Top Stocks For H2 2026!

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Daniel Snyder: Hey everyone. Welcome to Top Stocks for H2 of 2026 I’m Daniel Snyder from Seeking Alpha. And you’re in for a treat today. Now if you joined us last week for last week’s webinar about the review of the top ten from January, we know that we had one word and that was outperformance. Well, hopefully the word from today on is continuation.

And we’re going to dive into conversation and get those picks from Steven Cress here in just a moment. But before we do, let’s get a quick legal disclaimer out of the way. Past performance is no guarantee for future results. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of seeking off as a whole. The accuracy and completeness of content shared during the event cannot be guaranteed.

Content is offered for information purposes only. All event participants must comply with seeking office event policy. Analysts, investing group leaders and other third parties participating in the event include both professional investors and individual investors, who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body. Seeking Alpha does not take account of your objectives or financial situation and does not offer any personalized investment advice.

Seeking Alpha is not a licensed security dealer, broker, US investment advisor or investment bank. Now with that other way, this is the best part. I get to introduce you to Steven Cress. For all of you that know who he is, well, he is back. He is the Titan here at Seeking Alpha. Long history. But Steve, for the people that may not know who you are and your history, from Morgan Stanley to running your own trading desk to to the fintech that you created, why don’t you give people a brief review of how you got to where you are today?

Steven Cress: Yeah. Well, first and foremost, Daniel, thank you for organizing this event. It’s one of my favorite of the year, this event and top stocks in January. And we’ve got a great track record and I appreciate you organizing it. And yeah, a little bit of background on myself. I’ve been in the world of finance for over 35 years. Bulk of my career was spent at Morgan Stanley.

I was there for 13 years where I ran a prop trading desk in quantitative strategies. I was also at Northern Trust Global Investments in London, where I ended up international. After that, I founded a hedge fund in London, and I also started a fintech company that was acquired by Seeking Alpha in 2019. And that is what has brought me here today, and it’s been an incredible journey.

We’ve created some fantastic products with our system and, you know, it’s a foundation for our factor grids, for equities. We also have grades on rights, we have client grades on ETFs. And very importantly, we have quant grades, dividend safety scores which are very important for dividend investors. So it’s been a great journey

DS: and you have been through so many cycles.

You’ve been around the block. So obviously we’d love to pick your brain on the knowledge and see what your thoughts are on the macroeconomic things that are unfolding in the market, how that’s affecting the market, what you’re seeing within the quant system because you designed and built it, you know it best, and you can help guide us through these proprietary models that we’ve created, the waiting and how we rate the stocks here today.

So obviously we have ten stocks that we’re going to get into here in a little bit in the presentation. But I’d love to start off. Can you walk us through what are you seeing in the macroeconomic world right now.

SC: Yeah. So that’s I think that’s a great idea. We’ll cover a little bit what we see in the market, the macro economic world, what we see with the equity market and what we have seen.

And I’m sure many people have witnessed it and felt it in their own portfolios, is a lot of volatility during the first half of 2026. And it is amazing that the market is, you know, hit near all time highs in June. You can see on this chart on the right hand side that both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones are near record highs.

The Nasdaq hit the record highs in early June. And then technology really did come off sharply. And this is just a lot of uncertainty. We have a war that’s going on with Iran. We have inflation that’s been very sticky. And that was a result post pandemic and then tariffs. And then obviously with a war surging from $70 to $120, and we at the same time have had this AI revolution, which has led to CapEx spending by hyperscalers.

And of course, additional uncertainty coming up as it is seasonal with midterm elections. And we can show you and we will show you how during the last 25 midterm elections, the market typical is very volatile during that period. So it has been a period of risk on risk off, risk on risk off during January. But I will say our earnings, you know, have really helped keep the market near all time highs.

You can see even with the market closes at highs, investor sentiment is very, very skittish. This is taken from the CNN Fear and Greed Index which I commonly use. I think it’s a good index has a lot of underlying indicators that show what sentiment are. So these market indicators and economic indicators feed into this overall index. And you could see it is now approaching extreme fear.

And you know this is during a period where the market is close to all time highs. And as you look at the the fear of greed index on the right hand side, you can see what the number is. For the previous close it was 20 for a week ago, it was 31 a month ago. It was actually greed at 59 and a year ago it was even closer to extreme greed at 64.

So investor sentiment has been all over the place. If you look at the table on the right hand side and you go to the year to date calm, you can see easily. Technology has led this year, but it’s a very deceptive picture. If you take a look at the five day performance for technology and yesterday’s performance, you can see technology was down 2.7% for the five days.

It was down 1.2% when most other sectors were up. And it’s just like switching on and off every couple of weeks. Between technology taking the market to highs to technology falling off, energy, you could see, is up 18% year to date. At one point, energy was the best performing sector. It was up close to 30%. Obviously, that fell when it looked like we were going to have a treaty with Iran, but that has since reversed.

So there’s just a lot of volatility, which has led the VIX to rally during various periods, and the Fear and greed index to fall to the fear to extreme fear territory. And then at other times earnings are just crushing it, both top line and bottom line. But we have our results. And that helps bring the market to new highs.

So lots of mixed uncertainty. And Daniel we were just talking about this. You and I are clear today with the current CPI numbers. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about the economic data that just came out and had a positive impact on the market today?

DS: Yes. Does have a positive impact. Obviously we’ve been watching the inflation numbers every month, watching also producer price index numbers.

But the CPI, you get a little bit of hope this morning with the release of it actually falling, which was a surprise but probably not a surprise to some that are watching those prices. You know, watching the oil futures. Obviously, as we were doing our webinar last week, we were I think around $75. Today we’re up closer to $80.

The market’s going to be watching that as well going forward, because higher energy prices obviously can trickle down to that inflation number. But it is a little bit of a hope here in the cause being that the falling energy prices probably helped us here. But you think about the Federal Reserve, right. So what comes next? We obviously have a new fed chair.

Warsh, who stepped in the market, is probably going to test him at some point and see, maybe you can talk about this a little bit further into the presentation today. But thinking about the dual mandate, right. Employment and inflation. And with this inflation number, obviously they’re not going to react to just one inflation print. They usually look at three or more to see what the trend is.

So we need to see how it pans out over the rest of the summer. But also keeping an eye on those employment numbers at the beginning of every month. Employment, it’s been strong, is what we’ve seen, even with everybody talking about AI, maybe having job displacement, job destruction, the numbers aren’t showing it. So as you’re talking about with the trade that’s been going on with the AI trade, there’s a lot of focus on it.

But this inflation print today is definitely going to be welcomed by all. And we’ll see what happens over the next 2 or 3 months, especially as you mentioned with Iran, the closure with the Strait of Hormuz, everything that’s going on over there, just as we thought we were getting a glimmer of hope. Obviously things have escalated again. So all eyes are obviously on that.

But I do want to mention as well, if you were watching the bank earnings this morning, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan earnings are strong. To your point earnings are coming in strong so far. However I believe diamond even said one of the big key risks right now is still that geopolitical risk. So Steve, do you want to talk about what you’re seeing with the interest rate traders and what they’re looking forward?

SC: Yeah, absolutely. So much of uncertainty. And I’ll just show like on the table here that we have on the upper left hand side, you can see before this big drop it was a big increase like last month. And the market you know the Nasdaq really started to come off. That’s when we saw this like CPI print surge. So if you go back to that period people were like really fearful.

Will it contain a certain now we knew we had the treaty take place and that helped alleviate a lot of the pressure and oil did come down. But as we’re getting into more geopolitical events that could indicate further hostility, there’s still a lot of uncertainty there. And that brings us up to this next slide. So this is showing us the interest rate target probability going out to December.

So from the December meeting this is showing you what basically the sentiment is of interest rate graders. And this is completely different than what we were seeing really just six months ago. Six months ago we were looking for cuts in interest rates. Now interest rate traders are actually betting rates are going to go higher. And that’s due to persistent inflation.

That’s due to higher Treasury yields. And you can see here currently for the Fed December meeting about 21% of interest rate traders are expecting rates to say unchanged. However you have 41% expecting a 25 basis point hike. You have 28% expecting a 50 basis point hike. And you even have 8% of interest rate traders expecting a 75 basis point hike going into that December meeting by that period.

