Top Stock Picks for Week of November 2, 2026

Hello folks and welcome to this week's edition of top stock picks of the week. I'm Ethan Feller and I'll be joined today with by my colleague Benjamin Reigns and we're going to be bringing you two stocks that are leaders in the AI boom and both are uh top sax ranks. For my pick today, I'm going to be going with the stock Berive, ticker VRT. Let's get right into it. We all have become pretty familiar with this company. uh it's been one of the key players in the AI boom. But just for a refresher, it's a leading global provider of the critical digital infrastructure and services for the data center buildout. The company designs, manufacturers, installs a broad portfolio of hardware, software, and in integrated solutions that ensure that digital infrastructure operates continuously and it scales with business demands. It's also a dominant player in within a highly concentrated oligopoly that controls the endtoend physical infrastructure for data centers among other some other industrial industries. Um but even among the leaders the the other two players in the space Verdiv is really the pure play data center infrastructure specialist and the stock just reported uh quarterly earnings last week and the results were quite stellar as they have been for the last several years. Uh the company beat on both the top and bottom line by 15 and 20% respectively. Earnings per share grew 78% year-over-year and sales grew 61.2% over the same period and the company raised guidance and the stock jumped uh more than 16% last week after reporting those earnings. Uh so the stock has a Zach's rank one rating and that is reflected by these strongly upward trending earnings revisions. Uh we can see over the last 60 days the revisions have been unanimously higher and uh more revisions came in just within the last week which isn't surprising considering how strong those quarterly earnings results were. The company also has a very strong history of beating. We can see uh over the last year uh they have beat by as much as 21.43%. And if we look back, we can see basically they've been consistently beating earnings uh since you know the second quarter of 2023. The company has a very reasonable valuation at 32.6 times forward earnings and earnings are anticipated to grow 43.8% annually over the next 3 to 5 years giving it the PEG ratio below one. This is uh you know a GAR growth at a reasonable price stock at its best. And let's take a look at these detailed earnings estimates. This is a key page on the zach.com website. Should always check it out when you're looking at a stock. Taking a look at the detailed earnings estimates. We can see sales are expected to grow very nicely this and next year as well. Um sales are expected to grow nearly 40% in the current year and then another 31.24% next year. Earnings following a similar path. another 69.5 12% this year and then 33 1.5% next year. So, you know, if you've been paying attention to the market, you know that the AI trade is is under pretty significant pressure and being a key player in that AI infrastructure buildout is pretty sensitive to those moves. Um, the stock has been hit pretty hard. It's down, I believe, yep, 50% uh from its summer highs. Um, but you know, as I noted, those earnings results last week really gave it a nice boost off of these lows, 16% higher. And, you know, it's starting to put in this consolidation. There's no nothing clear yet, but you know, you can see we have this uh this channel here. And I I would watch for a breakout above this level. And I just want to reiterate that um you know, these fears around AI, is it over? Is it bubble? Is the spending going to slow? You know, we've been through probably a dozen times these these cycles of of sentiment uh dropping significantly and semiconductor and AI stocks and MAG7 stocks getting hit hard. But uh I just want to you know Verdiff has been through a few of these drawdowns. Um we can see here at the end of 2025 this was a uh 30 something% draw down and uh further back here this was another uh deep draw down at the start of 2025 43% and it had another deeper one in 2024 this one here this is a 2020 beginning of 2025 which was a 60% draw down. So um you know these draw downs are are typical of these stocks and uh you know once sentiment turns up vertive is again going to become a leader. So with upward trending earnings revisions uh reasonable valuation and and this technical pattern to watch vertive is definitely my top stock pick of the week. That's it from me. Let's hear what you got Ben. >> Thanks Ethan. Hello everybody. I'm Ben Reigns with my top stock of the week at Zachs. Today I'm looking at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as Taiwan Semi or TSMC, trading under the ticker TSM here in the United States. The company physically manufactures the most cutting edge chips, fueling the AI boom in the wider techdriven economy. Chip builder reported another strong beat and raise Q3 in the middle of October, confirming that the AI cap spending spree remains full steam ahead even after seeing more bubble concerns and headlines pop up. It's beat and raise Q3 turns into Zach's ranked number one strong buy right now. The company's also projected to more than double its earnings between 2025 and 2027. And this outlook comes on top of an impressive expanse