Friday June 20, 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 Friday, June the 20th, June 20th live edition of the 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. We have a little green on the screen, but not too exciting. I've looked underneath the surface of the market. It's better than being down. The Dow is up.

149 points, 42,320 as one of the Fed governors actually floats a rate cut in July, which in my opinion is long overdue. The S&P is up 15. That's a quarter of a percent. The NASDAQ's up 42 points right now to 19,582. The Russell 2000 small cap up 40 basis points at the current time.

The bond market, the 10-year is down one basis point to 4.41%. Gold is down today. Gold is down to 33.86 right now. Crude oil is up there at 75. I noticed gasoline has gone up. It costs a lot more to buy.

to fill the tank this week than it did several weeks ago. Crude oil is at $74.95. And Bitcoin right now is up $1,300 to $105,753. 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 had the day off yesterday, kind of a weird, you know, a Thursday holiday. It doesn't really do us much good, does it, in the long run? Weeks flown by. Of course, you know, Monday was kind of a bit of a travel day, right? Tuesday and Wednesday, meeting with folks in Sarasota and then...

And got back late Wednesday night, kind of early Thursday morning. And then yesterday was markets closed. Nothing going on yesterday. I was raring to go. I was raring to go through charts and get going. And I go, oh, gosh, the market's closed today. Doggone it. I get the day off.

Well, too late, pal. Left rates alone this past week. That's what Trump calls them. But Fed Governor Waller is floating. Maybe he's going to be the spokesman. I think it would be too much for Powell to swallow his pride and say, yeah, I think it's about time for a rate cut. So Waller is floating it instead, and that does have the market up a little bit. The big story the last couple weeks here has really been oil prices.

which might show up in the inflation numbers, but it is temporary, and it obviously is because of what's going on in the Middle East. Oil's up at $76 a barrel, and it certainly cost me more to fill my gas tank at the pump. I should have filled up the boat before I left. I knew that was going to happen. I didn't do it.

But here's the big story of the day. How about this one? The Los Angeles Lakers to be sold at a record $10 billion, making it the world's most valuable professional sports franchise. Boy, I don't know about that, but I guess the Buss family will sell majority ownership of the NBA team to Mark Walter.

in a deal that could be worth up to $10 billion. And, of course, Walter also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers.

and serves as CEO at Guggenheim Partners, sources told ESPN. Got some cash. I'll tell you, I like the story about how much Dr. Buss paid for the... Oh! He bought... Not only did he buy the Lakers, but in the same deal he got the LA Kings...

the hockey team, and the forum, and the fabulous forum all in the same deal. He was a dentist. I think it was $70 million or something that he paid for all three of those. The Buss family has owned the Lakers for 46 years. He's going to have a little bit of a long-term capital gain there to pay for.

He passed away, so maybe he had a step-up in basis where maybe Jeannie and the other kids got some kind of step-up in basis. Who knows? We'll need an estate attorney for that one. He bought the team in 1979 for $67 million. And it included the ice hockey team, Los Angeles Kings, and the fabulous forum out there in Englewood. So anyways...

Walter has been a stakeholder in the Lakers since 2021. He bought a 26% share in the team. Guggenheim must make a whole heck of a lot of money. They do pretty well. Oh, man. I know they own, I think they own stuff around us. I think a lot of this in Kanehoy is owned by Guggenheim.

And, of course, he also has interest in the Los Angeles Sparks, which is the Premier League Chelsea. Oh, yeah, Chelsea and Soccer League. Yes, and Cadillac Formula One team. So big money in the money management business at Guggenheim Partners. How about this one? Swiss National Bank cuts their key interest rate to zero. Do you hear that?

Jerome, they're at zero. They've been negative before.

