3 Stocks You ll Wish You Bought in 2026 (And 2 You ll Regret Owning)

AI stocks are surging right now, but this always happens right alongside an AI boom. Joining us today is Rob Spivey from Altimetry Research. Rob, I am so excited to have you on the show to talk about this sector that is going to be, if not already, starting to boom right alongside all of these AI stocks. You were on last month talking about energy a little bit, and we're going to dive even deeper into that today. So let's just talk about energy and this AI boom. How much are these two always tied together? The only way you're going to get the AI boom is if you have enough power to power the AI boom. We're in a situation where, if you just look back in 2022, when FERC looked out, FERC, the regulator for the US power grid, the one who has to figure out how much power we need, when they looked at how much more power they thought we were going to need by 2030, they said we were going to need like 24 gigawatts. For perspective, that's like 2.4% growth over seven years. That's nothing. By 2024, they were at something to the tune of 64 gigawatts. You can see the trend. Last year, they were at 166 gigawatts that they thought we were going to need. 16% growth in just five years, they were saying. So it kind of highlights that front and center with this huge AI boom is it is a power boom because of the fact that you need massive amounts of energy to be able to power these data centers and train it. And so that is the big thing is whenever you follow this, you need to know that you are 100% following, not just an AI boom, but this is a hard asset boom that starts front and center with how we get electricity into those data centers. Yeah, absolutely. These two are very much tied together. And this week totally showed that the AI data center story is not slowing down. We saw, you know, big tech earnings this week. And then all of those AI related stocks just soared. And we had some stocks go up more than 30% in just the last few days. So this is a huge boom right now in the AI space. I'm curious, we're going to dive into whether the energy stocks are seeing the same kind of rapid increase this week, or if there's still a big runway ahead. So we're going to dive into that and also talk about, one of my favorite things you talk about is three stocks to buy right now in the energy space and the two to avoid, which are just as important to know in the energy world. These are the names that are probably going to fall behind that you don't want to be in right now. So we'll dive into those. I want to talk a little bit more about from your accounting perspective. That's why I love to talk with you, Rob. When you're looking at what's happening in the AI story, is there anything that could stop or slow down this massive boom we're seeing right now? So to start with the accounting, right? I mean, when you look at it, it was staggering. You mentioned the idea of the hyperscaler earnings that blew up on Wednesday, where, you know, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet all reported just gangbuster earnings that just blew the doors off. The thing that people reacted most to, if you look at Meta though, was what Meta said, not about earnings, but what they said about CapEx, right? They said $125 to $145 billion of spending in terms of data center, which is nuts to think about because just two years ago, you were at the point where all the data AI data center spenders together were probably at like $250 or something. But, you know, when you think about what is everybody worried could upset the apple cart here, I mean, it comes front and center with NIMBYism, right? That's not in my backyard for those of you who didn't play SimCity when you were younger like I did, because I'm a nerd, right? So NIMBYism is the idea that, you know, all these people are looking at this, they're saying, hey, hold on, we've got all of our power prices are going up massively because of these AI data centers. It's not surprising that we've started to see this NIMBYism crop up. I'm in Maine right now. And, right, we just almost had a memoratorium on data centers pass before Janet Mills, the governor, basically vetoed it. And if she hadn't, then we weren't going to have any data centers built in Maine at all. You've got in Virginia, Loudoun County, having no, basically making it really hard for people to build data centers. You had Brookfields, who has been a massive builder of data centers, basically walk away from an 800-acre campus elsewhere in Virginia. And, I mean, even just to put this in perspective, even in Silicon Valley, you have an issue where you've got data center shells sitting there that just can't get power. If you were to say anything that people are starting to talk about But this is what we think is so important, Bridget, is we think that there's a way around this that's going to be the solution that everybody's scrambling to. And that's what we're excited about. Well, we're going to dive into some of these names here in just a minute. But I know you and your team at Altimetry have really dove into that issue of what's some ways around the potential energy crisis out there and what's the best way to explore investing in some of these hidden energy plays that could really be big for investors. And that is all in a new special report you have on dark energy. This is looking at different ways within the energy space to invest. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description to get access to that full report from Rob and his team at Altimetry Research right now. Again, we'll have that link in the description if you want to go and look at that report. It's a special offer just for our YouTube viewers. Rob, let's get into the energy discussion now. And we're looking at these three names that you are bullish on that you think have a lot of runway still ahead in the energy field. What do these three names have in common? What are you looking for? When you think about it, you've got this nimbyism cropping up, which is actually kind of actually what's probably holding back just how far some of these valuations could run right now. It's important to step back and understand, first and foremost, when you see Meta talk about $125 to $145 billion of spending, when you see $700 billion of total hyperscaler CapEx exceed that number this year when that was the budget. The reason why is because they all kind of understand that this is a winner-take-all race, meaning the first person who gets to AGI, right, general intelligence, is probably the one who wins and nobody else actually gets an opportunity to do it. And so there's this level of a prisoner's dilemma here where the first person who blinks and stops spending effectively declares, I've lost. And so they're all leaning full board. So you know that they're all focusing on a solution that gets around this. And the solution is not going to be, oh, we're going to keep on hooking up to the grid. And this is what we think is so interesting for all the three names that we think are so compelling, is all of them revolve around this idea of what we call dark energy. But dark energy is really simply just what we call behind-the-meter power, meaning it's power that's not coming from the grid. It's coming from co-location, something that's right next to the data center or something else. Or as we like to call it, BYOP. We may not be going out to a restaurant, but it's bring your own power instead of bring your own bottle. And so we see that this is so clearly happening. And it's already happening. I mean, just recently, Oracle and SoftBank and OpenAI, they announced with their Stargate initiative, right? Which is about building all these data centers around the United States. The biggest one is Stargate Jupiter. And Stargate Jupiter, it's like 2.4 gigawatts. They are going to build that entirely off of the grid. In fact, with one of the companies that we're going to talk about in a moment, they literally just signed a massive deal about it. You're seeing a bunch of these other solutions where we're building these campuses that are not hooked up to the grid. They basically are not relying on the grid for their power. So they don't have to worry about whether or not FERC or one of the regulators can give them the stamp of approval and whether or not somebody in a state house can tell them you're not allowed to build that data center. Because they're saying, hey, we're not on your infrastructure anymore. So we're solutioning it. That's their solution to get around that NIMBYism issue and that regulatory risk. Yeah, it's fascinating. And honestly, it makes sense for these companies who need so much energy to just bring their own. I love what you said, bring your own power. I think that's a great analogy to look at this. But it makes sense for these companies that need so much to be self-reliant. We see that in so many different sectors and so many different areas where that self-reliance takes away so much risk as a company. So a great concept. And the three names we're going to talk about fit that bill really well. Again, you have much more research and other names in the special report that you have. But let's get to the one that you were sharing with us today. What's the first name on this list of three companies to look at in the energy sector? Yeah, the first one is GE Vernova. GEV is the ticker. The three parts of their business that people pay attention to, they've got a wind turbine business, which we're not going to talk about right now. But then they make natural gas generator turbines. Turbines to create power at a natural gas power plant. And then they also have what's called the electrification part of their business, which is basically what's called balance of power in the industry. All of the other stuff you need. You need transformers, you need wires, you need all the other stuff to basically be able to manage the power. So when you look at that, what's fascinating about them is even after they've had a phenomenal run over the last two to three years, the market still doesn't fully understand what's going on for GE. And just to put in perspective. So first, let's talk about it from a fundamental perspective. And then we'll talk about the real secret, which is what we can see in uniform accounting that is so excited. Two years ago, they produced annually 12 to 15 gigawatts a year of power capacity in terms of turbines, natural gas turbines and everything else. This year, they're going to get to around 20. Their goal is by 2030 that they might get north of 25 to 30 gigawatts. So over basically a five plus year period, they're going to more than double the amount of power. They're able to sell capacity for the turbines. And every single time they sell a turbine, there is a long tail of profitability that comes behind it. And so you look at it. And so there is a a staggering amount of demand for what they have. And their backlog is already booked out to 2030 if they don't expand their capacity. So they've got a long thing. But the really exciting thing about GE Vernova, when we standardize everything and that's what we do with uniform accounting, we're cleaning up the accounting noise so we can compare companies. There's only like really three big players in making turbines. It's Siemens, GE Vernova, and then also Mitsubishi in Japan. That's basically it. The issue is all three of them are on different accounting standards. All three of them operate different parts of the world. So when you try to compare them to understand how profitable they could be, it's really hard to do because the fact that numbers aren't the same. But when we clean it up and we standardize it, all of a sudden we could see something that jumped off the page to us, which is when you look at their peers, GE Vernova's peers have a uniform earnings margin, how profitable they can be, of around like 20%. GE Vernova, when they spun out of GE because of all of the costs and everything that GE shoved on them and encumbered them, they were sitting at a 3% earnings margin. And so they're not just going to massively expand capacity. They're already on the way to massively expanding profitability too. And you combine those two things and sure, this company has had a crazy run, but this company could probably