Panel = CNBC's investment committee; "View" is the panel's net take this episode and the cell names which member(s) held it. This is an audio podcast, so each "At" cell opens the Spotify episode (not a deep-link); the (mm:ss) cues cited in the talking points are from the Spotify transcript. Order: Positive → Neutral → Negative. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What the committee said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVDA | Nvidia | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Two committee buys in one show, up more than 11% on the week. Kevin Simpson bought more at 218: "this is the OG, and it is the one stock that has continued to just make more and more and more money every single day, but not have the love from a share-price perspective… in the old days everyone needed electricity, you needed the internet — now the question is how much AI does every company need? They are the primary player in this space. This is not a trade. This is an investment. We're going to own it for a long time." He deliberately bought before the August 26 print "because they tend to report so late that you get a lot of the action from all of the other players beforehand… I think the report's going to be awesome, but I think the move's going to happen beforehand." (It now pays a dividend, "so I think it's worth a consideration.") Stephanie Link bought it for the first time ever, on valuation: "trading at a valuation they haven't seen since 2019, at 18 times — it's actually cheaper than Colgate or Hershey or any of the staples companies that are getting 3% organic growth. This company just posted 85% total revenue growth year over year, and the visibility is outstanding given the backlog." Not hope, she says: "look at their backlog, look at their customer base, and listen to Elon Musk — they haven't even started." Plus mid-70s gross margins and free cash flow set to double next year, "which is why they're financing all these other companies." Talkington: when Elon says SpaceX's massive CapEx is going all in on NVIDIA, "if you don't own NVIDIA after that, then you're missing the boat." | listen↗ |
| AVGO | Broadcom | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Link owns it and is "very pleased" — up 9% this week alone. Her framing pairs it with NVIDIA: both have badly lagged the semiconductor sector this year, "and that was the other reason why it was so interesting to me. They were such laggards and I thought they could play catch-up. Both have earnings power of $20 a share over time." The visibility argument: "Broadcom's AI semiconductor pipeline is $100 billion. There's a lot of visibility, they're doing a lot of great things." | listen↗ |
| MU | Micron Technology | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Up 5% week-to-date. Link: "Micron is a fairly new position. It's a volatile one for sure, so it's a smaller position. But I just think the visibility is phenomenal — they have $100 billion in bookings between now and the end of the year, take-or-pay contracts. That's a lot of visibility, and they're really in the sweet spot in terms of this whole AI memory shortage. We're short everything in this world and they're right there." Sized deliberately small for the volatility despite the conviction. | listen↗ |
| MRVL | Marvell Technology | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Link owns it — up 14% on the week as semis (both the SOX and SMH) post their best week since mid-June and momentum has its best week since mid-June, +8% from the July 29 low. Part of the laggard-catch-up trade she is leaning into alongside Broadcom and NVIDIA. | listen↗ |
| MCHP | Microchip Technology | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | A big move on the guide. Harrington owns the preferred, and the story is her "super old five-year-ago thesis, which we see everywhere: we're going to need every kind of chip forever. These are not the NVIDIA chips — these are the little like-nothing chips that are in things like this." The quarter: "every part of their business executed — industrial up 24%, data center up 97%, aerospace and defense up 45%, just across the board." Microchip itself trades at 20× earnings; the preferred still yields 5.3% "and there's still growth ahead in that." She bought the preferred in April last year in the tariff selloff at $41; it's 71 now — "it was a nothing company that everybody thought was just sleepy." Her generalized point: "you don't need to own everything. You don't have to own NVIDIA, you don't have to own Microsoft. You can find opportunities other places." | listen↗ |
| MSFT | Microsoft | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Up ~8.5% on the week after "the stock had done virtually nothing — it was such a disappointer." Simpson owns it and is harvesting the move with covered calls: the stock round-tripped from 550 in January to 350 within weeks while he held a 590 call, he added in the 370s and 380s, "and then all of a sudden this report blew it out of the water — exceeded any expectation that I could have dreamed of. So we wrote a 530 call expiring in a couple of weeks. It's 8% out of the money, but we're bringing in 10% annualized premium… no loss in conviction in the name whatsoever, but just trying to add a little alpha, a little premium on the edges." Talkington, who owns it, was "exhausted with the stock performance and actually with the company. The only reason I hadn't sold it is Amy Hood and Satya, which continue to be a masterclass" — and she credits them with "reading the room": committing to free cash flow and staying out of the debt market ("I believe Microsoft and J&J are the only AAA companies out there"), unlike Google. Cloud came in at 43 against a 38–40 run rate with Hood guiding upward — "so I do think it's a re-rating. People are looking at this in a new light." Her caveat: Microsoft and Google both have a bureaucracy problem, "and I think that's why you have to continue to watch the departures leaving to go do their own thing." | listen↗ |
