Wednesday Mar. 18, 2026

He's been seen on CNBC, the Fox News Channel, and the Fox Business Channel.

His articles can be found on Market Watch, Seeking Alpha, District.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 Gunderson Capital Management.

Here is professional money manager, Bill Gunderson.

And welcome to the Wednesday, March the 18th 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, and we have a down draft in the market today after two pretty good days.

And the culprit would be PPI.

Oh, that darned old PPI.

You know, just when everything's going right, here comes a 0.7% print on the PPI.

And the Dow is down to 50 right now, which is a half a percent to the downside.

Puts the Dow at 46,742.

The NASDAQ is down a quarter of a percent, 53 points, 22,426, as we await microns earnings after the close.

Tonight, S&P 500 down 21 points, 6,624.

The Russell 2000 is down 16 points right now.

The bond market is pretty steady right now, not much change in the bond market.

It is at, let's see, the bond market, the 10 year is at 4.23%.

And we've got crude oil up 5.3.

There's a problem today.

Crude oil is actually 2.6.

Brent crude is up 5.3% however.

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.

Let me just, I got to send a code to somebody that needs it right now.

And we'll send that code to him and then we'll get to the show here and do a bang.

There's a code that he needs.

He can't do it without me.

We had a good day in the market yesterday.

We've had two good days in the market in a row.

It seems like the market is getting used, if it ever does, to a war.

A big one in the Middle East with Iran.

And it may have already priced in the impact of the war, the impact of fire oil prices, which probably are going to be temporary.

And we kind of got back to a lot of the leadership stocks in the market behaving very well yesterday.

There were some really nice moves in the market yesterday by,

a lot of the AI, Western Digital, Sandisk, the Korean South Korean memory stocks, Nebius, etc.

And a lot of news coming out, obviously, from NVIDIA's big conference, GTC conference on Monday.

And news continues to leak out on that.

So that has led to a couple of interesting days in the market.

Now, the Fed is meeting today.

I saw one prediction and it came from a big firm, Piper Jaffery.

No rate cuts all year long, Barry.

Are you in that boat or are you going to roll a different direction?

I mean, we got a whole different chairman that's going to be in charge for most of the second half of the year.

My guess is, once you, from an oil stand point of oil stays at this level for an extended period of time,

it could actually, at some point, bring inflation down because you could have some demand disruption across a lot of places.

So, you know, my guess is, you know, probably still at least, you know, potential two on the table.

I mean, that's what I would say.

That's what I would say.

The consensus has really changed.

No.

Per se.

I mean, we've still got 12 months of a year, so.

And there is news here breaking Trump is doing something.

There's a law out there that he's going to, you know, go around as far as oil goes.

Trump should open up.

Should open up some.

Is it the job?

Is it not the job?

Is it the Jones Act?

I think so.

I think that's what it is.

Yeah.

So that may help.

Okay.

That may help.

We've got the PPI is the bugaboo this morning.

It comes in at 0.7.

And the headline was much hotter than expected, you know, at 0.7.

Did you get a chance to look through that at all?

Yeah, the problem.

Yeah, and the issue with this PPI, right, is in reality.

It's going to be a different, didn't put, you know, a bunch of stock in it because it's going to, you know, the PPI is going to change likely drastically if we go forward.

You know, because this, this PPI reading is from prior to, doesn't count the big, right oil, right?

Right.

And then the other thing I will say from an oil perspective is, you know, there's a big difference right now between, you know, financial oil.

And then you would, yes, you would refer to as physical delivery of oil.

I've seen, you know, where you've got Brent crude prices saying that 100 to 105 range.

And, you know, crude's being delivered right now in Asia for like 135 bucks a barrel.

So there is a, you know, so there's an, you know, there's an issue there.

The way I look at it is they may, you know, they're going to be more impacted at this point and have more reason to go ahead and start, you know, having some oil flow through the street.

So, you know, they're, we'll see, could, could actually potentially have this last, you know, not as long because they are going to be wanting, wanting that straight open as well.

