Yahoo Finance

It's time now for some of today's trending tickers. Scan the QR code on your screen to track the best and worst performing stocks of the day with Yahoo Finance's trending ticker page. First up, we're looking at the MAG 7 trade and Lou Basanese is still here with me. Lou, I know that you say alphabet is among the most attractive right now. Why is that?

I do. I think on a valuation basis. I also think it's a bet on the economy and the consumer just because it's a very advertising driven uh business. But also they're being underestimated in AI. I think Google absolutely has more data. Uh large language models are all about data, proprietary data. I think Google will become uh an eventual leader in that space. Um just, you know, upsizing everyone else and contributing to the business, right? We think about their moonshot bets of past perhaps that haven't panned out um very profitably. I think AI is going to be a different story for them. Um, but MAG 7 as a whole, I think this is like a boy band that's reached its point where they need to break up and go solo because everyone has always traded them as a block and I just you're seeing differences, right? If I look at where the economy is going, I got to be worried about meta, Google alphabets and uh Amazon, right? Because they're really bets on the consumer consumer spending and and business advertising. Um Apple, I think is really just the purest play of all on the consumer and they have the best advantage that that beats all the other MAG 7 stocks because they have 2.5 billion devices installed worldwide. They can incrementally change what they do and generate a significant amount of revenue and margin from that. And the proof is in the putting in services, right? $96 billion in services revenue in a year. That's more than Tesla, the roughly the size of Tesla and Disney's entire business. So I think Apple holds an advantage, but it's trading on the higher end of the range. So 30 times forward earnings is a little steep even for this guy. I've owned it since 2014. Uh but alphabet, I love it down here. I think, you know, there's an overhang of regulatory concerns that they're going to get broken up. If we're not going to ban TikTok, we're definitely not breaking up Alphabet and Google. It's just not happening.

Well, when you talk about the MAG 7 needing to break up like a boy band, which I love that analogy. It makes me think about the biggest laggard of the MAG 7 year to date, which of course is Tesla. How are you thinking about Tesla in this environment?

Look, I've never been a big fan of Elon Musk, right? So um, I think he's a great salesman and he's built a great following in the shareholder base, but the fundamentals just don't stack up for Tesla. I think he's selling a pipe dream that we're going to have stealth driving cars and robots in every home. That's great to generate interest and buzz and some retail shareholders, but it's not showing up in the bottom line. I also don't love autos. I mean, if you look at the auto space, it's almost as bad as the grocery space, right? The margins historically are 6 to 7 and a half percent operating margins. That's not a space that I can can absorb tariffs very easily, just like food and groceries can't. Uh it's just not attractive to me. Again, not saying that there isn't been tremendous money made there in wealth. I'm just not buying the dream. I want to see the fundamentals and I just don't see it in Tesla.

And and another stock I know you are watching is AMD, on among the chip names. Where do you stand with AMD?

Look, I think Nvidia, the potential delays that were rumored that didn't happen, they were, you know, probably will come back again. I think AMD has an opportunity, a window of opportunity to be that second source supplier, right? The world learned we can't rely on Nvidia alone. So will they ever, you know, ups outshine Nvidia? Probably not, but can they go from 12% market share to 20, 30%? I think it's a possibility. So I if if I'm in this market, I'm looking at AMD over Nvidia.

All right, really great overview of those names for our audience. We got Tesla, Apple, Alphabet and AMD all in there for you guys.