Deep Dive
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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.
Good morning and welcome to the Friday, May 9th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I am Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital Management. I'm holding down the fort for a minute for Bill. We've got some technical difficulties, but we'll get them on here in just a moment. In terms of the market, we've got plenty of green on the screen that we can go through. That's a
Always nice in terms of ending the week, but we've got the Dow up 82 points, 0.2% right now at 41,447. And we've got the S&P 500 at 5,686, up 0.4% today so far. We've got NASDAQ.
leading the way. We're over that 18,000 mark actually. Just broke over that this morning. So we're at 8,047 points here, up 119 for 0.67%. And we've got crude oil up a percent. Gold is in the green. Bitcoin's in the green. I know we've got Bill here.
And everything's in the green, so welcome. Everything's in the green so far. And you're good to go now. Which is unusual for a Friday. It's usually pretty wacky on Fridays. Well, there's a lot going on. They're meeting in China.
tomorrow in well in switzerland they're meeting in switzerland middle ground neutral ground in besant will not be in charleston at the circle k on meeting street this weekend not this weekend he'll be in switzerland probably somewhere near davos and working on a deal hopefully
with China, and Trump has made some overtures there on lowering the tariff. Well, there's nowhere to go but down with the tariff when you start out at 140%. There's a lot of wiggle room in there, and the markets are optimistic about it. Of course, you've got the U.K. agreement finally, which I don't think it was that big of a deal.
The automakers are kind of upset about the impact on them, but it's just good to have one in the bag. I saw a lot of momentum in the market yesterday. We've rebounded. We got down to like there were only 200 B+, A+, stocks out there for a while during the big swoon.
And now we're back to 800, 700. It's a much healthier number in the market right now. And the action has gone back to a lot of the momentum stocks, the high growth stocks, Palantirs of the world, and NVIDIA had a good day. It has a pretty good chart shaping up.
But we'll see where we go. Earnings season pretty much is coming to an end this week.
We'll still have some stragglers over the next few weeks, including NVIDIA. I was going to say, you've still got NVIDIA at some point, right? That's become the big one now, really. It's on the back end, too. Yeah, of all the companies that are reporting. Just before all the retailers, usually, because retail is always funny because they take the longest because they've got to count the shirts, do the inventory, figure out how much shrinkage they've had.
Speaking of shrinkage, I got a 17 neck now. Anyways, there's momentum coming back into the market. We've made four. I wrote an article there. I mean, I'm not pounding my chest here, but we've only written four market calls, articles, over the last several years. I saw one comment, oh, this guy just cherry picks the right calls that he makes. No, we've only made four, and we're four for four.
But, you know, that begs the question, where do we go from here? Well, thankfully, we don't have to make those calls but four times, right? Yeah. Usually those are some capitulation stages. Those are major calls, right? Those are major calls that we have made.
Usually after some pain, by the way. Yeah, I mean, it's when the pain is the worst, really. That March the 8th, after the 1,000-point swoon on Friday, and Kramer was predicting a Black Friday-like open to the market for Monday. And, you know, I watched that video with Scott Besson, and everything came together in my mind and made sense from a logical point of view.
And I said, I think these tariffs are going to work. Now, you have to say that so far, I mean, we're early on in the game, but so far the tariffs are working. We're somewhere near $8 to $10 trillion in new factories being built in America, with many more to be announced. We've got China at the table negotiating tariffs.
And by the way, did you see their exports were up 8.1%, but to America, I don't know where they're exporting to. Is that that vacant field out there where all the homes that they built, are they storing them there? I don't know. I mean, who's buying all of these goods? I guess Canada has become buddied up a lot with China these days. I can't see how they're exporting.
I saw some kind of, did they have some agreement? I saw, I guess, what, Russia and China, I think some kind of $200 billion trade package. So there might be, I don't know, maybe they were already buying $2 billion and they're just airing it out. But, you know, that's, I guess, a place where some of their goods could end up, right? Well, that's a bargaining chip that they have is saying, hey, I've got a big brother over here that can beat you guys up named Vladimir Putin. He's also got nuclear weapons.
