Monday May 19, 2025 - We recap last week’s 5-day win streak for the markets and preview the earnings week ahead.
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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 Monday, May 19th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I am Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital Management. Sitting in for Bill today, who's traveling. He took the early morning flight to Cleveland.

And we'll be packing our bags later this afternoon to get out there. So he's beating us there. Of course, market-wise, not a ton going on, at least on the tape here. We've got the S&P down about 0.4% to start after just a huge week last week that we'll get to.

NASDAQ down 115 points, just above 19,000, down 0.6%. And the Dow basically flat, down 30 points at 42,624.

Gold, about the only green on the screen here, up $17 at $3,221. That's up half a percent. We've got Bitcoin down just under 3%, down $3,121 at $103,000.

381. So good morning again and welcome to the Monday, May 19th edition of the Best Docs Now show. Barry Kite, planner and analyst here at Gunderson Capital Management. We've got Bill traveling to Cleveland today, getting a jump start on that and also excited to have Jeff Webster joining me on the show. Good morning, Jeff. Jeff's an advisor here at the firm. How's it going?

Doing great, Barry. How are you today? Doing well. Doing well. Looks like, of course, from last week, pretty huge moves, especially when it's always nice doing the Monday edition. You've got the weekend to kind of crunch some of the numbers. And, of course, the market had a pretty miraculous week last week, I would say, right?

Absolutely. And I was wondering what it was going to look like this morning with the credit downgrade. Things are looking flat. I wouldn't be surprised if they turn green here soon. Right. I guess we'll get to it. We'll be at the downgrade edition of the Best Stocks Now show today. But, yeah, I mean, we'll certainly get to that. And, of course, we've

Dow, the market ended on a five-day win streak. All the major indices were up on Friday. You had S&P finish the week up 0.7%. I think the Dow was up 0.8% and the NASDAQ up 0.5%.

And when you crunch the numbers for the week, of course, to go back in time, and we'll talk about some of the trade progress too, but you had Besant meeting with the Chinese group officials in Switzerland last weekend.

Of course, and then we had market took off on Monday, and then the technicals or the tech names really took off on Tuesday. And so when you crunch all the numbers, we've got what the S&P was up over 5.2% last week, the Dow up 3.4%. Really, the headwind there would have been UnitedHealth.

And the NASDAQ was up 7% last week. And so just a huge weekly move. The MAG-7, Magnificent 7, if that still gets followed, I don't know if it really still exists, Jeff. But at least the MAG-7 was up over 9% last week. So just some sizable, certainly sizable moves there.

We even had a big options expiration on Friday, which interestingly enough, basically it was uneventful, which is always a plus from the volatility standpoint. And the market even shrugged off a kind of a poor consumer sentiment survey on Friday, but just really a special move in the market since the lows started.

But it's certainly still volatile out there. And I think that's one thing in terms of talking to clients, in terms of Bill kind of picked out a bottom there, but you're still tiptoeing back in the market. It's not like you're kind of flashing the all-clear signal, right? I mean, the markets will tend to.

retest that low in the next, say, within three months of kind of putting one in. So as we see this market gain, it's also you're working back in after what was a brutal pullback from February 17th or so.

But, and then, yeah, and I mean, that's what, you know, and so then, you know, obviously overshadowing kind of that is, of course, you know, pretty much right at the end of the market on Friday, we had the news of what, you know, Moody's essentially downgrading U.S. debt, which, you know, is something that's really been alluded to by them for a while, but

The country's credit rating essentially went from AAA to, I guess, AA1 would be their ratings. And so now the United States, I guess, no longer holds a perfect credit rating from any of the three major indices. Isn't that right, Jeff, from what we were talking about historically where we've had those, I guess, this would be in the third downgrade since 2011? Yep.

