Muse AI agent led Meta Platforms into the Best Stocks in the Market list
(This is The Best Stocks in the Market , brought to you by Josh Brown and Sean Russo of Ritholtz Wealth Management.) Josh — Yes, Meta just made the Best Stocks in the Market list last week. No, I am not telling anyone to buy it right now. But something big has changed for this company, and the stock may not have fully priced in this new development. Wall Street’s sell-siders certainly don’t believe the rally is over. Let’s rewind… For most of the past year, investors treated Meta’s AI spending as a liability. “Why don’t they just rent out all that compute they’re paying for and bring in the revenue today?” was a common and not unfounded refrain. The company kept raising its budget for data centers and chips, and the question never changed. What exactly are we getting for all of this? Well now we have a pretty good answer: the Muse personal AI assistant for regular people. It’s one of the fastest adopted products in Silicon Valley history. The below chart comes from financial sector analyst Marc Rubinstein : Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8, and this is where it gets interesting. The AI trade has been a GPU trade for three years. Training models eat graphical processing power, so that’s where the money went. But Muse doesn’t just answer questions. It does things. It checks your calendar, reads your transactions, sends the email, makes the booking. Every one of those steps is a task, and a lot of that work runs on CPUs, the chips everyone forgot about in the AI conversation. Agents need both. That brings us to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), one of the few chipmakers that makes both. Meta had to convince investors its spending was worth it. AMD is on the receiving end of that spending, and the stock has been telling you so all year. The buyer and the seller in the same AI buildout are both on the list right now. Sean’s got the usual Monday morning highlights from the list. I’ll be back with some technical commentary and risk management. As of Sept 28, there are 154 names on The Best Stocks in the Market list. Top sector ranking: Top industries: Top 5 best stocks by relative strength: Sector spotlight: The Muse Ecosystem Meta Platforms, Inc. (META): Sean — I’ve spent the past week putting different AI assistants through the wringer. I’ve never had an assistant before and now I don’t think I’ll ever have one. Last week, I connected my card and had it book and schedule a U-Haul for an upcoming move, forwarded the details to my girlfriend over email, and let it dig through months of spending patterns to give insight into how much I’m spending. It now pings me every Sunday night with a rundown of what I spent that week, and it’s even scheduled a doctor’s appointment for me (the hamstring has seen better days). Suffice to say, this AI stuff is getting nuts. I keep finding reasons to believe the AI buildout is not over and price continues to confirm it. Meta’s AI assistant Muse launched on Sept. 8 and has become the clearest evidence yet that the company’s AI spending is turning into a usable product. The stock has climbed 38% since bottoming at $545 in August, only 27 trading days ago. The stock now trades around $750 today, making the period we just went through one of the best in history for Meta. Forward guidance calls for Q3 revenue of $61 billion-64 billion, and Meta raised its full-year expense outlook to $165 billion-169 billion while still expecting 2026 operating income above 2025’s. The bigger number is capex. Meta narrowed its 2026 capital-expenditure guidance to $130 billion-145 billion (including finance-lease payments), up from $125 billion-145 billion, and a meaningful chunk of that build-out is now flowing straight to AMD. Meta signed on as a lead customer for AMD’s custom MI450 accelerators and next-generation “Venice” CPUs, across a deal covering up to 6 gigawatts of compute. AMD is issuing Meta a warrant for up to 160 million shares at a penny each, vesting on purchase and stock-price milestones too. This is having an effect on the price and fundamentals of AMD as these two companies grow closer, which we will discuss next. Josh — Meta has spent the better part of a year repairing the damage from last fall. The stock gapped down hard in November on the heaviest volume on this chart and couldn’t hold above the 200-day for any length of time after that. What followed was a wide, sloppy range. Since the spring, the lows have come in between $520 and $545, in March, late June and August, and every rally stalled out in the $680s, in April and again in late July. Then came the Muse launch Sean described above. Meta gapped over the 200-day on September 8th and kept going, clearing the $680s in one big session and running into the $770s, right back to where it traded before the November air pocket. That gap is now filled. The stock has backed off to $752. The 50-day is at $616 and the 200-day at $626, with the 50-day turning higher and closing in on a cross above the longer average for the first time since the winter. RSI is 71, down from the upper 70s at the peak. That peak