Tuesday July 1, 2025
40:07 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 July 1st. Welcome to July. This is the Best Stocks Now show with professional money manager Bill Gunderson, president of Gunderson Capital Management. I'm here with Barry Kite, our chartered financial analyst. And we have a mixed market here so far today on this first day of the third quarter of 2025.

We've got the Dow up 112 points. I'll have to take a look and see what's doing it. Probably a few stocks. It's up a quarter of a percent, but the NASDAQ is down 64 after hitting a new all-time high yesterday. We'll have to look and see what's doing that. That's got to be a few big tech stocks. I saw the nuclear stocks were down a little bit today. The S&P 500 is down 9 after hitting a new all-time high yesterday.

It's at 6,196. The small caps are down a quarter of a percent. They did not have a good first half of the year at all. And they continue to be a poor place to be invested, small cap stocks. And they have been for quite some time.

which is unusual we've got the 10 year down a couple of basis points we're at 4.22 and you know with with the rates down at that level we're seeing that higher multiple in the market although it's a little bit stretched right here gold is having a good day gold is up one and three quarters percent it's at 33.66 and bitcoin is down 1245 dollars to 106.452 so

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 are off to the races here to begin a new half. The halftime show is over. It was brief. It was overnight. And here we are back again. We're going to get the day off on Friday, Friday.

July the 4th, happy 4th, happy July the 1st, two more days and we get a three-day weekend. And we do have a mixed market to start the second half of 2024, 2025. We also have a very expensive market, which I talked about at length yesterday. At the same time, you're seeing a little bit of a melt-up. And I personally think that a lot of these guys missed

The big run after that March 8th, March 9th low. And now it's like Johnny-come-lately getting into the market, not wanting to miss out, even though the valuations are extremely stretched here. The S&P 500, top 6,200 for the first time yesterday. And the NASDAQ seizes all-time high as trade deals progress.

They are progressing. There's some hardcore tactics going on. Canada, of course, with the digital tax. Japan. President Trump wants them to buy more of our rice. They do have a rice shortage, believe it or not, in Japan. And, you know, when I flew into Sacramento, we're growing a lot of rice here in the U.S., especially in that California Delta area where there's an abundance of water there.

And it's premium rice. It's a very good quality rice. So, yeah, I'd like to see them buy more rice, too, from the U.S. We've got the Carolina gold down here. Yeah, I don't know if we still grow it. I don't know if we really do much anymore either, by the way. I know they've got a...

I ran up the Cooper River one day, and I ran into an old rice field. Almost got my propeller stuck, my outdrive stuck there. I was watching my... It's a little sketchy as you get up close to the dam up there for Lake Marion. And those are old rice fields up in there. They're submerged now.

But not submerged by much, as I found out. You've got to stay within that traffic lane or you're going to get in trouble. Lots of alligators in that traffic lane by that dam up there. Oh, I'm glad I didn't get out to try to push the boat off of the reef I was on. There's one spot up there that I've seen on a video before, and it looked like a bunch of piranhas. Oh.

A bunch of alligators. I'm not going up there anymore. That's my last trip, only one-legged Bill. U.S. President Donald Trump ramped up trade pressure on Japan with tariff threats targeting rice and automobiles. And, of course, they want to sell more of their autos, and we want to sell more of our autos. You know, I did get a little color. I didn't know this, that somewhere in that China trade deal,

I was reading this in a report by Hasbro. He did carve out an exception for toys and hobbies to 10%. You know, China's what, at a 30% tariff? Right. And somewhere in there was a carve-out. Because I noticed that, you know, model train stuff never really jumped 30% like it was expected to do. But he did carve out a 10%. And Hasbro's very happy about that.

I guess they've got a big hit on their hands. We'll get to that in a little bit. But that does help because that would have been a terrible blow to the hobby, toy, you know, that kind of stuff that we really don't want to build here in the U.S. Trump and Musk are at it again as Trump questions the level of subsidies of Elon Musk companies.