Yeah, and you think about, you know, as consumers, when our debt, our credit rating goes up, and it's, you know, it's a function of our income. It's a function of, you know, how much credit we have out there, how much we're utilizing, what our payment history is. And, you know, if you look at why things downgrade from a federal perspective, you know, it usually is related to, you know, ballooning federal debt, interest rate going up,

persistent budget deficits. And of course, we're at like a $1.8 trillion deficit right now. Yeah, annually. Yeah, and then the one that certainly I think Moody's has expressed concern over is just the erosion of governance, the U.S. government's ability to

to manage its fiscal responsibilities because of the various political polarization that's happening out there as it relates to the debt ceiling and tariffs and all these different things. Yeah, because you had S&P downgraded, basically took the AAA rating from the U.S. in 2011.

And Fitch, you know, kind of, I went too long ago where Fitch did it after the debt ceiling battle in 23, where it was just kind of the uncertainty, of course. We figured it out at the end, but it wasn't pretty. And so they pulled it there. So this is kind of the third time Micah said it necessarily comes as a surprise that

to the markets of course you know in 2011 it was a surprise uh didn't you know i think looking back historically and you might have done some some stuff on this uh jeff already but the in terms of the the markets they kind of shrugged it off um you know each time and of course the first one being the most shocking but in terms of this particular move it's something that they've

essentially seem to have alluded to right over time. We all know that we have a 20, you know, whatever trillion, whatever number the trillion dollar debt is out there. And we know we're running a $2 trillion deficit every year, or at least almost this year. Of course, interest costs go up.

And so all of those considerations and just politicians having the will to actually cut budgets. We saw the pushback that Elon got for Doge in terms of just cutting things is not really the popular avenue for elected officials, no matter what side of the aisle they're on, it seems. But

But it's obviously a big note. I mean, you're basically all over the financial news this morning. You can kind of tilt it in the direction you want, I think, in terms of heard Besson speak on it. And he essentially looks at it as a lagging indicator because essentially when you think about 08-09, of course, the credit agencies didn't get that right until after the fact.

And so they are, you know, it is a lagging indicator. And so from his perspective, right, I mean, you know, he's looking at, you know, the Biden years, right, as a big spending period. Of course, you know, even the Trump years going in really a lot due to COVID. It's a huge budget deficit that you've had.

continuous deficits on top of deficits, which as you know from a compound interest standpoint, compound interest always wins. And that number continues to get larger and that

feeds into where we're at now. And hopefully it'll give Washington a kick in the pants a bit. But we're just getting started here this morning. And we'll take a look at the markets and see what's going on out there. We'll be right back. It's the Best Docs Now show.

What are you feeling? Now that I've caught my love.

And welcome back here to the Monday, May 19th edition of the Best Stocks Now show. I am Barry Kite, planer and analyst here at Gunderson Capital, taking the wheel for Bill today while he makes his way to Cleveland. And we've got Jeff Webster joining me on the show. Jeff's, of course, you guys know, advisor here at the firm at Gunderson Capital Management. But Jeff, what's your take on the best stocks now?

It's looking like we've got only green on the screen here. I see right now, Jeff, we've got oil up 11 cents to 0.18%. We've got gold up 0.7% after a pretty rough day last week, up $24 at $3,227.

uh dow basically is dead flat here minus uh six uh six point seven so that's it that's point zero one five seven percent that it's down and we've got the uh s&p down about a quarter percent and the nasdaq uh staying right around that uh down 40 basis uh points range so we'll keep an eye on that as we get through the show um you know hopefully uh

Things will be a bit quiet out there. Of course, on the debt side of things, you've got the 30-year was up above 5 here a minute ago or a little earlier this morning. It's at 4.99% now.

Of course, that 30-year, that's a key number for mortgages. Bill's been talking about mortgage rates on the show and ideally then coming down, I think, with some of the mooties and some of these downgrades you're going to get.

you know, really affects the bonds further off, right? So that's why you've seen this move in, you know, I don't think we're worried about the U.S. necessarily going bankrupt in five or ten years, right? It would be, you know, those 30-year debt, right, in terms of, you know, things that you would be more worried about and require, you know, the market's going to require a higher interest rate, right, for that potentially. And so those...

