Josh Brown was wrong on these three names on his Best Stocks list. Here are the lessons
(This is The Best Stocks in the Market , brought to you by Josh Brown and Sean Russo of Ritholtz Wealth Management.) Josh — There are many columns, substacks, tweet threads and Seeking Alpha posts in which an investment writer lays out the case for an undervalued or misunderstood stock he or she likes. I read a ton of this stuff, and I love it. I never stop learning. But in this column, we start with price and the stories come after. The Best Stocks in the Market list is a chameleon. At any given time, it’s meant to reflect the sum total of all bets being placed and to bring out the names that Wall Street seems to be most confident in. As such, we’re not hunting for misunderstood stocks. We’re not concerned with undervaluation. We don’t want hidden gems, diamonds in the rough or needles in the haystack. We’re focused on what’s working now, not what might work months or years from now. The discipline in the way we keep our list and publish the column for you is what makes it special. That discipline also forces us to change our minds. When a Best Stock is no longer acting like a Best Stock, it’s going to fall out of our universe. The good news is that we expect this outcome and prepare for it. Every time we write an opinion, we tell you how that opinion could change. Each column concludes with risk management — stop-outs and support levels that could be meaningful and how we would interpret them should the time come. We’ve had some very successful trades this year but they don’t all work out. Today’s column is going to focus on some of the Best Stocks in the Market that weren’t able to hold on. AT & T, Inc. (T) , CBRE Group (CBRE) and Chevron (CVX) were strong stocks with promising set-ups when we wrote them up. And then that changed. People don’t learn as much from their successes as they do from their failures and so we’ll look at these three failed ideas and see what we can take away. Trends break, sentiment changes and, sometimes, market volatility overwhelms even the cleanest chart formations. Our job is to listen to what the tape is saying and to respond accordingly when a good stock goes bad. But first, here’s Sean with a rundown of our usual high-level stats from the list… As of June 29, there are 204 names on The Best Stocks in the Market list. Top sector ranking: Top industries: Top 5 best stocks by relative strength: Sector spotlight: Broken stocks AT & T, Inc. (T): Sean — We first mentioned T on March 30 , right at the bottom of the selloff this year. At the time, T was showing relative strength and the old telecom company had just reported a blockbuster earnings report, touting new fiber subscribers and less churn. After the trend began to roll over, the stock was dropped from the list after a clear breakdown through its 200 day moving average. The stock is now down 20% since our original piece in March. Sometimes the best lessons are taught to the losers, not the winners. That will be the focus on AT & T and a couple of the other missed opportunities we laid out. Fundamentally, the story is more nuanced than a 20% drawdown suggests. The pressure is balance-sheet and capital-allocation driven, not operational. AT & T announced a $23 billion agreement to buy EchoStar’s FCC spectrum licenses — a big cash outlay layered onto net debt that already sits at $126.4B and a commitment to $23 billion-$24 billion in annual capex through 2028 to build out its fiber and AI-ready network. AT & T is sitting right there with the likes of Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft in terms of the market punishing (or not rewarding) companies for spending too much. The market is telling us that years of heavy spending and elevated leverage before a payoff AND a higher-for-longer rate environment on an already capital-intensive, debt-heavy telecom business is just too much to bear. For AT & T to earn its way back onto the list, the requirement is the mirror image of what broke it. The stock needs to stop making lower highs, rebuild a base, and reclaim its 200-day with the slope turning higher again. The fiber growth story is reasonable, but the tape has to confirm the trend again. Josh — AT & T looked like it was setting up for something in late March. A golden cross had just fired, the stock had reclaimed both moving averages, and it was coiling just below $30 with higher lows building into resistance. The call was straightforward: a clean breakout above $30 opens the door to the low-$30s. That breakout never came. Instead the stock stalled at resistance, rolled over, and spent the next three months giving back everything it had gained. “The level that matters is the rising 50-day, currently around $27,” I wrote at the time. That level didn’t hold, and neither did the 200-day below it. Price is now at $23 with both moving averages sloping lower above it. We got this one wrong. The setup was there, the technicals supported the thesis in March, and then the stock simply failed to follow through. When