You know, people like parking their money in Swiss banks. It's pretty interesting. I think about it. It's like, yeah, Swiss bank accounts. But, by the way, you can keep your money here. We're just not going to pay you any interest on it. Yeah, and if it's a quarter percent, they're going to charge you. If it's negative, if it goes negative, they're going to charge you to hold money. Right.

in their bank. Stock futures, well, you know, they were down this morning. The big question is, what's the next shoe to drop in the Middle East? Of course, you don't really know. I mean, Trump on one hand says, no, we're a few weeks away from a decision. That could mean they're going to do it tomorrow because he did say a couple of weeks ago that there's no imminent plans for a strike in Iran, and it happened the very next day. So,

A lot of what he says is positioning himself. And it just seems like that last bit that needs to be taken care of is that the real heart of the nuclear program is

And, of course, Iran says that they've got those vials. They've probably smuggled them out of the enriched uranium. I don't know if they're transportable. I'm not sure how much you can smuggle anything around the Israelis. Not with the Mossad over there. With the Israelis right now, I don't know if anything is a secret. But the Ayatollah says, oh, it's well hidden.

So anyways, the bunker busters, the bombers are positioning themselves. It takes the biggest bomber in the world to carry one of those bunker buster or how many ever they carry. So we'll just have to see. And that's what's keeping oil prices elevated. The Straits of Hormuz, that's a key, key shipping lane that you don't want that being interfered with.

If things were to escalate, what will Russia do? What will China do? Those are all questions with Iran. And what will the Iranian people do? Will they step up and try to replace the current regime, which hasn't been very good for them? China approves rare earth export licenses for select firms. That's the first part of the deal, right?

I think Trump's waiting to see the rare earth show up. He wants it up front. He doesn't want any promises.

And their rare earth sales have dropped, plummeted, while they're using it as a tool. Yeah, I saw those numbers with what I guess for May, the rare earth shipments really dropped. Obviously, that's data looking backwards since we've had more of an announcement in terms of a deal in those realms since. Yeah.

Certainly need that to pick up, right? Yes, and I see Citigroup raising their target price for oil up to the high 70s for Brent crude. And I see J.P. Morgan, a closure of the Straits of Hormuz could spike oil to $120 to $130 per barrel. And, of course, you cannot rule that out, those Straits of Hormuz prices.

I saw one big oil company warning Shell. It was the Shell CEO. He says blocking the Strait of Hormuz would have a huge impact on global trade. So they've got to keep that shipping lane open. If you're going to strike Iran in any way, you've got to do a lot of pre-positioning.

to ensure that the force is there to keep the Straits of Hormuz open, etc., different things. All you've got to do is look at a map and look how tight it is right there. Yeah, you don't want to be going around the Horn of Africa, which, hey, we actually talked to a guy down in Sarasota who was an engineer on one of those big container ships. Learned a lot from him. We'll be right back.

They call me free, I keep going. Oh, we're going on, what are you feeling? Yeah.

And welcome back here to the second quarter of today's Best Stocks Now show. You know, one of the concepts in the market that I have found to be true, and I spoke on this subject Tuesday night, is that the best stocks are the ones that are the best.

in Lakewood Ranch. I went through the whole CANSLIM philosophy of investing that was William J. O'Neill of Investors Business Daily, and what each letter stood for, it's an acronym, C-A-N-S-L-I-M, and the N is something new. New management, a new product, the stock is hitting new highs, and

something new and of course something new creates momentum and so that is part of just one of the elements that I look for and I'll tell you where this worked for me recently the market likes the new kid in town it just you know I mean like it knows NVIDIA well and it knows Palantir well and

Something like CoreWeave came along several weeks ago, not that long ago really, and I looked at their sales growth, which was just phenomenal. And the see-in can slim is very fast-growing earnings, current earnings. That means quarter over quarter, not year over year, but quarter over quarter earnings.

And I looked at CoreWeave. I didn't see explosive earnings, but I saw some of the most explosive sales I've ever seen. I saw four quarters of 520%, 500%, 450%. I said, you know what? This is the real deal. And in my mind, I said, I think it's the new kid in town.