Well, that's the way I look at it. There's a lot of pressure to get that straight, a hormones straightened out.

And China, number one, I mean, they need that Iranian oil.

So I, I just see that being opened up here at some point in time, although it continues to be a struggle.

In the meantime, I see that Iran is, is jamming a lot of GPS and spoofing, which is kind of weird stuff.

But the problem is they're getting information from China's satellite navigation system.

And it sounds like China may be cooperating on that, enabling greater accuracy and missile strikes for them.

And targeting across the region, anyways, that, and I think, you know, there has been word that Russia has been providing info intel to, to Iran also.

So, not good.

Yeah, well, and we also had, I think, I saw this morning, you know, attack on, I believe it's the, I believe it's the largest gas, gas, LNG gas plant in the world.

I think, you know, it's actually one that, it's actually one that, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's Qatar.

Yeah.

But there's one that Iran, Iran actually shares this gas field, I believe, with Qatar.

And the gas field became under attack today.

Qatar is mad too about it.

They're mad at Israel.

They said they thought it was kind of reckless to attack that, that oil field.

So anyways, there's a lot of cross currents, a lot of cross currents in the market right now.

Well, tonight will be a really big earnings report.

Believe it or not, even though the earnings season is over, there's always a few hanging out there like Nvidia and Micron.

And Micron is definitely an outlier as far as when they report.

Now Barry, when I wrote my last newsletter of December, you remember what my top, well, I actually made two top picks for 2026.

What was one of them that we had Lily and then the other being Micron.

Micron is 62% year to date.

And we actually bought it before January 1st, obviously.

And we cashed in on a 65% profit.

And now we are back into it.

But it is the biggest winner.

I'm going to guess, is there, is there a stock out there in the S&P that has done better than 62% year to date?

One doesn't come to mind at the moment.

I wonder if there's something that somebody that had a buy out maybe.

Certainly was an AT&T or Johnson and Johnson.

So last year, my number one pick was Palantir, which was up over 100%.

I think that was the number one name in this S&P, at least for a majority of the year last year.

Yeah, so, okay, we did a BWRA is the hashtag there.

Bill was right again.

I have people repeating that in comments on our articles, over on X.

They kind of know that I have a reputation over here to keep.

Trump asked, when will Pal cut rates?

The market is saying never.

That's what the market is saying.

And I also saw Piper Sandler's Nancy Lazar.

She's pretty well known on Wall Street, say, no interest rate cuts this year.

Meanwhile, we're at 4.22 on the 10 year, and that's too high.

We'll be right back.

And welcome back here to the second quarter of today's best stocks.

Now show micron is set to report tonight.

Year over year profits surge of 452% on 138% revenue growth, driven by strong AI-related demand for memory chips.

Remember the memory chips for particularly DRAM, which is dynamic random access memory, Barry.

I actually featured a stock in my book that did SRAM, which never really went anywhere.

Oh well, but I did learn all about all the different SRAM and DRAM and whatnot.

Of course, the new one is high bandwidth memory, which is HBM.

And there's four companies.

There's Sand Desk.

There's Sand Desk.

There's the two in South Korea, which are SK high-nix and Samsung.

And then there's micron.

And then there's ancillary companies, though, that are moving with these stocks.

The next ring in the Saturn's rings are the Western Digital.

Seagate falls in there.

And then I'll tell you another ring that is involved in this whole data center thing.

And there was a lot of news on it yesterday, which I'm going to get to.

Are these fiber optic stocks?

And wire, copper wire stocks that are part of the networking inside of these racks inside of these data centers,

which someday will be orbiting in space.

That's a whole nother thing.

We're probably going to work up some kind of an article on that.

As more news comes in on some new open claw is the new term right now.

And we're doing some research on that.

So anyways, that is the center of the universe right now, the market universe.

You go outside of that.

There's not a whole lot working, Barry, other than that.

You go to the trucking stocks, the food stocks, the industrials, the medical, the healthcare stocks.

