tv Fast Money Halftime Report CNBC March 31, 2017 12:00pm-1:01pm EDT
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morgan, up 5%. nowhere near the gains we've seen for some of these parts, but still as investors look for where they can play this, check out some of these stocks and etfs and all day on cnbc, we'll be looking at infrastructure stocks as a whole, but for now, squawk alley is over. out to scott wapner at the stock exchange for the half. after best qrter in years for stock, what happens now? is it too late to get in or is there another leg just ahead? with us today -- steve, it has been the best quarter in a number of years. you've had this tremendous run of quarterly gains if for stocks
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in the dow specifically. does it continue into this new quarter? >> look, i think it's news driven at this point. we're done with the quarter, so that means earnings are coming up. i think the market's okay, so i'm going to let steve take it up. earnings could break it out for positive news in terms of congress not being at a stalemate. ab septembsent that, if you loo the indices, the quarter was even better than the 6% for the s&p or worse, so you've got to be careful in your selection, more so now than at any time over the last five, six years. >> big surprises this quarter. if i would have told you at the beginning of the quarter that tech and health care were going to lead the way and financials were going to be one of the laggards even though it was up, you probably would have told me you're crazy. >> i agree that's surprising. i don't think however that that's necessarily the trend. i do think financials will regain their mojo. i thought health care was
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undervalued for far lopger than it should have been, so it's probably going to back. but my lesson is one has to be disciplineded. whether you're looking at sectors or stocks, if you have your buy target on a stock. don't force it today because you see the market's up u and you've quot to get in. just be patient. you've got your buy target, stick with it. same with the sell side. be disciplined with this market. >> so, josh, check up 12%. health care 8, discretionary, 8, financials, 3. >> sure, but i want to focus on the last week that we've just been through because it is so, so important from a technical and internal standpoint. what happened here was probably as good as what you could have asked for. s&p up 1%. leading stock, resume leadership. amazon added $20 billion more in market cap over the last five trading sessions.
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iwm, russell, which was the trouble spot, up 2.5%. this is what you needed to see to feel good about the we are not in a new trend that the existing one is still in tact. >> it could have gone the other day. you could have come in and questioned congress's ability. it was resilient as he can this week. >> item on the golf course with teper sunday, my new way of making a living. as we're looking at futures down and you come in monday and then the market all of a sudden brushes it off. we see that time and time again. we saw it with brexit. the market information moves so quickly. gets discounted and debated before the event happens, it's like yesterday's news. not going to see that though if we're not able to get taxes
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done, some infrastructure done. that will not be the case. >> the thing though is is earnings. you're going to get that hot and heavy coming up an they bet r show up. i thought it was the best point made on the show. a couple of note bable good ones like ford and the actual data across the s&p, no one field like they had to come out an drop a bomb on us. i felt like that's really interested because if you remember the prior pattern for this was the whole disappoint early and then be lowered expectations. we're not even playing that game this time around. on full display. >> consumer congress is huge. but at that point do you need other things so start showing
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up. meaningful extent, right, so the inreinvestment in the businesses, most businesses turns up new technology, new equipment. it's been deficient since we've turned the corner. now, i think you're see iing it and it's going the drive the market in my view, one o it have pillars of it. >> next week from a macro point of view, you got the jobs report. now, it would be surprising if you had a pad jobsz report at the stage f. you did, that would have strong implications for the fed and interest rates and the overall economy, which as we know is is tracking between 1 and 1.5% for this quarter. >> i don't think one jobs report. >> could be a one off. moving average of jobs. >> you guys are right, but you know what, the market, if you have a weak jobs report, there will be some hand wringing on friday. >> let's play it this way. >> so, the tech leads the way in this quarter.
