Joseph Carlson — 9 Best Stocks To Buy In July

Meta is Carlson's top July pick. The valuation math is the draw: a fast-growing, hugely profitable company trading at only about 18× next year's earnings — cheap for the growth. The extra kicker is what Meta can do with all the AI computing power it's building. A respected research shop (SemiAnalysis) lists the options: build its own top-tier AI model, make its ad-targeting system roughly ten times smarter (which directly grows ad revenue), rent a private version of Anthropic's "Claude" AI, sell access to its own AI through an API, and even rent out spare computing capacity to others like a cloud provider.

That last idea — renting compute at a premium, the way SpaceX's Starlink created a new business — is the one Carlson is most excited about: "just a couple hundred megawatts can already drive $10 billion a year in revenue," and he expects a ~$10 billion deal with Anthropic to get it started. His point is that Meta's heavy spending isn't waste; it's building a set of new money-making options on top of an already-cheap, dominant advertising business.

Amazon is Carlson's "easy" second July buy. Unlike Meta it isn't making a risky bet — it already owns the pieces that matter: a giant delivery network, two-day shipping, and Prime memberships. On top of that sits AWS, its cloud business, which he thinks is about to grow faster because demand for its services is so strong.

The reassuring part for him is that Amazon spends more on new capacity ("capex") than anyone, but "all of it is going online and being immediately monetized" — i.e. the moment it builds capacity, paying customers use it. So the spending translates straight into revenue rather than sitting idle, which is exactly what he wants to see.

Microsoft is the third of his big-tech July buys. The whole case is valuation: the stock is below $400 and trades at about 23× the last year's earnings. That matters because Microsoft normally trades much richer — usually 30 to 38× earnings, and nearly 40× as recently as 2024. The only other time in the last five years it was this cheap was the 2022 market bottom.

Why is a company this good suddenly this cheap? Because it isn't a semiconductor stock, so it's being sold along with "everything else" to fund the chip buying. Nothing about the business has broken — analysts still expect high-teens earnings growth and its Office software isn't losing ground — so Carlson sees a rare chance to buy a top-tier company at a bargain-bottom price.

Netflix has fallen to about $75.83, down roughly 40% from its highs, and now trades around 20× earnings — cheap for it (and Carlson thinks the earnings estimates are too low, making it even cheaper). He's unusually honest about the bear case: Netflix hasn't had a breakout hit in a while, and — per Bloomberg's data — viewers keep quitting its shows after the first season (One Piece, Beef, The Night Agent and Avatar all lost big chunks of their audience in later seasons).

His explanation is that Netflix waits too long between seasons and cancels shows on cliffhangers, so people lose the thread or stop trusting it — while Apple, by contrast, finishes every series it starts. But he thinks Netflix learns fast and will fix this, and crucially "this has never been a good company to bet against." The clincher: Netflix's stock chart moves in near-lockstep with Spotify's, even though Spotify has none of these content problems — proof to him that the drop is money rotating out of everything to chase chips, not a real deterioration in the business.

Uber is a recent buy. Carlson calls it "the ride-sharing king" — a giant network that aggregates enormous demand, which is its main defense against competitors. He passed when the stock ran up to $100, but bought once it fell back to about $70.

The big fear is self-driving cars (Waymo, Tesla, Zoox) replacing Uber. He puts the threat in perspective: Waymo does about 500,000 trips a week, while Uber does 3.64 billion trips a quarter — Uber does more than 570 times the volume. Rivals can chip away, but he considers that lead effectively insurmountable, so he views the AV worry as overblown relative to how far the stock fell.

DoorDash is the companion buy to Uber — same idea, different category (food delivery instead of rides). The stock ran all the way up to $281, then fell to $150, which is where Carlson bought; it has since recovered to about $190.

He likes both Uber and DoorDash because they're "early in their growth path" and both suffered heavy sell-offs in this rotation out of everything-but-chips. In other words, he's buying two dominant, still-growing platforms while they're temporarily out of favor. (He also noted his passive-income portfolio just crossed $1 million.)

Copart runs online auctions for salvaged and totaled vehicles, mostly on behalf of insurance companies. Carlson is "fascinated by the business model": it combines hard-to-replicate assets (lots of real estate to store cars), deep relationships with insurers, and its own software — a genuine moat.