And I nailed it. I mean, I was exactly right because all of a sudden everybody had to have a position in CoreWeave. And now this past couple of weeks, there was a recent IPO. It's not in the area of the market that I'm as enamored with, the cryptocurrency, but it is a hot area of the market. And there is something to the stablecoin market.

versus the pure crypto because the stable coin is tied to the u.s dollar right uh in a way barry yeah okay so yeah and the interesting thing about that legislation right is that it creates a new buyer for treasuries and yes and so and so part of the stable coin you know

construct, right, is it's essentially backed by a dollar. I think of it almost each token as like a little bank, right? I mean, I don't see kind of a deposit structure. It's a different animal from a pure digital currency. And I said to myself, self,

Circles are the new kid in town. Coinbase would be the nearest comparable. And I was talking about that end concept on Tuesday night, and I was going to say the new kid in town right now is Circle. And I don't know, I got distracted or I forgot to mention it. I wish I would have mentioned it. That is the new kid in town. What can I say? Look at the chart of CRCL.

Oh, my goodness gracious me. Look at that thing. The interesting thing is they just IPO'd. I know. But then, of course, this week, remember, because you and I were talking about it this week. Yeah.

when we were in Lakewood Ranch, but the legislation came out after they IPO'd, and it's another reason that the company shot up. It was almost like if they would have waited, they could have... Somebody is certainly PO'd. The people that brought it public are PO'd at the company that did the underwriting. Usually it's several of them.

Because it came public at $31 a share just like seven or eight trading days ago. Today it's $222. It's up seven-fold.

And think of them as a, best way I've heard them described is think of them as a stable coin printing press, right? So if Lowe's wants a stable coin, right, they can go to Circle and Circle will essentially make them one, right, in terms of backing, by the backing. And so they're actually in a better position than their competitor because from a regulatory standpoint,

There's some international ties, I think, with their nearest competitor in that kind of...

compared to this new legislation that came out. They're in the weeder space of that stable coin. I wouldn't buy it at this level. I mean, if the syndicate that brought it public thought it was worth $31 a share, and now it's $2.23, this thing's got to be a nosebleed valuation. And their growth in sales is nowhere even close to what CoreWeave's was. But it is the concept...

And if I find another new kid in town, there's always one coming along every few weeks or so. I'm always going to bring that to your attention. Now, are the tariffs working? I said I made a bold prediction back on March 8th at the bottom of the market. The title of my article was, I think the tariffs are going to work.

Well, I see that SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, who's the son of the guy who started SoftBank, is set to propose a $1 trillion U.S. AI hub to Taiwan Semiconductor and the Trump team. Now, they did kind of announce this before. He had...

He had SoftBank and he had Oracle and he had maybe Sam Altman at OpenAI talking about this. But imagine a $1 trillion hub. We need to buy some land in Arizona there in that Phoenix, Gilbert area. It would be the biggest bet yet, a trillion-dollar industrial complex in Arizona to build robots there.

and artificial intelligence. Sun envisions a version of the vast manufacturing hub of China's Shenzhen province that would bring back high-tech manufacturing to the U.S., the report said. And, you know, I know that a lot of companies want to be a part of this, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, etc.,

They're also set to spend a record $320 billion on AI and data centers in 2025, up from $230 billion in 2024. And, of course, that is when I listened to Scott Besson being interviewed. That was one of the major goals of this whole tariff initiative was

was to get big investments coming back to the U.S. in building plants and whatnot. And I don't know about you, but I've seen a lot of that taking place here so far this year. And you've certainly seen, at a minimum, you've heard the commitment. Yeah, exactly. This almost seems like an oxymoron, but it's not.

Like jumbo shrimp, you know, or military intelligence. Sometimes they make fun of the military a little bit. How about Japan and inflation? I never thought I'd see inflation in Japan. It's accelerating for the third straight month, 3.7. They have the hottest inflation in the world right now, which is very, very strange. Food prices up 6.5%. And Japan, of course, has got a problem with their bond market.

with rates clear up at 1.5%, and they were in negative territory, I think, at one point in time. We'll go to the other end of the spectrum. Who has the highest rates out there right now? This is the Best Stocks Now show. This is Bill Gunderson. Thank you for tuning in to today's Best Stocks Now, Best Inverse Funds Now show.

