The AI trade has hit the skids as of late, ignoring many of the solid earnings and upbeat outlooks. It's time to buy, bulk up, or both.
Mizuho Securities analyst Jordan Klein has more than 20 stocks that he thinks are worthy of investing in. They range from a few Mag Seven names -- Nvidia, Microsoft, and Alphabet -- to Take-Two Interactive Software, MasTec, and Quanta Services.
"We are deep in reverse momentum where all news, good and bad, gets sold, " he wrote. "It happens. Not fun. Drives more selling and shorter term fund managers realize its all risk, no reward. Why own any of these semis that beat, raise, and get sold?"
It's "time to do your homework," the analyst advised, because the "fire sale" is on.
The other stocks that Klen likes: Sandisk, Bloom Energy, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Seagate Technology, Tower Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Amphenol, Teradyne, Lam Research, Applied Materials, ASML Holding, Flex, Infineon Technologies, Nokia, and STMicroelectronics.
Klein's take on Sandisk is that memory stocks will take longer to recover "given they are the epicenter of the momentum chase on upside and now sell-0ff." Still, Sandisk's fundamentals are good and it stands to gain from Samsung Electronic's warning that the memory shortage will only get worse next year.
Microsoft had strong fiscal fourth-quarter results and held capital expenditures steady -- and Klein thinks there's more good to come. He sees upside across many of the company's business segments -- its Azure cloud platform, for example -- and thinks the stock "could start to work better."
About halfway through earnings season, Klein expects more good reports and guidance hikes. And he pointed out a couple of things that could help reverse the selloff:
"A cease-fire in Iran seems to be the #1 potential catalyst across buyside to reverse the downtrend. But I think it would take something else on the semi/hard-tech front to really get money coming back," he wrote.
A peace deal? A development in chips? They're both big ifs. The time to strike is when the iron is hot.