Nothing else is really working right now.

I don't know where we would be.

We're not for data centers, but that continues to be one of the hottest areas in the market.

Well, when they touch everything, I mean, think about what all they're telling me.

We've even been following ace air-conditioned companies, right?

Obviously power companies.

I mean, there's so many different ancillary pieces.

You know, follow the data center, deconstruct it and follow those tentacles out into corporate business, right?

Yes.

And you know, as an investor, well, you know, to be in the best stocks now,

you have to be in the best neighborhoods of the market now.

And that's where you're going to find out.

And that doesn't mean that every best stock now out there right now comes from the AI patch.

The oil patch is also kicking in a lot of them.

And sector rotation is taking place all the time in the market.

I tell you what's falling out of favor very rapidly is the precious metal move.

Silver, gold, which I think we called the top in that again.

Bill was right again.

And those stocks are really starting to break down now.

And that mostly is because of a strengthening dollar.

And profit-taking.

You know, that's another part of sector rotation.

It's kind of like a restaurant that's hot for a little while.

You can't get a reservation to the restaurant for several months.

And all of a sudden, it's easy to get in there.

You know, the same thing happens in the stock market.

There is a bit of a popularity contest.

And money does chase the hottest areas of the market.

At least smart money does.

Let me tell you, we had an account come in yesterday.

And I don't know where it was from.

But it had every single big name, big box stock that we talk about all the time.

That are just going nowhere.

I mean, I look at some of their big names, mind you.

But I look at their charts and it's just like, why would anybody own that thing?

And yet, you know, this portfolio was full of those stocks.

And I don't know where it came from.

But I'm going to guess that it's from a big wirehouse linked related firm.

Well, it's with us now.

And that's my job now is to clean it up.

Get your gardening tools out, Bill.

Well, it's April or not April quite yet.

But the gardening centers are starting to be full of spring flowers to plant.

The ground is warming up.

My tomato plants are about two inches tall right now.

I've got to get out all the dead wood that's left from last year.

And that's the way I look at these stocks that came over.

They're just so much dead wood.

And that is not a typical, it's typical of what comes to us when we get it from a big wirehouse firm.

Because they just don't let their people venture out much further than AT&T and Proctor and Gamble and Johnson and Johnson.

That's all the further out on the limb you're allowed to go.

That just seems to be the mantra.

Okay, optoelectronics.

There was word yesterday that, you know, Jensen Wang said, we're still using copper.

But the fiber optic stocks, they're having their own little convention right now.

The optical fiber communications conference in Los Angeles.

Well, I didn't get my invite, but that's okay.

I do know the hot stocks in that group, it's A-A-O-I, applied optoelectronics.

It's Lumentum, L-I-T-E, which we already sold for a huge profit.

And it's coherent, which we also sold for a huge profit, COHR.

And then they sold off when Jensen Wang made his comments,

but they had a good day yesterday because they were seeing some good things

at this optical fiber communications conference in Los Angeles.

Which I believe, I think Wedbush is headquartered in Los Angeles.

I remember seeing there, they're on a big, one of the big buildings downtown LA.

I could see them sponsoring a conference like that.

Bell is also on the periphery of that, as far as the chips go, MRVL.

Now, news on NVIDIA.

In my opinion, as I look at this stock, I think it's been the whole China situation

that's probably kept that stock going sideways for so long.

But NVIDIA gets approval to sell H-200 chips.

And they have now confirmed that China has received Chinese purchase orders.

So we'll see, maybe that will get that stock moving.

It's been kind of in a flat line, even though they had sensational earnings report.

And the value is there, the performance is there.

The only thing lacking is the chart.

The chart is just in a sideways trend right now.

But NVIDIA has received Chinese purchase orders.

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 date

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.

And looking back here to the second half of today's best stocks.

Now, show February or April 6th, 7th and 8th.

April 6th, 7th and 8th.

Sarasota again.

Yeah, and I think what?

6th is the Monday.

I think 80 told me a 7th and 8th.

