Monday Dec. 23, 2024 - Quantum Stocks Very Active!
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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 Monday. It is Monday, December 23rd. The live edition of the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunnarsson, president of Gunnarsson Capital Management. And I'm here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial analyst. We do have a pretty dull market here today. It's a split decision right now. The Dow down 279 points today.

That's 65 basis points puts it at 42,561. Let's not forget it hit 45,000 not too long ago. So you're off now about 2,500 points from that recent all-time high. The NASDAQ is just barely up by 10 points right now. That puts it at 19,582 after it hit that historic 20,000 level.

Last week, the S&P 500 is down 12. That's 20 basis points. It's at 5,918. It could not hold on to that 6,000 level. The small caps are down 0.5%. And we have the bond market is up just a little bit. Not the bond market, but interest rates are up just a little bit, going up from 4.52% to 4.55%.

And we have Bitcoin down about 600 points right now. So welcome to the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management Group.

And we're here with Barry Kite, our Chartered Financial Analyst. I wouldn't expect a whole lot to happen today and tomorrow in the market. Maybe Thursday and Friday we'll get some tax selling and tax buying and tax this and tax that. But today and tomorrow should be pretty quiet as well.

A lot of people in the air, driving, already there, whatever the case may be in these days leading up to Christmas. Well, we finished Friday. If the financial news is any indication, I'm flipping through some channels this morning. I don't think I recognized many people. They're all on vacations. As soon as that bill passed Friday night, boom, they were out of there.

But the market did finish off on Friday. The Dow was up 498. It was a pretty nice rebound, you know, after that big Wednesday sell-off caused by the Fed. And you also had the NASDAQ up 200 on Friday. So we finished off okay. Congress finally got their act together.

As much as they can get it together, and they prevented a government shutdown. High Tech had a really good day, a really good day on Friday. And today, though, I find it quite dull. I'm not finding a lot of big winners in the market today, if any.

Just not moving much off of the neutral line to the positive or the negative today. Okay, let's see. The biggest news is Nordstrom. You know it's not that busy. Nordstrom, yeah, being taken private. Mexico's going to own it. I can't think of the name of that big store down there. You know, Nordstrom's was worth a whole lot more at one point in time.

They've taken a beating, and I guess they decided we better sell it before it goes down anymore. Liverpool is the name of the company down in Mexico. Speaking of down south, Trump threatens to take back the Panama Canal.

And wants the U.S. to own Greenland. Okay, all right. There's always some drama out there with Trump in the wings. He's threatened to take control of the Panama Canal. Now, I've never been through the Panama Canal. My father and mother went through it. It's got to be kind of interesting to go through there.

Apparently they are charging astronomical fees for American ships traveling through the waterway. And Trump says it's a complete ripoff of our country. This will immediately stop.

The fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous, especially knowing the extraordinary generosity that has been bestowed to Panama by the U.S. He's a dealmaker, all right, Trump said, on Truth Social. Referring to the U.S. ceding control of the waterway, that was something Jimmy Carter did. I remember how controversial that was.

back with President Jimmy Carter back in 19... We seeded it in 1999, but it was a treaty that was signed in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. So we'll see what happens there.

If we can get those, you know, everything helps with the inflationary environment that we have. You know what? Listen, it just shows up everywhere you look. A 12-pack of Mountain Dew, just the cans, you know, $9.95 now. I remember when we used to get like two for $4, two of those packs for $4, then it was two for $5, then it was two for $7, then

Then it was three for, you know, 12 bucks. And then now it's $9.95 for one pack. I couldn't believe it. I haven't bought one in quite a while. Separately, Trump named PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, that's the PayPal mafia, part of that mafia, as U.S. ambassador to Denmark, which has some pretty important companies over there, for the purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world.