the 50-day gave way and then the 200-day gave way, those were the exits the original write-up identified. T has been off the list since breaking down. I wanted to bring it back up because it’s a perfect example of why many traders wait for breakouts and confirmations of breakouts rather than anticipate. You will hear me talking about potential breakouts. The operative word being “potential.” A set-up is just a set-up. In the case of this name, what looked probable at the time ended up never happening. CBRE Group, Inc. (CBRE): Sean — CBRE arguably has the cleanest fundamental story of the three. The most recent quarter was a standout with revenue up 19% YoY to $10.5 billion, core EPS up 81% to $1.61, full-year core EPS guidance raised to $7.60–$7.80, with the data-center development program delivering profits ahead of schedule and a new Meta technical-staffing partnership adding recurring revenue. When we wrote this one , Josh framed it as an early-discovery story worth giving room: “I think the stock is still being discovered. I want to give it a bit of a leash. If I enter here, I’m using the 135 to 140 area as an eyeball stop loss. This level was resistance in the first half of 2025 and I believe could serve as support during the next market pullback.” Well, the leash mattered, because CBRE is a name levered to commercial real estate transaction volumes and the rate backdrop, and when the market began pricing a higher-for-longer path and questioning the AI/data-center capex cycle, the stock got caught regardless of its great earnings numbers. This is where being right on the fundamentals and right on the stock diverged. You can nail every fundamental call and still get the price wrong. It’s the bane of every analyst on Wall Street these days. CBRE was about 16% above its 200-day when we added it, then broke below the line on February 11 around $149, and the stock has now drifted to roughly $136 — right into the $135–$140 eyeball-stop zone Josh called out at the time of writing in January. Josh — This may have been one of our worst ideas based purely on how quickly the stock fell apart. We wrote this one up as it broke out on Jan. 15. By the middle of February, it was already in violation of our $135-$140 stop level. You can see the violence of the move in the chart above. No quarter was given. Just an absolute assault by the sellers. The stock still hasn’t recovered. Sean made the most important point here so I will reiterate it and we can move on – you can get the story right but when the entire market changes its mind about a company overnight, it doesn’t matter. This is why we cut and run rather than stand and defend. There were plenty of Best Stock ideas to redeploy capital into as this name fell off the list. Chevron Corp. (CVX): Sean — CVX is the odd one out. On the most recent write-up we didn’t actually do any risk management on it. CVX popped up onto the list just as operations in Venezuela were underway. This stock was explicitly set it aside rather than building a risk framework around it: “We’re not geopolitical experts, but we are students of price… Chevron was added to the list post regime-change, but it is not one we want to focus on today. The price action looks messy, and it’ll take some time for things to play out. As Josh noted, gaps can be tricky and this is a tough one.” Going back further, we wrote about Chevron in September 2025. Here was Josh on the chart: “CVX is a C as well. I don’t trust this thing for the time being. I’d give it more time to trend higher before risking an entry here. I’m holding it for now, but not adding at the moment.” The fundamentals have been mixed. Q1 production rose 15% year over year after the $48 billion Hess deal. The company returned $6 billion to shareholders and extended its dividend-growth streak to 39 years — but earnings still fell year-over-year ($2.2 billion vs. $3.5 billion) as crude has been softening for weeks now. CVX slipped below its 200-day moving average on June 24, sitting around $170 against a $172 moving average line, removing it from our list. It’s a recent, shallow break, so it could repair quickly, but realistically we need crude to stabilize, which is a tough to factor to depend on these days. Josh — We wrote about Chevron because it had made the list, but we said it was a C at best, and I never liked the chart, even at highs. It’s still a mess six months later. In late March, it completely invalidated the winter highs by slipping and sliding around the 50-day without any real support developing. And just last week it completed a near-total erasure of the year-to-date gains, dropping below its 200-day like it wasn’t even there. Needless to say, there’s nothing here worth looking at in the near-term. This is a stock with no buyers and a broken story around higher for longer oil prices that no longer makes sense assuming the Strait of Hormuz continues to open back up. I don’t think we’ll be seeing CVX make our list or this column for a very long time. 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