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BMO: Here’s where to look for smoking growth in tech

Tech has been a massive outperformer off the market bottom.

6/18/25 2:06PM

Large-cap tech shares have ripped since the market’s April 8 bottom, with the Nasdaq 100 (Invesco QQQ Trust) up roughly 27% compared to the S&P 500’s (SPDR S&P 500 ETF) roughly 20% gain.

BMO equity analyst Brian Belski has been overweight on tech for a while, but he suggests that, going forward, tech’s performance will be dominated less by a sector-wide, knee-jerk recovery from the early April tariff panics than by the performance of certain individual shares. In a note published today, he wrote:

“We advocate for a highly selective approach to sector positioning. While we still prefer slightly smaller stocks within the sector with GARP [growth at a reasonable price] attributes as our preferred strategy, we thought it would be helpful to highlight some alternative selection approaches this time around... Specifically, we decided to “decompose” [growth at a reasonable price] and identify what we would view as the growth and value opportunities within the sector at both the industry and individual stock levels.”

Belski ginned up some helpful tables that break out tech companies with the highest expectations for earnings growth — he looks at near-term and long-term earnings-per-share expectations — as well as expected near-term return on equity, a key measure of how well companies use invested dollars to produce profits, combining all those measures to come up with a ranking.

Here are the top 10, which include retail investor favorites like Palantir and Nvidia as well as some less sexy companies, such as Seagate Technology. The maker of hard disk drives has jumped nearly 100% since the market’s April 8 low.

Luke Kawa

Opendoor soars as co-founders Keith Rabois and Eric Wu added to board of directors, Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian appointed as new CEO

Opendoor Technologies is soaring after announcing that two of the online real estate company’s co-founders, Keith Rabois and Eric Wu, have been added to its board of directors. Rabois will serve as Chairman.

The company said Wu and Rabois’ VC firm are buying $40 million in Opendoor stock via a private investment in public equity (PIPE) financing.

In addition, Opendoor has poached Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian to serve as its new CEO after Carrie Wheeler resigned in mid-August.

“Literally there was only one choice for the job: Kaz. I am thrilled that he will be serving as CEO of Opendoor,” said Rabois.

The company touted that it’s “going into founder mode” with these additions in its press release, with lead independent director Eric Feder championing this injection of “founder DNA.”

That exact phrase, “founder DNA,” was used by Eric Jackson, architect of the initial rally and social interest in Opendoor, as he openly campaigned for these very two individuals to be added to the board.

This underscores how far the company is willing to go in embracing a new strategy of listening to its investors (particularly the most prominent one, it seems!) as management aims to engineer a fundamental turnaround in its business to match the optimism embedded in its stock price.

Nia Warfield, Luke Kawa

Three stocks power S&P 500 to fresh record closing high

Eighty-three basis points of today’s return in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, more than 2x its daily gain, were attributable to Oracle and the two leading US chip designers, Nvidia and Broadcom.

Oracle’s RPO Remaining Performance Obligations

What is an RPO, the number that drove Oracle’s giant share move?

Matt Phillips, Max Knoblauch8h

Luke Kawa

“Pokemon” trading cards skyrocketing in value and GameStop’s collectibles business taking off are two sides of the same coin

The Wall Street Journal’s fantastic piece “The Hot Investment With a 3,000% Return? Pokémon Cards” includes this vignette:

“...the cards caught fire among amateur investors during the pandemic. As some investors banded together to spark the GameStop meme stock mania, a more fringe group of traders, also stuck at home and armed with cash from government stimulus, began scooping up Pokémon cards.”

And the connection between “Pokemon” cards and the video game retailer is in fact even closer than that:

GameStop’s collectibles business played a big role in why it smashed Q2 revenue expectations! Sales in this segment exceeded $227 million, while the two analysts that provided forecasts had an average estimate of $170.4 million. Fiscal year to date, sales of collectibles make up 25.8% of its revenues, up from 16.4% at this time last year.

The company significantly expanded its footprint in the “Pokemon” trading card world in 2024 by launching in-store buying and selling of individual cards, and introduced “Power Packs,” which include one card graded at 8 or above by the Professional Sports Authenticator, in its most recent quarter.

As a 35-year-old man who still plays “Pokemon” (Nuzlockes are peak math + strategy entertainment!), thinks the release of “Pokemon Go” marked the peak for Western civilization, and considers Christmas 1998 to be the second-best day of his life because it’s when he got “Pokemon Red,” I personally view the outperformance of “Pokemon” cards as being indicative of the power of nostalgia coupled with a drop-off in child rearing by millennials, leaving more room for discretionary purchases and investments.

And the nostalgia business seems like a great place to be.

The Hot Investment With a 3,000% Return? Pokémon Cards

“...the cards caught fire among amateur investors during the pandemic. As some investors banded together to spark the GameStop meme stock mania, a more fringe group of traders, also stuck at home and armed with cash from government stimulus, began scooping up Pokémon cards.”

And the connection between “Pokemon” cards and the video game retailer is in fact even closer than that:

And the nostalgia business seems like a great place to be.

Luke Kawa

10h

Oracle’s hyperscaler competitors lag after the cloud computing giant’s blowout revenue forecast

Oracle’s forecast for mind-blowing revenue growth through its fiscal 2030 is lifting most AI-adjacent stocks today.

However, the ones being left behind in this rising tide, falling or lagging well behind Morgan Stanley’s basket of AI tech beneficiaries (up 5.8% as of 12:22 p.m. ET), are its fellow hyperscalers.

Microsoft and Alphabet, which also have massive cloud divisions, are positive — but only just. Amazon, whose cloud revenue growth was deemed a disappointment relative to peers this quarter, is down 2.8%. Meta is down 1.2%.

This suggests, at the very least, that traders aren’t mapping Oracle’s outlook for Nvidia-like revenue growth onto the other major cloud players or one of their biggest customers.

BMO: Here’s where to look for smoking growth in tech

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Opendoor soars as co-founders Keith Rabois and Eric Wu added to board of directors, Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian appointed as new CEO

What is an RPO, the number that drove Oracle’s giant share move?

“Pokemon” trading cards skyrocketing in value and GameStop’s collectibles business taking off are two sides of the same coin

The Hot Investment With a 3,000% Return? Pokémon Cards

Oracle’s hyperscaler competitors lag after the cloud computing giant’s blowout revenue forecast

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