Elon Musk's report was horrible today, just absolutely horrible. I was expecting that. His European sales are dropping off a cliff. And, you know, look, I mean, he's got a lot of fall. He's got a lot of pushback for his involvement in Doge. It didn't go well. He kind of made both sides mad. You know, in the end, Trump is kind of mad. And I don't know if the MAGA people are mad at Elon Musk.

And those that are on the left-hand side of the aisle are mad at Elon Musk over getting involved at all in all of that. So he kind of hurt his brand quite a bit. Luckily, he's got a lot of other irons in the fire. He raised billions of dollars in his AIX startup, XAI I guess it's called.

which he may fold into the company formerly known as Twitter, called X. So he's doing just fine, but Tesla sales are not. The Chinese are really hurting, not only the fallout from being involved in Doge, but the Chinese cars, their sales and their growth is way up in Europe today.

while his is way down. Trump and Paramount in advance talks to settle the 60 Minutes lawsuit. Well, you know, 60 Minutes doctored the interview with Kamala Harris because some of her answers were so bad they had to edit the answers out. And he didn't think that was fair. And he filed a $10 billion suit saying,

He was seeking $10. He lowered it from $20 billion. He wants $10 billion. But it's gone far enough to where they're going to reach some kind of a settlement. There's definitely enough there. Also, it caused a huge uproar at CBS where you had the abrupt exit of the executive producer. Yeah, I mean, like Dan Rather many years ago with the George Bush interview.

He reported some wrong information, and it cost him his job. He'd been there for many, many years. And CBS also lost their CEO, Wendy McMahon, who was there for a long, long time. Musk is also threatening to start another party. Not a party like, you know, where you have wine, music, and this kind of thing. No, a third party called the American Party.

We pretty much have a two-party system. I can't see that changing, and I don't think Elon Musk has enough of a following, but that's his threat because he's not happy with the big bill, the big bad bill, the big bad beautiful bill, however you want to look at it. And Silicon Valley has got a little bit of grief over it. They want a few changes and a few amendments, and that thing is kind of hung up right now.

They got a deadline to get it done. They all are trying to get to vacation. Yes, they like to get it done. And I've listened to a few of them on both sides. On the one side, they're saying this is the most expensive bill ever put forward. Well, you know what? That's not exactly. Over 10 years, adding $3 trillion, but not taking into account the growth.

and not taking into account the collection of the tariffs. And talk about the kettle calling the pot black. It was Schumer who said, this is the most expensive bill. You know, some of these pork bills by both sides over the last many years, at least there's not a bunch of this pork bill.

packed into this sausage here. Tesla's Europe slump deepens. Sweden and Denmark registrations fall over 60%.

Those are registrations of new Tesla's car. New Tesla car is down 60% year over year. That's a heck of a hit. And right now, Tesla's stock is taking a hit. Last I looked, it was down 7%. Now it's down 4.2%. So there's some buying coming in. We'll be right back. ♪♪♪

And welcome back here to the second quarter of today's Best Docs Now show. Well, while

Musk deliveries or actually registrations of Tesla fell by 60% in a couple of countries, Sweden and Denmark. Li Auto, China, LI, their sales were up 20% or no, not Li, it was the other one, NIO. NIO was up 25% year over year. So they're gaining market share and I got to believe it's coming from Tesla, right?

You know, China...

They're putting out a lot of electric cars. I had one guy write to me. He says they're all going to a vacant lot in one of the provinces there in China. I've seen that. I saw stuff about that, I don't know, a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago. But, yeah, I mean, almost like it was kind of how they built those ghost cities, right? I've heard them building cars off the line and just putting them out in the field. I don't know if a lot of that's been...

necessarily confirmed, but I've certainly seen some pictures and we did have someone send that in. Well, China's been known to do some funny stuff. The coffee company Luckin Coffee was just making up the numbers. They just opened it, by the way. They just opened their first store here in America, actually. I saw a news thing about it today. I thought you were going to say right here in Mount Pleasant.