And that seems to be a card that China is playing right now. You know, they've wanted to create that BRIC. BRICs, you know, replace the currency and everything. Who was talking about replacing their currency? It was somebody. I think Brazil's currency has had a few names over the years, which to me has never. It might be Ukraine. I think it's Ukraine wants to replace. They use the dollar in Ukraine.
And Vladimir Zelensky, I don't know about that guy, he's saying, well, we're going to switch to the euro. Well, good luck, you know. I mean, they've said it. They're going to walk away from the negotiations if they can't settle the deal. Canada's unemployment rises to 6.9%. That's a pretty high number.
for Canada. And the Trump administration is seeking tariff reductions on our goods going to China. And, of course, they want China to buy more of our goods. And they're going to seek for rare earth concessions. That seems to be a pretty big...
a pretty decent card that China holds in their hand because it doesn't seem like rare earth is something that we can just go out and start mining for and filling the coffers with all of these 17 minerals and elements that are needed. So that seems to be a pretty good card, even though we had this deal with Ukraine earlier.
How does that work when they're in the middle of a war? Will anything ever come from that? And then you've got all of these companies in America like Mountain Pass and...
U.S. antimony and U.S. rare earth and everything and the one that's looking under the ocean. I think your antimony had a good day yesterday. I was kind of flipping by and somehow the name obviously jumps off the page because it sounds like it's from a comic book or something. But when I saw it, I was like, oh, that looks pretty good. Now here's something new. Trump explores taxing the rich.
He'd been hanging around Bernie Sanders too much, but he's thinking of taking the upper bracket. This is for people that make $2.5 million per year or couples making at least $5 million per year.
He talked with the Speaker of the House of taking that from 37% to 39.6%, almost 40%. Soak the rich, I guess, is the... But they're trying to look for areas to bring that together. I saw Adobe has come forward. I don't know if you saw that article. And they're going to slash the price for the U.S. government because they're going to help...
I was reading that a lot of the air traffic controllers, they're using software that still requires floppy disk. Yeah, it makes sense because, number one, you've got replacing those systems. You'd have to probably shut down things for a certain period of time. And then also, I guess, the cost, but...
I mean, it's pretty... It's a good investment, though, for the future. You would think. And the other thing is you would need less air traffic controllers, maybe. And the other thing is the government is way behind the times in going paperless. You know, I mean, I used to have drawers full of files on every client and everything, and now it's all online. And, no, the U.S. government still has a cave online.
where they go down there and update the files and everything and look for about 40 million files. A bunch of cardboard boxes, right? You'd have to say doge. I mean, with those sharp kids coming in there, I call them kids, and looking at the way we were doing things,
Well, Adobe is a leader, right, in updating and PDF files, putting it all online and everything like that. So Adobe might be worth an investment here because they're going to do a lot at a cut rate price for the government to try to bring them into the 21st century. We'll be right back. I keep low and low.
Thank you.
And welcome back here to the second quarter of today's Best Docs Now. Adobe will offer a comprehensive paperless government solution. It's about time. How long ago? I remember when the doctor's offices started going paperless. That was 20 years ago.
Well, electronic health records, yeah. I mean, they started really pushing it, was really kind of part of the high-tech act coming out of 08-09 with some of the stimulus package. And then, of course, you had a lot of those names in that health care space just took off. Remember, you had, I forget, some of those different names back then that were basically they got a bunch of money to buy.
Yes, they were good investments too. I remember some of those stocks being very good investments because they had a lot of work going to work on all the doctors and dentist offices across America. Yeah, you had Athena Health back then. Yeah, Athena was one. I think they're private now. But yeah, it was moving everything over. I mean, even Elon. Remember he was talking about in terms of the way that we still do things
send checks, right? Yeah. And the cost of sending checks and payments that way. And there's obviously easier to be fraudulent. And the procurement system, every agency had their own system and did their own buying and purchasing. They brought it all together, the GSA, and we'll have everybody talking with one another with the proper software set up.