| PLTR | Palantir Technologies | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Up almost 39% on the week, adding another $14 today. Talkington: "it was about 20 points below the 200-day, looking terrible. I feel pretty confident you had a massive amount of short covering on those really solid earnings… but you've had follow-through, to me very important — just like Microsoft, all week." On the company: "Palantir is the original GOAT of AI software companies. They're model neutral — they don't care [which LLM] — and it's safety, security, government, corporate. It's still an expensive stock, but it's been a wonderful re-rating, and a re-rating of the technicals, which could bring people like Joe T in later on down the line if the stock continues to stay well above that 200-day." Renick's options: 1.1 million-plus contracts for over $600 million in premium, almost 90% of it calls, volume 4× the 30-day average, and the fourth most-traded stock in the market today after Tesla, NVIDIA and SpaceX. The biggest single trade — also the second biggest in the entire market — sold $101M of September-18 155 calls and bought $110M of December 175 calls: "a trade that fades some of this short-term upward volatility, but is not necessarily bearish." Talkington: "that's a good trade… I do think it can definitely go higher later on this year after it digests this really big move." | listen↗ |
| SNOW | Snowflake | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | A new 52-week high, up 11% on the week and ~20% in three weeks. Link: "product revenue growth accelerated last quarter, and given all the new products they have it's actually going to do another 30 to 34% in product revenue growth. RPO and bookings are also growing double digits, and margins still have upside as they cut costs in some areas and they have pricing power in others." | listen↗ |
| IGV | iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF | QT · SA · STK | Positive | Talkington's structural call, off two "seminal moments" last week. First Microsoft: rallying ~130 points in a week while Satya said "models need to be swappable" and conceded they are spending far more on CapEx than they're making — with cloud acceleration across all three big hyperscalers. "Looking at the IGV, software [is] continuing to make higher lows, and I think we're seeing this broadening — all these application companies, and Microsoft is at the epicenter, the ultimate SaaS company, ultimately are going to be where you make money as these commodity models get commoditized." Second, the Situational Awareness blow-up: "he clearly wasn't aware of the risk of leverage," and the forced-margin washout on top of Microsoft's print showed "this CapEx is here to stay, but software's not going away. It's been a really great reset in the market." Her forward view: "the market's like peak-OpenAI valuations, and maybe software and NVIDIA are going to start ramping up… I still think the LLMs ultimately get commoditized and smart software companies are where the money's made." | listen↗ |
| SpaceX | SpaceX | — | Positive | Best week since going public, with the lock-up expirations having begun yesterday, and upgraded today at Argus to buy from hold, target 160. Link bought more: "my first buy point was a lot higher — the stock's down 40% — but I wanted to have a toe in the water, a piece of this, and it is a very long-term position. The decline to me is just too tempting, especially after the earnings report, which I thought was excellent: all segments beat on the sales line, EBITDA was up so much, total revenue +92%." On the spending that scared the Street: "they said the payback of that spend is going to be in the AI segment, and it's going to be within a year. I wasn't happy about the spend short term, but long term this is what they have to do." Meanwhile "the connectivity big piece just blew it away and they're doubling subscribers. Margins were really good… all the story is intact, I just wanted to be a little bit bigger on the decline." Asked whether she accepts the spend can only go higher because they are a hyperscaler now: "you have to be — I'm OK with that for the long term, because it's going to yield returns eventually. They're barely even spending now and they're producing the growth that they are. They had $14 billion in cloud service agreements this quarter alone. They're going to do 60 billion probably per year in these kinds of agreements over time. That's your real upside." | listen↗ |
| SCHW | Charles Schwab | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | A new record high this week. Harrington: "the thing about Schwab that I think is interesting is it's trading at 14.5 times earnings. The earnings growth is tremendous, and it's up a lot — but it's not up as much as many of the financial services companies and the big banks, which surprises me. So I think you've got an opportunity to get in here at a decent valuation." Her second argument is the operating environment: with equity prices where they are and volumes and volatility what they are, "you'd think the shares would have performed better. So get in while you can." Context: financials are going for a tenth straight week of gains, the longest streak since at least 1989. | listen↗ |
| BA | Boeing | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The FAA orders inspections of more than 400 737 MAX jets for possible cracks (per the Wall Street Journal), and the stock barely moves. Link: "it's a small setback — it's 471 planes out of 6,500 planes that they have in the 737 series. So not great news, but I think they will eventually get it fixed. In the meantime, the quarter they reported last quarter, the turnaround is quite evident: they're increasing their production rates, increasing their free cash flow levels, their margins are actually expanding again. To me, an organic growth of 8% — I think this is the buy." | listen↗ |
| NFLX | Netflix | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Called a buy today at Rothschild & Redburn, with the shares having de-rated from 47× forward to 19× over the course of a year. Link: "I don't think you need that kind of multiple expansion for the stock to recover. We actually added to it last week in our growth portfolio, sub-20× forward. I think the stock is cheap, we love the story. It's now about content — their content has lagged and they need to improve, they need to pick it up, and I think they will. I totally agree with the call and I think we'll see the stock back there in the not too distant future." Talkington's final trade: Netflix — "I think you can drift higher to about the mid-80s by year end." | listen↗ |