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it's immune to many of the issues that have dragged some of the other sectors. these ceos in the valley are not hinging on every word that donald trump says. they're not hinging on what bull lard or stan fisher tell steve liesman necessarily. those are the stocks that have outperformed. nasdaq is up 10%. >> it's a weird time because we're going to print less than 1% gdp growth for the fist quarter, but we had a number. 14 being a notable example. the markets saw through it that time. we have a weird season bable quirk in the first quarter gdp number and when the other stats say no, that number is not true, we should look at the weight of evidence rather than just that. >> nasdaq has had 21 record closed in the quarter. 100, best in five years. is this the place where you want to continue to be? >> i think there's other places. yes, you can be there, but josh,
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you mentioned the transports earlier. basic materials as well. now, i have an opinion here, scott, that we will get an infrastructure bill. having said that opinion, i would like to see facts to back it up. i would like to see on the political talk shows this weekend and next week, what the actual pace and cadence is going to be of bills getting through congress. i hope they don't go back to health care. are they going to do infrastructure? >> you're going to get off the apple train? >> no, i'm not. >> the facebook train? >> no, but i'm not 100% tech. it's been a great part of the portfolio, i'm sticking with it. i'm a value guy. >> this week, 73% of the s&p 500 names were higher. 92% of the financials in the s&p 500 were higher. so, there are set ups elsewhere outside of tech, then there are these tech stocks we never talk about. ibm. if this stock can hold the
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recent lows and not give up, the recent gain, here's a name that's a 14 forward pe, an incredible uptrend, support from berkshire hathaway buying every dip. >> it's not the om one in there. i would put apple in there, cisco system, qualcomm. the nice thing about tech is is no matter what type of investor you are, there's a segment of tech for you. you want to be a growth momentum guy, netflix is right there for you, so the facebook and i know there's fundamentals as well. >> news alert with meg. >> hey, scott, we're looking at forward pharma, those shares plunged before being halted on a patent decision in a case it's fighting on the multiple scler oasis drug. biogen getting a little pop on
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that. in other patent news today, we just updated folks on acorda. that stock falling on a decision invalidating four of its patents. so a lot of negative patent news driving tech stocks today, all negative, except for biogen. >> risks and rewards of theodse stocks. what about health care? second best performer of the quarte quarter. >> which i think surprised everybody. people get so negative. they get so despondent. it's all wash ed out so you buy for a trade. energy, people have to be surprised at energy. opec is going to make this deal. would you expect oil b to be trading back into the 40s? p i don't think they will.
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there's a paradigm shift. and the responsiveness of the shale oil producers. it's not like it takes two years to float a rig up to alaska. this is one month. one week you finish drills, wells that were drilled 90%. >> if you look at xle, your large cap energy proxy, you've got a bullish -- meaning the low of this week was lower than last week's by the high and we're finishing is higher than last week. we ran out of sellers there and now, we're precipitationing a higher number and that's indicative of a trend change. we've had week after week after week of a lower close in the xle really since the beginning of the year. that pattern could be interrupteded, possibly coinciding with crude over 50. >> got over 50 yesterday. i know we veered into energy,
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but how about health care? we're so worried about a presidential tweet. then this interview in time magazine, many, many weeks ago. i'm going to attack drug prices, they're getting away with murder, whatever he said. >> health care, i think the plan does come back. if the thing about trump is he could switch the middle and bring the democrats into the fold. i think that would be the smart move. disenfranchise the far right, so-called freedom caucus. that's what's holding the market, too. that would be very positive. that would eradicate gridlock. with the market, with the exception of tech, you always get an opportunity with sector while the market has done nothing since february 21st, it's flat, the rotations underneath. airlines down 20%. steel stocks down 20%. some retailers down 25%. the largest decliners, five of
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the six, are all retail. the way it cycles underneath except for tech, which seems to be you just have to pick your sectors carefully. >> it's been that way. julia boorstin, speaking of tech, has another news alert. hi hi, julia. >> that's right. snap just announcing its launching a search for stories. now allowing users to search publicly shared snaps. there are over 1 million stories on snap chat as the company used new artificial intelligence to cure rate snap that is 158 daily users share. snap doesn't mention anything about ad, but this opens the door to new snaps that could be severed alopg with the results. shares are up over half a percent. up over 30% from the ipo price of $17 a share. >> thanks so much. josh, you alluded to the only thing i could think of is that snap and ib sinsta and zuckerbeg
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and speeg l are going to be going back and forth this entire way. >> the only thing that i can think of would be the user anduin for young people sick of being on the same networks with their parents, you had to know their handle in order to connect with them. so if you're now going to change that, and make people's stories searchable, this could be one more thing that pushes ma len yals to say maybe snap is not quite the garden of eden of privacy that i expected and i really think on the other end of that, instagram is just going to continue to kick butt. >> of course, we're not talking about people's and grandparents joining to find their kids.