It was a 7th and 8th.

I think 7th and 8th is the Tuesday and the Wednesday.

Oh.

If we need, then we'll add a calendar.

Add a Monday.

Yeah, I'm Monday.

7th and 8th.

Okay, I got it now.

And that's a trip I look forward to every year.

We usually go try to get your sunscreen out.

Yeah, get your sunscreen out.

It's usually kind of the, we always come there about this time.

And it's getting, it's bouncing back between warm and chilly here in Charleston.

What woke up again is 37 degrees this morning.

So we're hoping to get down to a little more regular sunshine down there.

But on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, we have, with Tuesday and Wednesday right now,

we have those one hour slots available to meet with us.

I'll be there in the meeting and Barry will be there in the meeting.

And hopefully you'll be there in the meeting.

If you're listening and you're sitting there with Disney stock and AT&T and Proctor and Gamble and all of these duds.

Anyways, that is coming up and we're looking forward to that.

And then of course Tuesday night, Tuesday night, the 7th will be the workshop.

And we're going to be at the Evan even.

I don't know if it's Evan or even.

It's E-E-E-N.

Yeah, I always call it the Evan.

But yeah, it looks, I mean, even.

It looks like even.

I mean, usually Evan spelled E-V-A-N.

And so we are over there and liquid ranch as usual.

And if you'd like to make an appointment with us 855611 Best, 855611 Best,

grab one of those appointments or make a reservation to the workshop at 7pm at the even hotel on Tuesday, April the 7th.

So that's our update there.

Okay, now let's get back here to the markets, which are down a little bit today.

You can blame a hot PPI report.

Look how important numbers are.

0.7 for Evan Sakes has got the market all shook up today.

And it's about expectations.

I think what it said 0.3 was the expectation came in at 0.4 and 0.7, so we were 0.4 above.

But I mean, that's, I mean, obviously it's a month over month number.

PPI inflation does fluctuate pretty, pretty wildly sometimes.

But yeah, we know in this business, right?

If the market's expecting this, it comes in different one way or the other than the market's going to react.

Yes.

And a hot PPI print does not affect earnings.

It affects the multiple, the multiple in the middle pretty much.

It brings that contracts that multiple a little bit.

That's what you're seeing is a little multiple contraction.

We ended last Friday at 20.66 forward PE for the S&P 500, which is the lowest.

It's been in quite some time.

We were up to 23 at one point in time.

Goldman Sachs that says that the long-term trajectory for the S&P 500 looks very healthy.

This has been Schneider.

Their chief US equity strategist said the sixth to 12 month trajectory for the S&P 500 in broader US equity markets remain healthy despite elevated uncertainty.

It seems like we always have elevated uncertainty though.

You know, that's just kind of something that we live with.

I guess there's a little more out there than the normal right now in the uncertainty.

In the uncertainty equation, but they still like it.

You know, the consensus is around around 8,000 above 8,000 actually for the end of the year.

Now, that was before the war ensued.

And the question is, does the war impact earnings?

I think it impacts the multiple somewhat.

It contracts the multiple because of the unknown factor.

There's another factor on your multiple.

But I still think 8,000, let's just call it 8,000 as the consensus, a target price for the S&P 500.

Okay, nebius.

Man, they've been in the news a lot.

They've been getting one contract right after another from this company and that company.

And I'll tell you what I did, which I have observed.

Okay, nebius had fantastic news two days ago.

And it rocketed higher.

It gapped up.

A gap is when two.

It opens much higher than where it closed the previous day.

And there's a gap.

It creates a gap in the chart.

And almost always, more often than not, a company will take advantage of a big move and good news like that.

To do what, Barry?

To do a secondary offering, right?

Oh, yeah.

And they went out more shares.

Yes, I would say.

And I saw the good news.

I saw the gap.

We've owned this stock before.

Their sales growth is phenomenal.

But they're not profitable yet.

But they do have phenomenal sales growth.

Just, you know, their recent quarter was 547%.