So this is clearly a different picture than we had about a year ago. However, we do have a lot of spending there. And this chart shows you it’s from Goldman Sachs. And it’s a really nice chart. It shows you hyperscalers and AI CapEx spending, which is absolutely tremendous. And what I like to make a notation here is Goldman Sachs is looking for 1.4 trillion in hyperscale AI CapEx spending by 2027.

I remember doing showing a similar slide to this back in December, and this 1.4 trillion number was actually in like beyond 2030. So spending is happening at such a fast rate that Goldman Sachs actually put it into this chart that they’re looking for 1.4 trillion in AI CapEx spending by 2027. And just recently, we saw a lot of the Mag seven companies actually issuing bonds so they could raise capital.

These companies are rich in cash, really rich, and crash super profitable out there with bond issues so they could spend more money on AI. And it’s just really a testament to the revolution that’s taking place. But unlike what we’ve seen in the past with the TMT bubble, which occurred around 99, 2000, 2001, companies now have real revenue and real earnings.

And I was there for that period. And a lot of loans were being provided by vendors to companies that had absolutely no revenue and no earnings. And this time we are seeing lots of capital going to companies at that are earning money, and we own a lot of those stocks, and we recommend a lot of those stocks in our portfolio.

And you can see in terms of earnings the S&P 500 earnings outlook continues to improve. So the line that you see in blue as the recent number the line in gray is as of March 31st. So despite the AI bubble despite interest rates being higher despite inflation being higher for longer, we are seeing strong corporate profits. And that has helped to bolster the S&P to record levels up 9% year to date.

And in fact, S&P 500 earnings are expected to grow by 24% year over year for the calendar year 2026, led pretty much by technology and energy and stocks that are exposed to AI as data centers and the energy transition because AI requires a lot of energy. And in addition, really, I don’t want to leave out the geopolitical events with aerospace and defense spending and a lot of stockpiles having dwindled, there’s going to be a lot of government spending in this area as well.

There’s continued reason to believe that earnings should continue to improve going forward. And in fact, when you look at this table on the right hand side, every single sector except the healthcare sector is the only one where it shows that earnings will not be as high as March 31st. So another reason to be concerned about there is, you know, outside of inflation being higher than expected, interest rates being higher than expected geopolitical events.

We are also coming up on midterm elections. I mentioned this previously and this is a seasonal impact that does occur. And you can see here from the last 25 midterm elections and every single case, the largest drawdown in a 12 month period occurred prior to that midterm election. So you could see on average, there was a -18% drawdown in the market prior to the midterm election.

So certainly, you know, with a lot of the economic data that’s there, with interest rates potentially moving up, with inflation being higher than expected and not knowing what’s going to happen with geopolitical events on top of midterm elections, there is a lot of uncertainty, I will say, and this is a huge benefit to this, and there’s a huge opportunity here for those who have taken advantage of this in the past.

And I know many investors who have. You will see for the period after midterm elections, the three month period following it, on average, the market is up 5.8% for the six month period. It’s up 10.5%. And for the 12 month period, that’s up on average 14.8%. So really there is an opportunity. The market does weaken. It’s probably most likely, according to history opportunistic to take advantage of that market weakness.

And what I want to show here to is based on the uncertainty. Even though the market is trading near all time highs, you know, we should be prepped for this uncertainty. So what I wanted to highlight, and many of you may have seen this chart that we pulled together in the past, we took the last five market corrections going back to 2010, and we sort of drew a line in the sand, and we said if the market pulled back 15%, we would use that as an opportunity to buy the market.

And when we did, if you bought into the S&P 500, when the market was down 15% and you held it for two years on average, you were up almost 50%. So that really demonstrates the power of being able to take advantage of the market, dipping and not letting fear. Have you panicked, but actually taking advantage of the opportunity.

And more importantly, instead of buying the S&P 500, if you bought our top ten strong buys, when the market pulled back and you held those for two years, on average, you would have been up 117%. So that is a real testament to buying stocks with strong fundamentals. And I will tell you when the market goes into those corrective phases, even if the markets are only pulling back 5% or 10 or 15%, usually stocks with strong fundamentals fall far harder and far faster.

So it’s not uncommon when the market has that kind of pullback to see many of our quantum strong buys decline 2025, 30, 35, even 40% in the initial phases of a market pullback. But it creates a vast opportunity to buy stocks with strong fundamentals. And I use here a couple of quotes from some famous investors. I like to use the one from Peter Lynch, who famously said the key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.

The very top one you can see, fear and greed are moving the market. Panic selling during downturns can lead to financial setbacks and that is so true. If you get scared out of the market when it corrects, that really lead to a setback. One of our own writers here at Alpha Column, Roach, says the stock market is the only market where things go on sale and all the customers run out of the store.

And of course, Warren Buffett saying be fearful when others are greedy and greedy, what others are beautiful. And basically what I summarize all these, I sort of have my own quote I like to use fear fades. The market will always return to fundamentals, and that’s why you really want to take advantage of stocks with strong fundamentals during these pullbacks.

And we have our own track record to prove that we have a product called Alpha Picks. Alpha picks has been out since July of 2022. And with alpha picks we take we basically recommend our two strongest quant ideas every month. And we have asked a portfolio of about 40 stocks. And what I want to highlight here is in September 2022, the mini crash which occurred the market was down about 17%.

If you bought into Alpha Picks when the market was down 17% of leaving, many of the stocks and alpha picks were getting hit much harder than the market had you bought in at that point, when the market was up 17% and you held it, you would now be up 396%. And then even a little bit more recently, have you wanted the first quarter of 2025 when the market corrected about 12% on Liberation Day, the market was down 12%.

If you bought alpha picks at that point, stocks with very strong fundamentals, you would be up 146% now. And even more recently this year and March 26th, 2026, when we had the shock, the market pulled back 8.5%. And if you bought alpha picks at that point, you would be up 41% already. So it’s a real testament to buying stocks with strong fundamentals during these corrective phases.

DS: Hey Steve. And you don’t mind, I was going to jump in. We have a poll that I would like to actually open to everybody. So if you’re looking at the stream here on Seeking Alpha, on the right hand side, you should see a Q&A and a poll button. It’s going to open right now. The question is before we get into quant and the review of the top stocks is what do you think will be the major source of volatility leading into the end of this year?

Four options here geopolitical war, the Federal Reserve having a misstep or inflation. The third is weak earnings or the fourth is midterm election. I’m gonna go ahead and leave this poll open for a little bit. And maybe after you do a recap before we get into the ten picks, we’ll do a quick review of what everybody’s saying. All right.

Lots of good choices there. I’ll tell you. That could be more than one.

SC: Absolutely. Hopefully not. Hopefully not. So, you know, it’s I think that’s a good segue, because a lot of those issues that you raised could create emotions, could be high sentiment could be high, anxiety can run high. And really, the purpose of quant is to help eliminate emotion from investing.

And you wouldn’t people ask what is quant? Quant really is not that different than what many analysts do. I was an analyst myself and I worked at Morgan Stanley and, you know, many analysts at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch, they tend to look at fundamental factors and quant isn’t really any different. It looks at fundamental factors, but it does use a lot of data and math and algos to help identify investment opportunities.

So the quantity be different for many models are particular model is focused on what I call Garp. Plus Garp would be growth at a reasonable price. And then we sort of have the plus aspect because we also look at momentum and positive EPs revisions. And there are a number of analysts that look at those factors as well. But what does is it employs the power of computer processing.

So instead of what I was an analyst, I could only cover maybe 20 stocks at one given period. And when you cover 20 stops, maybe you can write a full report on each stock maybe twice a month, and then you have alerts that you might put out as well. On a monthly basis, you’re really limited into how much you can write and provide content.

The power of computer processing enables us to basically go through close to 5000 stocks on a daily basis, and every single morning we go through companies balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statements, and hundreds of financial metrics. And we look at stocks and we compare them to other stocks in the sector and we score them. So quantum gives us the ability on a daily basis to issue a directional recommendation, whether it be a strong by or a strong sell, by using data on a daily basis and comparing companies to other companies in the sector.