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it's indecypherable for people over 40. i think a lot of the appeal of it could come along with it. >> there's an underlying story here, you alluded to it with ibm. jewulia mentioned -- >> i got your snap by the way last night. super hot. >> funniest thing i've heard all week, by the way. whether@telemetry in cars, you're going to need artificial intelligence to sift through this. same in medicine. if you're an oncologist, too much information for you to sit there. who's at the vanguard of artificial intelligence is ibm. >> not so sure sflchlt which part? >> vanguard. it's highly competitive. watson supercompeter, that bit of artificial intelligence is
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the vanguard. >> you can beat watson in jeopardy now? is that how you're rolling now? judging by what you've told me lately, he could beat you on the golf course, too. they're challenged by other tech businesses. artificial intelligence. getting, making money on that. is going to be challenging. i got burned on a -- it is worth a look and josh, you're right to bring it up. >> one area of tech, we got to get, chips are going their thing once again today. ahead of most of the tech sector. i've talked about amd, i'm in. huge move today. 4% spike. >> 400%. this is like have been a breakout that's stopped in february, consolidating, looks like it wants to take out the upper end of the range.
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>> sets up for disappointment. >> that was amd. just getting started. here's what else is coming up. >> do you want to buy the rentals? the rental car stocks big time in the last six months. hertz down 56%. avis up 14%. are these names worth a test drive? plus, our traders calls of the quarter. see where they hit the target and misseded the mark. if you listen to jim levinthal and bought cisco on february 2nd, you'd be up 20%. more call, stocks and trades when the halftime report are back in two minutes. is happening before our eyes. shift in human history sixty to seventy million people are moving to cities every year. at pgim we help investors see the implications of long term megatrends like the prime time of urban expansion, pinpointing opportunities to capture alpha
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back at post nine in a week when the future of stock picking has been hotly debated, one wall street firm out today with a list of names it thinks can benefit in the weeks ahead from both man and machine. bernstein listing 11 stocks. the criteria are stocks attractive based on quantity taiftive bases, not too crowded and where fund u mentals play into the story, to melds both man and machine and at the top of their list is apple. which is up 24%.
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>> you want to scream, biggest company on earth. really under the radar. >> not too crowded. >> what i take from this, we've seen the announcements over the last couple of weeks and fid fidelity is going more quantity. bernstein is like the quintessential value research house and now, they're saying wait -- >> it's changing a bit. >> all due respect to bernstein, do you know who invented the screen? literally ben graham 100 years ago, so let's not act like this is some man melding with machine cyber netting. >> i've been using it since i got in the business. what price to book. what pe. the roe. that's quantitative, right? >> this is how you do it.
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we did apple, american experres delta, yum brands, motorola, you can look at the performance over six months for these stocks. they're all winners. obviously yum is down a couple of percentage point, but you have winners over the last six months, can they stay in that category if you meld fundamentals and quantitative analysis. >> i think the key is you have to own all of them. the thing that's going to dictate this is how you're waiting these and how long do you wait in a stock falls out of the criteria before you get out of it. so almost do a technical overlaw. i'll by it. these are good stocks.