So we're bringing our U.S. government, which has got to save a lot of money over time. I mean, you would think searching through a cave, for the record, would be a lot faster than search for it with a massive database and pull it right up. Italy's Multiply sues Google in a $3 billion lawsuit over alleged market dominance. Well, you know, we've said it before.
Europe likes to collect money from these big tech companies. They see billions of dollars out there through fines and whatnot. I mean, can you just sue somebody because of their market dominance? You know, I don't know, but they figure out a way. Weight Watchers declares bankruptcy.
Their balance sheet has lost too much weight, and guess who they're blaming for the damage? The GOP1s, I bet. 100%. I mean, no more counting calories, no more Oprah Winfrey pumping Weight Watchers. And, of course, we've said all along that Lilly and Novor Nor Dysk, these were major disruptors to a huge industry. The diet industry was huge.
And I've mentioned I used to see Jenny Craig a lot. She lived not too far from us in Rancho Santa Fe in a giant home. She certainly did well for herself. And her and her late husband, Sidney Craig, they owned some pretty big racehorses that they used to run at Del Mar. Those horses were pretty fit.
You know, while they were watching weight, they always looked good. So they had some very good runners. But, you know, a total disruption of that industry. Aurora Innovate. Oh, and what was the other one yesterday? Krispy Kreme, a victim of GLP-1. I've got to believe it's hurting the gyms, the gymnasiums, too, the Planet Fitnesses and things like that.
Aurora Innovation outlines plans for commercialization and scaling autonomous trucking. They seem to be the leader of
in autonomous trucking. Now, Pony is up again. I've never seen a stock want to tear like that. This may end up on our wall of fame. It was on our wall of flame for a while there. I mean, it had been all over the place, right? And I just decided to grit and bear it and grit my teeth. And I mean, it's in the emerging growth portfolio, which is kind of the nature of the beast. They're longer term stocks.
And Pony was up another 13%, 14% today. Aurora Innovation is kind of languishing in that $7 area. It's the U.S. version of Pony. It's in Pittsburgh. It's headquartered in Pittsburgh where our show is heard every day. We need to head up to Pittsburgh soon and get up there. And maybe when the Padres are playing the Pirates, the poor Pirates are not having a very good year.
I see they fired their manager. And I see that the Rockies are stationed in Denver that we're on. Six wins and 30 losses last time I looked at the poor Rockies. I wouldn't blame Buddy Black.
He's a good manager. I mean, you've got to have players. I saw the stadium yesterday, and it was virtually empty. I mean, it's a beautiful stadium. I've been there one time. Actually, the backdrop is amazing. But, yeah, I'm looking at the stadium, and there was literally did not look like there was very many people. No, six wins and 30 losses. Okay, Microsoft, Amazon, Google Palantir, that's who Wedbush likes.
That's pretty much, those names never change. I mean, they're big cheerleaders for Microsoft with AI and ChatGPT, and they have a big lead on Google, Amazon with their AWS services, their big warehouses and whatnot.
And, of course, Palantir, which I saw was down a little bit today. Palantir is a very expensive stock. That's all I can say. It's been a big week for software earnings. There were some real good ones, and there were some flameouts. Fortinet, I remember, had kind of a bad report. But today, Cloudflare, which is one of the upper echelon, no question about it,
They're one of the upper echelon software enterprise, computer software enterprise companies. They're out of the Silicon Valley. They're a $46 billion company. Their symbol is net, N-E-T. And today it's nothing but net. They're up 7% today after reporting earnings. We have owned that in the past.
And, you know, I just am a little more particular with my software stocks that I own.
I want to be a little bit more choosy. There was a time when I had a wider net that included Adobe, that included Palo Alto Networks, that included Cloudflare and some others. But lately I've narrowed it down to the ones that seem to be the best of the best in the software industry. But that's a very good report by Cloudflare.
and the stock is doing well. And there's a lot of other companies here that when we get to the second half of the show that have reported earnings. Now, I'll be going over, as usual, on Friday. I see the summary of the earnings, where they've come in at, where we're at right now with about 85% to 90% of the companies now reporting in the S&P 500.