This is the Netherlands-based AI infrastructure company.

So it gaps up.

And then yesterday, I saw them announce a secondary offering.

And it was down 10% or something like that.

I said, you know what?

There's my chance.

And I took advantage of the pullback and the secondary offering yesterday and bought into nebius and we're back into it.

And now I see today they're doing a small.

It's not impacting the stock.

The stock is bouncing pretty good today.

Maybe I made a good buy there yesterday on that big pullback.

Now they're going to do a private offering of convertible senior notes for billion dollars of convertible senior notes.

This is only a 28 billion dollar company.

So that's a pretty sizable offering, really.

And it's, you know, the first time I've really seen tech, it seems to be kind of a fad right now to turn to the debt markets, which they have not traditionally done in the past.

But anyways, this docs looking pretty good here today.

And they've had certainly had a lot of good news here recently.

But I would just say, if you see a stock gapping up, don't buy the gap up.

Wait for the next day for them to announce their secondary offering and let it gap down.

And then you may have an entry point there.

Yeah, a little misjudicial share, secondary offering, or even maybe convertible debt, right?

We've seen, we have seen some convertible debt offerings here, you know, over the last, you know, a couple of few months as some of these smaller companies were trying to, you know, trying to get creative in terms of raising money.

Well, and you know, if you do the math, if a company has a million shares out there and let's say their profits a million dollars, that's one dollar per share.

And if they say, well, we're going to print some more shares up and sell them and raise our shares to, let's say, 1.25 million.

The earnings remain the same. Now you're dividing that million dollars by 1.25 million and you're down to 80 cents per share.

And if you're using a multiple of, say, 20, you had a 20 times $1 per share as a $20 stock, you do a secondary offering, you dilute the earnings.

And now you've got a stock that's worth $16. That's what a secondary offering does. Now the caveat to that is, if that secondary offering lets them juice their earnings and they get a good return on their loading of those shares, what are you going to do with the new money, right?

What is the key, are you going to use that money to pay off something, or are you going to use it hopefully, right, to invest by more Nvidia, whatever your business is, right?

Invest in ROI, positive ROI projects, right?

Or give the CEO a big raise, you know, that's the one you don't want.

So the money, right, so they do need money and they do need capital to keep expanding the company. So a fast growing company like this one, you would think they do need more capital to keep growing at this rate, but at some point in time you would think that would turn into a profitable company.

Okay, now we have a few others reporting earnings here. Okay, so let's just go to the other side of the street here, the boring stocks, Macy's. Okay, Macy's, if we go back to their earnings just five years ago, it's $5.31 per share.

Now they're at $2.20 per share. So you see the earnings are going the wrong way and the stock is going the wrong way. Stocks follow earnings.

If earnings are descending, the stock is going to descend with that, more on that when we come back.

This is the best stocks now where we try to make things really simple to analyze the markets and individual companies.

And welcome back here to the second or the final segment of today's best stocks now show I was just looking at Macy's on the best stocks now app.

And here's where this comes in very, very useful. If I look at the 10 year track record of M symbol M, the S&P has delivered 23.2% per year over the last 10 years. That's the average.

Of course, it's been a very good run obviously much way above the like the 50 year average of the S&P 500.

While the S&P's been going up by 23.2, if you take a look at where Macy's was 10 years ago today and where it's at today, that compounds out to minus 4.9. Call it 5%.

It's lost 5% a year from the last five years. That's not good. And over the last five years, it's basically dead flat. And over the last three years, it's basically dead flat.

And so far this year, it's down 22.4%. Now the number that jumps off the page for me, do you remember the year 2021 coming out of the COVID year?

And all of that money was sloshing around way too much. And I mean, we're going back to the roots of the inflation that kicked in that was unabated.

And I think Jerome Powell can be held accountable to a great extent here for keeping interest rates too low for too long.

And of course, the administrations at that time, putting so much money into circulation way too much, they totally blew it.

Macy's was up 136% in 2021, which just indicates the kind of speculation that was taking place.