I put several hours of research in during the wee hours of the morning each day to bring you the very best cutting-edge stories that I can. To get two free weeks of my newsletter, go to GundersenCapital.com. To talk to us about our fee-based only money management services, call us at 855-611-BEST. Now, back to the second half of the show. Music

Call out the instigator, because there's something in the air.

We've got to get together sooner or later. And welcome back here to the second half of today's Best Stocks Now show. While Switzerland has a zero interest rate, Brazil Central Bank hikes rate by 25 basis points to 15%.

Well, you know, I mean, they got rid of kind of a capitalism system and a capitalist leader, and they elected Lula, who definitely leans way more towards socialism, even communism. And they've got a 15% interest rate over there. That's on their benchmark SELIC rate, raising rates by a quarter of a percent to 15%.

Not too good. We read earlier this week about Argentina becoming energy-sufficient, self-sufficient, and while Venezuela, on the other hand, their oil fields are a mess. NVIDIA joined $650 million funding round. Do you know how much investing NVIDIA is doing with their market cap of, what, almost $4 trillion? Yes.

They're investing in everything from self-driving technology to obviously on the health care side and some of these, I think you've mentioned a number of different ways, but with the drug discovery, all kinds of different things. Well, you've got to remember that these giant tech companies, Meta,

and Microsoft, and Uber, and Netflix even, and Nvidia. They are Amazon, massive conglomerates investing in all kinds of different things. Nvidia is investing in Bill Gates-backed nuclear startup TerraPower.com.

TerraPower also is a big investor, I'm pretty sure, in SMR, which is the Smart Small Modular Reactors.

So Bill Gates has his hands in a lot of things, and NVIDIA is going to have a piece of that venture. It's interesting. You would think Bill Gates would be kind of anti-nuclear, but that whole thing has shifted. We were talking to someone down there.

In Lakewood Ranch, he said, oh, no, they're still negative on nuclear. Not anymore. Uh-uh. Pro-pro-nuclear. In fact, the story he told us was...

In those big container ships, they put in their big diesel engines, which how many tons of diesel? It would burn 70 tons of fuel a day. Per day, yes. And it's very sludgy. I mean, it's not like refined like the gasoline we put in our car. It's not the gas coming out of our gas tank. But he said they left the space in those boats to put in nuclear fuel.

And then Three Mile Island and all that happened, and nuclear obviously went out of favor big time. That was back in the mid-'70s, but now it's come back with a vengeance. And investing in nuclear, look at NVIDIA. NVIDIA investing $650 million in Gates nuclear.

uh uh startup uh terra power which i know a little bit about terra power myself i have actually some people that uh connected to that that are involved with that company musk x okay here's another one you got to remember is a major diversified elon musk

He is eyeing X, which is private right now, but he obviously is going to roll it out as a public company. And he's thinking of, and he probably will do it, creating a trading platform out of X, which would be a natural. He needs to use my app. We need to get a hold of him and say embed X.

The best stocks now app in there, Elon. But he also may fold his AI company into X. That probably is going to be the vehicle. Now you say, yeah, he bought Twitter from Dorsey for, what, $45 billion, and X went down to about $13 billion. But he's using that.

just like these other tech companies are, as a platform to consolidate his other holdings. Who knows, maybe he'll fold Neuralink in there. Maybe he'll fold SpaceX in there.

I don't know. He can't get the symbol X, but I will say this, U.S. Steel is going to stop trading on the New York Stock Exchange because it's being acquired by Nippon Steel in Japan. That X will be up for grabs, and I'm sure that he's all over that with a kid named Little X. He definitely wants that symbol X.

which has been U.S. Steel for many, many years. X marks the spot for Elon, and you could see a Robin Hood-like trading platform coming out of that. Of course, a digital wallet. I mean, he can fold all kinds of things. That would be a hot IPO for Musk. I'm sure he would like to diversify that.

away from just being an EV as far as publicly traded companies, being just at the mercy of the EV Tesla market.

market and electric vehicle sales. Texas lawmakers want him to delay the robo-taxi launch. A group of Democratic lawmakers from the Austin area have urged Tesla to delay its planned robo-taxi launch. Of course, this is the next big step for Tesla. Until September,

Because they want to put in regulations between now and then. A new Texas autonomous vehicle law is set to take effect. I got a hunch that Elon's not going to wait for the bill to be passed, right? I mean, I think he wants to get out there with his robo-taxi and get it going. And in the meantime, Stellantis and Renault are mad at Europe because...

