Buy This, Not That: Three Reader Stocks… Only One Winner

Shah Gilani|March 5, 2025

When I recorded this video yesterday before the close, markets had rebounded nicely.

Yet, not 15 minutes before the close, heavy selling hit stocks, pushing them back toward the lows.

While it wasn’t a great ending to the day, I’m not particularly worried.

We’re only 6.5% off the all-time highs. And healthy markets always pull back.

Plus, this gives us a fantastic chance to look at the stock ideas you all sent in.

And today, I have three very different stocks, one of which I haven’t seen anybody talk about in… well… years.

So, click the thumbnail below to check out today’s Buy This, Not That.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, everybody.

Shah Gilani here with your weekly BTNT – as in Buy This, Not That.

Today and for the next several weeks, I’m gonna address the tickers that you all send in.

So, send them in!

Because I’m gonna hit them up three, four, sometimes five at a time.

We start your day with three of the latest I got from you all.

So…welcome to your BTNT.

First of all, it’s Tuesday, at about 3:15 p.m. I am recording this for you all tomorrow.

Now, the markets have just made a tremendous turnaround.

It’s gonna be very interesting to see how we end the day.

I’m watching the Nasdaq up 1% after being down, getting absolutely clobbered today and yesterday. Then we got a remarkable turnaround.

The S&P was having an ugly day. Now, it’s at the flatline.

So, it’s been one heck of a turnaround. We’ll see how stocks go into the close, whether there’s any selling or last-minute bidding because stuff looks cheap.

That being said, it’s gonna be an interesting week.

The president speaks to Congress tonight. That’s going to be live.

Everyone is gonna be watching.

We’ve got the tariffs going on and a potential trade war between Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.

China’s has already chimed in as well.

Anyway, this is the background of your BTNT today.

So, again, three stocks – tickers that all of you sent in.

I’m gonna try and hit a bunch of them.

But today, I’m gonna hit up three.

I’m gonna start with Fannie Mae.

FNMA is the ticker symbol.

Now everybody knows Fannie Mae…well, you should know.

Fannie Mae is the government conservatorship.

In other words, the government basically controls it.

They got in trouble in the financial crisis (2008) and had to be bailed out.

Now, the speculation by Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square hedge fund is that Fannie Mae should be taken private.

If it’s taken private, that means the government is out, and shareholders take over.

Who are they gonna sell it to?

This stock was trading below $2.00 all along here (before December 2024):

And then, of course, we start to see what might happen if President Trump is elected, and he was. Therefore, the stock shoots up.

Why?

Well, the speculation is that he’s going to be pro business and less regulation.

So, why not sell Fannie Mae? Why not get out of it?

Probably a lot of good reasons.

But one reason to get out is the U.S. Treasury owns senior preferred shares that, in liquidation (if it gets sold to a private entity), would be worth $330 billion dollars.

Now, that’s a lot of money the U.S. treasury could use.

And, certainly, President Trump will look like a hero if he ends up putting $330 billion back into the treasury.

So that’s one of the reasons that a lot of people plowed in.

But from $2.00 back here, getting up to $8.00, that was a 300% gain.

The stock is now at $6.28 on this chart right here. That’s a 212% gain from back here.

I’m just calling it rounding it up to $2.00.

So, the stock had gone flat.

Then all of a sudden, everybody’s interested because Bill Ackman owns roughly 11.3% of the company, which he did through various kinds of swaps, or about 7% the floating shares of Fannie Mae.

So, is he right?

I’m saying it’s too speculative. For me, this is a NOT.

It’s too bad there aren’t options.

I wanna buy put options on this.

This is a heck of a run-up here based on speculation that somebody’s gonna buy it.

Who’s gonna buy it with over $7 trillion in debt?

Besides, this would be a total disruption to the mortgage market because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together hold about and are responsible for over half of the residential mortgages in the country.

And they’re government-guaranteed. That’s what Fannie does.

It doesn’t originate mortgages. It bundles them into mortgage-backed securities and then sells them to institutional investors and everybody else.

Who’s gonna buy those bundled securities if there’s no government guarantee?

If a private entity has to guarantee payment of principal and interest, guess what? That’s probably not gonna work out.

Who’s gonna be able to guarantee that much debt?