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then i want a sell discipline and reason to replace. >> you can say this makes this, this doesn't. yum, too controversial. didn't make a lot of sense. take a look at the underperformer. apple, yes, it makes sense. american express, yes, it makes sense. hp, too soon so tell. it was up marginally. kudos for thinking out of the box and moving weight from their value based strategies. >> look, they'd be the first to say it's not a guarantee by any stretch of the imagination. they point out that five out of the eight previous picks beat the market when the report was last published. >> my question would be to what degree is this quaunts and to degree of the decision making
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progress is a flesh and blood person making a subjective decision on the company. we run money and rules based strategies like all the time. we opt for 100% rules based. i want i don't the subjective pl layered on to the quaunt because you could have a guy mess it up by saying yum is too controversial. it's already reflected in the price and you miss out on a home run. >> i think part of the point we're trying to figure out, too, is whether just traditional if you want to call it that, put it in quotes, stock picking baseded on fundamentals alone. is that dead? >> no. this is just -- probably enough. the it's wh it's what i do. doesn't mean i just slavishly look at the fundamentals. it's what i love doing. you mention ben graham. who's got a business model with a mode around it. now yourks overlay that. anyone, whatever their stripe
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is, should look at other ways of doing this. so i always look at charts. doesn't mean i base my decision on the chart, but i look at it and see is this an up or down trend. >> this is a quantitative screen of fundamentals. if these are published, things like price to book, earnings yield, whatever it is, do we think those are. >> this is not quantitative. that definition has been stretched. those strategies are hundreds and thousands of stocks trading against one another. may be equities trading against currency. maybe bonds trading against currency and they trade and keep trading tabd the formulas, renaissance rewrites the affordables. >> you're describing an al gor rhythm. they are quantitative strategies. >> right. and that's the way the frequency
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with which a program trades does not determine whether or not it's quantitativquantitative. it's the inputs. they're using the inputs, whatever they are, they call themselves also quantitative str strategies. >> scott's going to blow his brains out. can we get a shot on scott's face? >> we're done. next. on the halftime report, the quarterly report. see which stock calls the traders nail and regret. josh, finish this up. >> we'll be right back after this. yes?
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the dow. >> valuation is so forgiving. what's the downside? >> today is the last trade dag of the first quarter. all this week, we've been looking back at some of the trader's most memorable calls. good to see you. >> good to see you. >> let's talk about this call. january 13th, facebook b. 134 is your lucky number because it's up 13%. >> i still like the stock. i think it's got a long way to go. maybe takes a pause at these leve levels. if you look at what they're doing, the competition with snap, what's app, instagram, messager, facebook's is is the right place. they've got advertising dollars they're growing. >> what do you guys think of facebook b? 13% since he picked it. speaks for itself, but does it continue to go up? >> i think 150 will act as a magnet. i don't see it stopping. very unscientific, but i've seen these things before. >> jimmy, qualcomm is up 5%
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since january 25th. just mentioned it again a little while ago. >> nice to get a shoutout on this, but if you've been in this thr longer than three months, it's been a painful experience. long time holders know it goes through these experiences where regulators and competitors sue it. that's the case with apple, with u the tfc. long time holders know it gets through these things. it's very ak attractively priced. you really should own the stock. >> we had a debate on ibm, but josh, up 5% since you picked it on january 4th. and you said that it had a nice technical set up. >> yeah, i don't know anything about it. i just know the stocks have it high er. i know what everyone else knows. not doing a deep dive into fundamentals, stocks are going up. >> the biggest thing is the buy backs. >> great. >> you know what i'm saying, this is a, this was a flawless uptrend. went on for a long time.
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then a period of consolidation, but held the important support levels where you would expect buyers to come in. now, the uptrend is resuming. i can be clearly defined about where i want to come out of this name and geniuses that know more than i do, that's great. >> i would subject you're better at following tech of raw. the great things they've been producing in terms of earnings because the rest of tech has moved up. >> it's a low beta version of tech. so people saying oh, man, i'm afraid to buy facebook but i want in on the tech sector, ibm is more palatable. we mentioned last segment, buying every dip in the stock. >> the legacy business of services is going away. it's getting replaced by internet of thing, big data, cloud and artificial intelligence. may sound like buzz words. >> what i'm saying is everything you're say iing is true. the market knows that. it's not new information.