So it really gives us a great ability to rank stocks and to reach the strong from the weak. And we have a really good track record with our strategy. These are all simulated trades. This actually is not even a backtest. This goes back about five years. And what we do here is we take all our quant strong buys.

And on a daily basis we enter into a portfolio and we measure the returns. And what you’re looking at is not really an investment product. I put this out here as a demonstration of the overall strategy. And you can see if you bought into this or if you follow this, you would see our quant performance is up 179% over a five year period.

Just being the quants drawn bias against Wall Street strong bias. Measuring that on a daily basis being up only 15.89%. So you’re looking at our quantum system of 179% compared to Wall Street, strong bias of only 15% and the S&P 500 for the same period, up 52%. So any given day we could have anywhere from 380 to 400 strong buys that are in this portfolio.

So this really demonstrates that the overall Garp strategy that we employ works well. And we could also see our performance for this year alone is working very well. The quant system is up 22% versus the S&P up 12.78%. And this is actually a rare year where Wall Street analysts are actually doing fairly well. They’re up about 13%. But you could see over the different time horizons, whether it’s five years or just year to date, the quantum system is handedly believe it.

So now I want to provide a recap on our top ten stocks from January, and I’ll actually show you the performance for a couple other periods here. This is the actual top ten stocks for H1. So for 2026 you could see that the return from to from January 6th to June 29th was really 70%. That is a huge return for ten stocks compared to the S&P for the same period, up 8.32%.

But we do have a track record. If you go to 2025 and you measure stocks that we recommended on January 9th, 2025 through the end of June this year, you can see we’re up 91% in those stocks versus the S&P up 27%. If you took our recommendations from January of 2024 through June of this year, it’s up a whopping 329% compared to the S&P, up 60%.

And if we went back to 2023 and the stocks we bought in January then and held it to June of this year, we are up 232% versus the S&P up 101%. So that average total return is up 180% using our top ten versus the S&P up about 50% for the same period. So our strategy really does work very well whether we’re looking at all the quants stocks, which were strong by all 380 to 400, or just our top ten recommendations, it has Excel performance.

I want to give an idea to people because we get this question all the time. We have a great track record for our top ten stocks. And a lot of people ask me, how do I do it? Do I just go to the screen? Do I just pull the top ten stocks? And I will say, I do go to our quant screen and I do set some parameters and criteria.

So I am only looking for quant strong buys with preferred factors and fundamentals. And I added tilt towards top and bottom line growth. So and everyone has the capability to do this on our screening tool. So I’ll put a little bit of a tilt on growth. And then I also add a little diversification with market cap and sector diversification.

So if you were to see the names that I present here, it is not necessarily in the sequential order that you would see if you ran our screen. And the reason being when people buy these top ten, I don’t want it to be a full list of technology stocks. I want some diversification. I personally believe diversification is very important.

It helps to minimize risk and maximize returns. So even when it just comes down to my top ten list, I like to add that diversification through sectors, through market cap. And I do believe that helps to provide good returns over the long period. And you know, once I highlight the sectors, I try to find the best stocks within those asset classes that have the best growth, the best valuation framework, the best profitability.

So typically when you see the list, some of the names would be on the list on that top part sequentially. But you have to go down a little bit further to see some of the other names that I recommend. For the most part, if you’re looking at like the top 30 stocks, you’ll see most of the stocks will coincide with that.

I do want to say though, and we’ve had this question. You know, when a stock goes to sell from the top ten, do you sell it immediately? This is a list that I actually do not change. So where with the alpha picks portfolio or the Pro quant portfolio, or the quantum growth in income where those are actively managed, this top ten is just a static list of our top ten stocks.

We don’t make any changes. So a stock forced to sell. We’re not giving you any guidance. It’s really up to you as the individual to make a move of a stock goes to hold or sell. You can decide to either keep it in your portfolio or remove it. This is a static list for us, so we do not make any changes.

So top ten stocks for 2025. As I mentioned, there are 91%. You could see seven out of ten names have generated a positive return with four stocks returning triple digits. And you look at this, you can see again how to return a 322% Celestia with a return of 266%, credo with a return of 245%, and DSP with a return of 101%.

That was a heck of a list that we put out there. And you can see really 70% of the stocks are up and three stocks which are down. And what’s really nice to highlight is the stocks that are down. I mean, one being down 54%, no question about it. That’s a lot. But you can see the stocks to the upside far far far outperformed those that fell.

And if we take a look at our top ten stops for 2026, which are through the end of June, they were up close to 70%. We take it to today, they’re up close to 57%. As I mentioned, the markets have been really volatile in the first week of July, especially with geopolitical events and a lot of the AI companies, the investors, believing that they’ve been overextended in terms of valuation, have sold off.

So we’ve gone literally with from being up 5,070% to up 57% in a short period. Irregardless, I’ll take a 57% return any day of the week. Eight out of ten names have generated positive returns, with eight stocks providing double digit returns or better. And you can see here we have Micron Technology up 200%, Advanced Microsystems up 148%, Santa up 98%, coherent up 71% 80 which is an aerospace and defense company, up 55%, Allstate Financial up 22, almost 23% and up 19% and NSA up 12.2%.

All the stocks that are beating the S&P 500, we have two names that are down Barrick Mining and Wealden, down 21% and 34%, respectively. Having said that, stripping out the performance and just looking at our factor grades, we identify five core factors. And when we recommend stocks, we want them to be collectively strong on those factors which are value, growth, profitability, momentum and EPs revisions.

And you can see, for the most part, all top ten stocks really look quite good on these various metrics. Majority of the stocks are still strong by or by. We have three companies that have a hold. And hold to me means hold. It doesn’t mean sell. And even with our alpha picks, product of a stock drops from a strong by or by to hold.

We keep it in the Alpha picks portfolio for 180 days. So again hold being told it does not mean sell. And you can see, you know, part of the reason why is for a coherent evaluation grid drop to a D. So it’s gotten a little bit expensive, but the growth rate is still an A for the company. It still has a very strong momentum and analysts are still very positive.

You can see it as a B grade for EPs revisions. So that means the majority of analysts are taking their estimates up as opposed to taking it down. And again these are all sector relative grades. So whenever you look at the valuation grade or the growth grade for this company, you know it’s relative to the sector. So for Micron Technology with that A+ growth grade, you know its growth is far superior to the sector.

So now our top ten stocks for the second half of 2026.

DS: Before you want to leave it here. Yeah let me jump in real quick. And obviously Steve I want to remind everybody to the system that you were just talking about all this factor grades. They are refreshed every single morning before the market open. So you’re always getting those updated metrics.

The instant characteristic, as Steve likes to call it. Now let’s go ahead and jump into a quick recap of the poll. As we can see here the results. What do you think will be the major source of volatility leading in to the end of the year? We have 40% saying geopolitical war, 34% say the midterm election, 15%. This one surprised me.

Only 15% for Fed Reserve, Federal Reserve misstep or inflation and then 8% on weak earnings. I thought that was quite interesting. Thank you, everybody for taking the time to chime into the poll there. Also, let’s get a little bit of housekeeping out of the way. I do want to remind everybody that the top stocks list, as Steve mentioned, is a snapshot in time.

So keep this as like a menu of ideas, of quality ideas that Steve and the system and the team have put together for you. So you can put it together on your watch list. Because this is the number one thing I do. Every time we do these events, I immediately go, I create a Seeking Alpha portfolio. I add all these names in here, and actually I take the closing price of the day, and I kind of put that in there and said, what if I did ten shares today?

What if I did 100 shares? Whatever the account portfolio value might be that you’re working with? And then that’s how I try performance, because I loved it to keep an eye on the performance on it. And really I call Steve out sometimes. Let’s be honest, it’s fun to do. But all that aside, Steve, we got to talk about this because one of the big questions we always get is when we get into the top ten stocks, people want to know, are you buying these stocks?

Right. So let’s go ahead and put that out. First and foremost, you kind of did something unprecedented that you don’t normally do in the past from what I understand. So I want to make sure we are fully transparent with everybody right here, right now. Today, before we get into the stock list, do you hold these stocks?

SC: Yeah, absolutely.

Daniel, I’m really glad that you brought up because almost every time when I do this, we have the particles. Why don’t you own these stocks? Why don’t you buy these stocks? Why don’t you buy these stocks? Typically, what I do is I wait a few weeks after this presentation to purchase the stocks. However, this year I did something that was unprecedented.

