CNBC Halftime Report — The Momentum Reset and How to Trade It

Nvidia makes the chips that train and run AI. The news here is that Stephanie Link — a value-minded investor who says she "never owned it, regretfully" — finally bought it, purely on price. Even though Nvidia's business is booming (97% share of AI server chips, earnings up 130% and revenue up 85% last quarter, free cash flow on track to double to $206 billion), the stock has gone nowhere and is actually down on the year, so it now trades at just 18× earnings — the cheapest since 2019, and far below the 40–50× you'd pay for hotter chip names. Her rule is "buy low, sell high," and this is a rare chance to buy the best company in the industry on sale.

Josh Brown adds that Nvidia isn't a "momentum stock" anymore — the fast-money crowd left for Micron — which he thinks makes it safer, not weaker: lower hype, solid outlook. Bryn Talkington owns it and loves it, but raises the ceiling question: it's already worth almost $5 trillion, and she's not sure the market will let any company double to $10 trillion soon — so she keeps "selling calls" against it (collecting income by agreeing to sell at a higher price) rather than just holding and hoping.

Micron makes memory chips (DRAM and flash), which AI servers need in huge quantities. The committee is actively buying the pullback: Jim Lebenthal doubled his position at $60, calling it a "value stock" — it looks expensive on today's depressed earnings but only about 7× next year's expected earnings, and the company has locked in long-term supply contracts and will soon start returning cash to shareholders. One striking data point: Micron alone could be 15–20% of the entire S&P 500's earnings growth this year.

Bryn Talkington bought it too and, like with Nvidia, sells "call options" against it — she collects a $7 premium for agreeing to sell at $70 by September, which lowers her effective cost to about $53 and pays her to wait. The stock is up 257% this year yet still only ~7× earnings, which is why Jason Snipe says it's both a value and a momentum stock at the same time.

Josh Brown's single biggest conviction is that Apple is where all the AI spending eventually pays off. His logic: everyone else (Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon) is pouring hundreds of billions into building AI, but history says the value flows to whoever owns the customer — just as the phone companies built the internet's plumbing while Instagram (7 employees) captured the value. Apple has 2.5 billion devices already in people's hands, so it can simply layer AI on top and collect the fees, without spending on the expensive build-out itself.

The catalysts he sees: the stock is within ~1% of an all-time high, there's a $100 billion buyback, and on September 1 new chief John Ternus takes over with a likely foldable iPhone and a smarter Siri that lets you "bring your own" AI model (ChatGPT, Claude, whatever) — Apple gets paid through the App Store either way. Jason Snipe agrees: Apple's wait-and-see, low-spending approach is being rewarded. Bryn's caveat is on the enterprise side, not Apple — she thinks Apple "crushes it" with consumers.

Alphabet (Google's parent) is unusual in this debate because it plays both sides: it's a big AI spender, but it also owns a leading AI model, Gemini. Brown calls this the "double benefit" — the money Alphabet spends building AI infrastructure comes back through Gemini's own profits, so value accrues on both ends rather than leaking out to suppliers.

He's less certain than he is on Apple — the enterprise-AI picture is "murkier and harder to figure out" — but Alphabet is on his short list of companies positioned to actually capture the payoff from the AI build-out.

Citigroup was, for 15 years after the financial crisis, an "impossible to own" stock — a serial disappointment. Brown's "best stock in the market" thesis is that CEO Jane Fraser has genuinely turned it around by "shrinking to grow": selling off weak businesses and concentrating on its crown jewel, International Services (moving money for big companies across borders). The proof: the stock is up 65% over the past year, far ahead of peers like JPMorgan (+18%) and Bank of America (+25%).

Crucially, he thinks there's still room, because over 20 years the stock is still down ~4% a year — the worst of the big banks — so it's early in a real recovery, not late. Coming catalysts: spinning off its Mexican bank Banamex in 6–9 months, and finally escaping the Fed's regulatory "consent orders." It's still cheap (earnings per share jumped 56% last quarter). Jim Lebenthal, a long-time believer, owns it too and made it his final trade with earnings due next week.

