Transcript:

Caroline Woods Here with his top tech picks for 2026 is Daniel Newman, the CEO of the Futurum Group. Daniel, great to have you. Good to be with you. So let’s get right into it. Not in any particular order, but Micron top pick up 20% in 2026 already and still undervalued.

Daniel Newman It is running but it’s still trading in that low double digit forward multiple. And you have a multi-year likely multi-decade cycle for memory. A few years ago it was all about GPUs and Nvidia, and now it’s all about memory. The shortage is real. The capacity constraints are real. They have unlimited margin control. And here’s the one big thing, Caroline that’s different about it is for the first time, the boom bust cycle for memory.

I think it’s going to be different. In the past, the bust cycle has always been really bad. It’s made investors very nervous. AI is a long cycle, and this memory demand is likely going to stay intact for a number of years ahead.

Caroline Woods Also on your list was once a big underperformer, but has been a huge overperforming outperformer really for the past year. Intel about 140% over the past one year. Tell us why Intel is still a top pick for you?

Daniel Newman But still nowhere near its all time highs. And this is a company that’s been through it. But President Donald Trump. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, SoftBank and a number of others have really put their money where their mouth is and said Intel needs to be the United States chip manufacturing champion. So they’re going to keep making chips for PCs.

They’re going to keep making chips for data centers. What I think is going to happen in 2026 is the announcements of Intel Foundry winning significant designs for future chips on its 14 day process. We’re going to hear about it in 26. It’s going to start to really happen in about 28. But you know, it’s the market. It always runs ahead.

Caroline Woods And then Qualcomm is also on your list.

Daniel Newman Yeah. That’s why I’ve been banging the gavel. They’ve done a wonderful job moving into automotive. But really they had a great CES. They announced a whole robotics platform humanoid robots. This is a company that really specializes in bringing low power and performance together. They’ve done it in handsets and phones for a long time. But the future is going to be physical AI.

It’s going to be autonomous. It’s going to be robots. Qualcomm’s playing in all three. Another stock of trades in low double digit multiples. It’s been, well, underappreciated. I wouldn’t even call it frustrating. Carolina is a frustrating stock. But if you look at the business, you look at its growth. You look at its performance, you look at the markets.

It’s in. It’s an interesting bet if you’re looking for some underperforming names.

Caroline Woods And then you do have a few Meg seven names on your list. I see Amazon on here. You say it’s the biggest beneficiary of physical AI. Seems like physical is definitely on trend for 2026. But tell us why in the.

Daniel Newman Next multi-trillion dollar Tam is robotics physical AI right outside the data center? Amazon has both. Amazon was a little slow getting off the blocks with its data center and AI business. It’s added a lot of capacity. So that business, the AWS business, which is really the golden goose of Amazon, is performing well. It’s got its ads business performing well.

It has its merchant business performing very well, and now it has the opportunity to optimize all of its facilities and deliver a next generation commerce experience, taking all kinds of costs up. Remember, they’ve already built these advanced distribution centers with a lot of robotics in them. But when they can, you know, have autonomous vehicles and drones and warehouses that have 10% of the overhead they have today, they can finally turn the commerce business into a profit center.

I think we start to see that in 2016. I also like it because it grossly underperformed. So it hasn’t really run with so many of the other names.

Caroline Woods And then meta is also on there. Yeah.

Daniel Newman Look meta. I think it did about half as well as the as the chief review last year. But Mark was in the lab and I think he’s cooking up something good. I think all that investment in talent is going to pay off for the company. But I think the market always wants these immediate returns to play the long game.

So he’s gotten some things wrong. You got the metaverse a little bit wrong, but he also is willing to make the pivot. And when Wall Street asks Mark to slow his spending down or get his CapEx in line, he seems to be willing to play ball. And so he’s a it’s just been a good name over a long period of time for shareholders to own.

And that underperformance last year, I think opens the door to a little bit of an over performance this year.

Caroline Woods What about some of the other names? Alphabet. Oh, Apple. Yeah. Microsoft. I mean, if you’re if they’re in your portfolio, do you continue holding on to them? Yeah.

Daniel Newman Look, I.

Take.

Profits. I’m a tech Super Bowl. I believe this cycle is multi-decade. It’s it’s it’s not just about the markets either. It’s about global economic leadership. We need these companies to perform to be strong. And they’re just starting to monetize I, I was a big, big, big Google bull over the last couple of years. Thought it was grossly under undervalued.

It started to catch up. So it’s one that I if I was holding it I would hold it forever. I don’t really see any reason to exit that one. It’s kind of today’s version of what Apple has been for a long time. Apple I’m more nervous about because they’re so dependent on this form factor of a handset being the future handset PC, tablet, and you know that Jony Ive and Sam Altman and other companies are working on what might be the future in an AI era.

And I don’t know if it’s going to be the phone that’s their biggest risk. But they did make the big partnership with Google to at least bring Gemini, put it on every device, take advantage of their distribution. I think they need a CEO change, though. Apple needs a CEO change. Not because Tim Cook‘s not a great operator, but they need a visionary to come back in and start to build what’s next, because we’ve basically had the same products for two decades.

Caroline Woods You were just at CBS. What is the future? Is it going to be the glasses? Because we’ve seen that happen before and kind of flop?

Daniel Newman Yeah. You know, if I truly knew what was next, I’d build it. I’d use cloud code. I developed it, and I would probably get schematics, but not serious. I do think it’s a wearable. I don’t know that it’s glasses. I think that’s too fashionably personal. Not everybody wants to wear glasses. Right. But I do think something in your ear.

I do think a pendant. I do think something very lightweight that is super, ubiquitous in our lives. But I do think we still need that interface. And that’s what I’m just not sure what’s going to deliver us that interface. Like I say, as long as it’s the phone, Apple is in great shape. I just I’m worried about their lack of sort of disruptive innovation over the past two decades.

Caroline Woods It’s still early innings for 2026, but tech is the underperformer in 2026. If you take a look, most other sectors are outperforming tech. You think tech will still dominate the stock market this year.

Daniel Newman Tech will dominate the market this year and I think over time is the voting machine in the way machine? I think there’s a broadening I think people go from, you know, again are you trading or are you investing. If you’re trading there might be other sectors, there might be other plays, higher beta, higher alpha that you can make money on in the short term.

But if you look at where is consistent growth, you look at Nvidia, half $1 trillion in revenue, possibly creating 2 to 300 billion of free cash flow next year and still trading at a multiple, much lower than it was five years ago. So again, are you investing over over a multiyear horizon? Then I’m going to stay with tech.

If you’re trying to trade and you’re you’re running a hedge fund and you need to make money this year, there’s probably opportunities to broaden. But that’s not what I do.

Caroline Woods Okay. I’ll leave it there. Daniel Newman, always appreciate you joining us. Thanks so.

Daniel Newman Much. Thanks, Graham.

Caroline Woods That’s Daniel Newman, the CEO of the Futurum Group.