China's coming in with a lot less regulations and selling cars in their backyard, and they're asking Europe to lighten up on the regulations because they can't be competitive against China. That's another thing that you have to factor in is Europe is so heavily regulated that

It makes it very difficult to compete with competitors from the outside. NVIDIA Foxconn, here's another investment by NVIDIA.

They're mulling deployment of humanoid robots at a Houston AI server manufacturing facility. And that's another city that we have to put on our agenda and on our calendar, Barry.

I'm going to have to buy a bigger bus to travel in, a little longer range than the solar panels on the roof. But Houston will be headed down there at some point, but they want to build a new Foxconn. Of course, Foxconn is a Chinese company that builds Apple phones. They built them in China, and now they're building them in India. And now they want to build a big plant in Houston.

manufacturing facility and deploy humanoid robots along with some humans I'm sure

down in there. And speaking of another conglomerate, which I'm starting to realize is becoming more and more of a Fabulous 7 type tech play, Uber is on the outskirts of town from the Fabulous 7, but they're going to expand their AI data platform to train smart agents to

And, of course, Uber's technology can be used in a lot of things. Uber's going to have an Uber Freight division and an AI data platform that they can let others use to speed up their own AI deployments. So Uber is definitely becoming a big tech conglomerate investing in other areas of technology.

And then you just get back to the mundane, but it's really not mundane, the drone world. I see that AVAV, which is the third biggest maker of drones in the world, and they're teaming up with Denmark. We know that Europe is scrambling, scrambling to protect themselves from Putin, an aggressive Putin attack.

And they want to increase their drone supply, and they're forming a strategic partnership with AeroVironment, which we own in our emerging growth for advanced UAS capabilities, which is unmanned drones.

So a lot going on. Amazon's investing $5 billion to build South Korea's largest data center. What do all these things have in common, Barry? They eat up a lot of energy, right? How much is the factory in Houston going to eat up?

How much is a trillion-dollar plant or whatever they're talking about in Phoenix? Will there be enough electricity left over for the... Need some AC down there. Yeah, for the chili dog place and all that kind of stuff and air conditioning. So you can see where nuclear is going to have to play a big, big role. And when we come back, there's another one, big conglomerate, big,

Investing big in AI. We'll be right back. And welcome back here to the final segment of today's Best Stocks Now show. You know, as I wrote my newsletter last Friday and Saturday,

The thing that stood out to me more than anything and surprised me more than anything was the direction of the earnings estimates for 2026 next year and 2027 the year after that. You know, the experts over at CNBC were telling us and Bloomberg and the others were telling us that the tariffs were going to crush earnings going forward or put a big dent in them.

And I was shocked to see that the earnings estimates had actually gone up fairly significantly, especially for 2027, which is just the opposite of what the so-called experts said were supposed to happen.

You know, look, it's too early. The jury is still out. But so far, the tariffs, 30% on China, 15% on Europe right now. We're getting closer to a deal with Canada. So far, it's had very little impact. In fact, earnings estimates for next year and the year after that have gone up. And I actually raised my target price last week.

for the S&P 500. Now, we have not had a lot of earnings reports this past week. We're in between earnings season. We've got 10 more days until the second quarter of this year comes to a close. But, you know, companies are guiding, and you don't have to wait. These analysts don't wait for a company to report their earnings to adjust their prices. They're in constant communication with

with these companies and their guidance having discussions with them on a regular basis are those analysts that cover the companies facebook is the other one that big time spreading out spreading their tentacles spreading whether you like them or not

Whether you like Zuckerberg or not, you almost have to take that thing, your bias, you have to take your bias out of the equation. And I think it's hurt a lot of these Wall Street media firms, their bias. Their biases hurt them big time because they hate Trump so much.