With the 30-year, that's what kind of worries me in terms of potentially keeping mortgage rates there because even in a very popular area that we're here in, in Mount Pleasant, Charleston area, I mean, you noticed, Jeff, some less activity in terms of less houses for sale. You've also seen houses sit a little longer than usual. Yep.

And so that's, I guess, my biggest concern, I think, in terms of what I see from a market perspective today. You're not really seeing much of a move in the equity markets in terms of the downgrade, but it's really that, you know, keep an eye on that 30-year mortgage rate. Of course, we've got the 10-year up at 4.52, so, you know, a little bit above 4.5 there. So it's certainly important to look at it.

These aren't issues that you can fix overnight. They're things that you've got to make incremental change over an extended period of time. So we'll see what the political will really of the people are to do it at some point in time. It's either the market's going to make us do it or folks will vote pocketbook in a different way, I guess. Yeah.

One person who is cutting is the Federal Reserve. I don't know if you saw this, Jeff, where the Federal Reserve is going to cut their workforce by 10%, mainly through attrition.

So they're going to, you know, looking to reduce their headcount by 10%. They're going to, I think they're offering some voluntary deferred resignations if you want to, you know, kind of retire as of, I think you can retire as of December 31st, 2027 is what I saw here. So, you know, it's...

There's things like that where you've got to cut some places. On the opposite end of that, we had Trump's tax bill advanced through the Finance Committee late last night. A narrow vote. I think it was 17 to 16 votes.

in the budget committee, but it got through. So it'll get some more additions and subtractions before, I'm sure, things get much further down the line. But I did see something in there where they were going to, in terms of the SALT, which is local tax deduction, which is kind of a big

Certainly a big piece for a lot of folks out there. A good deduction increase from potentially $10K to $30K. I know some representatives were certainly wanting more, but that's one piece I did see in the bill to maybe help sweeten it up for folks or at least more palatable from a voting standpoint.

On the economic calendar, the good news is it seems like a pretty quiet week on the economic calendar, and we're kind of winding down earnings season here. Yeah.

And hopefully, you know, sometimes when Bill gets on the road, the markets tend to jump around and get a little wild. So hopefully this week will be a bit of a more quiet market. I'm looking at the earnings calendar right now. Some things that jump out to me this week.

Closing business today, we have Agilisys which provides hospitality software. They're reporting tomorrow

We've got Bill's My Little Pony reporting, Home Depot will be reporting. We've got Palo Alto Networks, Toll Brothers. Workday, I think, is on the list. I know that's up your alley in the software world. Yeah, Intuit, Deckers, you know, are a good –

One that we like at Gundersen Capital, you know, he's got Arquette, one of the quantum stocks that actually has an application they're reporting. Snowflake, you know, big data warehouse, data management company reporting on Wednesday Zoom. You know, everyone knows Zoom.

I don't think they are what they were three years ago. So it'll be interesting to see, you know, what people are doing now. We've got a couple of Spanish banks. Yeah, we've got Baidu, actually. China, you know, Xping, which is the X-P-E-V. That's the old...

an old electric vehicle company in China. Zim, the shipping company, they just reported this morning actually up 10% right now in terms of market. I'm sure they've got some numbers that we'll get into in terms of some of the shipping numbers since the deal a week ago.

From China's perspective, but I did see all three of the terminals on the Wando side of the river and the port here in Charleston were filled up yesterday as I drove across the bridge. So it makes sense that the numbers...

that I looked at this morning, makes sense that some of those shipping numbers are through the roof. And Zim, from an earnings standpoint, they went before the bell this morning. And it looks to be, it must be a good report, up 11%. So those shipping stocks have been on a tear since last weekend. So...