| NEE | NextEra Energy | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The Virginia governor says she will intervene in NextEra's acquisition of Dominion; both stocks are green. Harrington owns both and structured the trade deliberately: "when NextEra announced they were going to buy Dominion there was no doubt it wasn't going to go down without a regulatory fight. Dominion shares basically went up 10%, NextEra shares went down 10%. I ended up buying the NextEra convertible preferred — it's got a 7.9% yield." The calculus is symmetric: "if the merger does go through, that's great — you've got better earnings. NextEra right now has 8–9% earnings growth ahead, trades at about 18 times, so really fair valuation, and if the merger goes through they've got synergies and that earnings growth gets even richer. If it doesn't go through, fine — they lost 10% when it was announced, so I get a 10% pop." On the political noise: "there's no way that you bring two big utilities together and there's not political noise, especially with all the sensitivity right now highlighted by the data centers and everyone having higher utility costs. It has to be fought — that's her job." | listen↗ |
| D | Dominion Energy | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The target of NextEra's bid, and the other half of Harrington's position. The deal announcement "first of all highlighted Dominion — that it was undervalued. That's why we got that pop, and we could get a little more." Both stocks trade green on the Virginia governor's intervention news, which the desk reads as the market saying "we think this is just fine… some political blustering noise." | listen↗ |
| AMGN | Amgen | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The second Simpson move: he bought more after a record high yesterday, in the sector that has been the top performer over three months but did nothing in the last one. "I'm hoping this is one of those stocks making new highs and goes higher. We didn't want to wait after the earnings for a pullback, because the earnings were just so good — Repatha, Evenity, a bunch of their other new therapies have all been adding to this accretive profit margin. They still have Maritide in the pipeline, which would be a one-month shot for weight loss if they can get there. They beat on the top line, beat on the bottom line, and raised guidance." And the sector kicker: "I think biotechs in general, as well as healthcare, can be some of the beneficiaries most quickly from AI. We bought it post-earnings and we tend to hold it for a long time." | listen↗ |
| BMY | Bristol-Myers Squibb | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Harrington's healthcare poster child, at a 52-week high and up 23%. "Bristol was an interesting one this week because there were all sorts of rumors about them potentially being acquired by AstraZeneca. That turned out not to be true — but it highlighted that there's value there." The position: bought two years ago, "still only trading at less than 10 times earnings. They're producing $11 billion of free cash flow this year, $15 billion next year. They've got a four-and-change dividend yield still. And the investment thesis today is the same as it was two years ago, which is that with that much cash flow they will be able to buy their way to growth — and that's starting to happen, even though they have all these patent expirations." Her broader read: "there's so much free cash being produced [in healthcare] and it's been undervalued and ignored and neglected. So maybe now's the time." | listen↗ |
| LLY | Eli Lilly | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Argus reiterates with the target to 1300 from 1200, and the stock is knocking against it. Simpson: "this is the highest quality healthcare company on the planet. Zepbound, Mounjaro — they are the players in the space. They continue to do everything right. But what I like most about Lilly is it's not a one-trick pony: there is a diversification underneath the surface with their entire drug catalog." Harrington's qualifier: "valuation requires exceptional execution. I really like the name." | listen↗ |
| NTRA | Natera | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | A new high on strong numbers; BTIG raises to 320 from 290. Link: "it was a really good quarter — they beat and raised. Their minimal residual disease test, called Signatera, delivered 34,000 tests in the quarter sequentially; expectations were for 25,000. This is a total addressable market eventually to get to $7 billion, and these guys are number one in that space. And I just love this management team — they're really doing the right things in terms of investing where they should be." | listen↗ |
| PFE | Pfizer | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Harrington owns it: "even my Pfizer stock is up 10% this year, which isn't bad." Part of her healthcare-rebound roster — names "under so much pressure for so long that let's hope what we've seen this year so far is just the beginning of that rebound and there's room to go." | listen↗ |
| FCX | Freeport-McMoRan | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Copper hit a record high yesterday and the XME had its best week since March 2022. Harrington owns Freeport and Rio: "just like Steph said, all roads lead to copper. Everywhere you look, it's copper. And it's quietly risen to $6.60 this year. Freeport's up 30% year to date — but here's the thing, it's still only trading at 18 times earnings and it still has a 6% free-cash-flow yield. So that's why I think the wind could stay at the back, because they haven't gotten silly." Talkington's technical caution: FCX "got called away from me" (assigned on a covered call) and "does have a lot of resistance right at this level." | listen↗ |
| ANTO.L | Antofagasta (LSE) | STK | Positive | Link's preferred copper expression: "at least copper and aluminum in my mind are going to be in deficits this year, and that's where I think is the most attractive — less excited about gold and silver. But I prefer copper, and Antofagasta has done really well in the past year and they're really the best-run copper company." Her framing of the whole metals move: "it's all the same trade — it's electrification, EVs are back, it's grid, it's power, it's anything AI-food-chain related." | listen↗ |