I actually purchased these stocks before, and the reason why I purchased them is because they were getting crushed. And I want really to sort of use that as an example of buying stocks when they do, especially when their fundamentals are very strong. You have to sort of in the face of fear and negative sentiment and what is riding high.

You look to these companies that have good fundamentals. Are they beating revenue expectations? Are they being earnings expectations? Are the valuation framework strong. And it takes a lot of courage to be able to buy these stocks when they do decline. But that is really a way to create generational wealth. And I mentioned a bunch of quotes earlier. And I want to put my money where my math is.

So as you saw the top ten stocks from January at the end of June, they were up 70%. In a very brief period. They went from being up 72, up 58%. Of course, it’s still a great return, but that just shows you the volatility and the type of rotation that we’ve had during the last two weeks. So this is an unprecedented time and I really believe in these companies.

I want people to know it. So I put my money where my mouth is. And I have actually purchased these stocks. And yeah, so really get into it.

DS: And we have any questions everybody Steve is an owner just so that we’re fully aware. And obviously we won’t be updating this list as it goes on from here. So everybody keep that in mind.

We don’t send out sell alerts about this list. This is just that snapshot on time and with Steve. With that being said take it away.

SC: Let’s do it okay. The big event, what we’re waiting for and almost I do I like one thing I did put this slide in here.

Often when I recommend the top ten stocks. It’s new to individuals. But I did want to highlight that we do have a product which is called Alpha Picks. And alpha picks has an edge because alpha picks employees with quant system to identify our stocks. And as I mentioned, every month we provide our two favorite stocks. And I think what’s really interesting here.

So from the stocks that I picked in January this year, the stocks have about to provide to you. Now, many of those stocks were actually purchased earlier by Alpha Picks. And I want to show you the return on the stocks that Alpha picks plot and the date that they were picked. So Celestia, which was purchased on October 16th, 2023, is now up 1,164% sterling.

Infrastructure, which was purchased in August of 2023, is up 957%. Credo technology, which was picked by Alpha Picks in February of 2025, is up 244%. Micron technology was picked in October of 2025. That’s about 391%. TTM technologies also picked in October of 2025, up 131%. Insight, which was picked in November of 2025, is up 17%. And then we have wilderness, which was up only 4%.

And at one point that actually stock fell to a South. Many of the names that you saw in January and that you’ll see today have been owned by Alpha Picks for a while. And you can see the performance has been absolutely huge. So I refer to that as the edge. You do not have to wait for January or July every year to get to top ten.

You can participate in Alpha Picks, which has predict has basically included many of these stocks in the portfolio well before isolated the best top ten names. Now, I also want to give favorable mention as I’m going to ride you with a list. There are four stocks that I would have included on this list, but we’ve been doing this for a couple of years, and many of those who follow the list like to have fresh names, and they don’t want the names to repeat.

So definitely paying attention to the group of individuals and what their preference is. I do want to mention a few are fresh. These are stocks that I would definitely consider. So instead of being a top ten, you would actually say there’s 14 stocks. I would have had these stocks in the list. But again they do repeat from our top ten in January.

Those are Micron Technology Advanced Micro Devices ticker symbol AMD, Sienna Corporation ticker symbol Sin and ticker symbol. See, all of these stocks were picked in January. They naturally are still very strong. Again, we look for companies that are collectively strong on growth value, profitability, momentum, EPs, revisions. These all came at the top part of my screen. However, since they were recommended in January, we’re providing ten fresh names here.

So I just wanted to put these in front of you. I also want to highlight that with a lot of the tech stocks that we have, and some that aren’t even in the tech sector, many are benefiting from the AI revolution. AI I want to highlight is more than just software. A lot of it requires infrastructure. So there are semiconductor and advanced chip companies that we have.

There are data centers and connectivity indirectly or directly. There’s power and energy and infrastructure and there’s construction and digital infrastructure build that. And I think a really important point to highlight, as many of the companies that fall within these four industries here, they are experiencing record revenue and record earnings. And again, this is very different than what we saw during the TMT when companies were emerging in the stock market at UGE and they had no revenue and no earnings.

So it’s very different this time around. So our number one stock that we’re going to go with today is a technology company called Credo Technology ticker symbol CR Deo a strong by within the IT sector. It ranked 17 out of 532 stocks. And within semiconductors I ranked seven out of 69. The one year return on this company has been.

I want 146%, and I don’t want you to be scared by that return. The stock is close to 52 week high. Doesn’t matter if you look at the factor grades on the right hand side, you can see that the current factor grade is a C plus. So that means relative to the sector, its valuation is in line with the sector.

But importantly, if you look at the valuation grades six months ago it was a D. So the value of framework has actually improved. The stock is cheaper now than it was six months ago. And that’s despite the stock being up 146% in the last year. And if you look at the growth rate, it’s still an A+ growth rate relative to the IT sector.

The profitability is even stronger now than it was six months ago. You’d see the profitability factor grade is a minus six months ago it was a B. And you can see the momentum grade now is an A. And I’ll continue to like the company revisions grade implies that it’s the actual quantity of that are taking their estimates up or down, not the EPs number itself but the actual quantity of analysts.

So relative to the sector, it’s at a faster pace. And you know why this company has a long term EPs growth rate of 45% versus the sector at 18%, and the company’s return on equity growth rate. So this is not the absolute re. This is actually the growth rate of ROE is 302% compared to the sector at 3.38%.

And from a valuation standpoint, even though the overall value grade is a C plus, which puts it in line with the sector, if you look at my favorite metric, which is the PEG ratio and that combines PE and grow together, it puts it at a 32% discount in the sector, which is fairly steep. So our first pick here is greener technology.

Number two is Lumen Holdings. Ticker symbol. Light company has a market cap of $62 billion. This is another quant strong by within it. It ranked seven out of 532 stocks. It’s industry is specifically communications equipment and it ranks one out of 39. This stock up a lot as well over the last year up 164%. And again I want to take you immediately to the factor grades.

If you look at the valuation framework for the company it is a B+, which is a very attractive valuation compared to the sector. And if you looked at it six months ago, it was a dollar. So again, despite the stock moving up, its immense growth rate is carrying it. And the valuation is actually cheaper now for the company than it was six months ago.

Growth A+ is as good as you can get versus the sector probabilities in line with the sector and the momentum of the stock. And when you look at this momentum grade again it’s relative to the sector. So it shows you that the stock is not only outpacing the market but is outpacing the sector. And it’s for a good reason.

It’s because its growth is so strong. And when we look at the forward EPs growth rate, it is growing at 139%. That’s a 3 to 5 year dagger, 139% versus a sector growing at 19%. The forward ROE growth rate on this is 96% versus the sector at 6%. And on a PEG basis, that’s at a 48% discount to the sector.

So Lumen Holdings, ticker symbol Lit. Our number three stock is TTM technologies ticker symbol TT, mi. This company is a little bit smaller at a market cap of 15.2 billion. It’s not a small cap company, but not quite the size of some of the other stocks. And within it, it ranks 30 out of 352. However, within its industry it ranks four out of 18.

Again, this stock is up a lot, 218%. But when you look at the fact grades and the valuation, you can see it’s right in line with the sector. And here it’s a moderate move, a little bit of improvement from six months ago moving from C minus to see. But it still indicates that the company is even more attractive now than it was six months ago.

And more importantly, if you look at the growth rate for the company, it now has an A grade versus six months ago where it was a B grade. So the valuation framework is more attractive than it was six months ago. And the growth is actually superior, far superior to where it was six months ago. And in addition, analysts are looking at this company in a very positive light.

It is an A+, which is the best grade that you can get. Again, this revision grade is the quantity of adults bringing their estimates up compared to the quantity bringing it down. And you can see adults are actually looking more favorably at the company now with its A+ grade than they were six months ago with a B+ grade.

And why is that? Its EPs growth rate is 101%. That’s the board growth rate, 101% compared to the sector at 18%, and the row growth rate is 127% compared to the sector at 3%. On a PEG basis, it’s at a 39% discount to the sector, bringing us the stock number for send this corporation. This is not your father’s SanDisk a lot different than it used to be probably.

