During the first week of each month in 2026, I’m committed to highlighting a few key companies where current-day hiring could reflect a trajectory of major future growth.
Today, we’ve got three stocks to cover — ranging from energy to semiconductors to construction. All three of these companies are going “pedal to the metal” on hiring, and the recent market pullback has opened up a prime buying opportunity.
Click the video below to dive in:
Video transcript:
Welcome to Moneyball Economics. I’m Andrew Zatlin, and today I’ve got good news… and I’ve got better news.
Well, the good news first, the markets have collapsed and that has opened the door up to a buy the dip opportunity. And the better news is that I’ve got some ideas for where you might want to go, some candidates for your investing.
See, I’ve made a commitment to you that in the first week of the month, I’m going to share some ideas for specific companies based on what’s going on with their hiring.
You may or may not remember, I track hiring at the individual company level for publicly traded companies.
Now, I do that because today’s hiring is tomorrow’s business activity. And I’m very focused on what’s coming down the pipeline in general with the macro economy.
But I’ve also been able to convert the hiring signals into trading opportunities because let’s face it, when a company is hiring a lot of people, it’s only because they see a lot of business opportunity downstream.
And in particular, when a company has slammed their foot down on the pedal, when it is pedal to the metal full bore ahead in their hiring, that means they’ve got a lot of business on the horizon. And so I want to look at those companies because oftentimes that’s where the upside surprise is going to happen.
So today I’m going to share with you three companies for your consideration where the hiring is off the charts. It is growing and it’s been growing for a while and the stock price may not have fully caught up to it.
But even if it’s kind of sort of baked into the stock price, again, these are companies where their surging hiring is reflecting surging business and that business may be coming down even more than they expect. So still upside there. So I’m going to talk to you about a construction company called MasTech, an energy company, Chevron, and a semiconductor company, Microchip Technology.
And it’s really interesting how all three come together.
Let’s start with MasTech, the construction company. Their area of focus is commercial, industrial, but guess what? A lot of it is building power plants and data centers.
And as you might have read in the press the past year, that is hot demand, and that hot demand is reflected in their hiring…
Right now, they’re in the catbird seat. AI driving a lot of this demand, and we know AI is a little bit of a bubble. Once you’ve built the data center, well, you’ve built the data center, but that’s a two or three year issue. Right now, the demand is much higher than the ability to meet. The supply is just not able to meet all that demand up there. That’s what I’m trying to say. And MasTech is sitting in the middle. So we’re talking revenue growth, we’re talking margin expansion.
What’s also interesting here is there’s been a pullback in stock price.
Their stock is trading near the high. But when I look at the numbers, when I look at the trend for both hiring and stock price, I see a lot of upside in both.
Let’s talk Chevron because speaking about MasTech’s power plants and the demand for energy, well, Chevron really is at the center of all things energy, big gas and oil player. And guess what? Globally, we’re seeing a lot of things happening in that space. Venezuela opening up. For example, California, domestically having some issues getting more fuel, and Chevron is sitting at the middle of that.
Just like MasTech, demand is strong, hiring is reflecting that strength, but the stock price is also up. And here, the issue, just like MasTech is a little pullback in stock price coupled with increasing upside surprise. That’s the play here.
The third play, we talked MasTech power plants. Well, now let’s talk their data centers.
Microchip technology, a semiconductor company. Now, microchip technology, they’re at the low end of the food chain when it comes to semiconductors. Among other things, they make microcontrollers. Microcontrollers are hugely important in the entire electric world because everything needs a microcontroller, every sensor, every antenna, everything needs a microcontroller.
So this is a volume game for this company. You’re going to see their chips in a lot of things. You’re going to see them in, for example, consumer electronics like Apple Watches. You’ll see them in appliances like air conditioning machines, cars, a lot of sensors now.
You’ll also see them in the data centers because every server and every PC out there needs microcontrollers and you’re going to see them in missiles. We’re seeing a lot of demand out there for their products, and that again is being reflected in their hiring demand.
What isn’t catching up and where the opportunity here is, the stock price is way down. See, there’s a double by the dip opportunity with microchip. One, the markets in general are lagging. And then two, the semiconductor companies have kind of gotten hit a lot recently.
As a result, the P-to-E is very compelling for this company. They are trading. Their stock price is currently in the middle of their range for the year. So if I had to choose between the three, I kind of like MasTech the most because of the upside potential, but all three are exhibiting strong growth in hiring, which means strong demand for their solutions, which means lots of upside potential.
We are in it to win it. Zatlin out.
Andrew Zatlin
Editor, Moneyball Economics