The numbers now for the next quarter and the rest of the year should be pretty solid. We still have the tariffs hanging out there. We definitely did not see as much tariff damage. The only thing I would say, there's probably quite a bit of front running in this quarter, getting ahead of the tariffs, and that may have boosted the earnings this quarter. And I can see maybe a little bit of a downdraft in the next quarter that we're in right now.
Because of the front running, not having that impact anymore, it could just drop off a cliff for some companies. 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 GuntersonCapital.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. Music
And welcome back here to the second half of today's Best Docs Now show.
with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. And we're a little under two weeks out now for Warrensville, Ohio, in the Cleveland area for all of our listeners there, the whole vicinity up in that area, vicinity. And if you would like to join us Tuesday night for a workshop,
You can reserve a seat at 855-611-BEST, 855-611-BEST. And if you'd like to meet with us in person Tuesday or Wednesday during the day at that Marriott, you can make a reservation, reserve a spot with Edie at 855-611-BEST. That's 855-611-BEST. Now, let's just get a little update here.
on the market, see where we're at. Trump floating a lot of different numbers out there. It looks like the markets have moved a little bit to the downside here since we started. The Dow is now down 124. It's Friday, I told you. It's always usually kind of wild. And the NASDAQ is down 49 right now, or 50 points, and the S&P is down 15. A lot of times...
It just seems like a lot of the momentum and hot money likes to be out of the market over the weekend. A lot can happen over a weekend, especially in today's world. Yeah, particularly when you know there's something coming up, right? I mean, I go back to the early few weeks of COVID as the world was trying to figure out what the impact was going to be. Remember, you'd have big markets sell off on Friday and then,
going into the weekend and then on Mondays for a little while you'd have that money buyback in, and that progressed for a few weekends in a row until it finally just kept going. Well, this weekend with China is a very, very, very big deal. I mean, those are two major economies in the world.
that have been trading with each other for a long time, but according to Trump and a lot of others, it's been a lopsided trade with us buying a lot of their goods and them not buying much of our goods and them putting tariffs on our goods to keep them out. So they're trying to level the playing field a little bit is what it looks like. I think any kind of major news out of...
Out of China, concessions would be really good for the market. But right now, it's almost like we're going into a Fed meeting, right, on Monday. The Fed meeting's on Wednesday, and the market's quiet on Monday and Tuesday until the Fed makes their announcement. You know, that could also help the Fed with the rate cut down the line if we could get things solved with China because they're kind of holding out. They're using that as one of the reasons why they haven't cut rates yet.
because they don't know the effect of the tariffs. And obviously, China is the elephant in the room right now. Now, gold has been the number one, along with Bitcoin. I forgot to mention Bitcoin. Bitcoin's at $102,000 today. Close to what the high mark is, what, 107-ish or so? Yeah, right in there. So I would call it the asset class of the week, Bitcoin.
We own just a tiny little bit actually in the trading portfolio. That's not a portfolio I offer out to folks, but we own some BITB, which is an ETF that owns Bitcoin. The other consistent performer here in 2025 has been gold. No question about it. It has been the best hedge against Bitcoin.
the tariffs and uh... there's a stock in the news today uh... if i only had to own two or three gold stocks we own we own two i think maybe three this would be one of them anglo gold au if you look at the track record of anglo gold over the years this is one of the best gold stocks now okay
And that is an alternative to just owning the gold in your safe or buried under your mattress or wherever you keep it. Owning a gold stock. And AU has been, you know, it's a mid-cap stock. It's a $22 billion company out of the United Kingdom. I don't know if they have any rare earth exposure. Probably not, or we would have heard about it. But their sales were up 39%.
and their earnings were off the chart. And AU right now is trading at just nine times forward earnings, which would definitely make it a candidate for
for the value the relative value portfolio this stock is hitting let's see it's up 6.4 percent today look at the chart on au which is anglo gold ashante they're actually they're in south africa but they're headquartered in the united kingdom which used to have some ties to south africa
But they have 11 operations in nine countries located in Africa, Australia, and the Americas, which would mostly be Latin America. They had just a phenomenal quarter. And I would have no problem with owning this gold stock. And they pay a dividend yield of 2.1%. So you say, well, gold doesn't pay a dividend. No.