| AA | Alcoa | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Link's aluminium leg of the same trade — "you have Alcoa too… Alcoa, Antofagasta, right. Same thing" — held on her view that both copper and aluminium go into deficit this year on electrification, EV and grid demand. | listen↗ |
| RIO | Rio Tinto | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Harrington's other diversified-miner holding alongside Freeport — "Jenny, you have Freeport and… Rio" — inside the "all roads lead to copper" view as the metals-and-mining complex posts its best week since March 2022. | listen↗ |
| INFL | Horizon Kinetics Inflation Beneficiaries ETF | QT · SA · STK | Positive | Talkington's vehicle for the whole real-assets complex: "I own INFL, which owns a basket of precious metals, base metals, energy names. To me that's a good way where I can own it over time and I don't get caught up if gold has a big drawdown, or silver, because they're diversified with energy, base metals and precious metals." Her gold view alongside it: it bounced off the 200-day last week "in the face of the yen intervention — the third time this year" — so she assigns some probability to a macro accident and wants the exposure without single-metal risk. | listen↗ |
| AMZN | Amazon | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Kevin Simpson's final trade: "Amazon — they're demonstrating how to make a return on their investments." Also named by Talkington (with Google) as confirming Microsoft's cloud-monetization read. | listen↗ |
| AMCR | Amcor | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Jenny Harrington's final trade: "Amcor — 5.4% yield, and enough competitors have reported that they have good numbers too." The packaging name as an income position corroborated by peer results. | listen↗ |
| EL | Estée Lauder | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Stephanie Link's final trade. | listen↗ |
| PWR | Quanta Services | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Upgraded to overweight at KeyBank. Link owns it and won't chase: "I mean, I own it, but I don't think I would add to it. The company just had a blowout quarter, so I understand wanting to get on board. I would just wait for some weakness or a pullback." The numbers behind the upgrade: "earnings growing 70%, revenues up 41%, backlog up 59% — these are big, big numbers. They are in the sweet spot of electrification, EVs and all of that." A strong fundamental view with an explicit no-add-here entry discipline. | listen↗ |
| ALL | Allstate | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Downgraded to underweight at Wells Fargo, target 250. The holder's response concedes the analysis but rejects the action: "growth is slowing, margins are starting to compress — all fair, all fair comments. And if we look at the daily chart, you'd think we'd probably need to get out of this name at peak margins coming down. I would submit they probably are." But: "if you stretch this back and look at a one-year chart, this thing has been on fire, it's been on a tear. So if you're taking some profits up here and you tone down the estimates, I'm OK with that" — while making clear the downgrade implies selling all of it, "and we're not doing that." Conclusion: "I don't agree with the 250 price target, but I do agree that if you're at a peak margin you're probably not going to go to the next peak — you're probably going to level off. But this is a durable earnings story. You don't need to sell the stock here. I think it can be higher a year into the future." | listen↗ |
| RHHBY | Roche Holding (ADR) | SA · STK | Neutral | Upgraded to overweight at Morgan Stanley today, target to 63 from 46 (it had blown past the prior target), citing "a strong mix of visible growth and pipeline upside." Harrington owns it and is torn — by her own rules, not the fundamentals: "they've got strong oncology, they've got everything going for them other than for us, because frankly it's done so well. It's up 13% year to date and we've had it for a while now. We're down to a 3% dividend yield. So now our question becomes, does it still fit the strategy? That's always the challenge — once these companies start to really pick up steam, sometimes the valuation no longer makes sense for us. Trading at 16 times, great growth ahead, great stock… but, OK, we've got that discipline." | listen↗ |
| GSK | GSK plc (ADR) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | One of Harrington's healthcare holdings read off by Wapner (with Bristol-Myers, Pfizer, Regeneron, Roche, Thermo Fisher and Zimmer): "some of them are up 10% and some are up 23%, but they're all up nicely — so the rebound's already started." No individual call. | listen↗ |
| REGN | Regeneron Pharmaceuticals | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named among Harrington's healthcare positions in the sector-rebound roll call — part of the group she describes as having been "undervalued and ignored and neglected" while producing large free cash flow. No individual call. | listen↗ |
| TMO | Thermo Fisher Scientific | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Another of Harrington's healthcare holdings in the same list — "they're all up nicely on the year, so the rebound's already started." No individual call this episode. | listen↗ |
| ZBH | Zimmer Biomet | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The last name on the read-out of Harrington's healthcare holdings (with Bristol-Myers, GSK, Pfizer, Regeneron, Roche and Thermo Fisher) in a sector Yardeni says is ready to rebound. No individual call. | listen↗ |
| XME | SPDR S&P Metals & Mining ETF | QT · SA · STK | Neutral | The frame for the metals segment: "it's going to be the best week for the XME — that is the metals and mining index — up 14%, best week since March of 2022," with copper at a record high, gold going for its best week since January and silver since February. Link's explanation: "it's all the same trade — electrification, EVs are back, grid, power, anything AI-food-chain related." Market color rather than a position. | listen↗ |
