My Top 2 Stock Buys Now in 2026

Today, I'm going to share the two stocks I've been buying heavily in 2026 and still think are a great buy right now. One of them is the largest position in my taxable dividend focused account that I update every single month on this channel. The other is the top position in my Roth IRA. So, I'll dive into why I think these companies are great values, especially after the sell-off that just happened on Friday. The S&P 500 sold off over 2 and 1/2% on Friday. The Nasdaq 100, as represented here by QQQ, sold off 4.8% on Friday. And semiconductor stocks, as represented here by SMH, which is the VanEck Semiconductor ETF, that went down 9.2% on Friday. These are crazy one-day moves. So, the question is, is this another opportunity to buy the dip? I'll give my thoughts and then an update on what I'm doing with my personal stock portfolios in 2026. With that said, let's roll the intro and get into this month's portfolio update. >> [music] [music] >> The following reflects the opinions of a man who spends far too much time thinking about stocks. Please do your own research before making any investment decisions. Nothing in this video is personal financial advice. Continue at your own risk. >> My name is Zach. This is Dividend Data. You should leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you enjoy the video. Now, today, I'll be giving you an update on my dividend growth stock portfolio that I've been updating every month on this channel for over 5 years. You've watched me grow this account from $30,000 to now over $339,000. But, I'll also be talking about another one of my accounts in this video, which is my Roth IRA. And as you can see, this is heavily concentrated into one position, and a move I made a couple months ago. If you're wondering which website I was showing at the beginning of the video, that is the new next generation version of dividend data.com. It's in development. I've been spending a ton of time over the past month and a half working on it, and I'm hoping to get it out to you guys in the next couple weeks. So, if you want to be notified about when this launches, I'll have a link in the description and pin comment of the video you can join the wait list and find out right away when it launches. So, yes, on Friday we had a little bit of a sell-off, but year-to-date the market is still doing very well. The S&P 500 is up nearly 8%. The QQQ is still up 15% year-to-date, and the most popular semiconductor ETF, which I mentioned was down a ton on Friday, is still up 52% year-to-date. And really, the entire market, it's being driven up by AI and semiconductor stocks right now, and the main driver for that is AI. So, as you can see, SMH, we have things like Nvidia, TSMC, Micron AMD Intel Broadcom Qualcomm. These are the top holdings of the fund. And in the QQQ, the top holdings are Nvidia Apple Microsoft Micron Amazon Google AMD Google Tesla and Broadcom. So, let's zoom out for a second. You might be looking at this and say the stock market's been going up. Some of these companies, like Nvidia, they're still up 43% over the past year. Perhaps the market's at a little bit of a premium, and the sell-off is deserved. Now, the way that I like to look at it is by analyzing the specific companies that make up the ETF or index. So, let's look at Nvidia as an example. This company's up 43% over the past year, but there is real actual earnings backing that up. As an example, over the trailing 12 months, their earnings per share is up 83% year-over-year. So, there's a real earnings growth backing that up. And in fact, the earnings growth rate is far exceeding the stock price growth for Nvidia. And this isn't just earnings, it's free cash flow. Their free cash flow is up 65% year over year, and they just hit an all-time high in the latest quarter, just under 50 billion dollars in quarterly free cash flow. And this is not expected to slow down anytime soon. So, Nvidia stock today is actually far cheaper than it was a year ago. The valuation metrics look more attractive now. So, in stocks like this, I think the market is actually quite attractive, and there's many opportunities I see. And if you haven't noticed, Nvidia, that's one of the companies I've gone heavy on in 2026, and I plan on owning for the next couple years. However, it's kind of unpredictable what's going to happen in the AI trade over three to five to 10 years. So, that's why I own Nvidia in my Roth IRA, where I can take the gains on the stock with no tax hit, and I can potentially reallocate a couple years down the line into a different holding. However, in my dividend growth-focused account, I do less of that kind of trading where I'm in and out of stocks. And in general, I have this account focused on buy and hold. So, my number one stock buy for 2026 has been Microsoft, ticker symbol MSFT. I also think that's a great buy right now, and sold off 2.6% back down to $416. Overall, I still have a 20% positive total return, but I think it's still attractive at these prices. And right now, in the whole AI industrial revolution going on right now, a lot of the profits, pretty much all the profits are being made at Nvidia. But over time, that's going to move across the stack. And over the next few years, you're going to see the data center part of the business start to be a big profit generator for companies like Microsoft. Of course, cloud already is, but right now we're in the phase of massive CapEx investment at Microsoft, and it's going to be a few years until you start to see the return on that investment. As an example, we've seen Microsoft grow its capital expenditures to 97 billion a year. That's over the trailing 12 months. So, the company's operating cash flow is growing strong at 30% year-over-year, but free cash flow it's only grown at 6% 5-year compound annual growth rate. A lot of the actual growth at Microsoft is going into investment in CapEx. And financially speaking, it's really only CapEx that's the concern around Microsoft stock and speculation about what kind of return on investment they end up getting. In terms of the fundamentals of the business, they have more opportunities than they really ever have with this AI industrial revolution. A whole new growth vector in the AI data centers, you know, the AI factories as Jensen likes to call them. Major advancements in software with the AI models and harnesses like Claude