Two Josh Brown stocks bucking the real estate headwinds: The new data center landlord and a mall owner

(This is The Best Stocks in the Market , brought to you by Josh Brown and Sean Russo of Ritholtz Wealth Management.) Josh — I'm old enough to remember when people were bullish on Prologis (PLD) because of its reputation as "the landlord of e-commerce" circa 2021. I was trading the stock back then for this exact reason. When Amazon and every other retailer needed warehouse space close to consumers, Prologis had the locations, the scale, and the relationships. That story hasn't gone away, but there's a new one running alongside it. The company is now pushing aggressively into data centers, using both conversions of existing warehouses and greenfield developments, with publicly stated ambitions to scale data center capacity to as much as 10 gigawatts over the next decade. Corporate customers tied to U.S. data center construction are making up an increasing share of Prologis's forward-looking pipeline, as suppliers move their distribution centers closer to data center developments. The world's largest industrial REIT is quietly becoming a digital infrastructure company, and most investors still have it filed under "e-commerce warehouses." The benefit of doing our Best Stocks in the Market research is that it forces me to ask why a stock in the "wrong" sector might be among the market's leaders when most people just hear the name and ticker and revert back to their previously held biases. …