Tech might be the biggest buying opportunity on the market right now, said Brian White, an analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co., an equity research and trading firm.
The sector has seen better days, with a slew of bad news hitting some of tech’s biggest names and sending market watchers into sell-off mode. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell in correction territory on a closing basis earlier this month for the first time in two years.
But White told CNBC this is a chance for investors to expand their portfolios. “There are some great secular trends in this group,” he said.
His picks include Apple, Facebook, Alphabet and Amazon. Here’s why.
“It is kind of the consumer staple of the tech world,” he said Thursday on “Power Lunch.” That same day, the stock was trading around $174, which White said was “significantly undervalued,” and he issued a buy rating with a $235 price target.
“The fact that Warren Buffett got involved in this name should tell you something,” he said.
Even the potential for tariffs doesn’t make White shy away from this stock.
“There is this insatiable appetite for Apple right now in China,” he said.
Google’s parent company is “very attractive, for sure,” White said.
Alphabet Class C shares were priced around $1,025 Thursday, compared with $1,152 about a month ago. But White called this a buying opportunity and set a price target of $1,280.
He cited the company’s ventures with projects such as Google Cloud Platform and artificial intelligence as signs of continued growth.
White called this company a “money machine.”
While he acknowledged that the Facebook data scandal has hurt the entire tech sector, he called Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony on Capitol Hill this week “a phenomenal performance.”
“Zuck crushed it,” White said.
Facebook stock was trading just over $164 Thursday, compared with the March 16 high of $185.33.
“It’s unbelievably cheap,” he said and issued a buy rating with a price target of $200.
In fact, “you’re starting to see value investors poke around in Facebook.”
After news of the scandal broke, the hashtag #DeleteFacebook began circulating online. But Kate Warne, principal and investment strategist at Edward Jones Research, doesn’t think the platform’s 2 billion-plus users are going anywhere.
“We’ll likely be able to see Facebook continue to grow over time,” she said on “Power Lunch.” Warne also said the stock was an attractive buy.
“All those [political] concerns continue to weigh on the stock short term,” Warne said.
“[But] the pullback is an opportunity to add a company that is growing fast,” she said.
President Donald Trump tweeted about Amazon earlier this month, saying the e-commerce giant was underpaying the U.S. Postal Service. Shares immediately fell.
But White called Amazon “an unstoppable trend” and said he doesn’t foresee increased regulation as a real risk.
Amazon was trading around $1,430 on Thursday, down from $1,587 earlier in the month. White set a price target of $2,000 on the stock.