Yeah, I don't know where they go to that. It's a ghost store where they dump the coffee into the trash can every day. It looks like they've got a lot of customers. I don't know. You know, that's all I know is they report the numbers, and the stock moves higher in a lot of cases, especially with that BYDDF, which recently split.

Three for one. Now, you're wondering why the drone maker, AVAB, it's one of the biggest laggards today. Not that much. It's down 7%. They did a secondary offering. And that's the problem. Stocks break out. They hit new highs. Everybody wants some. And they floated. Get it while it's hot. And they floated more shares, which dilutes stocks.

the current owners, but it just depends on what they do with the money, with the proceeds from those shares. If they can get a good return on the investment that they make, on the money that they take and float out there, it could be accretive over time and add to their earnings. So it's really up to the company. But any time a company does a secondary offering, for the most part,

It's going to be a negative on the stock for a day or two. Let's see. Lee Auto Deliveries fell 24% year over year. They hit $111,000 for the quarter. That's pretty good. I mean, they're doing...

500 million cars a year. That's a lot of cars. Doge said to target SEC policies. That's one of the things that they're having some indigestion over in Silicon Valley. They want an easing up of the rules. You know, I was not a fan of the SPACs, the Special Acquisition Act.

corporations which made it really easy you float us back for ten dollars it was not even a business it was just money sitting there looking to buy a business i don't like the whole idea myself they even had a spacky tf a few of the specs turned into spectacular investments but most of them a lot of them never found anything to buy

And they just closed and liquidated. But they want deregulation from the SEC, and they even want to go into the SEC and change some of the rules. And the SEC is saying, wait a minute, you know.

But DOGE, we're an independent agency, the SEC. We don't want to have anything to do with DOGE setting our regulations on stocks. Who knows? Maybe there needs to be a few things changed with the real IPO process. But the goal, the reasoning behind the actual normal IPO process is to –

just make sure that the company's worthy, number one, of investment a lot of times versus with SPACs, you can kind of get funded faster with less, you don't need...

Yeah, it's very quick. Certainly as much paperwork to do it, which creates in certain instances the potential for more fraud or investors to get hurt a bit. Yeah, I'm against it. U.S. Supreme Court to hear the Enbridge pipeline. Well, you know what? We'll see. It's finally going to go to the Supreme Court.

How long, how many years have they been fighting over that? Now, this is the one that takes, this is with the state of Michigan and Governor Whitmer. Enbridge wants the case heard by the federal court, arguing that the dispute deals with foreign relations between the U.S. and Canada. Michigan's Governor Whitmer ordered Line 5 shutdown in 2021, deeming it an environmental threat to the Great Lakes.

So does she have the power to do that, to shut down international trade between two countries? Enbridge refused to comply, believing Whitmer exceeded her authority because federal jurisdiction should take precedence. Well, we'll get an update when we're there in about four weeks or so in the Michigan-Detroit area. You know, people have differing attitudes on Governor Whitmer there in Michigan.

in michigan and of course when we go to minnesota there's differing opinions on uh on walls governor walls up there but we'll see i mean it looks like it's going to end up in the supreme court i would just think i mean i'm just using logic i wouldn't think a governor has the power to shut down a pipeline that connects two countries that to me seems to be a federal issue

All right, now here's your homework assignment, Barry. Play this game over the Fourth of July weekend with your kids. This is a massive hit. Is this the Hasbro one? Hasbro Magic. It's a card game. Okay, I just looked it up on Amazon. I've got a lot of grandkids. We play games on Sundays, a lot of different games. And I was looking this thing up on Amazon. The whole set...

The Ultra set is $320. That's it, huh? For a card game? Does it come with Uno? This is all of the modules. The basic set is $164. It's based on Lord of the Rings.

Tales of the Middle Earth. Then you have all these booster boxes. It's almost like baseball cards or Pokemon. It sounds like Pokemon, yeah. Collect them all. You get 30 packs of magic cards. Now, this is the one Hasbro was saying, this is going to drive our growth for quite some time.