This is another one he's on. The U.S. feels that the ownership and control of Greenland. Now, I've never been to Greenland. Have you ever been to Greenland? Has anybody, any of our listeners been to Greenland? I've flown over it, and my wife's grandpa actually, he was in the military, and I think he was stationed or did some flying in Greenland, around Greenland and Iceland, obviously, at one point. But, yeah, it's a...

I mean, I don't know how much of Greenland is actually green, but it's certainly important. It's mostly frozen. Yeah, it's important given its proximity to the Arctic Circle. Obviously, on the other side of the Arctic Circle, you've got Russia. Absolutely. It's a strategic. Well, anyways, he proposed this back in 2019, and the Denmark Prime Minister, Maddy Fredrickson, at that time said it was absurd.

The Danish government has not responded to Trump's latest statement. But anyways, this is the third PayPal co-founder named by Trump to join his team after David Sachs and Elon Musk. Some pretty smart people. There's some brain power definitely in that cabinet. Here's the stock of the day.

Are you ready to rumble? Rumble is now up 64%. And of course, rumble, if I remember right, it came about as an alternative to YouTube when YouTube started cracking down and really starting to go heavy in the censorship. Rumble has entered into a definitive agreement for a strategic investment of $775 million from Tether.

Now, I'm not totally up on tether. Barry, do you have any color there to add to where tether comes from? I do not. I could make up a couple of things, but it hasn't made it to my... Well, I am thinking that, you know, I plan on getting my YouTube channel back up and running again with maybe like a 10 to 15-minute spot each day on the highlights of the market.

And that's probably going to happen here in the first few months of 2025. As soon as I get the cameras back up and my hair looking right and all this and that. But I think probably we'll have to also put that up on Rumble. I guess it's big enough now to at least, I'm sure it pales in comparison to YouTube.

When I was back in New York at the NASDAQ, there was about three or four people there. I kind of know one of them from Seeking Alpha.

And they all have YouTube channels. I guess it's not the barrier to entry to have a YouTube channel. Not that much. Pretty slim, yeah. And, of course, they make money off of ads. They're in the $30,000 to $50,000 range of people that are subscribed to their YouTube channels. Like and subscribe, right? Yeah. So they make money when they run ads and stuff on their YouTube channel. But anyways, it sounds like Rumble is...

is a player here. And is the Tether, I mean, is that the Tether that's the stable coin? Tether is a Bitcoin, a crypto coin of some sort. It's a stable, you know, quote-unquote stable coin. It must be a conservative stable coin because Rumble is definitely conservative. I know that Dan Bongino and a few others were investors in the early days.

This was back when they were deplatforming people off of YouTube and demonetizing them. And now there's a...

Of course, there's a liberal competitor to X. I think it's called Blue Sky. They've been after me to start. It's hard enough just to answer my emails, let alone all these social platforms. Okay, when we come back, there's a big merger in the making here. And then a huge target price increase on Lilly today.

We'll be right back.

And welcome back here to the second quarter of today's Best Stocks Now show. Well, everything's gone rad right now, Barry. I'm going to take my ball and go home. I've had it for the day. We've got the Dow down 245. The Nasdaq's now down 16. There's just not much. It's very light volume. Volume has to be low. Yeah, I mean, look, everybody with Christmas on Wednesday,

That's going to really make the market pretty dull. Thursday and Friday could get interesting, but today just seems like there's just not a lot of appetite for buying stocks today. Honda rallies after merger talks with Nissan, and I read that Mitsubishi might also rally.

be in there also that'd be a pretty formidable i mean to take on toyota i suppose and of course the u.s car makers honda which boy i remember honda had a pretty big share of the u.s market there and so did nissan but now they've had they've fallen on hard times honda's up 11.8 percent today

Nissan is down 1.2%. I have no interest in any of these stocks, but it's just interesting to see what Japan kind of has to resort to to keep up, stay in the race here for a portion of the U.S. auto market.