double or more beyond from now, just because of those two drivers creating so much value for that business. Yeah, you hit my next question I was going to ask about this, but it's already had a crazy run. It's up quite a bit right now, but I know that you are always looking at those accounting principles and looking at what money is actually coming in. What's the potential for the future? What are those margins looking like? When you're looking to invest in a company like GE Vernova, do you pay attention to that run-up and the entry point that you're getting in? We did research and what we found is in the middle of a bull market like this, we went back and we looked at the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, the last five years also in the 2020s. We found is if you just bought companies that doubled, you had a better than a coin flip chance that that company in the bull market was going to double again. And if we used uniform accounting on top of it, what we found was actually that increased to a 60% odds. Six out of every 10 that we would pick off would double again. And so when we look at GE Vernova, we go, okay, hold on. We know that we've got the momentum confirmation tool. It's not because they doubled, they're going to double again, but it's confirmation that the market is recognizing the fundamental momentum is real for this company. Well, if we see that and our uniform accounting shows us it's still cheap, not like cheap, you know, insanely cheap, like it's trading at a 10 times multiple, but it's cheap that earnings growth could go like this and the market's only pricing it to go like this. That is when we get really, really excited because we say the market's picked up on it, but it's got a lot more room to run. I love to hear how you look at these names. And that is really important when we look at this next stock on your list, because you talked about stocks that double. This one has a way more than doubled. This one is up almost 1500% in one year. Let's get to the second stock on your list. Yeah, and the second stock is Bloom Energy. And this one, to your point, Bridget, we fortunately for our readers, so right, like that special report that you highlighted, for our readers have been riding along with us because it's been up 1100% since we recommended it less than a year ago. And so when you look at Bloom Energy, this company is really, really interesting because what it does is not like GE, right? GE makes the turbines that go in traditional natural gas power plants, rating power plants. Bloom Energy has what are called fuel cells, which basically what it does is it takes air out from, it takes air and natural gas and a little bit of electricity to make a lot more electricity. And that's all that it does. But so what it's basically done is it's created a solution that means you do not need to rely on the grid for your power if you're going to be able to stand up a data center, a factory, whatever else. What's fascinating about what they've built out is their fuel cell business, two years ago or last year, they were producing around 100 megawatts a year of power capacity. And they talked about the idea that they had two gigawatts worth of capacity to be able to produce two gigawatts annually of capacity on their current campus. But everybody was like, is this going to happen or not? Well, the earnings call that they just had this last week was so telling in terms of realizing that everybody is jumping on. I mentioned that idea of Stargate Jupiter earlier. Well, Stargate Jupiter just signed an agreement to get all 2.4 gigawatts of power that they need using Bloom Energy's fuel cells. And that was such a massive vote of confidence for Bloom because it highlights that, no, the big hyperscalers are starting to recognize that this is a viable solution with a breakeven between $50 and $80 a megawatt hour. It makes sense relative to the other solutions that they have. And so what's so exciting is, yeah, it's run 1,000%. Like I said, 1,100% since we started recommending it, 1,500% in the last year. But again, let's step back and do the uniform accounting analysis, which is what gets us so excited about this. Again, we said 100 megawatts to two gigawatts, and they're talking about that by 2030, they could be producing five gigawatts of power a year that they're selling out there. And when they sell that power, just like we talked about how GE Vernova gets that slip of service demand, well, it's even stronger for Bloom because these fuel cells, each year they need to have what's called the catalyst. The reagents that are inside the fuel cell needs to be topped up so that you can basically make sure that the reaction is happening. So they have to go back to Bloom to buy that. So each megawatt they sell gives them this nice recurring revenue of business. But the bigger thing is, so you look at what the market's pricing this company to do right now, and the market is pricing the company for around, call it $3 billion of uniform earnings a year by 2030. That would sound really high if you look at what Bloom's as reported metrics are. But for context, this is what's really cool with uniform accounting. We know that Bloom already was profitable back in 21, 22. It was already making money when everybody else thought that Bloom wasn't making money. So we already know that they can make a lot of money fast. But the second thing is, if we just do that math that I talked about, how you look at comparable profitability and everything else. Well, GE, Vernova, when they were making 12 to 15 gigawatts of power back in two years ago, if they were at 20 to 25% uniform margins, which is where Bloom already is about to get to, they would have been throwing off $7 to $8 billion of profit. So for Bloom to get to $3 billion of profit with what they're forecasted to grow, easy. And they have the opportunity to expand capacity even more. Like I mentioned, that five gigawatt opportunity for expansion. And so we just think that even after this run, Bloom is going to be one of these companies that it transforms how we think about power and that recurring revenue, high margin business on top