He cut his teeth in the technology sector — running the world’s largest technology and internet fund for Merrill Lynch during the dot-com bubble.
Now, Paul Meeks is trying to avoid most of it.
His decision comes as the biggest tech names such as Facebook, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon report quarterly numbers this week in the midst of giant multiyear runs.
“I would recommend [to] investors, and here’s a guy that’s been looking at the sector for a long time, to be no more than neutral weight the sector in their portfolios and most likely underweight,” Meeks said Monday on CNBC’s “Trading Nation.” “And, be very careful which stocks to pick.”
Meeks, chief investment officer at Sloy, Dahl & Holst, is concerned that a large portion of tech stocks are too pricey.
“I always worry about valuations. I invest in the sector with a value hat,” he said.
One of those stocks is Apple. Meeks, who has owned Apple shares for years, is hoping to get guidance from the iPhone maker when it reports quarterly earnings on Thursday. Apple stock has dipped 5 percent in the past week.
According to Meeks, Facebook is the only big tech stock reporting this week that could see ample upside.
“Pendulums have swung too far in the direction indicating doubt and pessimism with the changes that Facebook plans for its news feed,” he wrote in a special note to CNBC.
But he’s not counting out all of tech. There’s one pocket of sector that may give investors broad gains, he said.
“The stocks in the industry that I like most in the technology sector is semiconductors because particularly some of the memory based companies have come down in my view way too much,” Meeks said. “Micron is very interesting here on a semiconductor capital equipment side.”