Now, okay, two good pieces of news on Lilly today, and I bet the stock's not moving. It is a little bit. It's up $11 a share. Lilly had very good news, a spate of good news with the struggles that

that Wagovi and its competitor Novo Nordisk is having. They lost, what, almost 20% in the day last week. Novo did. And Lilly has been trying to get approval, gaining an indication that where a doctor could prescribe Zepbound for sleep apnea, and so far they haven't been able to get that. But they got it.

The U.S. FDA has approved an additional indication for Eli Lilly's Zepmounter's Epitide to include obstructive sleep apnea in obese adults.

Okay, so you see the commercials of the people wearing the big equipment on their heads and on their noses and on their ears, these sleep apnea machines that provide a nice continuous flow of oxygen through the night. And that market's

is pretty much dominated by ResMed and a few others. Okay, and then you have the second one that came along, which is the device that's implanted, which was not a bad stock, but, you know, that's an invasive procedure.

Okay, well, losing weight is the best way to help with your sleep apnea. And so they finally got approval. So that's one more thing that it can be prescribed by a doctor. And, you know, I think that brings into the equation coverage by your insurance. So that's good news for Lily. The second bit of good news is J.P. Morgan said,

They named their top health care stocks for 2025. Now, I've always been a fan of health care stocks. I found a lot of big winners over the years. Dexcom comes to mind. Gilead Sciences comes to mind. We've had a lot of big winners in this industry. Okay, Lilly...

J.P. Morgan is putting out a $1,100 target price on Lilly, and I would agree wholeheartedly. Now, hopefully the market agrees someday, but J.P. Morgan says about Lilly, this company is the cleanest name in our sector. The stock's recent pullback has created a more attractive entry point for what has perpetually been an expensive story.

Well, that's true. I mean, you're paying about 40, at the peak, you were paying 45 times earnings. But, you know, the growth can support that, in my opinion. JP Morgan says, from here, we see a clear path for the stock to recover, driven by a strong and highly defensible position in an unprecedentedly large T2D obesity market.

So anyways, I think Lilly's in a good – there's no excuses for 2025. I was asked during my interview over there at the NASDAQ. I should have mentioned one of my biggest disappointments for 2024 is that Lilly didn't do better than it did. So maybe things are well – I mean, they really have got a lot of things set up for 2025.

They seem to have cleared out the compounders, and they're clobbering their competition, their main competition. And I don't really see any weight loss drugs. Now, there's a lot of drug companies, a lot of biotechs working on a weight loss product.

But nothing really seems out there on the horizon. Nordstrom has been a publicly traded company for 53 years. You know, it was my mother's favorite place to shop. I remember the silver boxes. They were beautiful. There would be a few of those underneath the tree. And you knew it would be something that was really high quality. The customer service at Nordstrom's was phenomenal.

And then came Amazon. You know what? I mean, look, that could be one of the most disruptive. When you think of the size of the disruption that Bezos caused, little did they know, these retailers. I put a picture in my newsletter over the weekend of the day Amazon went public. And there's a very young Jeff Bezos there.

And little did these companies know, Sears, Nordstrom, Macy's, Bed Bath & Beyond, whoever else was wiped out in the pathway of Amazon, leaving behind the carnage. Kmart, all of these retailers busted up.

by a little company named Amazon that didn't even have a store. And his original intention was to go after Barnes & Noble, the book business, and then it grew into what it is today. Nordstrom's accepts a $6.2 billion buyout. You know, I want to say at one time Nordstrom's was probably a $50 billion company, somewhere up in that range. Let me just take a look if I can see anything. What was their highest price today?

Over the years, you go back, it was $80 a share. So that's three times. Yeah, well, it was at least $20 billion.