| RSP | Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF | QT · SA · STK | Neutral | Talkington notes "we own RSP" in passing while making the broadening argument — the equal-weight expression of a market where, per Link, "the equal weight is actually outperforming the market weight. We've been talking about that all year long." | listen↗ |
| OWL | Blue Owl Capital | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The lead example in the software-to-private-equity read-across: "if software is acting better, then maybe private equity is acting better. That appears to be the case — Blue Owl, for example, up 14% this week, their technology BDC up 18%." Wapner's market color; no committee position. | listen↗ |
| ARES | Ares Management | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named among the alternative managers with "pretty decent moves this week" as software stabilised — "there's got to be at least a little bit of correlation between stabilization in software and stabilization in some of these private equity stocks." No committee position. | listen↗ |
| BX | Blackstone | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named with Ares and KKR among the private-equity names moving on the software stabilisation. Context: financials overall are going for a tenth straight week of gains, the longest streak since at least 1989. No committee position. | listen↗ |
| KKR | KKR & Co. | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | "KKR is up a couple of percentage points" in the same private-equity move tied to software's recovery. No committee position. | listen↗ |
| GOOGL | Alphabet | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Two-sided. Positive: Talkington says Amazon and Google "confirm the same thing" as Microsoft — real revenue monetization in cloud. Negative: her praise of Microsoft is explicitly at Google's expense ("they did a great job of reading the room, of not doing what Google's doing — saying they're going to be free cash flow, that they're not going to the debt market"), and she extends this week's DeepMind departures into a governance point: "Microsoft and Google both have a bureaucracy issue… that's why you have to continue to watch the departures leaving to go do their own thing. That bureaucracy has hindered Microsoft, it's definitely hindered Google. You can't ignore these departures, which we all kind of ignore — but I don't think we should." | listen↗ |
| FI | Fiserv | QT · SA · STK | Negative | Mizuho cuts its target to 78 from 90 while reiterating outperform — and the holder is heading for the exit anyway, on a credibility rather than a valuation judgment: "it's on our chopping block. It's very much like what Steph was saying about the Honeywell aerospace spin: if you're a new management team, maybe you get one, maybe two chances to guide down, reset the bar. But after that, you'd better get it right. These guys have been in place for over a year now. They've lost credibility. The numbers are still compelling — that's why there's still a good price target; it trades at 7 times with huge free cash flow. But this is too much even for us. So we'll exit it. We're not exiting it today, because there's still value there, but we'll be out of it." | listen↗ |
"View" = the panel's net stance this episode, with the committee member named in the note. Discussed but not tabled: the recently-spun Honeywell aerospace business, which Link says to avoid ("you don't spin out two months ago, reiterate guide, and then report earnings with a $0.25 miss and lower guide… I just don't like the credibility that was just lost overnight" — Phil LeBeau "flabbergasted") — the transcript does not name a ticker for the spun entity, so no row was created rather than guessing one; the SOX/SMH (best week since mid-June) and the momentum factor (+8% off the July 29 low); gold and silver (Link "less excited," Talkington noting the bounce off the 200-day and a third yen intervention this year) — discussed as metals, not as a named vehicle; Colgate and Hershey, used only as valuation comparators for NVIDIA; Johnson & Johnson, cited as the other AAA-rated company; AstraZeneca, the subject of an untrue Bristol-Myers acquisition rumour; and Tesla, named only in the most-traded-stock ranking. Also untabled: the news update (a court order on the White House ballroom renovation, a school shooting outside Bangkok, ICE body cameras). People not tabled: Scott Wapner & the committee (Stephanie Link, Jenny Harrington, Kevin Simpson, Bryn Talkington), Oliver Renick, Brandon Gomez, Tom Lee, Ed Yardeni, Michael Hartnett, Satya Nadella, Amy Hood, Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Phil LeBeau, Jeremy Siegel, Mohamed El-Erian.
A jargon-free summary of why each substantively-argued name matters. (These render on each ticker's consolidated page, where this audio episode has no excerpt to pull.)
Two committee members bought Nvidia in the same show, for two different reasons.
Kevin Simpson added at $218 and framed it as ownership, not a trade: "this is the OG… the one stock that has continued to just make more and more and more money every single day, but not have the love from a share-price perspective." His analogy is infrastructural — every company once needed electricity, then the internet, and now the question is simply how much AI each one needs. His timing choice is worth copying: Nvidia reports last among the big technology companies (August 26), so much of the information is already public from its customers and suppliers by then. He expects a good report but thinks "the move's going to happen beforehand," so he bought ahead of it.
Stephanie Link bought it for the first time ever, purely on price. Nvidia trades at about 18 times next year's earnings, its cheapest since 2019 — "actually cheaper than Colgate or Hershey," companies growing sales 3% a year, while Nvidia just grew revenue 85%. Asked whether that's hope, she points at the order backlog, the customer list and Elon Musk's commitments: "they haven't even started." Add gross margins in the mid-70s and free cash flow set to double next year — which is also how it can afford to help finance its own customers.