Remember there’s a little thumbnail drives. I have one still. I can’t believe it. Probably dating myself by having that. SanDisk still produces those, but it produces a lot more. That is very central to data centers and AI. Company currently ranks two out of 532 within IT and within technology. Hardware and storage ranks one out of 29. This return for the stock is absolutely incredible.

In the last year, this stock is up 3,495%. And before you say okay, I missed it, you did not miss it. The valuation for this company is an A loss okay. That means it is incredibly cheap versus the sector. So despite that meteoric rise from the stock price in terms evaluation, it is incredibly cheap versus the sector. And it has some period growth to the sector.

In fact this is a straight A report card for SanDisk Corporation. Whether you’re looking at value, profitability, momentum, analyst revisions at straight A’s across the board, and it speaks to the stock’s EPs performance, which its long term growth rate of 3 to 5 year category is 338%, compared to the sector at 19%. Its net income margin is 34% versus the sector at 6%.

And on a PEG basis, on a valuation standpoint, this company is at a 94% discount to the sector. So I love this stock. SanDisk incredibly cheap. Amazing growth. You have not missed anything. Stock number five Sterling infrastructure. This is another name that was one of the Alpha pick stocks early on. It’s still a strong by currently ranks number three.

And this is in the industrial sector. So we’re moving out of it. This is actually in industrials. It’s three out of 660 in stocks. And within its industry which is construction engineering. It’s one out of 37 stocks. Now most of the time you would not expect a construction and engineering company to have a return of 175%. But they are a massive benefactor of the AI investment cycle and really reshaping the US economy.

Sterling designs and builds critical infrastructure, powering many data centers, transportation networks and large scale commercial development. So they are in the sweet spot for the AI investment cycle. From an industrial standpoint. The company’s EPs growth rate for the 3 to 5 year tagger is 33%, versus the industrial sector at 13%. Its four ROE growth rate is 7.72% versus the sector at 1.45, and on a PEG basis, it’s a 35% discount to the sector.

So again, here’s a case of stock up 175% in the last 52 weeks. Ignore it because evaluation is is more attractive now than it was six months ago. And the growth rate is very attractive, profitability even more attractive. It’s moved to a minus from a B+ and on both momentum and revision stock looks great. Stock number six by core corporation thinkers and will be I see this is another industrial company is another strong buy.

It ranks one out of 616 companies. This industry is electrical components and equipment where it ranks one out of 61. Again, another meteoric rise 450%. Don’t worry about it. The valuation is a little bit expensive for this company, but it is still a better valuation now than it was six months ago. The plus does make it expensive versus the industrial sector, but you’re getting a plus growth compared to the sector.

So it’s growing at a much faster pace than the sector and it makes the valuation worth it. Hence why we have that strong by very profitable company. Good momentum excellent EPs revisions. Analysts continue to like this company and they mark it up higher than they do the rest of the sector. Growth for the company is very strong. Its EPs 3 to 5 year growth rate is 30% versus etc. 13% for growth rate is 78% versus the sector at 1.45% and on a PEG basis.

It is at an 86% discount to the sector stock number seven sizzle. And it has definitely been sizzling market cap. And this company is about $6 billion a straw buy. This is the financial sector. So we moved out of industrials into financials. This ranks one out of 691 financial companies. This industry is known as a transaction and payment processing industry where it ranks one out of 40.

The stock has been sizzling. It’s up 155% valuation grade. It does look expensive compared to the sector, no doubt about it. But despite the stock’s rise, it’s actually a more attractive valuation now than it was six months ago. But what is definitely notable about this company is its growth rate is far, far stronger than the rest of the financial service sector.

It has an A+ grade versus the sector, very profitable and an A score for both momentum and analyst revisions. And why do analysts like it? The 3 to 5 year EPs growth rate is 265%, versus the financial sector at 11%. The net income margin is 31%, compared to the sector at 25%. And on a PEG basis, even though that overall valuation grid is a D, and we looked at a lot of underlying metrics to get us to that grade.

My favorite metric, PEG, puts that at an 87% discount to the sector. Okay, we’re coming into the homestretch here. Stock number eight. Another finance company known as the ticker symbol Darby has a market cap of 5 billion. A strong buy this ranks four out of 691 in the financial services sector and within the industry, which is consumer finance, it ranks one out of 39 year to date.

This is not the last 52 weeks. This is actually year to date. The stock is up 78%. This is a fintech company that helps consumers manage their money through the growing demand for digital and first financial solutions. So very digital oriented company with an immense growth rate. You can see the growth grade is an A here. You can see that the year over year EPs growth rate just year over year.

This is in the four growth rate. Year over year. Earnings grew at 223% versus the sector at 16%. The growth rate here is 248%, which is a huge, huge premium to the rest of the sector. That puts out a 3,000% premium to the sector where that type of growth rate and on a PEG basis, stock is at an 85% discount to the sector.

So both Sizzle and Dave, relatively new financial names that we’re bringing forward here. We often get a lot of credit compared to Wall Street firms that we do bring forward names that most of the larger houses do not. So we have, again, different market cap diversification. Of course, you’d be looking at big banks like City or Golden or Bank of America, but we have two smaller financial institutions that we really prefer here, both Dave and Sizzle.

Stock number nine. This is taking us to the healthcare sector. Pax Group, ticker symbol CS, is a strong by with a market cap of 6.8 billion. Within the healthcare sector, it ranks ten out of 935 stocks. We really do have a large universe of stocks, and the healthcare sector is a huge universe in itself within its industry, which is healthcare facilities.

This ranks one out of 18 for healthcare company. It has had an enormous return over the last year. It’s up 214%. This company focuses on nursing facilities and healthcare operations, and it’s positioned to benefit from the powerful demographic trends, which of course, a lot of people are getting older and it is in the sweet spot for demographics. And you can see if you look at the report card for the factor grades, very attractive valuations.

So despite the stock being up 241% and very, very attractive compared to the sector, and even on an absolute basis, the valuation grid is a B minus now compared to six months ago it was a D plus. So despite that rise in the stock price, the valuation framework is much more attractive now than it was even six months ago.

Growth still remains very strong with a B+ grade for growth. And then when you look at profitability, momentum and analyst revisions all in the A cap, notably for revisions, I want to highlight. Analysts are really positive on the company. Now, if you looked at where they were six months ago, it was actually an F grade. So analysts are very pleased with the earnings that are coming through in this company.

It seems like it’s going to be sustainable. Hence that A+ growth rate. And what do we see in terms of consensus. It has a forward EPs growth rate of 52%. And when I say consensus, what we do is we don’t set our own growth models at sea. We actually use revenue growth rates, EPs growth rates, EBITDA growth rates.

We take the consensus of Wall Street. So we keep it very fair at that. We’re not using our own models. We’re using that of Wall Street analysts and taking consensus for those forward growth rates. So you can see that consensus number very strong at 52% the year over year growth, which is actual a revenue growth rate of 22% versus the sector at 7.5%.

And on a PEG basis 91%.

DS: Take a sip of coffee. So and real quick, Steve, since we’re on this page about Pax, I do want to point out there’s a couple of people here in the chat that actually have shared with us. The valuation grade is currently a D plus on packs, so we want to make sure we clarify that on that specific slide.

SC: Okay. So what we’ll do is when we move to the platform we’ll see where the current grid is. So our grades they contain quite frequently. And of a stock does run up or the sector changes. We can see grades change. We’re very transparent. So we’re going to take you to the platform there. And we’ll show you exactly where the grade is.

And I’ll even show you how you can find with the grades were historically, because we not only show the grade currently for what it is, we show the grades every single day. So you can go back three years and see what the value grade was, or the growth grade, or the profitability grade, as well as the rating. So without further ado, we will take you to stop number ten, which is Amazon.

Now this is a bit unusual. We normally don’t come through with any of the mag type stocks here. But we did find for the consumer discretionary sector this was one of the top stocks, especially for broad line retail. Orion’s number one out of 27. So kudos to Amazon for making this list. If you look at the quant rating history, you can see on occasion the stock is as strong by.

But a lot of times it’s a hold. And it’s because that valuation grade is typically so expensive. If that valuation grade were false, D minus the stock would automatically default to a whole. The whole being sold doesn’t mean sell. However, right now at a D it does help qualify it. And when you look at the growth for the company and the profitability for the company, as well as momentum and analyst revisions, they’re all very positive.