code and Codex allowing way faster software development. This is something I've been talking about Microsoft stock for years. In fact, you saw GitHub, so Microsoft owns GitHub, it's the number one code repository in the world. They have seen a 3x increase this year in the amount of code submitted. And this is just the beginning. And right now with the AI coding revolution, it seems like Anthropic's grabbing a big chunk of that in the enterprise, but Microsoft is still in a fantastic position to bring this AI technology to the enterprise. And their Microsoft 365 distribution is going to be a great platform for that. Product-wise, they're basically doing everything that Anthropic and Claude is doing. They have their chat, they have their co-work, they have their code. They're basically releasing a full like super app type thing. And Microsoft's also started developing AI models themselves. They just released seven of them at the Microsoft Build conference, and probably over the next couple years they'll have frontier models and they'll be competing at the frontier. And really back in January, I was getting very into AI and all of the new advancements and agents. And when I started playing around with it and seeing how all of it works, it just like at that exact time I became more bullish on pretty much everything AI related. And ironically, we've had so much choppiness in early 2026, if you're high conviction on this, it has been a great opportunity to have some buying points. And frankly, I think it's crazy that as we're looking at Microsoft stock price here, it was $510 last summer. The fundamentals are so much better this year versus last year. And you get to buy the stock so much cheaper. The financials are better. The story is better. The actual growth prospects and fundamentals are better. So here's a little view of the financials. So this is what I call the value graph. I was just starting building this the other day. It basically compares the price overlapped with the median of whatever financial metric you choose. So it's kind of like a valuation comparison. So right now what we're looking at here is the median PE ratio ranked with the stock price. So you can see Microsoft's earnings per share has been growing over time. So their median earnings has been going up. And basically right now, it's one of the best buying points for Microsoft since 2022, 2023. It's trading 27% below fair value. Based on revenue, it's 20% below the fair value. Operating cash flow, more than 30% below. And even in free cash flow, where they're massively increasing CapEx, so free cash flow is kind of constrained, not growing as fast, it's still basically fair value. So I feel very good with my Microsoft position. I think it will have pretty good returns over the next year, the next two years, the next five years. And I plan on being a long-term position, barring something crazy doesn't happen with the company that goes off the rails. Other than that, my dividend growth focused account, I have Hess Midstream, that's an energy pipeline, midstream oil and gas pipeline. Bought that in fall 2025, 21% total return right now. I have Alphabet, ticker symbol g o o g l, that's the parent company of Google. I haven't bought any of this recently. I've just been riding the way up. I'm up a 128% and this was primarily built in the first half of 2025. So hopefully this uh Microsoft return is looking a little bit more like that Google one when we look back in a year and a half. Other than that, I have the Altria Group ticker symbol MO. This is a dividend stock I've had for a while, great return. Also Exxon Mobil Corporation, another dividend stock I bought at a very cheap price, just have been riding up all the way. And MPLX, which is another midstream oil and gas pipeline. This is my lowest position. MPLX and HESM, I'm viewing these as good long-term high-yield dividend stocks. But I haven't been buying them lately cuz the capital that I am buying stuff with, I am putting towards Microsoft and Nvidia. And since this is a dividend-focused account, let's talk about the income cuz this is starting to get to some bigger numbers and I actually just had my biggest month of dividend income ever. So over the next year, this account is projected to generate $13,185. That's $3,300 every quarter, $1,100 every month, $36 every day, and a dollar and 51 cents every hour. So in June, I'm expected to get $438. That'll be from Alphabet, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, Altria, that'll be $517 in July. In August, I'm projected to get $2,300. That's when my two big midstream oil and gas stocks pay out. And that'll actually be higher then because I'll have another dividend raise. So here you can see my earned dividend history and year-to-date, I earned $5,943 in this account. And you can see I just had my biggest month ever, $2,294. Brings my three-month rolling average to $1,077. And yeah, I got $1,900 from HESM and $350 from MPLX. And I reinvested both of those to acquire more shares. So this is a continuous reinvestment process. And it's really the dividend snowball at work and I'm really happy with actually how it's turning out. So those are the two stocks that I'm buying right now in 2026 and I think especially after that Friday sell-off, they're still pretty attractive right now. And I know the big story though coming into the next few weeks is the SpaceX IPO. I'll be sure to make a video about it this coming week. I've gotten many comments about people asking my thoughts. So make sure to leave a like and subscribe to the channel so you can be notified of when I make that SpaceX video. But really there's going to be a flurry of a lot of IPOs coming up. And notable ones. We have Anthropic which has filed their S1 so they'll probably do an IPO in a month or so. And then it's also speculated that OpenAI will try to IPO this year as well. So I'll probably cover all of those cuz that really intersects with the entire stock market. It's difficult even understand if you don't understand all of these other AI companies. And I'm going to wrap up this video cuz I want to get back to work on making the next generation dividend data.com. It's very exciting. I can't wait to show it to you guys. If you want to be one of the first people to use it, sign up for the waitlist. Link in the description and pin comment. And with that said, I'll see you in the next video.