Here's what market forces and company innovations Club members care about most

Published Sun, Mar 5 20232:19 PM EST

I spent the day last weekend with CNBC Investing Club members in New York City. Research director Jeff Marks and I convened our first annual meeting and people learned a ton about us, including the interview that CNBC's Carl Quintanilla did with me. We also learned a ton about our members and, of course, stocks in our portfolio. As part of the Club convention , we let everyone who wanted to take pictures with Jeff and me. It was in those moments that I really got a sense of what people are interested in. We do our Morning Meeting and Homestretch every day — two terrific segments — and I like to infuse them with what Club members care about right after the market opens and later for the last hour of the trading day. First, everyone seemed hungry for anything related to ChatGPT. That was easy. The only good way to invest in artificial intelligence is through Club holding Nvidia (NVDA), which makes the software and hardware that enables these programs to take advantage of accelerated computing. That's what powers the neural network learning behind this stuff. As I mentioned recently in the most heavily re-tweeted offering I've made, the AI story is all laid out in Nvidia's conference call, where CEO Jensen Huang compares it to the rise of the personal computer, or the internet, or the smartphone; breakthroughs that changed everything. For years, Huang was a lonely voice calling for mass adoption of AI technology, an idea that didn't get much love until ChatGPT made it popular. Now that more than 150 million people have viewed it, this could finally be the breakout moment that turns artificial intelligence into an $11 billion opportunity for Nvidia. People want to be in that stock and I don't blame them. There were lots of skeptics of FANG, the original members: Facebook, now Meta Platforms (META), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), and Google, now Alphabet (GOOGL). We own Meta, Amazon and Alphabet for my Charitable Trust, which we use as our Club portfolio. We have never owned Netflix. Apple (AAPL) was added later to make FAANG. We own that one too and always say own Apple, don't trade it. I think Amazon is way too hated. Where else can you order something at 5 p.m. one evening and have it arrive at 6 a.m. the next day? Sure, Amazon's stock will go higher once they lay off tens of thousands of people, but it's the service that makes the stock worth owning for the long haul – not to mention the dominance of Amazon Web Services cloud business. AWS' massive growth has slowed. But it's still the cloud to beat. Nobody wants Alphabet simply because it has too many enemies — it seems threatened by Microsoft (MSFT) and by Apple. If Alphabet's stock weren't so cheap, I think we'd throw in the towel for the Trust. My ardor has certainly cooled on this one. Plus, all these FANG names now have the law of large numbers working against them. Same goes for Apple. Alphabet also faces government antitrust litigation over its dominance of the online advertising business. There's a similar sense of ennui surrounding Salesforce (CRM), where I know some of the large activist hedge funds had not been appeased by the recent board changes, the buyback or the cut cuts. Nor have they been appeased by this past week's killer quarter and co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff's new focus on profitability. Paul Singer's Elliott Management, one of the five known activist investors in the stock, nominated a slate of board members. I say give Benioff a little benefit of the doubt and let him work his magic. My ultimate takeaway from the Annual meeting is that there are still plenty of people out there who want to make fortunes in individual stocks, or who've already done so. So many financial experts will now tell you that's impossible. They want to invest your money and they don't even feel compelled to tell you what they're doing with it. Our members despise that kind of attitude and bridle at the notion that they can't manage their own money, when they've been very successful at doing precisely that. That's not eye-opening, it's core to what we do here: pull back the curtain on how we manage our portfolio — the good, the bad and the ugly. We aim to show you our winners and losers so you can learn from both. Education is at the cornerstone of what we do. Kind of like the Fed, however, we have a dual mandate. Our other mission is to give all of our profits and dividends to charity. Our total contribution this year is $326,951 , and this brings our total donation since the Club's inception to approximately $4.1 million. It's always nice to have hundreds of people tell you to keep doing what you're doing, because it's working for them, and that's exactly what all the folks who work on the Club and I are going to do. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . 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