So we have Amazon one of the first times for our top ten being recommended on that list. And of course everybody is familiar with Amazon. But getting down to the numbers, we like to look at the data they had. Their projected EPs growth rate is at 21% with that 3 to 5 year tagger, versus a consumer discretionary sector at a 12% growth rate.

So almost a double the growth rate of the sector. And in terms of on a PEG basis, the stock is at a 9% discount to the sector. So Amazon looking quite strong really very rare for us to have a mag seven stock up there. But it looks great in terms of the broad line retailers and consumer discretionary. And those were our stock picks for the second half of 2026.

And if we want to look beyond that and you don’t want to rely just on our top ten stocks in January, our top ten stocks in July, there are ways that you can participate in our recommendations through a number of different products that we offer. And one of them might be right for you. We have three products that we manage.

There is a pro portfolio, there’s alpha picks, and there is our latest product, which is the quantum Growth and Income product, which is designed for investors that seek income generation. So just to tell you a little about these, the pro portfolio is a portfolio of 30 stocks. It’s always 30 stocks. But it was designed for people that want a high frequency of ideas.

So every Monday we rebalance it. And there could be two to new three ideas that come out every Monday for the pro portfolio. So that is a higher frequency of stocks. And really we came up with the idea out of a survey from Alpha Picks customers. And as you look to the middle you’ll see Alpha picks over here.

Alpha picks is just two picks a month. And when we survey a lot of the alphabet customers, they wanted more than just two picks a month. So we actually created the Pro portfolio. And that came out about a year ago. Alpha picks. So if you just want to have sort of a low frequency of ideas. This is a terrific product.

It’s got a portfolio of about 40 stocks right now. It is not a fixed portfolio where pro portfolio is fixed at 30. Here we’re just generating new ideas every two weeks. And there are some restraints and criteria that we have for alpha picks that make it a little bit more conservative than the portfolio. The market cap has to be above 500 million, stocks have to be above $10.

And for the most part, it’s just in US stocks or companies that have ads that are primarily listed in the US. The pro portfolio is much more flexible with address, no market cap restriction and again a much higher frequency of ideas. And then lastly, if you like dividends, we have designed the quantum growth and income, which is 30 dividend paying stocks.

So unlike alpha picks in the pro portfolio where we’re very focused on long term capital appreciation, and most of the stocks don’t pay a dividend for the growth in income. All the stocks that are selected for that to pay a dividend. This rebalances every two weeks on Wednesdays. It does have US stocks. It does have address. And the market cap does have to be above 400 million.

Again the common thread with quant growth and income all the stocks have dividends. You know what. All three products have a great track record Alpha picks as I mentioned, which came out in July of 2022. That is up 378% compared to the S&P, up 97.8%. The Pro portfolio, which came out last June, is up 54% compared to the S&P 500 on an equal weighted basis, up 24%.

And the growth and income portfolio, which we just launched this June, is already up 6.25% compared to its benchmark. And that is a Vanguard High Yield Index ETF. We don’t use the S&P 500 because this product is designed for individuals that are seeking income. So we use a benchmark that is comparable where that ETF, the stocks pay dividends.

And it’s one of the largest ETFs around for individuals that are interested in growth and income. So you can see we’re rushing it over that one month period. And that shows us the audience the track record. There’s more ways to participate than just waiting for every January or July to get my list of top ten. Obviously, really good performance of this top ten stocks, but our other products have very good performance as well and that really concludes it.

Do you have any questions you want to bring forward?

DS: We do have questions. But before we dive into them first we got to say thank you. Right. Thank you to Steve. You’re always taking the time to present these ideas to us. We greatly, greatly appreciate it. And also to everybody watching. I love watching the chat throughout the event, seeing all the success stories of all of you that I have had success with some of these picks I pick ideas over the years, so thank you for being here as well.

We want to say that we can’t do this obviously without you and for everybody. I mean, you watch us clearly through all the different model portfolios that you and the team run over there. Steve. But I want to mention one more thing that we have to mention. Maybe you’re not ready to take the step to the model portfolio.

Why not go ahead and follow Steven Cress author profile here on Seeking Alpha, where him and the team, they’re always putting out new ideas for you. Of course, they don’t come with the buy in the sellers all the time that we do with the model portfolios and alpha picks and pro portfolio and the quant growth and income, which was recently launched.

But that’ll give you some more ideas there as well. So Steve, with that out of the way, there’s lots of questions. Lots of questions and more continue to come in as we talk by the minute. So we’re going to try to cram as much as we can here within the last 25 minutes that we have together. So let’s kick things back to the beginning of the presentation.

You shared a great slide about the quant system, and if you had bought during pullbacks, right, how you would have benefited from alpha picks or the quant system. Well the question came up what do you consider a pullback. Because right now in this market it seems like anytime there’s a pullback of 2 or 3% it gets bought.

SC: That’s a really good point.

A good friend of mine who used to work at Alpha just showed me a chart the other day, and I was looking for the one on pullbacks. You know, we used to look at pullbacks as being down, you know 10% for the market indicating that we were in a corrective phase, maybe even potentially a bear market. Certainly 15% is a pullback.

You know what we’ve noticed is that we’ve had these swings just over a 2 or 3 day period where the market could be down 3 to 5%. And then it actually comes roaring back. And I think, you know, if you look at this part here and we went to September 2022, the market pulled back 17%. Have you bought into alpha Picks.

You were up significantly. Have you looked at the first quarter of 2025? The market pulled back 12%. If you purchased in, you did really well. But if you look at this year, that pullback was 8.5%. That’s one of the larger pullbacks that we’ve had this year. And the stock’s immediately rebound. So I think investors are really beginning to learn.

As I said fear fades. Investors always return to fundamentals. And I think that lesson has really being learned by many investors. So we’ll have periods where the market is only pulling back for 2 or 3 days. And they want to take advantage. And they’re now looking at these stocks like they are on sale. So the way to sort of call Roach implied with his quote, the stock market is the only market in the world where people run for the doors when things go on sale.

I believe investors are really learning from that, and they want to take advantage of these pulp acts. And the same way I mentioned to you, you know, I saw the market pullback, I was pulling this list together and I really wanted to put my money where my math is. And I bought these stocks when they were pulling back a lot.

I mean many of the stocks that I we recommended here today, they were off like 5 or 10% even more in just like a 1 or 2 day period. So and you could see they start snapping back right away. So there will be maybe some geopolitical and that’s, but there may be some economic data point that comes out.

The market overall comes off 2 or 3%. Stocks with strong fundamentals could come down five, ten, 15%. Look at how much Micron and SanDisk have come down in recent days, when there have been four days for the IT sector just to snap back. So I think people are really learning what does qualify for pullback? Well, I feel like people are not waiting around anymore for those 15 or 17% pullbacks.

DS: They’re jumping in pretty quickly. Yeah. Thank you for that. And since you mentioned the fundamentals right, which we we kind of rely on so heavily within the quant system, we always get the question that we should address is does the quant system take technical analysis into effect. Because I know a lot of people kind of go in there.

They start drawing Fibonacci lines, trend lines, trying to look at, you know, waves and different all sorts of Gan levels and things like that. Does it incorporate any of that or are we strictly fundamentals?

SC: We’re pretty much strictly fundamentals. I will say we do use the momentum factor. And of course, you know, momentum can be indirectly considered a part of technical analysis.

You know, you have relative strength indicators. And you we’re looking at momentum relative to the rest of the sector. And that happens to be a very strong indicator. And in fact, you can go back over 250 years. And momentum is actually one of the strongest factors in terms of stock price predictability going forward. It’s stronger than valuation. It’s stronger than profitability.

It’s stronger than a company’s top or bottom line growth. So there are certainly periods where what momentum works for you. It works very well. And then when it doesn’t work, it’s harsh. But if you look over a long period of time, the empirical data shows that momentum is one of the best factors. That’s really the closest link you could have to technical analysis.