over the last few years where actually grow its earnings by 400% between 2019 and 2025. And the stock which has nearly quadrupled the tech sector over the last 15 years and tripled over the last five is down 15% Ruth peaks. So let's head over to zaxs.com and see to dive in more details about Taiwan semi. Okay, so we're on our Zach ticker page for Taiwan semi. We can see here as I said it's number one strong by it just more broadly as on top of it being all the things we talked about front is really the chip makerly captures 60% of the entire phone view market and roughly 90% of all advanced manufacturer. Taiwan Semi has really built an impressive almost unreachable fortress around its leading edge chip building business at this point. Its customers include Nvidia, Apple, AMD and really every other major tech company and they're addressing really one of the only kind of possible shortfalls for their business and that is expanding beyond Taiwan. So that's that geopolitical kind of overhang in the background. So they were building factories in Japan, the United States and beyond to address that kind of one elephant in the room as a possible geopolitical fault in Taiwan at some point, but no one really knows at this point. And it is still, as I said, the leading ship builder and it's expected to grow its revenue by 30% in 2026 as part of a compound annual growth rate of 25% or more between 2024 and 2029. So let's look into some of our estimates and then look at some other fundamentals for Taiwan. So we go ahead and take a look at our detailed estimate page. Here we can see we're calling for actually 40% revenue growth in 2026. Go from 122 billion to up to 171 billion and then get up to 100 or 227 billion in 2027. So adding over a hundred billion dollars to the top line between 2025 and 2027. number calling for 60% adjust earnings growth in 2026 and another 32% growth in 2027 to double its bottom line from $10.65 in 2025 to $2244 next year. You can see as I mentioned post earnings release for revisions. Go to a snapshot. It's a little easier to see that in terms of the actual numbers. So we're up uh it's Q4 estimates up about 13% 12 and a.5% since that release and it's 2027 outings up 7 and a half%. So we can see that these blue lines here in this gold line as part of these upward earnings of regions trends that kind of have seen it gone straight up which is because it's so critical to the economy. So we can see then this is its growth the last few years and we can see that it's had a little bit of a pullback and it's gone straight up since then. We can see that it did $70 billion in sales in 2023. And we go back here and see that we're calling as I said for 20 nearly 30 billion in 2027. So just massive massive growth. And we can go ahead and take a look at our gap earnings picture here. So we can see it had been doing steady growth for a very long period of time. It's been an important company for a long time. But after this little brief downturn in 2022, its gap earnings have gone straight up as well. So just massive earnings growth for Taiwan Semi. And I'll go ahead and take a look at the performance. As I mentioned, it's been a booming stock for a long period of time. So this is over the last 20 years, up 3,700% compared to tech, which is up 900%. We'll go to the last five years. We can see it's up about 256% versus tech 78%. Go over the last year. So we can see it reached these peaks be before it reported. So that's early October. We can go exactly to that date 10 five. See it's down around 16% from those levels. Go ahead and take a look at where it is from a technical standpoint. See go to the last five years. Go to the last year. Actually a little harder to see on this this size screen. So it's trying to hold this gold line here. It's trying to hold this kind of level it's been in for the last six plus months. This red line here is that 200 day moving average trying to hold its ground there. If it does fall below there, let's see where it might then hopefully find this is I'll get rid of these trends here so you can see it better. So this green line would be the 50we moving average and pulls back here. That'd be a great long entry point. See fallen from really overbought RSI levels on historic time frame over here to roughly neutral and we'll go ahead and take valuation levels. Here's a wrap up on the bull case for Taiwan semi. So you can see it's trading at 18.8 times forward 12 month earnings which is a roughly 45% discount to its highs for the last decade plus which is a really great sign. So overall its valuation is looking strong as well with that pullback mixed with its broader earnings provisions activity. We can just see it's really a booming stock. might have a little bit more room to pull back in the near term, but if you're a longer term investor, you don't want to necessarily play the these exact market timing games. So, if you want to get in the stock now, falls by a little bit more. So, that's the the really the long and short of the bull case for Taiwan Sevy. So, all in Taiwan Sevy is one of the most important companies, if not the most important company in the world, making it nearly a surefire long-term investment in AI technology in general. So, that does it for me in this episode of Top Stock Zachs. Please head over to zax.com/pro page for a look for services, portfolios, and more.