It actually costs money to store it. It's a negative yield, actually. This stock has doubled since December. It's up 100%, and it's still cheap, obviously. The earnings estimates for next year are $5.16. The stock's trading at $44.62. That's less than a 9 forward P.E. ratio. This stock still has a lot of upside potential there.
especially if gold continues to get higher they had 1.9 billion dollars in gold income so trump has been very good for precious metals yeah and keep in mind that you know those miners obviously you know the bullion is its own animal but of course you know they're they're they're running a business they've got a you know you want you want to accompany any of those miners you know the
You want good operations, right, a good-run company, and that's certainly one of them. One of the best, blue chip. Now, Rare Earth, the stock we've chose to own in the Rare Earth space is MP Materials, but, you know, you have to realize it's out there on the frontier. MP just reported their earnings. They did $60 million in sales.
They also, you know, they have a lot of lithium, too. But they're hoping to score big there with the rare earth. That seems to be one of the hot spots with that hot desert sun there.
And whatever it does, you know, I've been out there, those dry lakes and all the salt, and that's really kind of an eerie little part of the world. Elon Musk has his giga battery factory out in that area close to MP materials. But the big hope for MP is that they score some fines in the rare earth. I'm sure they're getting a lot now, but probably just byproduct.
But this stock's down 8.7%, which kind of emphasizes the nature of the beast, that it's very volatile. And, of course, rare earth is on the table tomorrow along with lunch. I don't know what they're serving there for lunch. But, you know, I'd like to be a – wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall at those meetings between Besant –
And China, Besant does not look like he's one that can be taken advantage of very easily. He's a sharp cookie. It's got to be fascinating. Yeah. No, I mean, it's certainly... And like I said, he's been in these types of negotiations, at least from a business standpoint, with folks from all over the globe. I'm sure he's had a lot of dealings with China in his...
Forty-year career. Forty-year career as a hedge fund manager. He's a capable guy. Okay, a software stock in the news. This was kind of software week. HubSpot, which is a cheaper competitor, a lower-end competitor. You know, the premier CRM software is the company with the simple CRM, Salesforce. Right.
And we don't own either one. Salesforce is a member of the Dow. That's how well Salesforce has done under Mark Benioff, CEO. Salesforce is down 1.2%, but their competitor, HubSpot,
reported earnings and the street didn't like it and HubSpot is down 11.7% today we looked into CRM you know going to a different we have Redtail which is kind of linked to our industry
You use the red tail, Barry. I'm sure that Salesforce has a lot more capability. Yeah, I mean, and usually a much higher expense tag. Much higher. So, yeah, to me, you know, in
In terms of any CRM, right, it's garbage in, garbage out. And so that's where Salesforce makes their money in terms of implementation for individuals' businesses. Yes, for my first 10 years in the industry, I had a very nice index card system that worked just fine. And then I went to Goldmine was my next one, which I liked a lot. Okay, we'll be back for the final segment of today's Best Docs Now show. ♪ music playing ♪
And welcome back here to the final segment of today's Best Docs Now show. Well, the week goes very fast. I mean, it moves fast.
By the time you look at all the news in the morning that happened since the show yesterday, sometimes you find some tidbits, some nuggets in there that are really, really valuable. But you have to screen through a lot to find the really good stories, the really salient ones that could help in managing money.
And then, of course, the market opens and it moves very quickly and you're sifting through charts and all the different stocks you're looking at with obviously a big focus on the ones that you already own. And then, of course, during the day there's news coming in. And this time of year right now it's dominated by earnings reports, which come along every three months. And then earnings season, you know, it lasts about six weeks or so.