DS: Yeah, the mystery of momentum has definitely been shared time and time again over the years. So speaking of momentum and all of that, I think we should I’m going to try to blend a couple different questions here because obviously we’ve been talking about memory you have at Sandy’s. You had micron at the beginning of the year. People are always wondering when we talk about memory, there’s usually typically been a cycle throughout history.

If you go back and look at semiconductors, there’s typically a cycle. And we are definitely in an unprecedented one right now with these kind of picks that you have. So how do you know when you pick these stocks that you’re not buying at the top? Is there any way that the quant system can kind of give us a little bit of a leverage?

And inside look, if when things start to slow?

SC: All right. So what the system does is as I mentioned, it’s, you know, our quantum system is not just based on one factor. And many quant systems are, but we use five factors. And importantly, evaluation is one of them. So we don’t want you know, we want to make sure that these companies are earning money.

And we want to make sure that the valuation is at least in line with the sector, their worst case scenario, maybe slightly expensive compared to the sector. But that valuation grade means a lot, and that helps us to prevent us from buying companies where they’re trading on a PE of 2 or 300 times, with growth rates of only maybe 5 or 10%.

So the valuation grade is very important for sort of keeping it in line. Of course, we don’t try to predict what the markets are doing overall. And certainly when investors feel that technology stocks or AI stocks are overvalued and as a big sell off in the sector, you know, we will suffer with that sell off when it occurs.

However, our value, our grades are updated on daily basis. So if a sector does come off and you see that valuation grid is very attractive and the growth rate is very attractive, you know you have a stock with good fundamentals.

DS: All right. Here’s the question that we need to address. Because obviously there’s a lot of people here that probably joined us back in January or maybe even previous years when we give out these stock picks.

So when we give out these top ten for H2 of 2026, are we recommending, are we telling people or to to sell the January picks to get into these picks? Are these separate ideas? What’s what should they know about this.

SC: You’re not introduced view this as independent and separate ideas. One of the things that we did here actually, which was a little bit different, is we actually showed the performance on the stocks going back to the time that they were recommended.

Let me see. Here we go. So this was assuming that if you bought the stocks and I actually like many of the stocks that I bought in January of 2025, and certainly the stocks I bought in January 2026, I’ve held on to I, you know, I really haven’t sold many of them. So that’s why I wanted to highlight if you held the stocks from the period that we bought it in January of 2025 or January 2024, and you held it to this June, these are what the returns are.

So each idea that’s being provided, it’s an investment research recommendation. We do not know what your risk tolerance is or your risk profile how much capital you have. That decision has to be made by the individual. But these are static recommendations. It’s not an actively managed portfolio. And as for myself, I continue to hold many of these stocks that I purchased back in early 2026 and 20 2025.

DS: All right. Thanks for that disclosure as well. Steve, I wanted to ask you, obviously, me and you, for anybody that’s joined our webinars over the many, many years we’ve been doing them now, we often talk a lot of times about the barbell approach within volatility. Right. The times of volatility in the market barbell approach can help you out.

Would you consider the ten picks you gave here today? Is this a weighted barbell approach for people.

SC: No this is there’s definitely a towards growth here for top and bottom line I think on the chart that I had and see if I could sort of narrow down to it how we pick these stocks. Here we have we ran our screen the same way.

Anybody who has Seeking Alpha Premium, which I highly recommend because that has our screening tool and our portfolio tool ran the screen, looked at the top quantum strong buys, made a slight tilt in the screen towards growth. And that’s what I was looking for. This would not be a barbell approach. We were not looking for dividend income or income generation.

We were definitely looking for growth here. This is highly focused on capital appreciation.

DS: All right. Pretty interesting going into growth before the midterm election in a pullback of what we expect with the markets. With the slide you showed I love that there was a question about why not any energy picks with energy doing so well this year. Any thoughts there that you can share.

SC: You know a couple months ago if I had picked the stocks or maybe even a few energy names up there, but I think since number of them have lost momentum in recent weeks, they are no longer ranking at the top of the screen. So what we were really looking was to identify stocks that came out on the top portion of our screener, and we really didn’t have a lot of energy stocks there.

DS: Simple enough. Follow the screeners. What it sounds like, right.

SC: Yeah.

DS: All right. So also back to the memory trade. There was a question here. Obviously I don’t know if people here have been watching, but everybody’s been keeping the eye of the volatility of the South Korea market. Obviously quite fluctuations with SK Hynix. Obviously a lot of memory chips come out of there.

Do you anticipate anything going on in that market maybe having an effect here in America? Because it seems like if you go back to to how the top weightings of the S&P 500 are so heavily weighted right now, if there’s any issue in the AI trade or any cracks showing up, will it affect us?

SC: You know, Daniel is quite possible that impact the overall market, geopolitical events, country events, certain sectors being overextended, countries being overextended.

There certainly could be a domino impact. And I would say, you know, look at what’s happening to the market during those periods. Identify the stocks with strong fundamentals and of those fundamentals remain intact. And our EPs revision grade shows that of analysts were becoming fearful they would be taking numbers down. But if analysts aren’t taking the numbers down and in fact, if they keep moving them up, that really identify as a great time and opportunity.

So markets are dipping because of outside factors, and the fundamentals remain strong. And we do take that into consideration through Wall Street. Estimates of those estimates aren’t being cut. And in fact people are remaining more positive than they were. That really presents a great opportunity.

DS: All right. Well said. Now this question does come up every time. How do these picks kind of correlate with some of the names you might have with an Alpha Picks Pro portfolio?

SC: And now she and I. Oh, there’s no question about it. If I go to the list of stocks here.

Let’s see if we can get that summary of them. So we can show them all at the same time. Okay. Sorry I want to take you through it. But if we had that summary page, which I wanted to show, we could use our top stocks for 2026. The update.

The it really comes down to the fundamentals of a company. And when the fundamentals remain intact and strong, yet we try to do is just really ignore the emotion of the market. And as an investor, you have to try to ignore the talking heads that are out there, because when you listen to CNBC or Bloomberg or you read the Wall Street Journal, there’s certainly a lot of hype and fear and anxiety that can be delivered.

We just try to stick to the data. Daniel. Not sure. Maybe that answered your question, but you could rephrase it and maybe I’ll answer it.

DS: Yeah, the main question is I think a couple of people pushed out. Maybe Credo technology was in one of the model portfolios that we have, or maybe it still is. I’m not completely familiar with each of them, but they were kind of seeing is, you know, are these top ten stocks in those portfolios already or are these new ideas?

Do you have an insight into that?

SC: Well, so there were four stocks that we mentioned. And these are the four stocks that were are type ideas in the first part of the year and would have been there again. But when you look at a stock like credo technology that was part of Alpha Picks for a long time, but it’s just merging sort of as a top ten now because it’s at the top portion of our screen.

So when we strip out these four stocks and you go to credo, credo on its own, fundamental factors has gotten to the top of the list.

DS: All right. Perfect. And I do want to mention real quick that the team in the back here from Seeking Alpha, the amazing team we can’t do this without. Everyone has added a link to the chat here.

And if you’re watching the replay, it’ll be beneath the video where you can click that link and these top ten picks will be added to a Seeking Alpha portfolio directly into your account today, so you can track performance and keep an eye on all the rating changes and key updates of these stocks over the next few months. All right, jumping into the next question here for you, Steve.

Why are the recent big IPOs not rated by the quant system. And do you think that the recent IPOs will affect some of these picks.

SC: I believe IPOs do impact the market to a certain extent, where people will sell companies where they’ve made money because they’re buying into the hype of the IPOs. But in terms of why we don’t have them part of our model, we have very strict rule for our somatic quantitative process that a stock has to be trading for a full year before it can enter into one of our models.

So we want to see four quarters of revenue and four quarters of earnings. We want to see the income statements and balance sheets and cash flow statements for a complete four quarter period before it could make our list.

DS: All right, here’s another question. Why not just create an ETF of your picks? People always ask us, can you just throw an ETF to get even alpha picks?

People always say, can you just put this in an ETF and do it for me?

SC: Yeah. Well our firm provides investment research. So we’re we’re not an asset manager. We’re not a broker dealer. We’re not on investment bank. We are purely focused on providing the best research we can and providing investors with the tools and resources that they need to identify high quality stocks or the ability to monitor their own portfolios.

So it’s really an investment research firm first and foremost. And that’s why we do not have any ETFs.

DS: All right. Well said. Now this question has come up in a couple of different ways. Obviously in the past with how markets perform. Gold had a massive run up. Silver had a massive run up. What’s going on with gold. Do you see any thing coming back to it?

Obviously it’s pulled back in time. We haven’t seen really from the quant rating system. Are you seeing any of the names pop up in screeners that might be attractive here?

SC: I’ll tell you why. Gold. You know, it’s been very interesting. You know, we had a lot of gold stocks in alpha pics of the pro portfolio over the course of 2025.

And what makes it just very unusual this year. You know, in the past historically, gold would be considered sort of a safe haven sector. So as geopolitical events unfolded this year, we went to war with Iran. You would have expected gold to surge even further. However, quite the opposite happened. We began to see the gold would have an inverse relationship with the dollar.

So it would be going completely the opposite way of the dollar. And that for digital safe haven rotation kind of fell by the wayside. So it was a very odd year. I would anticipate the many of the underlying trends that were there for gold before the geopolitical environment has transpired into what it is. The market sort of did normalize.

There are a lot of central banks throughout the world that had been buying gold. I think that could continue at a certain point. But because of the volatility with a dollar this year and that inverse relationship that it had with the dollar, that was a reason for its weakness. So we’ll just have to see how geopolitical events unfold going forward.

And if investors return back to this asset class.

DS: Yeah. Well said. I mean obviously the dollar is strengthened recently. But it had been pulling back and weakening something to keep an eye on for sure.

SC: Yeah.

DS: All right Steve. So we got to talk about this obviously if you wouldn’t mind scroll back up to that midterm election slide that shows all the records going into the midterm years.

Because I think everybody watching this market obviously we’ve seen volatility, but we haven’t seen bear market volatility. We haven’t seen correction level volatility as we’ve been talking about. So are you anticipating I mean we’re coming up here. It’s July 14th. Midterms will be here before we know it. Are we going to get this correction pullback between now and then.

Do you have any thoughts.

SC: Yeah. You know on average it’s been an 18% pullback. You know some years you could see it was only 4% in terms of the pullback or 7% other years you could see 33% or 41%. You know we have war. We have sticky inflation. We have the prospect of interest rates going up.

But irregardless of that, we do have corporate earnings that are pretty solid. And many investors are anticipating that those earnings will remain solid for a period. So I’m not sure if this time around we’re going to get that type of pullback. Certainly the closer you get to the election, more nervous, the more you know, nervousness increases, anxiety increases.

So there could be a pullback. And again as I mentioned I would really use those pullbacks as buying opportunities. Can’t say what extent we’re going to have. A lot of the uncertainties are known by the marketplace. And we have not seen that much of a pull back yet. But there are certainly some potential. And if it happens I would just be all over stocks that have strong fundamentals.

DS: Well said, well said. That’s obviously the big unknown for all of us. So to that degree. What are your thoughts about inflation and interest rates? Obviously, as we talked about earlier in this slide, before that, inflation had a surprise print this morning when everybody was still expecting to rise. We’re going to get an interest rate hike. Are we going to get that interest rate cut that everybody’s been wanting for so long?

How would that affect the stocks in the portfolio? Do you have any thoughts?

SC: Well you know I don’t have some forecasts. We have a lot of interest rate traders here that are forecasting. And the bond vigilantes have been at this a lot longer than I have. And according to the bond vigilantes, they believe that there will be an interest rate hike taking us back to this chart.

21% of them think that rates will be unchanged at current levels. And to a certain extent, that’s actually pretty good for markets, because that means that, you know, it removes uncertainty. And that would bode well for many industries and sectors, particularly financial institutions. But having said that, interest rate traders, 41% of them are indicating that we’ll have at least a 25 basis point hike by December 9th, and 28% of them believe that’ll be a 50 basis point height.

So it doesn’t matter what I think. The interest rate traders are out there with their thoughts already and hear what the futures are implying.

DS: No, right. And I do stand corrected. Gary, I see you in the chat. Actually, I’ve seen you here. I feel like a few times we did have a 9% pullback in March of this year.

I do stand corrected. Thank you for pointing that out. And maybe that was our pullback. We’ll see. We never know.

SC: It’s quite possible.

DS: Yeah it is quite possible. All right last question for you Steve. Because we’re about out of time here. Before we wrap things up. What are your thoughts about if hyperscalers pair back their spending. That was a great question I saw earlier.

SC: Well, we just saw some huge bond issuances by a few of the magic seven stocks. So it doesn’t look like they’re pairing back anytime soon of anything. They’ve just raised this capital and they’re putting it to work. But even if you go outside of the hyperscalers, there are so many companies and even individuals that are using more and more AI every day to day.

I’m not sure if you use AI, but certainly I you know, I think every individual, you know, is using AI in some form now that either for writing or they use it for coding, they use it to answer questions. So historically people might type something into Google. Google now they’re just like, you know, hey, Siri, asked ChatGPT. So from my vantage point, we are the very, very, very beginning of this AI revolution.

DS: I agree with you. And actually we just I had a great conversation with one of our affiliates the other day. We were talking about memory specifically, and if you believe in what Jensen Wang is telling everybody about, everybody’s going to have their own AI agent. Well, guess what? That is a lot of memory that needs to be stored for every single person across the world.

So I’m a big fan every day. I’m sure you do too. Steve. But yeah, as I mentioned, we’re coming up at the top of the hour. Do you want to mention anything else before we jump off? I see you jumping over here.

SC: Yeah, we had that question on Pax and indeed for the time that we created a presentation to now that grade has moved to a loss.

And what you can see the valuation right here. And I’m glad that I have the opportunity to dive into the system, because I want to show people how in-depth this is. I show the factor grades and you’ve seen the overall grades, but if you click into it, you can see that there are a lot of underlying metrics that make up that overall grade.

So we’re looking at PE. We’re looking at trailing PE board PE gap. We’re looking at PEG. We’re looking at EV, the sales EV to EBITDA prices. So a lot of underlying metrics make up this overall grade. And I will say impacts on a PE really the most conventional evaluation metrics. The stock is cheap. If you look at the PE it’s 19 times versus a sector at almost 26 times.

So it’s about a 23% discount on a PE basis. Now I mentioned before we’re very transparent. So I’m going to click on ratings and I’m going to show you where the grades were. And you could see on July 13th that valuation grade was a B minus. And now it’s a D plus. And yes, it has to do. You know again this is really a sector relative basis.

So it could be compared to the healthcare sector. The stock just became more expensive. It had really been in the C plus territory at that brief day. So that was actually really a brief period where the valuation looked attractive. But then it got more expensive. So again, this system updates every day. We look at numbers or thousands of companies.

So it’s literally millions and millions and millions of data points that go through our system. And then we basically look at each company and compare to other companies in its sector on a daily basis. So you could certainly see some fluctuations like this. So I know it’s not always the best and most user friendly experience to see a grade jump like that.

But that’s the reality. Stocks trade. And when stock price is trade metrics change. And that’s the beauty of the quantum system, is that it really has its finger on the pulse of the financial world every single day.

DS: And I’ll tell you, my favorite part is that it remains it removes all the human bias. Right. Because I know for me up here, sometimes when I’m investing and trying to pick names and stuff, I start to doubt.

I start to get greedy, kind of seeps and so can’t thank you enough. Steve, thank you so much for all the time these picks today answering all these questions. Everyone, thank you for tuning in with us. If you’re watching the replay, thank you so much as well. Don’t forget to click that link and get this portfolio added created directly into your Seeking Alpha account today so you can keep track.

Obviously, if you haven’t already, follow Steven Crest as well and we just appreciate you enough. We can’t say that enough. We appreciate you so much. So if you ever need anything from us, if you have any questions about your subscriptions, anything else, reach out to us. Subscriptions asking. And this has been the top stocks for 2026 the second half.

And we’ll see you again here in January when we kick off top ten stocks for 2027.

SC: Yeah I’ll just mention we do have an article that’s coming out. And if your questions didn’t come through here today when the article gets published, feel free to put your comments into the comment section in the article, and hopefully we’ll get to at that point.

DS: Well said. Great note. All right everyone, that’ll do it. Take care. Have a great rest of the week and stay safe out there.

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