And if the mortgage market implodes, is the government gonna come back in again to save a private company? I highly doubt it.

So, to me, Fannie Mae people – you missed the run.

If it comes back down here and you wanna play below $2.00, maybe as speculative play to see what happens, that’s a gamble.

But right now, paying $6.00 up here to maybe get back up to $8.00…

The likelihood of the Trump administration zeroing in on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take them private and somebody coming along and saying, I’ve got the money. It’s not gonna be Blackstone people.

It’s not gonna be BlackRock people because they have too much interest in the mortgage-backed securities themselves. They’re not gonna back them. They wanna trade them, house them, and utilize them. They don’t want to own them.

The big banks, they’re not gonna get the money to do this.

They’re not gonna certainly put this kind of stock on their balance sheets. That ain’t gonna happen…ever.

So, it’s a speculative play. I like the idea. There’s been a lot of lawsuits challenging the government’s ownership of it and conservatorship. They’ve gone nowhere.

The stock, I think, had a fantastic run based on beautiful speculation. Yeah. I love speculation, but Fannie Mae is a NOT.

Next up is Palantir (PLTR).

People, this is a BUY. Palantir is a buy.

The stock got absolutely hammered.

Now here we are.

Like I said, it is Tuesday afternoon. The stock has made a heck of a comeback. So I’m looking at this bar here (Tuesday’s candlestick).

The stock was down, trading as low as $79.30 today.

It’s now trading at $87.89 as we head into the final 45 minutes of trading on Tuesday afternoon.

A nice turnaround like the rest of the market.

Again, the day is not over.

Palantir down here is a bargain.

See this gap here (left open from February 3)? It filled it. That’s what I have been waiting for.

So Palantir is a buy down here. Now that it filled this gap, I think that’s all good.

You’re safe here.

By the way, you just might wanna keep some dry powder to buy more Palantir in case it comes down because it is pretty expensive.

In Price-to-Earnings Ratio (P/E) terms, the trailing P/E is 439x.

The forward P/E is 144x.

So, it’s getting a little cheaper.

But, look, this is a profitable company. It’s got:

• A +16% profit margin
• Great revenue
• $5.23 billion in cash
• $239 million in debt
• EBITDA of $341 million

The company’s profitable people. And it’s in AI play.

Plus, the government isn’t their only customer anymore. They have several big, big, big customers.

So Palantir, yeah, it’s a buy down here. Just keep some dry powder.

You might wanna add to your position if it comes down low (around $65). But this is a long-term hold. Palantir PLTR, is definitely a BUY.

And last but not least, for today, we have B2Gold (BTG).

BTG, this was an interesting one.

And a few of you sent this in.

This is a speculative gold play. It’s a Canadian-based gold miner.

They own a bunch of mines as well as interests in other mines. Yes, it’s pretty interesting.

Except look at this chart, people.

Here’s the bottom line for B2Gold…

It’s been around since 2006. The company doesn’t make money. Yes, they make money in terms of EBITDA, which is $926 million. But the profit margin is -33%.

So they’ve been around mining gold for that long, and they can’t make money. They have a negative profit margin?

That’s ridiculous.

The market cap is $3.53 billion. That’s kind of expensive.

And it’s got good revenue of $1.98 billion. But they lose money.

How do they do that?

Something is very wrong with this. And I can’t figure it out.

So, I don’t bother with it.

In 52 weeks, this is up 1.52% percent.

Why would you wanna invest in a gold-related miner when you can buy GLD?

You can buy the proxy for gold (GLD) that in last fifty two weeks is up 36%.

So as far as B2Gold, BTG, too speculative, too lame.

I don’t understand why they’re not making money.

Say they find gold. They still gotta dig it out. They still gotta sell it, and that’s all good.

But it’s not going anywhere.

The stock’s been an absolute mess.

You wanna look at it on a longer-term basis.

This is just a speculative stock that’s had a run and now has come down.

So this is a three-year chart.

That’s a pretty ugly chart coming down. Why would you wanna invest in BTG?

You wouldn’t. So the answer there is NOT.

And there you have it. That’s your BTNT for this week.

Enjoy the rest of the week because it’s gonna be interesting.

Cheers, everybody.