Broadcom designs custom AI chips for the biggest cloud companies, and Stephanie Link owns it — up 9% this week. Her reason for holding both this and Nvidia is that both had badly lagged the semiconductor sector this year, which is unusual for the two most important names in it: "they were such laggards and I thought they could play catch-up. Both have earnings power of $20 a share over time." The visibility comes from a stated $100 billion pipeline of AI semiconductor work, which is what turns a cyclical chip company into something you can forecast.
Micron makes the memory chips AI servers need, and Stephanie Link has recently started a position — deliberately a small one, because the stock is volatile. What convinces her is the contracted order book: "$100 billion in bookings between now and the end of the year, take-or-pay contracts." A take-or-pay contract obliges the customer to pay whether or not they take delivery, which converts a notoriously boom-and-bust business into something close to guaranteed revenue. "We're short everything in this world and they're right there."
Microchip makes the unglamorous small chips embedded in industrial equipment, cars, aircraft and appliances — "not the Nvidia chips… the little like-nothing chips that are in things like this." Jenny Harrington's five-year-old thesis is simply that the world will need every kind of chip forever, and the latest quarter delivered across the board: industrial up 24%, data center up 97%, aerospace and defence up 45%.
She owns the preferred shares rather than the common — a security that pays a fixed dividend and sits ahead of ordinary shareholders. She bought it in the April 2025 tariff panic at $41; it now trades at 71 and still yields 5.3%, so she captured most of the recovery while collecting income. Her wider point: "you don't need to own everything. You don't have to own Nvidia, you don't have to own Microsoft. You can find opportunities other places."
Microsoft rose about 8.5% this week after a long stretch of doing nothing. Bryn Talkington admits she was "exhausted with the stock performance and actually with the company," and the only reason she didn't sell was her faith in CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood. What they got right, in her view, was "reading the room": committing to remaining free-cash-flow positive and staying out of the debt market, unlike Google — Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson being, she believes, the only two AAA-rated companies left. And the number that mattered: cloud growth came in at 43% against a 38–40% run rate, with guidance raised. "So I do think it's a re-rating."
Kevin Simpson's contribution is a lesson in managing a position rather than a view. He owns it, added in the $370s and $380s when it fell from $550 to $350, and has now sold a covered call at $530 — meaning he collects a cash premium today in exchange for agreeing to sell his shares if they rise above $530 in the next couple of weeks. That's a 10% annualised return on a strike 8% above the current price, taken deliberately after a big move because option premiums are rich. "No loss in conviction in the name whatsoever, but just trying to add a little alpha on the edges."
Palantir rose almost 39% in a week. Bryn Talkington separates the two forces at work. The first spike was short covering — investors who had bet against the stock being forced to buy it back after strong earnings, which inflates a move but doesn't sustain it. What convinces her is what happened afterwards: the stock kept rising all week. "You've had follow-through — to me, very important."
Her business argument is that Palantir is "model neutral": it sells the software layer that governments and corporations use to act on data, and doesn't care whose AI model sits underneath, so it isn't a bet on any one lab winning. Expensive, but re-rated — and, notably, re-rated technically, which "could bring people like Joe T in later on" if it holds above its 200-day average.
The options market went wild: 1.1 million contracts and over $600 million of premium, roughly 90% of it in calls, four times normal volume — the fourth most traded stock in the market. The single largest trade rolled a bullish position further out, selling September calls and buying December ones: a bet that the near-term surge cools but the trend continues.
Snowflake stores and analyses corporate data in the cloud, and it hit a 52-week high — up 11% this week and around 20% in three. Stephanie Link's case is that growth is accelerating rather than fading: product revenue growth picked up last quarter, and with new products she expects another 30–34%. Committed future contracts ("RPO," remaining performance obligations) and bookings are growing double digits, which is the visibility part, and margins can still improve as it trims costs in some areas while raising prices in others.
Bryn Talkington's structural call on software rests on an idea worth understanding: the AI models themselves are becoming commodities. Satya Nadella's comment that "models need to be swappable" is the tell — if a company can swap one AI model for another underneath its product, then no model provider has lasting pricing power, and the value accrues to the applications built on top. "All these application companies, and Microsoft is at the epicenter, the ultimate SaaS company, ultimately are going to be where you make money as these commodity models get commoditized."
The chart supports her: the software index keeps making higher lows. And the violent July unwind — a leveraged hedge fund forced out of positions — she reads as a cleansing rather than a warning: it proved that the AI capital spending is here to stay "but software's not going away. It's been a really great reset."
SpaceX had its best week since listing, even though the first lock-up expiry — when insiders can start selling — happened yesterday, and Argus upgraded it to buy with a $160 target. Stephanie Link bought more, having started with a deliberately small "toe in the water" position at a much higher price; the stock is down 40%.
