9 stocks to buy in October 2026: from AI hardware to value ETFs

Ten thousand dollars placed in Palantir three years ago would be worth nearly 300 thousand today. That opening example carries the whole thesis of this nine-stock list: outsized returns come from catching the right product in a fast-growing market before the numbers explode. The host therefore explains products before balance sheets and backs the talk with his own money, showing a real portfolio that is up year to date yet once drew down by 80 thousand dollars. A decade advising large companies on emerging technology taught him to concentrate on what he knows, technology, and leave everything else to index funds.

AI hardware: Intel and robotics chips

Intel opens the list, and the story is about making chips rather than designing them. Its new Arizona plant builds the Panther Lake architecture in-house, and together with investments in New Mexico, Oregon and Ohio it makes the company one of few players able to manufacture silicon inside the United States. Public support sweetens the picture: roughly 8 billion dollars under the CHIPS Act plus a direct government investment of about 9 billion dollars. To test that manufacturing story against numbers, the place to look is the official quarterly release of Intel (INTC); the growth and profitability details follow in the next paragraph.

The numbers partly confirm the story. Total revenue of 16.1 billion dollars rose 25 percent year over year, while data center and AI products grew 59 percent to 6.3 billion dollars. Foundry revenue reads as 5.8 billion dollars, up 31 percent, yet only 293 million of that came from external customers while the rest is billed internally. Two big risks stand out: AMD has carried its server revenue share to 41.3 percent, and the loss-making foundry unit lost 2 billion dollars last quarter. With some fabs not coming online until after 2030, this is a position to hold for years, not to buy and forget.

The second hardware thesis is an under-the-radar name selling the chips that control every joint of a robot. Humanoids are not run by one giant brain but by many small distributed chips, so Allegro sells multiple products per machine. Know-how built for electric vehicles in power and sensing carries over into robotics, which creates a hidden business growing inside the larger one. According to quarterly data compiled by Trefis, the company posted 259 million dollars of revenue and 23 cents of earnings per share in the June 2026 quarter, with revenue up 27.5 percent year over year and power products up 47 percent. The risks are auto-market cyclicality and Chinese competition; robotics growth still has to show up in profits.

The second robotics name is Symbotic, a warehouse automation company. It runs everything from pallet unloading to storage and order assembly with AI -driven vision systems, works with Nvidia on computer vision, and holds more than 250 patents. Contracts signed by giants such as Walmart, Target and Albertsons have converted into 22.5 billion dollars of backlog. According to the quarterly summary on Investing.com, fiscal third-quarter 2026 revenue grew 22 percent year over year to 721 million dollars, adjusted pre-tax profit reached 95 million dollars, and eleven new installations began. A warehouse software platform acquired in July 2026 adds recurring software revenue on top of installation fees. Yet the 10-Q shows 90.5 percent of revenue comes from a single customer; if that customer walks, most of the value disappears overnight.

Big tech: Google and Oracle

The host's largest technology position is Alphabet, described as a secret technology fund. The logic is that the company holds a seat at nearly every emerging wave: a new AI model, a project generating explorable worlds on Street View imagery, an eyewear push, and an experiment in orbital computing. For investors the real story sits in the cloud: Google Cloud revenue jumped 82 percent year over year to 24.8 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2026, operating profit roughly tripled to 8.8 billion dollars, and cloud backlog hit 514 billion dollars. According to the quarterly summary on Yahoo Finance, total revenue grew 24 percent to 119.8 billion dollars, so the cloud is now large enough to move the needle. The host holds 123 shares worth about 42 thousand dollars, up more than 100 percent. The price of that growth is the risk: the company poured nearly all its free cash flow into infrastructure last quarter while criticism of debt-fuelled AI spending keeps rising.

The second giant is a fallen one, down more than 50 percent over the past year: Oracle. Cloud revenue grew 62 percent to about 11 billion dollars, the infrastructure slice tripled its pace with 121 percent growth, and total revenue reached 19.3 billion dollars. Remaining performance obligations climbed to 664 billion dollars while management guides next-quarter cloud growth of 64 to 70 percent. According to the company's investor relations release, that pipeline is backed by 850 megawatts of added data center capacity. But a force-majeure notice delaying rent on the Project Jupiter site in New Mexico cut 8 percent off the shares in a single session; management insists the project is on schedule, yet the market is unconvinced. This debt-fuelled structure ends in near-collapse or a huge breakout, which is why the host keeps the stock on a watchlist.