of it, the market's totally sleeping on that can add a lot to the upside for this business. And this whole conversation about Bloom really parallels so well to the conversation we've had in the last couple of videos we've had on the channel the last few days talking about the AI and the chip stocks and the explosive growth they've seen in the last month. You know, some of those names like Intel up 130% or more in just the last month. It's a huge run-up, but the demand and the spending happening from these mega cap companies, it's not going away. It's not slowing down. If anything, the earnings reports this week showed that that CapEx spending is going up. And so the same applies to this energy story. If Bloom Energy has shown and proven to these mega cap companies that are doing all of this CapEx spending that their product works, they're not going to pull that money away anytime soon. If anything, it's just going to continue to increase. We've got Satya, Satya Nadella, CEO came out and said, we've got Nvidia chips ready to go. We've just got the issue of basically getting the power to plug them in. And the COO said, we need something like 500,000 more electrical engineers because of what we need to build on the power side. All these big hyperscalers, these mega cap companies, they are saying we're not going to stop spending, but their issue is not on just the chip side, right? It is on the power side because the power side is what they need, what they need to be able to make any of those chips work. And so while Intel or Micron, right, who had a great run at the beginning of this year, or obviously we all know Nvidia for the last three years, while they were running, what everybody is starting to realize is actually the power story is going to figure out whether or not that can all work or can't work. And that just proves a really good point for the long runway that a company like Bloom could have, even though it's already had such a great run in the last year. Another great company to talk about in this story. Let's get onto the third company that's a buy for you in the energy space. Yeah, this one is definitely more off the beaten path. I think anybody who's paying attention to the energy world has probably seen Bloom and GE Renova pop up just because of what's happened. This one is Kodiak Gas. And right, you'd say Kodiak Gas, what does this have to do with producing power? Well, so what Kodiak Gas does, which is really interesting, when natural gas comes out of the hole in the ground, comes out of the well, and it has to get to wherever it has to go, you have to compress that natural gas to push it through a pipeline. Well, they own fleets of these compressors that push that natural gas through the pipelines. And so already, of course, you probably can tell that one of the things I'm going to say is we need a lot more natural gas if we're going to be consuming all this natural gas to be able to produce the power that we need to be able to power the AI data centers. But that's actually not the most exciting thing about Kodiak. If you look over the last six months, they have announced some really interesting things because what do you need to be able to power those compressors? You need mobile fleets of power. And so they have a strong skillset in being able to run massive generators that are very efficient on cost and bring them wherever they need to be brought to be able to run the power that needs to be happening. And so historically, they've used that to run their compressor fleets. But what they've realized is, well, wait a second, we can actually get even better pricing taking this to data centers in West Texas or in Central Texas or anywhere else that we operate, even in Pennsylvania, where they're building a massive data center campus outside of Scranton. And they said, well, wait a second, we can bring this here and we can actually sell the power here at an even better price. And they've gotten on for Caterpillar, they've gotten in Caterpillar's backlog to buy a bunch more generators so they can bring several hundred megawatts worth of power to bear wherever it needs to be born. And the market is still not fully comprehending how that re-levels the profitability potential for Kodiak. And so Kodiak is gonna potentially be able to double dip in terms of more demand for natural gas means more demand for their compressor fleets, but also more demand for power on demand means they can actually sell their power capacity at higher prices elsewhere. And you put all that together, and that's why this company looks really, really interesting. It's not a company that we're quite patting the table like Bloom and G-Vernova, but it's a company we are definitely sticking around and paying attention to for that reason. Yeah, the natural gas story is also interesting. This would fit into that storyline that I've heard talked about from many different analysts and people over the last month or so with the Iran conflict talking about, well, one thing that helps with energy dependence in the US is we have a lot of natural gas. We are one of the main suppliers of natural gas. And so turning towards more of this as a solution, as far as development goes for energy independence over the next few months, do you think that that plays into Kodiak's story at all? Oh, 100%. I mean, we have such a global competitive advantage in terms of natural gas and what that means for our ability to really be immune to what's happening in Qatar and what's happening at the Strait of Hormuz, where Europe saw in a day, it might not have been a day, it might've been three days, the price of natural gas double for them. And at the same time, we basically shrugged because we are not attached. The only way that we are attached to the entire world universe of natural gas is because we export a bunch of natural gas and LNG from Chenier and from everybody else. But we have so much more natural gas to be able to produce than we even export. And so if we're gonna have to build more pipelines to get it where it needs to go, including exporting, including here in the United States, that means more demand for Kodiak and everything