Her reading of the report that knocked it down: revenue grew 92%, every segment beat on sales, and profits before interest and depreciation rose sharply. The market disliked the spending — but management said the payback on that spending, in the AI segment, arrives within a year. Meanwhile the profitable part, satellite connectivity (Starlink), "just blew it away" with subscribers doubling and good margins.
Asked whether she accepts that spending can now only rise, since SpaceX is effectively another hyperscaler, she does: "it's going to yield returns eventually… they're barely even spending now and they're producing the growth that they are." Her single most concrete upside number: $14 billion of cloud service agreements signed in this quarter alone, potentially $60 billion a year over time.
Schwab is the big retail brokerage, and it hit a record high in a week when financials went for their tenth straight weekly gain — the longest run since at least 1989. Jenny Harrington's argument is relative value: it trades at 14.5 times earnings with strong earnings growth, and it has risen less than most other financial services companies and big banks, which surprises her.
It should be doing better still, she notes, because Schwab makes money from trading volume and from client cash — and volumes, volatility and equity prices are all elevated right now. "So get in while you can."
The FAA ordered inspections of more than 400 Boeing 737 MAX jets for possible cracks, and the stock barely moved. Stephanie Link's arithmetic explains why: 471 aircraft out of roughly 6,500 in the 737 family is "a small setback," and it will be fixed.
Underneath the headline, she argues the turnaround is real and measurable: production rates rising, free cash flow rising, margins expanding again, and about 8% organic growth. "To me, I think this is the buy."
Netflix has fallen from 47 times forward earnings to 19 times over the past year — an enormous de-rating — and Rothschild & Redburn called it a buy. Stephanie Link added to it last week below 20 times, and her point is that you don't need the old multiple back for the stock to work: "I don't think you need that kind of multiple expansion for the stock to recover. I think the stock is cheap, we love the story."
What has to improve is the product itself: "it's now about content — theirs has lagged and they need to pick it up, and I think they will." Bryn Talkington made Netflix her final trade, seeing it drifting up to the mid-80s by year end.
NextEra is buying Dominion, and Virginia's governor says she will intervene. Jenny Harrington structured a position that works either way — the clearest example of merger arbitrage on the show.
When the deal was announced, the usual thing happened: the target (Dominion) jumped about 10% and the acquirer (NextEra) fell about 10%, because acquirers usually overpay. She bought NextEra's convertible preferred shares, which pay a 7.9% yield and can convert into ordinary shares — so she's paid handsomely to wait.
Her two-sided logic: if the deal closes, NextEra's existing 8–9% earnings growth at a fair ~18 times gets richer through merger synergies. If regulators block it, NextEra simply recovers the 10% it lost on announcement. And she expected the political fight all along: "there's no way you bring two big utilities together and there's not political noise, especially with all the sensitivity right now highlighted by the data centers and everyone having higher utility costs."
Dominion is the utility NextEra is trying to buy, and Jenny Harrington owns it too. The takeover approach did something useful independent of whether it closes: it "highlighted Dominion — that it was undervalued," which is why the shares jumped 10% on the announcement, and she thinks there could be a little more. Both stocks traded higher on the Virginia governor's intervention news, which the desk reads as the market treating the threat as political noise rather than a real obstacle.
Kevin Simpson bought more Amgen right after a record high, and explains why he didn't wait for a dip: "we didn't want to wait after the earnings for a pullback, because the earnings were just so good." The company beat on revenue and profit and raised guidance, with newer drugs — Repatha for cholesterol, Evenity for osteoporosis — adding profitably to margins.
The bigger prize in the pipeline is Maritide, which would be a weight-loss treatment injected once a month rather than weekly, a meaningful convenience advantage in the largest drug market of the moment. He also thinks the sector gets an AI dividend early: "biotechs in general, as well as healthcare, can be some of the beneficiaries most quickly from AI," since drug discovery is a search problem. "We tend to hold it for a long time."
Bristol-Myers hit a 52-week high, up 23%, helped by a rumour that AstraZeneca might buy it. The rumour proved false, but Jenny Harrington's point is that it did something useful anyway: "it highlighted that there's value there."
She bought it two years ago and the thesis hasn't changed. It still trades at under 10 times earnings, pays a dividend yield over 4%, and generates $11 billion of spare cash this year rising to $15 billion next. The problem every large drug company faces is patents expiring on its best sellers — and her answer is that with that much cash, "they will be able to buy their way to growth" by acquiring other companies' drugs. That is now starting to happen.
She generalises it to the whole sector: healthcare produces enormous free cash and "has been undervalued and ignored and neglected. So maybe now's the time."
Argus lifted its Lilly target to $1,300. Kevin Simpson calls it "the highest quality healthcare company on the planet" — Zepbound and Mounjaro have made it the dominant name in weight-loss and diabetes treatment. But the reason he likes it isn't the blockbusters: "what I like most about Lilly is it's not a one-trick pony. There is diversification underneath the surface with their entire drug catalog," so the story doesn't depend on a single franchise. Jenny Harrington adds the honest caveat: at this valuation, "it requires exceptional execution."