Well, we're getting through the first half of the Best Docs Now show. We'll come back and get into some specific names, hit some more earnings in terms of what we saw last week and what we've got coming up this week. Stick with us. 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. Call out the instigator Because there's something

We got to get together sooner or later. And welcome back here to the second half of the Monday, May 19th edition of the Best Docs Now show. Barry Kite, planer and analyst here at Gunderson Capital, serving as relief captain for Bill this morning while he's traversing his way through the air to Cleveland. So looking forward to that.

to getting down there and seeing some folks over the next few days. So,

Bill's getting there planting the flag first, so he may already be down there as well. But, you know, got Jeff with us here on the show as well, helping us along. And also, of course, if you want to stay up to date with Bill's thoughts, our thoughts on the markets, you know, feel free to get Bill's newsletter at GundersenCapital.com. Or, you know, if you want to have a discussion with Jeff or myself, you know, feel free to give –

Give Edie a call at 855-611-BEST. That's 855-611-2378. We're here to be a resource, and, you know, always that's our primary hat here at the firm, right, Jeff, is talking with the folks and helping folks identify and meet their goals there. All right.

Absolutely. Best part of the job. Yeah. I mean, you know, it, uh, you know, every, every, everyone has a story and it's, uh, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're lucky enough to, to, to get to, to get to hear those and help folks, uh, particularly, you know, to certainly where we can, um, from a,

And that's kind of bill on the road. That's why we want to get out. And we're certainly comfortable with geographic separation in terms of clientele. I think we've got clients in all 50 states. And so...

It's always nice to get out there and see some folks. So good news is on the economic calendar, I was saying, all we pretty much have is a bunch of must-be lecture season on the Federal Reserve because pretty much if you look, I think we've got a couple of minor data points. We've got the leading economic indicator that came out this morning at 10.

I haven't peaked at that number yet, but we'll, of course, get the weekly jobless claims. But other than that, you pretty much have a bunch of Fed speak this week, which maybe, I guess, maybe with that U.S. debt downgrade, maybe they've all got to rehash their notes for the speeches or Q&A, for Q&A at least, right? So we'll see how that goes. But it should be fairly quiet. I mean, most...

I was going to say, Barry, most of the pundits that I've been watching this morning and listening to,

They're kind of reading this credit drop of, to some extent, as a non-event. I mean, we'll see. Well, they're the third one. That's the thing. They're also the third one to the table, right? We've named off two other ones, the only other two. So it's not like we haven't seen this before.

And I'm with you. It seems like a lot of shoulder shrugs, right? It seems like as you hear some of the pundits talk about it. But, you know, I think that, you know, a lot of this stuff is importance, right? It's also, you know, the growth end, right? So, you know, one of the reasons why the U.S. has been able to run, right, these sizable deficits is, you know, is because of the fact that, you know, the underlying business, right, of the U.S. economy is

And so, you know, as we certainly, you know, trade deal, you know, all the trade, world trade has a big place big into that in terms of growth. And, you know, kind of we, you know, I think as we kind of progress, you know, through the,

You know, first week of, like I said, of the Besant-led China kind of reduced trade tensions deal. I don't really want to call it a deal. Just at least it seems like we really kind of reduced some tensions there. And, you know, we're essentially, what, I think about a third through the 90-day pause with, you know, other countries, right, when that was announced, you know, I say roughly 30 days ago. That was the day that the market went up, what, 12%, I think, in one day, at least on the NASDAQ.

So as we kind of get through these, you want to see some progress. And I think, as Bill has mentioned, the biggest deal is going to be the China-U.S. deal, right, in some form or fashion, if they can get to one, and what that looks like and how that shapes out. Of course, I think the reason that countries trade, you go back to Economics 101, is that it's beneficial for both in some ways.

In some capacity. And so, you know, I think, you know, it's important, you know, both countries, I think, you know, need, you know, need some type of deal, right? Because the fact that it is beneficial for both in terms of us and China and investments mentioned, you know, doesn't want to decouple, really only wants to decouple strategic industries to where you've got a more diversified supply chain and,

To me, that just makes good common sense there. What we've seen is kind of the pain a little bit on each side, whether it's the consumer sentiment numbers were some of the kind of poorest numbers we've had in a while that came out on Friday as we started the show on Friday. A lot of those, you look at the inflation's expectations, jumped to 7.3%.