else. But yeah, I mean, the natural gas story is such a story of the US going from strength to strength. We have this really embedded competitive advantage to anybody else because we're not dependent. And our natural gas, our price to get it out of the ground, it's like EQT, largest natural gas producer in the United States. It's cost to get natural gas out of the ground, $1 per BTU of natural gas. Put in perspective, the current going rate is $5. And so that just shows you, we've got so much cheap natural gas here in the United States and we could ramp it up even more if we wanted to, once we actually get the demand, which is clearly coming from these data centers. And those are the kinds of names, other names that you will find in their special report from Altimetry on dark energy, more natural gas names, other different ways of looking at energy that are the up and coming solutions where investors could see a lot of growth stories still ahead in this energy field. So if you wanna check out that report again, you can scan the QR code or click the link in the description to get that special offer and that full report on dark energy from Rob and his team at Altimetry Research. All right, Rob, now onto the important last couple of stocks to talk about. And these are the energy stocks that you would not be investing in right now. What's that first one to avoid? Yeah, the first one is NextEra Energy, right? N-E-E is the ticker here. And so this one you'd say, well, hold on, this is the largest utility company in the world. And also in theory, if you listen to what the hyperscalers pay lip service to, it should be perfectly positioned because of the fact that NextEra is huge in renewable energy, solar and wind, basically any way to be low carbon energy, they are front and center. That's how they became the largest utility in the world. And all the hyperscalers are saying, hey, we want to have carbon light power and all this other stuff. Well, the issue that NextEra has is if you're going to run a data center, data centers need what's called baseload power. And what baseload power means is power that can be on 24-7 because the data center's demand actually doesn't drop at night, just like normal power does for us, all of us humans who interact with things. And so because of that, the issue is wind and solar, they don't work 24-7. And when you talk about battery backup, anybody who's worth their salt and knows this space will tell you in terms of utilities will tell you, battery backup is a bit of a misnomer because it's just about battery extension. When you have a huge set of batteries, that can basically take your solar and your wind like two hours longer than it would have otherwise. But that other eight to 10 to 12 hours when there's no sun and no wind, guess what? You don't have that power. And so because of that, the data centers actually aren't interested in leveraging NextEra's power as much as you would think that they are. And so NextEra is one of those ones who's actually going to be left out in the cold as some of these bigger players that have natural gas and nuclear exposure are going to be big, big winners. Interesting. I'm curious to see, are there any stocks in that clean energy space that you think have potential? Or would that concept about NextEra energy apply to a lot of stocks that are in that clean energy solar wind space? Solar and battery backup are going to be part of the portfolio for all of these. But the thing is, they are not the viable primary solution. And so anybody who's hoping that, you know, the data centers might ride to the savior of solar stocks or something like that, just the math doesn't work. They're going to benefit a little bit, but just they are not going to benefit nearly as much as good old natural gas. And then eventually when we get around to it, being able to build nuclear. Very interesting. Of course, nuclear is always a part of the story too. Let's get to that second stock that you are avoiding when you're looking at energy stocks in this current market. Yeah, and this is ACOM. A-C-M. So ACOM is a construction and engineering firm. And with everything that we just talked about in terms of how we are seeing a boom in construction of data centers, of power plants, of everything else, you would think that a rising tide lifts all boats, right? I mean, assume that ACOM is actually going to also really benefit from this too. And you're going to see a ton of spending and investment and everything else. Well, this is where it's actually the issue for ACOM comes in. Because they've, if you look at the stock chart, they've gotten beaten down since November. The reason why is just quite simply, it's not exposed to the right places. It's exposed to places like transportation and wastewater and not power and telecom and data center construction. And so, well, you might think, and this comes back to Bridget, the conversation we were talking about before when you asked about G-E-Vernova and Bloom. You might think, well, maybe I can, you know, dumpster dive or bottom feed on ACOM here because it's going to benefit with all of these other players that are going to be lifted up. This is a time to listen to the market. The market's telling you this one isn't going to benefit like somebody like a Primorus or a MazTec will. So don't pay attention to this one. Look at some of those other alternatives because this one is going to continue to struggle to execute just because demand is not flowing to where they do. And they don't have the core competency to do the stuff that people really are investing in right now. Pay attention to the strength and what the market is telling you. A great lesson for investors to remember when they are looking at the market, especially in the kind of explosive growth season that we are seeing right now. If you want to hear more about energy from Rob and Joel from Altimetry Research, make sure to check out last month's conversation when Joel was at the Sarawak convention all about energy. It's another really great conversation with three other stocks to buy and two to avoid all in the energy sector. You can watch that video here.