With the Nordstrom family, they saw a lot of money disappear. There was a time, Barry, they owned the Seattle NBA franchise. Oh, yeah, the Supersonics. Yes, their tentacles were huge in Seattle, and now, I mean, they're dwarfed by all the other, the giant super, well, Amazon is based in Seattle, and others, Costco, etc.,

And Nordstrom's got their launch aid. What can I say? Now it will be owned by Liverpool, which I've been in a few of those Liverpools. They're nice stores down in Mexico. And it will be taken private. No longer will it be a public company. 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. Music

and welcome back here to the second half of today's best stocks now show where uh

You know, there's just not a lot of excitement. There's just no buying appetite right now at this stage of the game. The NASDAQ is now up by one point, and the Dow is now down by 206. But I don't imagine there's a lot of players today sitting behind the desk.

You know, with big bucks to put down, it's not a good day to make any kind of big trades. I mean, with big block trades, trading's okay with little personal accounts and whatnot. Okay, the U.K. is weighing facial recognition technology to keep kids away from social media.

Well, you know, I really think social media, here I am trying to figure out, you know, how to keep up with all my social media, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X, Rumble, and not true social even, you know. I mean, by the time you do post on all of those, it's very time-consuming.

I think most companies now have dedicated social media people that just do the social media for the company. I do our social media. And, you know, at some point in time, I suppose, you know, we'll have to find somebody to handle the social media aspect that I try to keep up on. But anyways, I don't think it's good for kids at all.

I think kids are better off using their brains, using their minds, writing stories, doing painting, venting, all kinds of things instead of screwing around with social media.

And I really believe it's harmful. I really do. It's certainly not productive. Don't put it that way. So anyways, you know, a kid's going to lie about their age. Are you 18 or over? Well, sure, they're going to click yes, but the facial recognition comes on. Oh, no, Joe, we've seen you before on here. We know your age, which gets a little intrusive at the same time. So anyways, trying to get kids unhooked.

From social media. Just YouTube. I mean, just like the, you know, it's funny. I mean, like in terms of, you know, the content on YouTube where, you know, YouTube, as you mentioned earlier, YouTube channels, you know, YouTube TV. You know, it's, there's a, one video may be, you know, may be educational and the next video, no.

Not so much, right? It's hard to tell. Warp, propaganda, whatever. Trick the mind. Palantir continues to become a monster. You know, I was talking about everything that Palantir is getting into now.

I did name Palantir on Wednesday in my NASDAQ interview as my highest conviction stock for next year, 2025. It had a huge day on Friday. It was up big time. Granted, Sharers does have a two-times Palantir. The symbol is P-T-I-R.

PLTR is the actual stock. This is now a $179 billion company. That's one of the fastest moves. The only faster move I've seen than that was NVIDIA, which went right into the Dow. Of course, NVIDIA has been around for a while. But Palantir went public in 2020, $8 a share, and now it's $180 billion. We've talked about their...

Their exposure to AI, we've talked about their exposure to quantum computing. We've talked about their exposure to crypto. Now they're trying to form a consortium to take on the big defense companies, which could be interesting. Defense and military is getting a lot more high-tech now.

Now it's cyber attacks, drones, all kinds of different kinds of warfare, laser beams, space, satellites. And they have to develop their own AI models. I've seen in terms of where AI is going, a lot of these countries for national security purposes are really going to have to create their own systems.

AI models just like Meta and other companies are doing it and Palantir is a company that can help them with that. Yes, and they all want a piece of that $850 billion annual budget on defense.

We'll see what the Doge boys, if they can put any kind of a dent in that. But I would think that more of the site, I would think you would bring costs down for defense with some of this high-tech stuff instead of building all of these aircraft carriers and submarines and whatnot, which are still necessary.

But I would think that maybe you can bring down the cost by doing it more through cyber. I know that a drone's a lot less expensive than an F-35 built by Lockheed Martin. We'll see where this goes. And a human life. Yes, and nobody to die if the drone goes down. Okay, as quantum computing stocks soar, Wall Street analysts take bullish stance.

Okay, so could this be one of the themes of 2025? I think so. I think, though, however, you're really in the early stage. This is down around, I call it the Cathie Wood stage of development. These are long-term. Maybe they'll be profitable someday. Maybe they won't.