And, of course, that's just surveys of how people feel, right? That's not necessarily hard data. And on the other end, in China, you do have some hard data. We've got some numbers that came out today where you've got

I saw where the growth industrial output slowed to 6.1% year over year, and that's from 7.7% in March. Their retail sales rose less than expected in China for the month of April. And so, you know, you're seeing, we've talked about, you know, kind of pain on each side, particularly if you get into some layoffs on, you know, on the Chinese side.

But, you know, so beneficial for both to do some trade. I think we've talked about containers, the container ships. Jeff, in terms of them being, you know, there was one big one over there yesterday evening, you know, filled up. So the terminal here, boots on the ground, was filled up.

And it looks like the trade at the spot price rates rose 31% last week in terms of what the cost of a container was. Those rates are still below April of last year. But, I mean, you've seen we talked about Zim and some of those other cargo. There's not too many of them, but those other cargo names are

really shooting up the charts and starting to show up on some of the Best Docs Now rankings, too.

Yeah, they actually, you know, one of the key metrics that they look at in that business is what's called 20-foot equivalent units, TEUs. Most of those container units are 40-foot, but they use the 20-foot equivalent unit. And while a lot of these companies are saying, you know, we anticipate the

going down, you know, that the cost for each one of those units to ship is going to be going up. And that's, you know, I think what's providing, you know, folks that choose to invest in those stocks some optimism that they're going to continue to do good and

You know, they're going to continue to effectively manage those freight rates. They're going to continue to effectively manage their vessel operating costs, which is their fuel, the crew wages, maintenance, the port fees, all those types of things, and try to continue to be as efficient as

as they possibly can with their reliability and performance. And it's a function of demand, right? When you had the slowdown in shipping, right, so the supply was outweighing demand and you had the rates going down. There's a map of...

I know Verizon does some of the tracking. I mean, not Verizon Vision, but with a Z, does some tracking where you can look at all the ships, basically where they're at around the globe. And I think the seven-day average was up like 277% over the last week. So...

Big jump there. I would imagine they're going to be busy at the ports for the next couple of months. They're trying to get stuff in here, particularly if you're doing it before a

Before a big deadline, some of the other side of that trade potential truce there last week was gold. Gold had one of its worst weeks. I think it was still up 21% year to date, but I believe it was one of the worst weeks in a while for gold.

For gold, I had the number here. Oh, yeah, one of the worst weekly drops in almost four years. So that's the other side of the equation where as some tensions ease up, then the safety trade, the fight to safety kind of moves back over to the risk side of the equation as well. Well, we're blazing through three-fourths of the way through the quarterfinals.

Monday edition of the Best Docs Now show and we'll be right back for fourth quarter here. And welcome back to the

Final segment of the May 19th edition of the Best Docs Now show. I'm Barry Kite, planer and analyst here at Gunderson Capital, sitting in for Bill today as he's headed to Cleveland. And we've got Jeff Webster here on the show as well, advisor here at the firm, holding down the fort a bit this week. And so, let's see, we've got – I was hoping we were going to get to some green numbers before we got done with the show, but –

The only thing that's really made a bit of a comeback is Bitcoin, only down about 2.25%. So everything else except for gold, gold's up $30 today to $3,234. The Dow is doing the best, I guess, just basically down 0.12% today.

And speaking of, talking about the Dow, when we went through the weekly numbers, the Dow certainly didn't participate nearly as much as the other two indices last week. And we had, do you see where UnitedHealth, which we've got UnitedHealth headquartered in the Minneapolis area, so we've got a good number of listeners in Minneapolis. But we had the new CEO, of course, Bill Gates,

rough, rough week this week for UnitedHealth, and it's been a tough six months for them.

It's been a tough year probably ever since the murder of the CEO, the co-CEO. But they named Stephen Hemsley last week. Well, he bought $25 million worth of the company shares last week. Jeff, if you were in charge, would you want to catch that falling knife?

I don't know, maybe the board, like, said, hey, we're going to offer you the job, but here's what you need to do. You need to buy $25 million worth of shares to demonstrate to the market that you're, you know, all in on this.