And not only that, here's the Final Fantasy Commander Deck Bundle. It includes all four decks, $370, and there's a backlog for it. If you order it today on Prime, you get it July 17th. So this is a major hit. It's got coins. It's got cards.

If any of you have played this, send me an email, bill at gundersoncapital.com. Let me know how it is. It doesn't sound like my cup of tea. I'm more of a strategy kind of guy, trivia and strategy. And look at this. It's got collectible dice. Big hit for Hasbro, which will drive 2026 revenue and beyond. And their tariff's only at 10%, so they're very happy right now. We'll be right back. 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 Docs Now show.

with professional money manager Bill Gunderson. Let's just take a look here and see if the market... I think the big bad bill is probably a little hiccup. They're waiting to see if that gets resolved in the market.

I saw comments from Yardini, Ed Yardini, who does a lot what I do as far as the macro outlook, updating earnings every week, target prices. He says, like I would agree totally with what he says, we usually are in agreement with the work that we do. He says the bull market obviously is still intact.

but he says that there is the risk of a melt-up. What's a melt-up? Well, I talked about that yesterday. A melt-up is a big move higher in the market despite very high valuations in the market, and that can be caused, I would say in this instance, by FOMO, fear of missing out or fear of,

They were left behind. They got left behind and didn't believe. How many times did I say that, look, here's an article on CNBC that says this isn't real. This rally is the most hated rally. Investors are not buying it. That went on for months. And now that it's hitting new highs, oh, well, okay, maybe this is a real rally in the market and they're getting in now.

So, you know, it's kind of hard to evaluate just how high that's momentum taking over in the market.

And so that gets to be a little bit on the dangerous side, and you have to be on the vigilant side of the ledger. Things are picking up a little bit in China. I see that their manufacturing index is doing pretty well, starting to pick up once again.

And there was a big hiccup there, obviously. We saw it right here in our port in Charleston, Barry, when the boat sat there for several days without being unloaded. Right. While things were being worked out between Washington and Beijing. Right.

on where the tariffs would land. They couldn't unload the stuff. I hope it wasn't bananas or anything. They couldn't unload things out of those containers off the ship. Once they hit American shores, they were subject to the tariffs. But I will say this. It's definitely going to hurt China. One company after another is moving their diversifying away to,

And, you know, that's not just the tariffs. COVID exposed a lot of weaknesses in the supply chain.

where we were too dependent on goods. Pharmaceuticals would be a good example of things coming from China. We had that baby formula issue. Remember that? That was something where only basically one place was making it at the time, which is not good for a supply chain. Well, I see Hewlett-Packard. They're going to spread it around from Asia to places like Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia,

Mexico, other areas diversify the supply chain. I think that's all good, but at the end of the day, China is kind of the loser in that. There's a new problem out there with AI. Okay, AI, this is a new term. I did not know this, but there's AI crawlers out there.

And a crawler is gathering information, right, so that they can feed it into the AI system. It's going on like behind closed doors here. Cloudflare is now the first Internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers accessing content without permission. So a crawler could come in and follow my show and my newsletter for several weeks online

And then come up with your own show. You could never duplicate what we do. But anyways, and the newsletter. But it's happening like L.A. Times articles and writers. Reddit is actually fighting this because there's tons and tons of just...

different discussions on Reddit and you can use that, you know, use that data to help train, right? Some of these AI models and, you know, number one, they don't want you to take their data. You know, number two, it,

It's actually valuable to them to read it. It's like if you're going to take it, at least let me sell it to you. Yeah, we want to be paid for it. Right. But these crawlers have been scraping content, I mean, without limits because they want the more content they have, the better the AI is because it goes out.

It kind of arrives at what the consensus of all the different, I mean, they're scraping recipe. It goes on and on and on. Cloudflare also noted a list of companies and organizations in support of a permission-based approach for AI crawling.

which include Adweek, the Arena Group, the Associated Press, the Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Engineers, Ground Views, Half-Baked Newsletter, O'Reilly Media, Quora, and it goes on and on and on and on and on. It'll end up in the Supreme Court, I would think. But I would think that the creators of the content, I mean, it's a whole new world out there. Look at these poor artists.