And the heart of it is two or three weeks where there's just so many per day it's almost hard to keep track of them. But I do glance, at least glance, at every single earnings report that is on Seeking Alpha. And then, you know, at the end of the week when the bell rings and you can take a deep breath, you made it through another week,
I do my internal research and kind of wrap up everything for the week, what happened, all the highlights. I look at the technical analysis, which all changed since last week. We've pretty much had a V-shaped recovery here off that March 8th desperation low, which looked to be the washout.
But every chart's different. The small caps, the NASDAQ, oil, gold, Bitcoin, inverse funds. I look at them all. And then, of course, updating the portfolios. I'm always looking to upgrade a stock. If one's not performing or I do have quite a bit of cash still out there to spend, I
But it has to be the right thing. I had somebody email me, how come you haven't really made any buys in my portfolio recently? It's because I haven't found anything that I really like.
That's just a reflection of the market right now where it's a little bit slimmer pickings. You have to look a little bit harder. But the bottom line is... You've added to some positions we've already owned. Yes, for new people that have come in, I've added quite a bit. But as far as brand new positions, those are kind of hard to find right now.
Now, having said that, the bottom line is I sum everything up at the end of the week in my newsletter, which is my internal research. And I make sure that I look through everything very thoroughly, make sure I didn't miss anything. And then I get ready for it all to start all over again on Monday.
And I send out my internal research, which is the newsletter. Yes, it's a lot, but it's the highlights of a week of action in the market. I mean, I've distilled it down a lot. And it's in large type, and there's a lot of pictures and a lot of charts on
But there's an education there in that newsletter. If you go through it systematically with the opening article and then what happened this past week, all of the highlights,
in different areas, whether it be in an individual company or a country or the U.S. economy. There's all that for you. It would be like reading Barron's on the weekend, okay? Only much, much, much, much better than Barron's. And then look through the charts. That's a lesson in itself to see how I analyze a chart and how I come away with my prognosis.
and my current opinion of the chart. And then there's the big macro outlook, which is key. The macro outlook is key. That's our target price for the S&P 500. And we're basing that on earnings estimates going forward, which change every week.
and multiple that I apply to those earnings. We've been right since 2009 about our macro outlook because earnings have been going up. It's eventually going to come to an end, and we'll start to see a regression in earnings. That's not out there yet, but we watch for that every single week. Then we go through the portfolios, show you. I'm completely transparent. Here's what we own in them. Here's how they've done.
And then we have at the end, we have how I would have a TSP allocated right now if you have one of those government retirement funds or how I would have a 401k allocated if you've got a bunch of mutual. Most of the 401ks now have gotten more sophisticated to where you can buy individual stocks and whatnot.
And then I have pictures from my app showing you the leading sectors in the market right now, the leading mutual funds, the leading ETFs, the leading inverse funds. So it's a handful.
But, you know, if you want to learn about the market and be educated on the market, those are the things that I look at. I always call it a collection of your research. That's exactly right. I mean, I do it more for me. I learn way more from it doing it than I do in sending it out to everybody. Now, if you'd like to get four weeks of that newsletter along with access to the app,
The app, I could not manage money. It would be so cumbersome if I did not have the app narrowing down the search every day and pointing me in the right direction. And then, of course, I give out several comments during the day. Come to your email. When I see something, I say something. Maybe a half a dozen. Maybe sometimes only two or three. It just depends on the days. Some days there might be a dozen comments.
That's an education because I try to explain why I did what I did and what I'm seeing, and I usually accompany it with the chart. There's not a better deal out there. You get four weeks. I mean, if nothing else, the education there is so compact, it's like a crash course.
cramming an MBA into a few months in the market. You can go to GundersenCapital.com and sign up for four free weeks to make an appointment with us. If you like what you hear and how thorough we are in what we do and how different we are, we're not just plain vanilla asset allocators like most of our competition. You can set up an appointment with us at 855-611-BEST.
That's 855-611-BEST. It will be especially interesting to see. As of last week, we were looking for 12% growth year over year for this quarter that is being reported now. I wouldn't be surprised to see 14 or 15 by the end of the day. That will be in this week's newsletter at GundersenCapital.com.
to make an appointment for Cleveland, for the workshop, or to meet with us in person. This is a rare opportunity. 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.