It is in our nature to want more: More money. More friends. More muscles. More food. A more luxurious car. And, of course, more earnings through the stock market.
How can I tell after a year in which the total return of the S&P 500 (^GSPC) was 17.88%, bringing the index’s three-year total return to 86.11%? Because I’m always being asked by people for stock ideas, especially after years of the market basically moving up and to the right.
As a rule, I don’t give stock ideas, as that is no longer my career (I was an analyst for ten years). So I come to you in early 2026 with a tidy list of stock ideas provided by my contacts.
I warn that I am not endorsing the choices of these money management pros. This is not me saying to put your life savings into these stocks or even buy a single share.
Do your homework on each one. When you do this, you may find that you like other stocks in the industry better.
“One chip company in the world is riding the AI revolution, and that’s Nvidia. And I think how it plays out, the [earnings] the numbers are significantly underestimated. I think 15% to 20% as a minimum [earnings growth] we enter 2026. Put that together, and I think we’re looking at a $250 stock in a base case to end 2026.”
“We love Palantir. From a defense standpoint, they’re the leaders in AI and data, with Department of Defense approval and use. And then beyond that, corporate adoption and sovereign adoption. So we think the name continues [to go higher]. It’s one of those names, you can’t justify it from a valuation standpoint. But the narrative is quite compelling. And that can drive stocks for a very long time, just like Amazon did for the first 20 years of Amazon’s life after the IPO.”
“I think Broadcom is a little bit wrong. We were big buyers of it during COVID actually when it was giving you over 3% dividend yield. So you know we like dividends. So what I like about it is the VMware side of the business and the programmable side. These are very specialized chips. So they’re not competing as much with Nvidia, and I think they’re their own market and I think their own market is creating tremendous growth.
“We were reducing this position because it grew so much in our accounts. I mean, we had up to 7% of our portfolio in Broadcom. We didn’t want that much. We still love it, but we’re not expecting the 5,060% return. We’d be very happy with Broadcom. [returning] about 10%.”