This is really out there, but the quantum computing has become the talk of the town after several major updates in the space.

including a mind-boggling quantum computing chip. That was that Willow chip by Google. That really kind of was the opening shot fired over the bow. That's what kicked off those quantum names. And Amazon investing in the quantum names. So right now, it's just a matter of time before we have a quantum ETF, which invests in all of these stocks.

But right now you've got QU, let's just check and see how they're doing today. QUBT, ooh, that's a good chart on QUBT. That's a really good chart. It's up 9% today. You've got Rigetti, which I've already done a quick trade on and did very well. Rigetti is just exploding to the upside today. It's up 27%.

Jeff Webster was telling me there's a new article out on Rigetti today. And then you've got D-Wave, which seems to be the real deal. So while the rest of the market is dull, really dull, these are really exciting charts here. D-Wave is up 22.2%.

And then ARQQ would be the other big one. I brought these to your attention several weeks ago. I said, look, it was the day Amazon disclosed their investments in these companies. Well, that's why we call it the Best Stocks Now show. But we're also, I try to find these things way before. I try to find them, I try to be first to market with this stuff.

with the information on these stocks. I'm adding one today. Let's see, what was it that I added? Oh, yeah, we'll get to that story in a minute in the last segment of the show. But we also have ARQQ, it's up 2.3%. This is the real deal, it really is. And then, of course, Google itself is up one cent today.

But I think there's some, oh, and then there's IONQ. All of these are in the app, and they're showing up in that A-plus momentum list, but they are volatile. Rigetti was down like 32% one day last week, and now they're having a good day. You can see really the three quality ones. They're all up over 20% today. Okay, here's the one that I added to the app today.

And, you know, five years from now, J.P. Morgan will be talking about this stock. It's still around. Six months from now, maybe you'll hear about it on CNBC or whatever. Pony. My biggest gripe, my biggest problem with Pony is it's Chinese.

And I have a real bias against Chinese stocks. You know, been there, done that, been burnt a few times. Got burned with, what was that, coffee stock? Luckin' Coffee. Luckin', oh yeah. No luck there, boy. But I got out for a big profit. Yeah, right, we did. But it's still, you know...

It was one of those stocks where all of a sudden it popped up some accounting issues. It's kind of like SMCI, but with not as good of a happening. Big time accounting issues where they were just making up numbers. And people that held on to it, we sold it up around $0.38 or something. Then it went to like $0.10 or something. People got hot coffee spilled in their lap, man. Oh, that was a mess. Okay, now Pony...

This, according to Pony, rallied early trading on Monday after the quiet period for analysts. Ratings expired. So after they go public, we'll finish the story when we come back. This thing has only been public for one month now, okay? And you're probably hearing about it the first time. Pony AI, ADR, it's a robo-taxi player. We'll be right back with more on this story.

And welcome back here to the final segment of today's Best Docs Now show. You know, going back to New York City...

I could only not help but think about robo-taxis as we, you know, the Uber driver negotiated the course from LaGuardia Airport to Times Square. Right. At 5 p.m. in the evening, 5.30 p.m. It's hard for me to imagine a robo-taxi.

autonomous, fully autonomous level four car negotiating that madness, that mess with cops blowing whistles.

pedestrians taking advantage of traffic jams to dart between cars. I mean, I just don't know how it's going to work. And human drivers also mixed in with robots. That's the part that throws me off. It can be hard for a computer to predict what our fellow human driver is doing. Yeah, and you know, the Uber driver told me that the worst problem they have is the jaywalkers.