And why we got this hot inflation and why the Fed had to come along with all of those draconian interest rate hikes in 2022, which sent the market down.

Yeah, you can see it. Yeah, you can see it peaked out on around November 20th or so of 2021.

You picked out around $30.48 and then what, trading at $17.60 at the moment.

Yeah, I was just, you know, when you flood a lowland, if you flooded Charleston, if it rained here for 10 days in a row, it would fill every little look and cranny out there, even Macy.

And that's what I saw happen. It went into every there was so much money sloshing around for too long.

That's the other issue. And there is the root. I mean, there should be books written about this.

This should be taught at the Harvard Business School and, you know, what not to do, what creates inflation.

And now, you know, of course, they want to blame it basically on the current administration. Well, definitely Trump bear some responsibility for the first, his first time around because he was part of putting a lot of money into the system there.

Under some odd circumstances with backdrop of COVID, but I would just say that Biden threw gasoline on the fire.

And he just kept putting gasoline on the fire. And the Fed kept gasoline on the fire and they blew it big time.

One of the biggest bone-headed mistakes in the history of economics, I mean, you got to go back to the 0809 crisis, which was a much, much bigger crisis.

It, in fact, impacted the markets in a different way. It was all about credit.

This was excess, excess. And anytime you provide excess, and of course, there was excess credit in 0809, way excess, which created excess demand for homes.

And, you know, this time around, really, the same mistakes get repeated all the time.

It's a matter of time, maybe 10 years or so now, with whatever, you know, there will be another crisis and that's real money added and that's real money added and that's real money added and then inflation.

And to undo, inflation never really gets undone. No, no, it just, it just piles on top of it. It just piles on top.

Compounds. Yeah, compounds. I did hear something a great comment this morning from someone who's talking about oil, right?

The oil, they said that the one thing in terms of stimulus or no stimulus, he said, you can't print molecules, which is pretty interesting.

Meaning you got to have the oil in some way, some form of fashion, you can't print it at the central bank, which is kind of interesting.

And now, I mean, I look at prices on, you know, items at the grocery store and it just, it's mind boggling how much some of these things are.

You walk into a butcher shop, walk into the New York butcher shop.

Oh, I know which one you're talking about. And look at a prime rib eye, how much per pound, that ain't coming down.

I mean, it's there to stay. And you can go back and look at stocks like Macy's that were up 136% 2021 was the huge mistake that created the inflation monster.

That, you know, once it's there, it's there. And it's all you can do is get it to moderate, but to get prices down, you'd have to have a depression.

Contraction, yeah, yeah. Huge, right.

People stop buying. There's no, there's no, all of a sudden meat is piling up in the freezers and they got to get rid of it and whatnot.

And they're, you know, they have too many cows out there. So that, that's just economics 101 right there.

And that's what creates these excesses, what we've got going on right now. And there, it hasn't been in the news for the last few days, but you've got this private credit excess.

People getting greedy wanting double digit returns and buying into private credit and Wall Street is the one that cooked this stuff up and it's not going to have a good ending.

Okay, well, this is a good ending, I guess. We're out of time. I'm ready to go to work here today on a down day in the market a little bit with the hot PPI, but that might create some opportunity here as I go through my best stocks.

Now list of charts and analyze them. I was very active and busy yesterday, very active and busy in the market just a few by a few guys.

I'm sure the folks at home are going, wow, Gunderson, what got into Gunderson all the time, all of a sudden he's been on a buying spree.

We'll see what today brings to get four week trial to the newsletter and the app and the live trades go to Gundersoncapital.com to set up an appointment with us and get away from Wall Street.

855-611 Best, 855-611 Best. Have a great day everybody.

The show is not a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Bill Gunderson or clients of Gundersoncapital management may have long or short positions in stocks mentioned during the show.

As performance is not indicative of future performance.

Gundersoncapital management is a fee based registered investment advisory firm. All accounts are held at Charles Schwab. Schwab is a member of SIPC in FINRA.