Two Dow stocks, a ‘FANG’ giant to buy amid the tech sector volatility

Technology stocks roared higher Friday as the market’s best-performing sector after posting substantial losses over the two prior sessions. Amid the choppy price action, two leading Wall Street experts recommended which tech names they see as solid bets.

Apple and Microsoft, two of the three biggest gainers in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday, are stocks that Craig Johnson, chief market technician at Piper Jaffray, would recommend at current levels. Apple is finding “decent support,” Johnson said Thursday on CNBC’s “Trading Nation,” and he’d step up to buy shares at this juncture.

“The charts are not broken. The charts are just seeing corrections in longer-term uptrends,” he said, adding that Microsoft is exhibiting a similar setup.

“[The] long-term uptrend is still fine, stock got a little bit ahead of itself. We’re seeing some of those excesses come out, but it’s just a correction back to the uptrend support, and we’d be a buyer of both of those shares here,” he said.

From an options market perspective, Alphabet is one of the top picks at this juncture for Stacey Gilbert, head of derivative strategy at Susquehanna. The firm’s analyst covering the stock, Shyam Patil, rates the stock positively with a $1,500 price target — implying around 35 percent upside.

Gilbert, for her part, says the stock’s valuation is attractive.

“The volatility is high, as is all volatility across the board here. So if you’re interested in positioning in Google, [and] don’t want that downside exposure, you could look to something like call spreads where you’re going to get that upside exposure with limited downside risk,” she said, referring to an options trading strategy.

Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet shares all bounced strongly Friday.