They used to ticket jaywalkers in New York City, but then they found that there was a disproportionate amount of tickets being handed out to minorities. So they decided not to ticket jaywalkers anymore. And now it's madness, really. Well, if they can't figure it out in China, which has got to be even worse than New York City, although it's hard for me to imagine,

Pony, Pony up. Okay, Pony has got some astonishing growth going on. So you have to take notice of that. Their last two quarters, their sales were up 101%. So this is kind of just getting off the runway, really and truly, as a stock. But keep in mind, it's Chinese, which adds a level of risk.

But right now it's very much under the radar, and I read some very positive things here from Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs, the quiet period is over. It's been public now for a month, and now the analysts can start weighing in.

Goldman Sachs fired off a buy rating on Pony on its view that the robo-taxi player is positioned to be a leader in level four. Okay, level four is fully autonomous. Looking down the road, the firm sees compound annual growth of 158%. Now, that's per year. That's compounded. Yes, from 2027 to 2030 as the company scales up its operations. Okay.

Well, can you imagine the need, the demand for robo-taxis in China? Bank of America also initiated coverage on Pony. What's the symbol? Pony, with a buy rating. So it's in the app. It's now in the app. I'm sure it's going to start showing up in my A-plus momentum list.

And I would just say right now, well, maybe you could make an investment in Pony, but I think it will also be a very viable trading vehicle, autonomous trading vehicle along the way. B of A's number crunching on Pony,

For the robo-taxi business, we expect the fleet size, empowered by Pony's technology, to reach 68,000 units by the end of 2029. And then it really goes up exponentially from there. So only 68,000 by 2029? Yes. I mean, this is going to take a while. But Pony has... That's a long-duration play. Yes, they have very ambitious plans for 2025 to really take off the runway.

So that puts them in there with the RoboTaxi peer plays right now are WeRide, WRD, Aurora Innovation, AUR,

Pony, which is Pony. And then, of course, you've got Tesla, Baidu, Alphabet, Mobileye, Uber, and Lyft. Yeah, a lot of those big names aren't necessarily pure plays. But, yeah, you don't have a ton of players in that space in terms of investable players. No, and a lot of them have dropped out. Apple dropped out and GM dropped out. But that seems to be the next big challenge for humankind now.

Now that we've figured out AI and it's running, and I'm sure AI will have a big part of this whole autonomous thing. We'll see whether or not they can solve this AI puzzle in a city like New York City at 5.30 p.m. right before the holiday season, which has got to be about as crazy. The flight to New York is just so easy. It's just so easy.

But once you – LaGuardia is an easy airport to navigate, really easy. So is Charleston. But then you get in that Uber and, you know, you get a little ways away from LaGuardia and all hell breaks loose. Yeah.

It's really, it's just nuts. Okay. And the key on that, the one thing I've thought about in terms of some of that autonomous driving is what do you do with weather? I mean, it seems like it would, you know, yeah, it could work great, right, in a vacuum. But then when you get into, you know, some rain, wind, snow, right, I mean, do they just not operate during a certain time of the year? I mean...

There's a lot of variables that come into play there, okay? Crashes up ahead, detours, you know, all kinds of pedestrians starting in and out of traffic. Road work. It is crazy. All right, we are out of time. The last one I wanted to mention is Google's Wing.

which is a drone that will hover over your house and drop dinner down to you. Now, that would be something, you know. That's what the folks in New Jersey think about that. This is starting up in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. You can order food from two malls in the Dallas-Fort Worth area today.

And the Google Wing will pick it up and it lowers it down. The drone hovers over your house and lowers down a gourmet meal to you. Sounds pretty good to me. I like that even better than the autonomous cars.

Anyways, I just can't believe the people that have signed up for the four-week trial to everything. Everything that Gunderson has to offer, the Christmas buffet, the New Year's Day buffet, with all my messages that I send out during the day, my observations, every buy and sell I make, whether it's an investment.

or whether it's just in the more fun, I guess, trading account, which we've done pretty well with so far. No guarantees going forward. Good source of idea generation. It's a good source of idea generation, bringing stocks to your attention. I'm in water every day up to my eyeballs.

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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.