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>> doing a good job. >> it's a big boat to turn around. so it's got to have you know, slowly. >> exactly. it's got a long trend ahead of it from a fundamental point of view. i'll let you do the chart frs a fundamental point of view. i'm taking another look at it. >> weiss, kate spade, up 18% since february 16th. i know you're recently out of it. >> i sold it out of these lefls becaulevels because at this poi there was value. you can see the price target on takeout, which companies said they're look at options and it's rare that a company listeded such a damaged asset coming back and says we couldn't find any buyers. this is about right now, this is about the price and i think i want to get out. not interested in being in -- so, this was an easy one. >> guy, good stuff there. not all the calls though have worked out. >> exquisitely run. adam is a savvy ceo. taking what was a utility stock and turned it into a growth
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stock. >> right now with oil coming down, merrin american is the most unhinged. >> verizon with you first, jim. down 6% since the call on swran 24th. >> i still like it. they're becoming less of a utility stock and more of a content stock. i can hear josh saying what hebts a month ago, the content they have doesn't matter. that may be true, but i think they're going to have more acquisitions to make it patter. >> they're chasing some of the others who have announced similar things. >> i think that hurts them and the unlimited data plan has hurt them. i think that is why the stock is down so much. >> serrat, american airlines down 5% since march 9th. what do you do here? >> still buy. accumulate. it's the cheapest of the airline stocks. it's got a good trajectory. i would hold it and keep on buying it. >> all right. before we let you go, let's gelt to your q 2 play book.
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home improvement and the banks. that's where you're banking on. >> home improvement, what we're playing is the consumer. the consumer is strong. employment is strong and if you look kind of the housing supply in our con tri, it's dated. and we find that the consumers are going to spend more money remodeling. they're going to be focused on their kitchens, cabinets and companies we like are masco, fortune brands and lowe's. we've had a little pause in the banks. regional banks are still cheap. good dividends and balance sheets. if you get any movement, i think those stocks are going to run again. a little pause this quarter, but a huge back end of last year and you could see a lot more going forward. >> we'll see you back at h qurk. sxwl thank you. >> coming up, rebuilding america. how can you profit from president trump's $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan?
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that is your market picture. at 12:37 on the east coast, final trading day of the quarter. that's been darn good for stocks. dow up, s&p, 6. go to your right, the nasdaq is the big outperformer, up 10% in the quarter. >> congratulations on the quarter, gentlemen. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> courtney reagan has a look at the headlines. >> good afternoon. here's what's happening. president trump held a meeting at the white house this morning with former bush administration secretary of state kocondoleezz rice. rice did not support trump for president. jim mattis meeting his british counterpart in london for the first time in a joint briefing, he said north korea is an urgent problem. >> in the larger scheme of things in a global situation this dynamic, you've highlighted appropriately i think the north korean threat. this is a threat of both
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rhetoric and growing capability. and we will be working with the international community to address this. >> the fbi has recovered a 1919 norman rockwell painting stolen more than 40 years ago called lazy bones or boy asleep with ho. it graced the saturday evening post. the owner bought the painting for 75 bucks. after accidentally damage iing s it's now worth more than a million dollars. now over to melissa lee. >> quite a buy. thanks so much. coming up at the top of the tour, rebuilding america's infrastructure. which projects will give the most bang for your buck. amazon pushing higher and higher and we've got a bold new call out today. bio tech, this stock taking 30% right now. we'll give you the trade behind that and also, a special treat for your u "fast money" fans, guy makes a special appearance with his trade on target.
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surged on the heels of president trump's proposed spending plan to help rebuild america, but has the trade moved too far too fast? josh manages the alpine global infrastructure funds, beating 98% of its peers. welcome. good to talk to you today. >> great. thank you for having me. >> you have some really and i think it's fair to say, unconventional infrastructure type plays. not the traditional ones you hear every day on the network. your top picks are canadian pacific and american tower. tell us why. >> yes, so, in the infrastructure firm, we believe it's important to look at companies for the long-term. it's predict bable cash flows rather than cyclicals and the if you look at the names we've talked about, the trump plays, there's short-term play, but once a bill has pass aed, you don't see spending for 18 to 24 months, so we like a name like amt. they have stable, predictable cash flows. in addition, there's tail winds for it.