And I think it's definitely, definitely influenced them in their outlook, their sour outlook. Everybody hates this bull market, they say, and this and that. You kind of have to set your bias aside when you're looking at companies because more important than anything are the earnings of the company and the earnings growth thereof.

Meta has had some phenomenal earnings growth and is a phenomenal company and one of the best stocks in the market today, despite what you may think of the guy at the top. They continue to spread their wings and branch out and become a more and more powerful company all the time, and they make a lot of money.

A lot of money. Now, two more companies that I want to talk about here in the remaining minutes that we have. Let's see. The first one would be, we mentioned Meta. I want to mention one that had some earnings here this morning. The other one would be Lilly. Lilly, the UK declined to endorse the use of Lilly's Alzheimer's, new Alzheimer's drug.

which really has not made much of an impression, I suppose. Biogen, they finally got their approval for their Alzheimer's drug. Lilly has one that they say is better. And of course, Alzheimer's is one of the holy grails of the biotechs trying to find something to help with that horrible disease.

But the U.K., they're going to appeal the decision. And then don't forget, Biogen's was taken off the market by the U.S. and then put back on the market. So Lilly's down 2.9% today on that news. And the last one I want to mention here today, what do these have in common? Bahama Breeze, Eddie V's.

The Capitol Grill, The Yard House, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, Seasons 52, Longhorn Steakhouse, and I suppose their flagship brand, Olive Garden, that's Darden. Darden. All of those are Darden brands, even Ruth's Chris now? Yep. They bought out Ruth's Chris and the Capitol Grill they bought out.

My wife and I like Eddie V's in San Diego. We always go to Eddie V's when we're downtown San Diego. We have Longhorn here in Mount Pleasant. Olive Garden is always packed over there in North Charleston.

We had a Ruth Christ here, but I don't think they could compete with Hall's Chop House, Barry. Yeah, that's a tough competition in that space. In that high-end steak restaurants. But Darden, this is definitely, I mean, if you tell me, oh, the economy is horrible, why is Darden, with all these brands, breaking out today on a super earnings report today?

The consumer must be doing okay if they're going to places like this. Darden is hitting a new 52-week high. The restaurant stock that we own is DoorDash. Now, while there's a lot of restaurant stocks that are troubled, there's only a handful, only a handful,

They're in the consumer sector, consumer discretionary sector. There have been some major winners there over the years, by the way. I would say one of the biggest winners of all time came from that sector in Chipotle, CMG. McDonald's blew it by selling their steak in it. I can remember way back when, when Outback Steakhouse was one of the hottest stocks in the entire market.

As they swept the country, I think they were based out of Florida. I know they were based out of Florida. I want to say Boca Raton swept the country with a low-end steakhouse, affordable steakhouse. Texas Roadhouse has done very, very well. But Darden has got one heck of a lineup. And their earnings were up 12% year over year, and their sales were up 11%.

So I call that a bellwether for the discretionary consumer, and they're definitely spending some money over there at Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse and Eddie V's. Yeah, I'm getting hungry. I'm going to have to go out for dinner tonight. Right. And all of these. Ruth's Chris. I love Ruth's Chris. We had one in San Diego.

that we used to go to for special occasions and whatnot. Okay, well, we're out of time. I was there. They always called ketchup tomato condiment, not ketchup. Yeah, I just like the sizzle. I like the sizzle of Roost Chris. Just don't get any on your tie of that sizzling butter. All right, well, the four-week trial to the whole enchilada, that's the Gunderson Buffet of information.

at GundersenCapital.com. A lot of people hiring us to manage their money for them. They're sick of the same old Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble. Give us a call at 855-611-BEST. Set up an appointment, 855-611-BEST.

Have a great day. Have a great weekend. 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.