The value leg: ETFs and a hidden gem

With the broad market looking dear, the host turns toward value. The anchor is the Buffett gauge near 230 percent, a historic high meaning the US market is worth 2.3 years of national output. According to the April analysis in Fortune, the gauge sat at 227 percent, clearly above levels once described as playing with fire. A Vanguard report places US equities in the most expensive percentile on record, while GMO forecasts near-zero returns for US deep value and negative returns for small and large caps. The MSCI comparison sharpens the picture: US growth trades at 26 times forward earnings against 14 for non-US small caps and 12 for European value.

Three exchange-traded funds are presented as ways to play that gap. The first, EFV, gathers large value companies across developed markets outside the US, with names such as Nestle, Mitsubishi, Shell and HSBC. The second, AVDV, targets small and cheap companies beyond America. The third and cheapest-looking option in the host's telling is the Japan value fund EWJV, holding Panasonic, SoftBank, Mizuho, Toyota and Mitsubishi at an expense ratio of just 0.15 percent, with Japanese small value carrying the highest forecast returns. Buffett investing aggressively in Japan before handing over the reins adds a vote of confidence.

The most hidden gem is a small Kazakh fintech: Kaspi. The idea is borrowed from Mohnish Pabrai, a concentrated Buffett-style investor holding only four positions, who allocated 147 thousand dollars to it in his latest filing. The thesis has two legs: the stock is very cheap and it throws off serious cash. Dividend yield runs above 8 percent with a price-earnings ratio near 7.4, pricing unthinkable for a US fintech. According to the earnings calendar on Public.com, second-quarter 2026 earnings of 2.87 dollars per share beat expectations while advertising and delivery revenue grew 49 percent year over year. The host sits 15 percent underwater on 51 shares yet is happy to hold for years; this is a patient dividend compounder, not a ten-bagger.

Cybersecurity and the big picture

The number-one slot belongs to the host's largest overall holding, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The thesis sits where AI meets security: autonomous tests probe systems without human orders while attackers use AI to find flaws and write malware faster. The company has run a machine-learning threat graph spotting attack patterns since long before it became fashionable, was named a leader by Forrester, and topped the Gartner endpoint ranking for the seventh time. According to the CrowdStrike investor release, annual recurring revenue grew 23 percent to 4.92 billion dollars in fiscal third-quarter 2026, with the addressable market seen near 150 billion dollars a year. The shares are up 160 percent in a year and look dear on almost any metric, which is why the host trimmed once the position passed a fifth of his portfolio. The remaining 464 shares are worth over 100 thousand dollars, up nearly 600 percent since purchase.

The sponsored segment fits in one sentence: the host says he built his company comparison dashboard with a 10-dollar-a-month chat app from Abacus AI. The portfolio lesson stands apart from the sponsor: concentrate where you have an edge, index the rest, and accept volatility upfront. The host is open about high-growth stocks swinging hard and his own portfolio falling deep before recovering through the summer. Read this way, the list is less a shopping slip than the diary of a tech investor at peace with drawdowns.

Stepping back, the list is built like a barbell: long-dated growth stories such as Intel, Symbotic and Oracle on one side, value ballast such as EFV and EWJV on the other, and high-conviction anchors Google and CrowdStrike in the middle. Conviction is legible in position sizes: CrowdStrike overall, Google within big tech. Oracle is deliberately left out; one more quarter of results will either kill the thesis or set up the entry.

Four catalysts matter next quarter. A first SymMicro installation completed within six months to unlock a 400-system option at Symbotic, a clean Jupiter schedule and smooth debt rollover at Oracle, continued backlog growth in Google Cloud, and intact dividend discipline at Kaspi. If the first lands, the warehouse thesis turns industrial; if the second wobbles, the watchlist name stays on the bench. The message for investors is simple: love the story, but spend on the calendar, not the feeling.