Yeah, I need to know. I kind of need to know the impetus. And Bill's mentioned before in terms of insider trade, you know, insider trades, right? You know, sometimes they can mean something. Other times they don't mean anything, especially on the sell side where you'll have somebody who, you know, say a big CEO, right, sells some, you know, number of shares in the market. It's like, oh, you know, CEO sold this many shares. And, you know, next thing you know, they're paying taxes or buying, you know, some palatial property and, you

you know, Malibu. And it's like, oh, well, that makes sense of why they sold the shares. They had some other transactions, just like all of us. The buying side is important. You're putting your money where your mouth is, but I need to know where the money came from. It's like, oh, by the way, we give you a $25 million signing bonus, and then he puts the $25 million on the...

on the shares, then I don't have as big of, you know, I'm not as excited about that. But bottom line is, you know, hey, he bought, you know, basically average price of around $288. So we'll see how that works out for him. I didn't realize, but he did lead the company in 2018.

2016 and 2017. So he's obviously been in the system, knows the stock better than all of us do. The CFO, John Rex, actually, he made a $5 million purchase as well last week, and he had a few board members made about $1.6 million worth. But I just thought it was interesting to note.

Yeah, I mean, we'll see where they go. So we'll keep that $288. I'm going to keep that one, write that one down over here and see how they work out. The good news is hopefully they're in control of their own destiny, right? We'll see what happens. NVIDIA, how about last week, just a big...

Big move there. I haven't looked at them as closely. The big news is that Jensen Wang is at a trade show in Taiwan, and apparently he's opening up their AI platform to developers. I haven't had a chance to read the full. I saw some headline that basically stated that Jensen

He's opening things up and saying, hey, look, this is a great time to partner with us and

And I think he made a quantum investment while he was there. I think they might have bought a quantum company. I saw another little tidbit of information that went by the ticker a little bit earlier this morning. But, yeah, so last week, NVIDIA finally, you know, they're now turned positive for the year. So they're the weightiest member of the Magnificent Seven to move into positive territory the other year.

Others being Meta and Microsoft. Meta for the year up 10% and Microsoft up I think 7% or so for the year. NVIDIA back above $3 trillion. At least they were $3.3 trillion as of yesterday, I believe. That stock, you had a really big recovery. Last week was interesting where you had

you know, really broad participation. It was just, you know, on Monday you had a lot of the, uh, laggard, you know, kind of names really popped. And then of course, Tuesday rally, uh, continued through to the, uh, to the sec, you know, to the tech side of things. And, um, it's really been, uh, you know, I mean, last week was really a kind of a, you know, broad based, uh, broad based move across the board. Um, and, uh,

From a kind of risk standpoint, you've had a number of firms took the chance of recession. I know Apollo Global, Apollo, who we follow and have owned off and on over the years, they took recession off the table after the pause of some of the tariffs or at least the

of the tariffs with China from last weekend. And you've seen it in a lot of the names that you follow. I mean, the energy names last week, right? The nuclear names. Yep. You know, even...

You know, some of the quantum names were kind of getting a bit of a boost last week, right? Which means, you know, it's kind of, I kind of look at the, some of the quantum names is almost like the new biotechs, where they risk on, move, they take off.

They report later this week. I mean, they're up, what are they up today? 17%. I'm trying to figure out what's going on with them. Again, they're the one quantum that actually has a specific application, their security. So, yeah.

Curious what's going on there. Of course, you look at some of their fundamentals and it says they have like $20 million, you know, cash. It's like, that makes me worry a little bit, but I'm not sure what's going on there.

Yeah. And then what core, I mean, core weave had a huge day on Friday. That's C R W V up. Also another up another 6% here today. That's kind of what a big, you know, cloud player, software player. And yeah, a lot of those names, you know, that will show up, show up in the app. But thanks for, thanks for getting with us. We can always follow us at Gunderson capital.com.

Give us a ring at 1-855-611-BEST. 855-611-BEST. We'll be on the road. We'll be calling from Cleveland tomorrow. Have a great day, everyone.

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 SIBC and FINRA.