Altimeter Capital founder and CEO Brad Gerstner, joins CNBC's "Halftime Report" to discuss his market outlook and how he's positioning his portfolio for 2026.
3:06It sounds like you've increased your long exposure to this market. Is that fair?
5:25... questions about debt, and you had almost a same-sentence conversation with Oracle, which is under some heavy pressure, and you see the CDS blowing out, and then you've got the CoreWeaves that are in that group too. Is that overdone?
6:47Because it's not on your list, do you no longer own Meta?
The big story yesterday was of course Jensen Wong's keynote at CES and what he was going to talk about and how the market would react to it for a stock that frankly hasn't done all that much lately. If you back this out, you can get the picture. Over the last three months, for example, just take a look at what Nvidia has done. Yes, he talked about faster AI chips. Yes, he talked about robotics, which many think of as the next big wave. And this Vera Rubin chip is now in full production, which people like Stacy Rascan at Bernstein, a top analyst, suggests looks like a monster. The rest of the keynote was more incremental, but that seems to be the big takeaway from Mr. Rascan, Dan Ives, etc. Let's talk to another big shareholder in Nvidia. It's Brad Gerstner. He is the Altimeter founder and CEO, and he joins us now. This is his first appearance of '26 with us, and it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on today.
Well, maybe just a comment first. I think that you just ran around the horn on the desk, and I think everybody is spot on. This is going to be a stock picker's market. It's not 2023 or 2024 where we were early in this super cycle and we were recovering from the pullback in 2022. And remember, last year wasn't straight up and to the right either. The NASDAQ was down 20% on Liberation Day in April of last year and ended the year up 20%. So I think there's a lot to be excited about as you look at this year, but as Venezuela reminded us over the weekend, as the Supreme Court's decision on tariffs will probably remind us, there's certainly a lot of things we have to get through this year. But if we just look at the general operating framework and then I'll get to Nvidia, lower taxes, we're in a rate cutting cycle, inflation under control, earnings growth is occurring. We've got this AI super cycle, this massive investment super cycle. We have this re-industrialization and bringing onshoring our national supply chains. That's also a huge investment super cycle. So the backdrop looks good. And then we have these companies that are all getting more fit, right? They're leveraging AI. This is tough for the employment picture, but it really does lead to this golden age of margin expansion. And I think what you heard from Nvidia yesterday was a lot more of the same, right? The consensus estimate this year, I think, is that they're going to grow earnings to about 65%, maybe 30% in 2027. You said it's an earnings-driven market, so they don't need to expand multiple. The multiple is 25 times earnings. It peaked in July of '24 at 41 times earnings. It troughed last April at 21 times earnings. Now we're at 25 or 26 times. So it's not a demanding multiple. And as a shareholder, Scott, I'm thrilled and happy just to sit here and let an incredible company generate earnings and let our returns come from earnings. We don't need our returns to come from multiple expansion in Nvidia.
You sound like somebody who, if you paint the picture that you just did of the backdrop which you think exists, has taken their exposure up. I would say I don't know the answer to this, so I'm going to ask you straight up. It sounds like you've increased your long exposure to this market. Is that fair?
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Gerstner, B. (2026, January 6). 'We're still very early in the super cycle,' says Altimeter Capital's Brad Gerstner [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/622333/
MLA
Brad Gerstner. "'We're still very early in the super cycle,' says Altimeter Capital's Brad Gerstner." CNBC Television, 6 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/622333/.
BibTeX
@misc{gerstner2026_622333,
author = {Brad Gerstner},
title = {'We're still very early in the super cycle,' says Altimeter Capital's Brad Gerstner},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/622333/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
