Barron’s Midyear Roundtable: 45 Stock Picks as Pros Point to Value Beyond the AI Rally

Barron's has published its Midyear Roundtable, in which a panel of investors put forward 45 stock picks for the second half of the year, arguing that much of the market outside the artificial-intelligence trade is undervalued.

The central thesis from the group is that the AI rally has concentrated gains in a narrow set of names while leaving many other companies behind. According to the roundtable write-up by Barron's Lauren R. Rublin, that dislocation has created what the panelists describe as a market full of bargains. Specific names highlighted in the coverage include Expedia Group, Total, and Brink's.

Who is on the panel

The roundtable brings together a group of well-known money managers and strategists. The participants named in the article are Meryl Witmer, John W. Rogers Jr., Todd Ahlsten, Christopher Rossbach, Henry Ellenbogen, Scott Black, Sonal Desai, Abby Joseph Cohen, Rajiv Jain, and Mario Gabelli.

Barron's runs the format twice a year, gathering the same broad cohort to debate the macro backdrop and then commit to individual stock picks that readers can track over the following months.

The setup: a market waiting for direction

The framing of the discussion leans into uncertainty rather than conviction on the macro picture. The article opens by cataloging the open questions facing investors: whether the AI trade continues to inflate or corrects, whether the Federal Reserve moves toward cuts or hikes, and how geopolitical risk around the Strait of Hormuz plays out. The piece notes that the S&P 500 had been stuck in a roughly two-month holding pattern heading into the discussion.

Against that indecisive backdrop, the panel's case for individual names rests less on a directional call for the index and more on valuation. The argument is that stocks left out of the AI-led advance offer a margin of safety that the market's most crowded trades no longer do.

What to make of it

The roundtable is a recurring feature rather than a single thematic report, and the full reasoning behind each of the 45 picks sits behind Barron's subscription. The names surfaced in the public summary, Expedia Group, Total, and Brink's, span online travel, energy, and cash-management logistics, which fits the broader pitch that value is scattered across sectors untouched by the AI story.

For readers in Asia-Pacific, the list is worth reading as a snapshot of how prominent US managers are positioning around the AI concentration rather than as a set of recommendations. DTW does not offer investment advice, and the panel's picks reflect the views of the individual managers as reported by Barron's, not verified forecasts.

The next checkpoint will be Barron's own follow-up, which typically revisits the roundtable's calls to measure how the picks performed against the market.