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for instance, yesterday, first net awarded at&t the contract to build out broad band network. they're going to spend 40 billion. with that thairks going to have to spend money on towers, in addition month in april, the spectrum auction ends and once that happen, whoever receives that is probably going to build out their net work further. >> you think amt? >> ebitda growing double digits over the next several years with head winds to help it out. >> forgive me. oil transportation, is that the cp part of your infrastructure story? >> i wouldn't say oil transportation, that's not the catalyst behind it. basically, cp, the canadian railway, we like rails in general. we see carloads inflect right now. they're starting to go positive. over the past u few years, they've gone negative and cp had
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increasing earnings during that time. it's the most efficient rail out there and we think that as carloads inflect, their earnings are going to grow because of it. and it's cheaper than the other rails. >> you know, i get the rails, i get the energy plays. i sort of get the towers a little bit. but the spectrum auction, those are occurring any way. that has nothing to do with the infrastructure spending that trump's going to do. t mobile is on your list as well. i don't get how that is infrastructure. i understand you can stretch your, say, hey, if the economy's growing, you need more communications, going to need bigger bandwidth, but you can say that about anything. >> structure workers are closed and go retail. >> so, that's why you have to separate it out. we think there's great opportunities in infrastructure today and if the trump bill is passed, we don't think the spend ing is going to happen for 18 to 24 month afrs wards, so we'll own companies that will benefit, but we don't include that in our
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valuation. kind of a free option like -- they're a company that owns public private partnership, they own roads here. they jouust won the i-66 in november. they'll certainly benefit from the trump infrastructure plan, but that won't happen for about two years from now, so we're looking for the opportunities today rather than say what might happen in two to three years from now. >> i get that. i just don't see t mobile as an infrastructure play. everybody owns a phone. >> the other part of this josh frankly is whether the infrastructure bill even getting passed. and when. >> so, we think that there will be a bill passed. again, that won't happen probably until the second half of this year, if not early next year, but we're looking for plays and opportunities globally for infrastructure owners today. the core of our fund really are the owners of infrastructure. and the monopoly type assets, so we look for companies that own toll roads, airports, ports, the towers, globally and that's
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where we're seeing the opportunity. rather and we think the trump infrastructure plan is good and it's important for this country. but to actually invest purely on speculation of whether that gets passed or not we think is fool heartedly. we can make money in infrastructure today with many different opportunities globally. >> so, josh, the opinion i guess is clearly basic materials. not in your play book, whether it's steel, concrete or anything like that. >> absolutely not. for the most part. steel, that's a cyclical industry. we're trying to avoid that. we're really looking for -- >> it could be, but we're not trying to go the up and down. we have a long-term strategy that has been successful in our fund since we started, we've had over 13% annual returns, so we're look iing for companies wh stable, predictable cash flows. we want to own the owners of infrastructure globally. >> again, the companies that own the toll roads and airports globally and we're seeing opportunities certainly globally and here in the united states.
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there's more many ppps in the united states than when we st t started. >> doing something right as we said. well outpacing your competitors and the major averages. josh, thanks for coming on. appreciate it. >> great, thank you for having me. >> next up, one firm sees big opportunity in the beaten down rental car space. the call of the day is straight ahead. first though, take a look at the most actively traded stocks on the new york stock exchange. back after this. at fidelity, trades are now just $4.95.
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we're back on "the halftime report." . avis and hertz, we've made it our call of the day. we're literally in from break on uber's impact on the rental car business and what the impact on the stocks has been and will continue to be. both of these stocks are down more than 15% year to date. >> and i think they're trouble. so you're left with almost
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duopoly of companies, hertz and avis. one large company, it's been consolidated. yet they've been unable to raise a price. we heard ford say that their fleet sales are down, right, fleet is terminology for selling often to these rental agencies. i know when i go away, i can't think of the last time that i rented a car. and i used to rent them all the time. now it's just uber. you uber, it's cheaper, you don't have to worry about parking. >> these companies have down played the threat for three years now. they've been saying, like, no, you don't understand, the use case is different than our customer. it's a total lie. they need to believe it, and i understand that. i did rent a car recently, and usually i'm uber-ing. frankly, i had to. i drive from one part of florida to the other. i went on car wire and all these competitive search sites. i beat these people to within an inch of their life for every
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dollar because i could do it on the phone while i'm standing in an elevator. i don't go to avis because their commercial is better than hertz is. i take the best deal, and that's the world we live in for almost every consumer product. >> if you have to make that trip -- >> i had no choice in this case. believe me, they barely made any money on me. >> let's take it to the extremes. if it was so dire, these companies are not going out of business -- >> look at their charts. they're collapsing. >> if they're down year to date, 19 and 17 respectively, and that's avis and hertz, and over the last month annihilated, too, maybe they're ripe for a pop. >> i don't think so. >> maybe amazon decides they want to get into the car rental business. >> to what both of you are saying, when you look at the pricing on this and compare it to uber there's all these things they slip in, the airport fee -- >> insurance. >> what are we, idiots? we're not idiots. we know it's going into their pockets. >> air freshener rental. >> you're standing in the
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elevator. >> i paid a surcharge to leave the wilson phillips cd in the changer. it was fine. i needed it. >> we'll do final trades. there's over one year, hertz down 57%. we're going to take a quick break and welcome in a surprise guest after the break, too. various: (shouting) heigh! ho! ( ♪ ) it's off to work we go! woman: on the gulf coast, new exxonmobil projects are expected to create over 45,000 jobs. and each job created by the energy industry supports two others in the community. altogether, the industry supports over 9 million jobs nationwide. these are jobs that natural gas is helping make happen, all while reducing america's emissions. energy lives here.
