Buy Hold Sell: 5 stocks with controversial leaders

I'm sure that he's going to do a lot of stuff that's positive, but I'm not sure that you really want to be there for the ups and the downs. So, I would say that it's a sell. And we know that he's always talking a big game, but I'm not sure that that's what I really want to buy.

Ally Selby: It has been very up and down over the last 12 months and share price is now up around 3%. Jacob, is it a buy, hold, or sell?

Jacob Mitchell (HOLD): We own Meta. It's certainly a position we've reduced our weighting in as the stock has become more expensive. At 24 times, I think it's a hold. It's definitely an AI beneficiary. It's a company that's capitalising on AI in its ad tech. So they're growing revenue and they're reducing cost through the application of AI in the core business. The Llama models are powering their WhatsApp, they're being used right across the business - very exciting.

Arvid Streimann (BUY): Buy. They collect data and I would say that the data they collect is probably the most valuable in the world, because you've got people with high frequency and a lot of people telling the Facebook properties what they're feeling. I think this is better data than what Google gets, which is knowing what people want to Google search. I think this is very valuable data, and they obviously have billions of people around the world who use their properties regularly, and that number's still growing. So I'd say that their engagement and their data collection are very powerful.

Arvid Streimann (SELL): This one's a sell for me and I'll tell you why. So I think you're right. He came back a bit of a messiah. But at the end of the day, I think Intel is facing a very tough situation here. They used to be one of the leaders in manufacturing. Through executional and strategic missteps, they've lost that mantle. And I think it's very hard for them to get that back. And in fact, no company which has ever fallen off the leading edge has ever made it back.

They'd be the first company that's ever done that. The US government even tried to help them out by cutting them some checks out of their CHIPS Act but it wasn't enough. This is a very big and expensive thing that they have to do. 

If you're going to buy Intel right now, you are relying on the company reversing all of their strategic and executional missteps, and you also have to wait and hope that guys like TSMC and AMD actually blow themselves up, and they're doing quite well. So, I think this is a pretty hard line to walk. It's a sell for us.

Jacob Mitchell (SPECULATIVE BUY): It's a buy, in brackets, speculative. And we don't own it in the funds. We certainly looked at it from a lot of different angles. And I agree with what Arvid is saying with one difference. Inside of Intel is a really strong design business. And Intel still has, let's call it, roughly 60% market share in CPUs in the data centre, and they have 70% in PCs. So, they are still very dominant. 

What's dragging it back is its lack of competitiveness in manufacturing. So when we look at that and we think, "Okay, can they fix that?" Even today, Samsung and Intel are in discussion in terms of trying to potentially merge or cooperate on foundry to get back to their competitive position. I think it's too big to fail in foundry, which is why Uncle Sam is writing checks to them, and I think will continue to write checks to them.

Jacob Mitchell (BUY): Look, we think Alibaba is a good example of a company that had a very high-profile leader and founder, Jack Ma, who-

Jacob Mitchell: Yes. And for a while there, he was sort of allowed to leave China and enjoy life. The running of the company, really was about whether it was going to make a transition and whether it was strong enough to survive in the more competitive e-commerce environment that has emerged in China. 

We own the stock. We think it's really interesting as a strong platform company. Retail in China is highly concentrated, not just e-commerce, but all retail. The biggest retailers in China are the e-commerce platforms. Alibaba has 40% of e-commerce, but it's arguably almost 15% of total retail. Find a retailer in the world that has that level of wallet! At 12 times with a focus on really deploying AI and monetizing the tail in Taobao, they're turning it around. They're growing GMV (gross merchandise value). It's what you would call in the US, a high-quality company that would trade on 25 times, which is available on 12 times. So yes, definitely a buy.

Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX)