In this article, we discuss the Mark Cuban Stock Portfolio: 8 Best Stocks to Buy.

Mark Cuban is a billionaire entrepreneur, investor, and television personality whose career reflects the rags-to-riches trajectory of the American dream. Born into a working-class family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cuban displayed an early hustle by working as a bartender and software salesman before founding his first company, MicroSolutions, which he sold to CompuServe in 1990 for $6 million. This set the stage for his most famous windfall: the sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.7 billion at the height of the dot-com bubble. Following this massive exit, Cuban became a household name through high-profile investments and his long-running role as a shark on the Emmy-winning reality show Shark Tank. He is perhaps most publicly recognized for his ownership of the NBA team Dallas Mavericks.

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After purchasing the team in 2000 for $285 million, he transformed the franchise into a perennial winner, culminating in a 2011 NBA Championship. Although he sold his majority stake in late 2023 for around $3.5 billion, he remains a minority owner and a vocal fixture at games. In recent years, Cuban has shifted focus toward practical disruption and emerging technologies. His most significant current venture is the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, a public benefit corporation dedicated to lowering prescription drug prices. By prioritizing transparency and sweat equity over traditional corporate structures, Cuban continues to position himself as a contrarian innovator dedicated to solving large-scale social and economic problems.

Our Methodology

It is important to clarify that the stocks listed below were picked from the public comments that Cuban has made on his investments. He has explicitly mentioned some of his private holdings during these public appearances while only alluding to others. However, based on a careful assessment of the comments, the stocks listed below largely align with his investment philosophy. Data for the hedge fund sentiment surrounding each stock was taken from Insider Monkey’s Q4 2025 database of 1041 elite hedge funds.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 498.7% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 303 percentage points (see more details here).

Mark Cuban Stock Portfolio: Best Stocks to Buy

8. Reading International, Inc. (NASDAQ:RDI)

Per filings from 2022, Mark Cuban was a shareholder of Reading International, Inc. (NASDAQ:RDI), a global cinema and real estate company. While he was verified through SEC filings as a 10% owner of the voting Class B shares, he has been famously quiet regarding his specific investment thesis for the company. Reading focuses on the ownership, development, and operation of entertainment and real property assets in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The company operates cinemas, and develops, rents, or licenses retail, commercial, and live theater assets.

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In late March, Reading International, Inc. (NASDAQ:RDI) posted earnings for the fourth quarter of 2025, reporting losses per share of $0.11, against estimates of losses per share of $0.10. The losses per share for FY25 improved to $0.62 from $1.58 in FY24. The revenue over the fourth quarter was $50.3 million, down more than 14% compared to the revenue over the same period last year. FY25 revenue stood at $203 million, against $210.5 million in FY24. The net loss for the fourth quarter widened to $2.6 million from $2.2 million. However, the FY25 net loss improved significantly to $14.1 million from $35.3 million in FY24. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter decreased to $5.1 million from $6.8 million in Q4 FY24, while FY25 adjusted EBITDA surged to $17.8 million from $2.1 million.

7. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:LYV)

Back in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic tanked stocks like Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:LYV), which operates as a live entertainment company worldwide, Cuban appeared on news platform CNBC to outline that he was using 1% or 1.5% of his available cash to invest in stocks as the market went down. Cuban said he was buying index funds like SPY but also, “dipping my toes on some Live Nation”. During the discussion, Cuban also added that he was taking profits on his put and call options because “the premiums are just incredible.” Puts and calls allow investors to lock in future buy and sell prices for stocks. Cuban clarified that, “”I’ll dip my toe in the water hoping that two years from now this will all be a nightmare that we put behind us and the market will be much higher”.

Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:LYV) has been dealing with a recent decision by a US court in which the company was found to have a harmful monopoly over big concert venues, alongside Ticketmaster. However, over the past six months, the stock is still up close to 30%. Cuban remains a big proponent of firms which offer live experiences like concerts. Latest reports suggest that he has bought a sizable stake in Burwoodland, a New York-based live events company specializing in themed nightlife experiences. Per Music Business Worldwide, Cuban said, “It’s time we all left the house and had fun. Alex and Ethan [Burwoodland founders] know how to create amazing memories and experiences that people plan their weeks around. In an AI world, what you do is far more important than what you prompt”.

6. Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAOI)

Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAOI) is one of the favorite AI stocks among billionaire investors. Mark Cuban, in an interview on the the Big Technology Podcast earlier this month, gave his view on the companies that provide the so-called plumbing for the AI world. During his interview, Cuban urged investors to focus not just on the software but on the physical hardware being set up for AI, noting that companies like Apple had “spent next to nothing” but had the foundation to plug and play AI into their devices. He decried businesses for spending trillions on building AI data center capacity and spending more cash than they had available, noting, “I understand why but I am not convinced that for all of them it is going to work”.

Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAOI) engages in the design, manufacture, and sale of fiber-optic networking products in the United States, Taiwan, and China. The company offers optical modules, optical filters, lasers, and laser components. Cuban has talked about how companies providing these services are going to get more business in the coming years as, “data center build gets faster, cheaper” at a pace that investors might not realize right now. Cuban is alluding to the classic argument that without owning the actual phones or computers people use, standalone software makers will struggle to survive, even in the AI age, because the competition is too fierce.

5. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Mark Cuban has made no secret of the fact that he respects the position of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) as a legacy software provider but also issued several sharp warnings that the era of traditional software, which Microsoft pioneered, is effectively over. However, Cuban still views Microsoft as a critical player in the AI arms race due to the partnership with OpenAI. In an interview on media platform TBPN earlier this year, Cuban discussed these views, saying that young people coming out of college needed to learn how to implement AI in companies because these companies did not know how to do this to gain a competitive advantage. Cuban said, “You have got the CEO of Microsoft saying that software is dead because everything is going to be customized to your unique utilization”.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is one of the most prominent backers of OpenAI, the company which owns ChatGPT, the AI engine that ushered in the AI craze around the world. Cuban talked about ChatGPT during a recent interview with Eric Bricker, the former cofounder and chief medical officer of Compass Professional Health Services. Cuban acknowledged that he used AI for writing software and converting text-to-video. He added that he recently used ChatGPT to track his medicine and exercise habits. During the interview, Cuban said AI could make “just one dude in a basement” the world’s first trillionaire. Cuban compared the push for AI to the early days of computers and smartphones. He said people hesitated to make the shift but would now struggle to live without the devices. Someone who can come up with a way that makes AI as essential will make a lot of money, Cuban added.

4. Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)

Although Mark Cuban was bullish on big technology firms like Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in the past, he has recently confirmed that he has moved away from investments in these big tech companies to focus on his own ventures like Cost Plus Drugs. Previously, Cuban was a vocal critic of Meta’s multi-billion dollar pivot toward the Metaverse. A few years ago, Cuban gave an interview to Youtube channel Altcoin Daily to outline that buying digital land in the metaverse may not be the best use of your money. While defining the metaverse, he said, “It all comes down to community. Where can you create a community and what’s the impact of that community? Which platforms create the strongest community will be one type of a metaverse”.

More recently, Cuban has talked about AI and how it is impacting companies like Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META). In July last year, reports surfaced that Meta had offered huge signing bonuses in a deal to recruit the Scale AI CEO and other top researchers. Cuban took to social networking platform X to underline that the AI arms race would be won by companies that hoarded top talent and locked up valuable intellectual property. He claimed that, “What people are missing about AI, IMO [in my opinion], is no company is going to spend what will end up being more than a trillion dollars and accept not being dominant”. He also added that, “We are seeing them hire away talent and IP to advance their models. They will start paying to lock up IP they think their models need and the people who create it, just to keep it away from their competitors”.

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