Second half of 2024 could be more volatile, says Kari Firestone

The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ logging some back-to-back gains. Joining us now, Carrie Firestone and Co, founder of Arias Asset Management and ACNBC contributor. More to come. Carrie, at this point in, in your view, even though halfway through the year were up about 15% on top of 26% last year? Yeah, Hi, Joe. Well, I think that the rest of the year could be more volatile than the first half. I mean, we've had really no correction. If you go back to the beating of 2023, it's been almost a straight line higher and it's been more and more concentrated. And that becomes an issue when 10%, ten companies represent 76% of the gains in the SP for six months. You know, that's pretty extreme. I mean, we've, we've seen it before, but for short periods of time, this is extended for a long period of time. And that that way that's primarily, you know, NVIDIA and I call NVIDIA is 34% of the gain for the whole SP. The the 15% gain for the entire index, 34% of that is NVIDIA. So we think that there is upside, but we feel that we could have some ups and downs along the way through the the rest of the year. There's no recession. Unemployment is low. We still have an economy that is positive. We have, we have not fallen as so many people had predicted. We continue to grow. But on the other hand, it's, it's a soft landing still. You may not if you don't want to play those leaders, you may want to look at some of the other areas that because you always have to be invested, don't you, Carrie? Do you or do you, you never go pretty highly invested. Yeah, you never go to to 100% cash. So with with the implied or you're implying maybe there's some volatility in in those top 10. So there's some other stocks that you that you think aren't, aren't overbought? Yeah, exactly. We, we on the big names. But if we're looking at what has not moved or what's been hurt by, of course, all this huge surge, if you have $1.5 trillion that's moved into NVIDIA over the past 12 months, that money didn't just come from cash, it came from other names. So the software, enterprise software other than Microsoft, for example, and and met or Google, if you call them software companies to some extent names like Autodesk or Adobe CRM, which is Salesforce.com. Those stocks have been heard as people have moved away from from enterprise software and we think they offer offer great opportunities. Their multiples are down. Their stocks have underperformed. A couple of them, Autodesk has started to move higher. Adobe has had a little surge, but they're still attractive. They offer critical offerings in in their areas. And the customers who might have been a little weak last year because they weren't sure where the economy was going, they have deferred spending. And they're going to have to move capital spending back toward the software environment and and not just spend it on chips because there aren't even enough AI chips available for people other than the big buyers to own. So, so we like those names. We also see opportunities and names like American Tower. American Tower has been an underperformer that it has a lot of debt. They had the Sprint transition, they had properties in India that weren't working. We think they have things moving in the right direction. The stock is selling at a low PE relative on their cash flow and everyone needs more and more digital communications. Plus AMT owns a lot of digital storage centers, which is another way actually to play artificial intelligence. So we like that. And the last name I would give you is Thermo Fisher. So TMO was one of the stocks that really benefited through COVID because of all the testing, of course. And then the stock had a set back, you know, naturally because we weren't in COVID and people were not testing so much anymore, it started to come back and we see that earnings growth continuing. We went next year, we're going to see better numbers than we've seen for quite some time. And also, if you mentioned bird flu earlier, you dare you perfect, don't you?