was the strongest momentum reading on this chart in over a year. Last November and again in the spring, RSI was down in the 20s. Momentum went from washed out to leadership in a matter of weeks. A cooling toward 60 while the stock digests the gap fill would be completely normal. Nothing broken here. If you’re already long Meta for a trade, $685 is your stop. That was the ceiling in April and again in July, and a close back below it puts the stock back inside the old range. In essence, you get to find out real fast if you’re wrong. Closing prices only, don’t get whipsawed intraday. If you don’t own it yet, I’d let RSI settle down and wait for a dip back toward the breakout. Buying closer to $685 lets that level do the risk management for you, with a much tighter stop than you’d be taking on up here. Investors can anchor to the 200-day at $626. The Muse gap from September 8th sits right on top of it, with the first price paid after that air pocket around $640. That is not an accident. A weekly close below $626 fills the Muse gap and loses the 200-day in the same move, and the range is back in charge. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD): Sean — Meta’s Muse launch helped push AMD into the trillion-dollar club for the first time. AMD closed at $615.52 on Sept. 21, up nearly 10% on the day, as a broad AI-chip rally (Muse had just topped Apple’s App Store charts) lifted the stock past a $1 trillion market cap, the fourth U.S. chipmaker to get there after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron. The stock trades around $631 today, up 194% year-to-date and just off its all-time high. The chips behind that move are custom-made. Meta is deploying up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs across several product generations, anchored by the new MI450 accelerator, alongside sixth-generation “Venice” server CPUs and AMD’s rack-scale platform. Meta isn’t the only one using this hardware. OpenAI has a similar 6-gigawatt MI450 commitment (with its own 160 million-share warrant), Anthropic has committed up to 2 gigawatts of MI450-based racks alongside a $5 billion strategic investment from AMD, Oracle is lining up 50,000 units, and Microsoft is integrating this equipment into Azure. The business is scorching. Q2 revenue rose 50% year-over-year to $11.5 billion, with Data Center revenue more than doubling (+107%) to $6.7 billion – now 58% of total sales, up from 42% a year ago. Gross margin expanded to 56%, and AMD guided Q3 revenue to roughly $13 billion (up 41% year-over-year) at a similar margin. Management now expects Data Center revenue to more than double again in 2027, server CPU revenue to grow over 70%, and EPS to push “significantly above $20.” Josh — AMD broke out of a tight base near $200 in April and gapped higher in early May, leaving an air pocket between $360 and $390. That gap never got filled. The stock ran to $570 by late June, then spent the summer in a range between $420 and $570. The September 21st session Sean described above gapped it out of that range to new highs. It’s now at $631, with the 50-day at $505 and the 200-day at $365. Plenty of people will assume this new gap has to get filled. It might. The May gap says it doesn’t have to. RSI is 73. That’s overbought. It hit 89 in late April, then reset all the way to the low 30s in late July while the stock held most of its gains. That reset is what gave this breakout room to run. With RSI at 73, the stock has gotten ahead of itself. If you’re long for a trade, $575 is your stop. That’s the first price paid after the September gap, sitting right on top of the summer highs. Make the call on the close. If you’re not in yet, we’re watching for a retracement into the $600 to $610 area. The stock has held right around $600 every day since the gap, and we want to see if that turns into real support. Investors can give it more room, with the rising 50-day at $505 as their line, about 20% below the current price. If a 20% risk is too much, then this isn’t the right set-up for you. Wait for a different pitch. DISCLOSURES: We currently hold shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for clients in our Porterhouse concentrated momentum strategy. For full disclaimer and additional details, go here . All opinions expressed by the CNBC Pro contributors are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC, or its parent company or affiliates, and may have been previously disseminated by them on television, radio, internet or another medium. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND DOES NOT CONSTITUTE FINANCIAL, INVESTMENT, TAX OR LEGAL ADVICE OR A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY ANY SECURITY OR OTHER FINANCIAL ASSET. THE CONTENT IS GENERAL IN NATURE AND DOES NOT REFLECT ANY INDIVIDUAL’S UNIQUE PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES. THE ABOVE CONTENT MIGHT NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUR PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCES. BEFORE MAKING ANY FINANCIAL DECISIONS, YOU SHOULD STRONGLY CONSIDER SEEKING ADVICE FROM YOUR OWN FINANCIAL OR INVESTMENT ADVISOR. Click here for the full disclaimer.