We used to stand in line to buy one song from the Beatles on a 45 record, right? And now you've got an all-you-can-eat buffet of all the music.

on apple for so much a month and it's all there it's subscription based now d wave quantum completes a 400 million dollar at the money offering there goes another one see that stocks had a little bit of a run up here

And they go to the well and they do a secondary offering. Okay, I've been waiting for this all year long or for the last several weeks. The top picks from Bank of America.

For the second half of the year. Hey, look, you know what? You've got to go where you want to go. Do what you want to do. But I just, you know. Okay, so here they are. Bank of America came out with a new list of its top ten ideas. Bank of America's Merrill Lynch, for the most part, for the third quarter on Tuesday. They have eight long ideas and two short ideas. Okay, Cisco. Cisco.

Cisco is probably the most owned stock in America. You know, they had their day 20 years ago. They're still a decent company, but they're not a double-digit grower. Okay, their number two is Boeing. You know, then Datadog, Fair Isaac.

Eh, you know, this is a tough interest rate environment for Fair Isaac, which does FICO scores when you apply for credit. KeyBank, KeyCorp out of Chicago. Levi Strauss. Boy, I don't know about that's a growth industry anymore. Medtronic, very sluggish growth. Warner Brothers Discovery. Oh, my gosh. That talk is so overloaded with debt.

and problems so there's eight of their uh... their of their long picks on the long side right down those eight make your little portfolio do a paper trade see how it does they're too short ideas are con agra and hymns and hers

Maybe we should buy those. Levi Strauss is one of their top picks for Q3. You know how old that company is? Levi Strauss? Is that really a growth industry? What, 1%, 2% a year or something like that?

I don't understand it, but hey, you know what? It's a competitive marketplace, and guys like me and them, we have differences in our opinions, and the people will eventually go where they feel the most comfortable and where they think they can make the most money and be taken care of and this kind of thing.

They're just not very imaginative at all. 1853, by the way, is when they're around the gold rush. That was their heyday, and today it's Bank of America's top pick at Bank of America. Anyways, over at Wedbush, which is much more current, of all of the big firms out there, they're not exactly, I wouldn't consider them a big, giant Wall Street firm. They had a car in the Indianapolis 500 back then.

But they certainly are more in line with the kind of companies we look at, the growth stocks of the day. Here's their top five picks, which basically have been their top five picks for a long time. Nvidia, no problem there. Meta, no problem there. Microsoft, Palantir, and Tesla. They are big, big fans of Tesla. One that I don't see in their top five...

which they've been bullish on for umpteen years, is Apple. And Apple just, you know, doesn't have much going on in the way of new stuff right now. And if it's not on Wedbush's top five list anymore, it must really be hurting badly. We'll be right back. ♪♪♪

And welcome back here to the final segment of today's Best Stocks Now show. I want to mention a few stocks here in the last segment of today's show. One that's on a roll is Embraer.

The Brazilian manufacturer of aircraft, you know, one step below your big, they're more of the regional jets that you fly to some of the smaller markets. But, man, that thing's been on a roll. Scandinavian Airlines agreed to buy as many as 55 aircraft from Brazilian manufacturer Embraer as part of the airline's ongoing fleet renewal strategy.

They're going to buy 45 E-195 E-2 jets, which is a narrow-body aircraft designed to seat as many as 146 passengers. That's a lot of people to cram into that thing there, Barry.

I don't know if I like that myself. I like the big wide body. Right. Get a little tight in there. That's a good stock. Don't bring any carry-on luggage because you're going to have to check it at the gate. Yeah, you've got the guy next to you. His elbow is in your ribs the whole way. Anyways, Embraer has been a great stock. We own it in the value, the relative value portfolio.

which is off to a very good start. I'm really happy with some of the, you know, I've found a lot of bargains, and I still do. You know, several weeks ago, Chipotle pulled back. So you might look at it and say, well, on a value basis, I mean, Warren Buffett would just cry foul today.

looking at the P.E. and the price to sales and the price to book value and price to cash flow. But there's a concept that I believe in wholeheartedly, and that's relative value.

