enchilada, not just the newsletter, but access to the app, access to the daily alerts every day, and the newsletter for four weeks at GundersenCapital.com to set up an appointment with us. The value portfolio coming out on March 31st.

GundersenCapital.com or 855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. Have a great day, everybody.

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.