The stock has been "crushed in this market," falling from $62 to about $28, more than 50% off its highs, even though nothing is wrong with the business — it has a very strong balance sheet and should keep growing for years. That mismatch between a durable, high-quality company and a beaten-down price is exactly the "left behind" setup he's hunting.

Constellation Software grows by buying up lots of small, specialized software companies — each one runs niche software that a particular industry depends on (a "serial acquirer of vertical-market software"). It's selling off partly on the general market rotation and partly because investors have soured on anything software-related, fearing AI will make software easy to replace.

Carlson thinks that fear is misplaced here: "I do not believe that Claude is going to replace or even really damage the huge majority of software that they own" — this is sticky, mission-critical software for specific industries, not something a chatbot casually rebuilds. So he sees the sell-off as overdone and the quality intact.

Mastercard is the last of the nine, and Carlson calls it "another obvious one." It has been "left behind" with the rest of the non-chip market, falling from about $600 to $530. At roughly 23× its expected 2027 earnings, that's an attractive price for what he considers a very high-quality, dominant payments network.

He's been adding to this and the other names so that when the crowd eventually cools on semiconductors and money rotates back to quality, he's "well situated" — buying great businesses cheap now and waiting for the rotation to reward them. (Mastercard is his single largest, highest-conviction position elsewhere in his coverage.)

Micron is the poster child for the trade Carlson is deliberately avoiding, not joining. It makes memory chips, and right now demand so far exceeds supply that Micron has raised prices roughly tenfold ("scarcity pricing"), producing spectacular short-term margins and earnings. That's the engine behind semiconductors ballooning to ~20% of the whole S&P 500.

His caution is that this is historically cyclical: scarcity pricing eventually normalizes, and much of the current gain is price rather than more units sold. He doesn't own it, and he frames the crowd piling into names like Micron — "buying whatever is going up" — as the momentum that's leaving his quality compounders cheap.

Mobility Global is a company that was spun off from S&P Global (one of Carlson's holdings), so he received shares in it automatically. He hasn't formed a firm view yet — "I've not decided to sell it yet. I'm going to be holding on to this one for a little bit." It's a wait-and-see holding, not a buy or sell recommendation.

Spotify comes up as Carlson's proof that Netflix's drop is about market flows, not the business. Spotify has none of Netflix's problems — no reliance on hit TV shows, no merger drama — yet its stock chart moves almost identically to Netflix's, falling in lockstep.

If the two trade the same despite completely different fundamentals, the common cause must be external: money being pulled out of "everything else" and pushed into semiconductors. So Spotify is used here as evidence for the rotation thesis rather than as its own buy pitch in this video.

Bitcoin appears because it's the asset underneath the MicroStrategy story. Carlson's point about it here is narrow: "Bitcoin has no earnings per share… no fundamentals, no free cash flow. It's all dependent on other investors valuing it at even more than you paid for it." In other words, unlike a company, there are no profits underpinning the price — it only rises if the next buyer pays more.

He isn't making a full bull-or-bear call on Bitcoin itself; he's using that feature to explain why a leveraged, buy-only strategy built entirely on Bitcoin (MicroStrategy's) is so fragile.

MicroStrategy is Carlson's "fail of the week." The company borrows money and issues stock to buy Bitcoin, so it's a leveraged bet — when Bitcoin fell 30–40%, the stock fell about 80% (from over $450 to roughly $98). Carlson argues this was structurally doomed. The whole model only works while the company's stock trades above the value of the Bitcoin it holds (a "premium to NAV"): that premium lets it issue new shares, buy more Bitcoin, and repeat — a flywheel.

The moment the market started valuing the company at a discount to its Bitcoin instead, the flywheel reversed — "roll-ups typically don't work well in reverse" — and it unravelled. He piles on Michael Saylor for evangelizing extreme leverage (even urging Warren Buffett to convert Berkshire's ~$320B in Treasuries to Bitcoin), getting hostile with a fair interviewer question, and flip-flopping on his own "never sell" pledge. The collapse, in Carlson's view, "was entirely inevitable."