You know, you could say, well, it's 80 degrees in Charleston today and humid. Yeah, but on a relative basis, that's a lot cooler than it has been. It's been 90. And we got a nice little, okay. Relative basis works with valuations also. If you've got Amazon, just for instance, which has been trading at 40, 45, 35 times earnings per

over the past several years and for whatever reason, tariff scare, regulatory scare, you know, any number of things that could affect the stock temporarily and drives it well below the same works in the market.

The value of the market over time, the P.E. ratio has been around 20. We got down to 17 at one point in time, but on a relative basis right now, even 19 is cheap. 20 is cheap on a relative basis for the market right now in this environment that we're in. And, you know, on a relative basis, Embraer dropped down here recently.

on the tariff scares. Chipotle dropped down recently on various issues, and we swooped in and bought some, and now it's turning around and doing quite well. So I'm a big believer in this portfolio. I put a lot of focus. It's replacing the dividend in growth. I don't like the fact of having my hands tied to

of having to buy a stock that pays a dividend. That limits your choices out there. So I think this is a better substitute, a better way to go in the environment that we're in. And, you know, this dividend thing is played so heavily. Everybody, all the dividend ETFs out there right now,

which makes it very difficult to find any kind of inefficiency in dividend. I noticed that, have you noticed that Seeking Alpha doesn't, that's not their top guys anymore, dividend-paying stocks. They've died out because a lot of people were going in there. They were after the high dividend payer.

Right, yeah, high dividend yields, right, chasing yield essentially. And I'd see those guys have just dropped off the leaderboard. I don't even see them anymore. And, you know, I was making a lot of noise about that, how that's a sucker bet. And those people were preying on suckers. And the headlines they were using were disgusting.

You know, retire, buy your yacht with this high dividend stock. Almost that bad. It was bad. Almost, yeah. Clip this coupon forever. That kind of thing. Those types of things. It's like the two people or two retirees holding hands on the beach because they invested in a prudential annuity, right? I mean, they're happy ever after. It's just like false advertising, in my opinion. But theirs was horrible.

And it really gave me a distaste for what Seeking Alpha was doing there. But I've seen that those guys have kind of disappeared right now. And probably people have learned their lesson the hard way, unfortunately. And speaking of Amazon, did you know that they have more robots than humans in their warehouses?

Amazon just deployed its one millionth robot. Well, they had a party for him. Hey, look, you're our one millionth robot. They had a nice lunch they ordered in for the robots. Gave them a gold watch, this kind of thing, at their fulfillment center in Japan.

close to the number of humans working at its facilities as the e-commerce giant continues to expand the world's largest fleet of industrial mobile robots. 75% of the company's global deliveries are now assisted in some way by robotics.

You wonder how you get that package the next day or two days later, and its fleet spans more than 300 facilities worldwide. The average number of workers per Amazon facility last year was 670, which is the lowest record in the past 16 years recorded in the past. Why? Because they're being replaced by robot. But their amount of packages per employee has gone up. So anyways...

That's where these robotic factories are coming into play. All right, well, we are out of time. This is the second half. What challenges will the second half bring?

I don't think we're going to get that. We were lucky in a way to get that big dip, which created that buying opportunity, but the big dip was no fun. Could we have another big dip in the second half? Yes, we could if something out there in the world comes along that we weren't expecting.

And we do have, you know, kind of a hair-trigger kind of market with the valuations that it's at. But that doesn't mean, you know, I'm buying stuff almost every day. I added to Arista Networks yesterday. I added to a couple others yesterday. There's always something out there if you're vigilant.

to set up an appointment with us. Give us a call at 855-611-BEST to try the subscription out. Four-week trial of the whole enchilada, 855-611-BEST or GundersenCapital.com. That's GundersenCapital.com. 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.