CrowdStrike sells cloud-based cybersecurity. Earlier this year investors feared AI (and companies like Anthropic) would make cybersecurity software obsolete — the "SAS apocalypse" — and dumped the whole software group. Brown says that fear "lasted about 10 minutes": the stock is up 68% this year. The company flipped the argument on its head — more AI means more cyber threats, which means more contracts, more pricing power, and stickier customers.

The numbers back it: annual recurring revenue reached $5.51 billion (up 24%), free cash flow hit a record $468 million (34% of revenue), and its "rule-of-40" score (growth plus profit margin) is 59 — elite. Brown is a long-term holder who won't sell a share, and points to CrowdStrike as proof the market is now "getting smarter," sorting the software winners from losers instead of hating them all.

Snowflake runs a cloud "data warehouse" — where big companies store and analyze their data — which is central to AI, since models need well-organized data to work on. Jason Snipe owns it and notes Citi just named it a top software pick. After a slow start to the year it reported a strong quarter (earnings up 68%, revenue up 33%) and targets 30% revenue growth, helped by a new deal with Amazon's cloud.

One quirk he flags: Snowflake charges by usage ("consumption"), so results can be lumpy quarter to quarter. But with all the AI-driven spending flowing through data infrastructure, and the stock up 21% this year, he thinks it's clearly "worth owning" — a reminder that not all software outside cybersecurity has been a dog.

ServiceNow sells workflow software that automates IT and business processes for large organizations. It's down about 30% this year on the fear that AI "agents" would replace traditional software subscriptions. Jason Snipe's view is that fear is misplaced for a company like this: ServiceNow is embracing AI by adding its own "agentic" tools, so it's on the winning side of the shift, not the losing one.

Goldman Sachs reiterated a buy rating, and while the stock's price action hasn't been strong, momentum has been building over recent months before a recent pullback. Jason calls it "worthy of ownership."

Goldman Sachs is Jason Snipe's favorite name in the financial sector. His case is that Goldman's investment-banking business is booming — revenue there jumped 48% last quarter — and he expects "capital markets" activity (deals, IPOs, trading) to keep surging. The stock is up 20% this year and, after a recent dip, is regaining momentum.

The one hesitation is timing: the committee generally avoids buying banks right before earnings because results can swing the stock sharply, and bank earnings start next week. But he continues to like the space, with investment banking as the standout.

Marvell makes custom chips used in data centers and networking — a direct AI beneficiary. Stephanie Link owns it and is candid that it "scares me because it goes up a lot and goes down a lot"; she's up about 100% on it. It's her deliberate slice of high-volatility semiconductor momentum, which she balances against the calmer, buy-low approach she took with Nvidia.

In other words, she's willing to hold one wild momentum name for the upside, as long as the rest of her semi exposure is the cheaper, steadier kind.

Microsoft is the committee's example of an AI spender whose payoff is in doubt. Bryn Talkington owns it but is openly skeptical it can "execute": she thinks its Copilot AI assistant is mediocre — "more like Teams" — and that despite a fantastic cloud business, "the money they're spending, I just don't see the output." The stock is also down about 32% from its high.

Her broader framework is that in the murky enterprise-AI layer it's easier to name the likely losers than the winners, and a giant spender with an underwhelming product is a candidate. It's a caution on execution and on paying up for a heavy spender, not a claim the business is broken.

Zoom is video-conferencing software. Bryn Talkington's blunt verdict: "Zoom should not exist as a publicly traded company" at its ~$28 billion value, because Microsoft Teams — even though she calls it "mediocre" — comes bundled free inside Microsoft's software that companies already pay for. When a good-enough competitor is included at no extra cost with a product everyone already has, the standalone version struggles to justify itself.

She uses Zoom as her clearest example of an "enterprise loser" in the AI/software shakeout — the kind of name whose niche gets absorbed by a bigger platform.

CBRE is the world's largest commercial-real-estate services firm (leasing, property management, brokerage). Bryn Talkington made it her final-trade pick, citing an expectation of roughly 26% earnings growth when the company reports at the end of the month — a fast growth rate for a real-estate-linked business.

Live Nation is the concert-promotion and ticketing giant (it owns Ticketmaster). Josh Brown made it his final trade, pointing to two analyst price-target increases the same day — including one from Wells Fargo up to $222 — as a sign of building confidence in the stock.