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all right, name that tune. we took the cd are from your rental car -- >> lol. >> figured we'd bum in with it. by the way, welcome in kevin o'leary. who we were hoping would join us at the beginning of the hour. are you there? >> i'm certainly here. if you think you're getting out of laguardia today, you can forget about it. >> i don't want to be walking or driving in this weather today here in the city. i can't imagine trying to land at one of the airports. we're glad you landed. thanks for calling in. you're holding a lot of cash. we had a great quarter. is that because you don't think we can repeat this it going forward? >> no. it's the theme we've been debating now for two months. i took my allocation of financials, which was at 20%, and i sold all my regional banks and i've cut down the overall holding financials to 9%. so i just don't -- i'm
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disagreeing with a lot of guys. i don't think the sector will perform the rest of the year for a bunch of reasons we've talked about particular ly the delay o things we hoped would get done. not saying they're going to get done but there are better places to put the cash. i'm going more mid cap. i listened to wilbur ross this morning. he wasn't mincing words. >> that's right. >> he's going to be very protectionist. i'm going more into mid cap. i'm going to put half of this to work in mid cap and the rest of the international large caps. i'm getting worried the b.a.t. tax which keeps coming up. wilbur dissed it a bit today but that's going to be on the table. a real problem for s&p companies if it happens. i'm getting good performance out of asia. i'm just spreading my risk around. financials, i just took -- that's where i got that cash. i just sold all those regionals. i wish i'd sold them earlier. that was a correction. i'm checking out of town on that. >> we don't have ton of time. what about tech.
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the best performing sector of the quarter, do you like it? >> yeah, i'm still long. still long. i've got my apple . i keep trimming it. microsoft. that's all the big names and it's working. the pes are getting back to the crazy days again. i hope the earnings will show up this quarter. some estimates were up 16% on s&p. i don't think we're going to get that indication in q-1. i think we have to hope for a good back end of the year. >> the party will start once again in earnings season where it will be -- they're going to rain all over it. give me a final trade if you don't mind. >> just more mid cap. i have to sing my own book. i bought more of it today. >> have a good weekend. >> the russell 2000. >> take care, bye-bye. >> let's do final trades. josh? >> reiterating amd, the breakout is for real. >> one hell of a breakout.
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>> micron the same thing. my favorite is intel. i think mobile eye really helps them. >> we have 15 seconds left. >> i'll take them all. the trade i put in yesterday which is short treasuries. i still think that yield pops up. >> you did leave me time. it's been a great quarter for stocks. we'll see what the next one brings. the next hour "power lunch." i'm michelle caruso-cabrera. here is what's on the menu. commerce secretary telling cnbc this morning, you're worried about a trade war? we're already in a trade war. he says we've been in one for decades. what the administration says it's going to do about it and what the impact will be on u.s. manufacturers. that's first. the details strit ahead. also, rebuilding america's crumbling infrastructure, and there's a lot of it as we've told you. we're going to tell you how to profit by investing in one of america's most hated airports. i hope their on time payment rate is better than the ontime arrival rate.
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