Natera sells genetic tests, and its key product, Signatera, detects "minimal residual disease" — traces of cancer left in the bloodstream after treatment, which tells doctors whether a cancer is coming back before a scan would show it. The quarter beat badly: 34,000 tests delivered against expectations of 25,000, and the company raised guidance.
Stephanie Link's case is that this is a market that barely exists yet — eventually worth around $7 billion — and Natera is the number-one player in it. She also credits management for "investing where they should be" rather than harvesting early profits.
Copper hit a record high, and Jenny Harrington owns Freeport, the largest listed copper miner. "All roads lead to copper. Everywhere you look, it's copper" — electrification, EVs, the grid, and every data center needs enormous quantities of it, and copper has quietly climbed to $6.60 a pound this year.
What makes it still investable after a 30% run is that the valuation hasn't inflated: 18 times earnings and a 6% free-cash-flow yield, meaning the company generates cash equal to 6% of its market value each year. "That's why I think the wind could stay at the back, because they haven't gotten silly." Bryn Talkington's technical caution: she had her shares called away on a covered call, and the stock faces heavy resistance right here.
Antofagasta is a Chilean copper miner listed in London, and it's Stephanie Link's preferred way into the same trade — she calls it "the best-run copper company." Her framework separates the metals: copper and aluminium are heading into deficits this year, meaning demand exceeds mine supply, which is a mechanical support for the price. She is deliberately less excited about gold and silver, which don't have that industrial-shortage argument (though silver has some industrial demand). "It's all the same trade — electrification, EVs are back, it's grid, it's power, it's anything AI-food-chain related."
Alcoa is Stephanie Link's aluminium holding, and it sits in the same bucket as her copper position for the same reason: she expects both metals to be in supply deficit this year as electrification, EVs, grid upgrades and data-center construction all draw on the same limited mine output. "Alcoa, Antofagasta — same thing."
Rio Tinto is a large diversified miner and Jenny Harrington's other metals holding alongside Freeport. It sits inside the same "all roads lead to copper" view, in a week when the metals-and-mining index posted its best performance since March 2022 — a diversified way to own the electrification and AI-infrastructure demand for raw materials.
Bryn Talkington owns this fund rather than any single metal, and her reasoning is risk management. INFL holds a basket of precious metals, base metals and energy companies, so "I don't get caught up if gold has a big drawdown, or silver, because they're diversified."
Why hold the exposure at all: gold bounced off its 200-day average last week just as Japan intervened to support the yen for the third time this year. Currency interventions are a sign of strain in the financial system, so she wants a position that pays off if there's "a macro accident" — without betting the outcome on one metal.
Fiserv processes payments for banks and merchants, trades at only 7 times earnings and generates huge free cash flow — and it is being sold anyway. The reason is not valuation but credibility.
The rule articulated here is worth keeping: a new management team gets "maybe one, maybe two chances to guide down, reset the bar. But after that, you'd better get it right." This team has been in place over a year and has kept cutting guidance. "They've lost credibility… this is too much even for us. So we'll exit it. We're not exiting it today, because there's still value there, but we'll be out of it." It's the same test applied to the newly spun Honeywell aerospace business earlier in the show — a company that reiterated guidance two months after spinning out, then missed by $0.25 and cut.
Quanta builds and maintains electrical grid and power infrastructure, so it sits directly in the path of data-center and electrification spending. KeyBank upgraded it, and the quarter was outstanding: earnings up 70%, revenue up 41%, and the backlog — work already contracted but not yet done — up 59%.
Stephanie Link owns it and still won't add here. "I understand wanting to get on board. I would just wait for some weakness or a pullback." A rare, clean separation between liking a business and liking today's entry price.
Wells Fargo downgraded Allstate to underweight with a $250 target, arguing growth is slowing and profit margins are starting to compress. The holder on the desk agrees with the diagnosis and rejects the prescription — a useful distinction.
The concession: "if you're at a peak margin, you're probably not going to go to the next peak. You're probably going to level off here." Insurance is cyclical, and after a huge run the easy money is made. The rejection: a downgrade to underweight implies selling the entire position, "and we're not doing that." Taking some profit after a big run is fine; abandoning "a durable earnings story" is not. "I think it can be higher a year into the future."
Morgan Stanley upgraded Roche and raised its target to 63 from 46, citing strong oncology, visible growth and pipeline upside. Jenny Harrington owns it — and her problem is success. Her strategy is built around dividend income, and as the shares have risen 13% this year the yield has fallen to 3%.
"They've got everything going for them other than for us… once these companies start to really pick up steam, sometimes the valuation no longer makes sense for us. Trading at 16 times, great growth ahead, great stock — but we've got that discipline." A good illustration that a sell decision can be about a mandate rather than a judgment on the company.
Summary derived from the public CNBC Halftime Report audio episode (transcript in transcript.txt) for personal study. Not investment advice. © CNBC for source material.