Our top and bottom performing stocks in the market’s record run over the past 6 weeks
The past six weeks since our last CNBC Investing Club Monthly Meeting have been great for the market overall and most of our portfolio. The S & P 500 and Nasdaq on Wednesday were trying to add to their record highs. Since our April 16 meeting, through Tuesday’s close, the S & P 500 jumped 6.7%, and the Nasdaq surged 10.6%. .SPX .IXIC mountain 2026-04-16 S & P 500 and Nasdaq since our April 16 monthly meeting Despite a bit of a rough patch earlier this month, due to Iran-war-driven elevated oil prices and bond yields, it has been an especially good stretch to own stocks. Only nine of our 33 portfolio names were in the red over the past month-and-a-half. On the flip side, nine other stocks were up double digits, including one up nearly 100%. Here are our top and bottom performers since our last meeting, as we look ahead to our May meeting livestream , starting at noon ET on Wednesday. Top performers Arm up 97.9% Wall Street keeps sending Arm to record highs on signs that demand for central processing units (CPUs) will continue to jump in the era of agentic AI. That’s because Arm designs (and will soon make its own) CPUs, which are well-suited to running AI models due to their lower costs and energy demands, as well as their ability to deliver quicker responses to queries. Club holding Nvidia ‘s quarterly earnings last week was a key example. Arm shares surged after Nvidia management said that Arm-based Vera CPUs (and their Grace predecessors) have visibility to $20 billion in revenue this year. That’s great news for Arm’s royalty business. We started a position on April 20, less than a week after the last Monthly Meeting, at around $173. We trimmed twice because we tend to book profits on parabolic moves higher. Arm shares closed at a record $321 each on Tuesday. CrowdStrike up 60.6%, Palo Alto Networks up 53.8% What a turnaround in cyber. These stocks have climbed for weeks as the market brushes off the narrative that AI is a threat to the cybersecurity industry. There has been a steady stream of price target raises on Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike . Last week alone, a barrage of Wall Street firms hiked their targets on CrowdStrike and Palo Alto. We did the same on May 18, taking CrowdStrike to $650 from $500 and Palo Alto to $255 from $200. We will reassess after next week’s earnings, as both stocks have exceeded these levels. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto were, however, giving back some of their gains on Wednesday. They were falling in sympathy with cyber peer ZScaler , whose stock was crushed 30% on weak guidance. We can’t blame anyone for profit-taking on either CrowdStrike and Palo Alto, considering their big runs, but ZScaler’s issues do seem to be more company-specific than a warning sign for the whole industry. CrowdStrike is our favorite cybersecurity stock. Qnity Electronics up 25.3% Qnity, a provider of materials for making chips and other electronics, delivered blockbuster earnings , sending the stock flying. We viewed the Qnity quarter as the best in the entire semiconductor sector. Management hiked its full-year guidance for the top and bottom lines. We love Qnity as an under-the-radar AI play. Qnity was spun off from Club name DuPont late last year. Bottom performers Meta Platforms down 9.5% The bulk of Meta ‘s losses came after quarterly earnings in late April. While the Facebook and Instagram parent posted top and bottom line beats, investors didn’t like management’s decision to spend even more on generative AI moving forward. Meta reaffirmed its full-year total expense guidance, but the company still raised its capital expenditures outlook by $10 billion at the midpoint. Investors have not been as tolerant of Meta’s spending because it doesn’t have a public cloud to fall back on like our three other hyperscalers — Amazon , Alphabet , and Microsoft . To be sure, it was still an impressive quarter, with the strongest revenue growth in five years. We saw all the selling as shortsighted. Home Depot down 7.9% This home improvement giant continues to get crushed by stubbornly high mortgage rates. We have had so much patience in this stock, with so little reward. Frankly, we regret even getting into it. Home Depot was supposed to be our play on lower interest rates from the Federal Reserve. That clearly hasn’t worked out yet. With soaring gas prices and higher bond yields, will new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh be able to deliver on President Donald Trump ‘s desire for rate cuts? We’ll see. We did, however, take solace in Home Depot reaching same-store sales growth parity with Lowe’s this quarter. Earlier this month, we cut our price target on Home Depot to $360 from $420 after a so-so quarter . Capital One down 7.1% A lackluster quarter in April sent this credit card stock much lower. We do not think the release should take away from our belief in Capital One’s transformation story, driven by its Discover acquisition last year. The benefits from the $35 billion deal, however, are taking longer than expected. Weakness in the financial sector, due to concerns about consumer health and the economy, has not helped. Not all bank stocks have gotten the short end of the stick. Club holding Goldman Sachs shares rose more than 10% since our last monthly meeting after SpaceX tapped its dealmaking business to lead what’s expected to be the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. (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 . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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