Listen to Jim Cramer’s personal guide through the confusing jungle of Wall Street investing, navigating through opportunities and pitfalls with one goal in mind - to help you make money.
Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer
Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 7/12/24
Hey, Fidelity. Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app? With Fidelity, it's easy to get an outside opinion from independent experts in a single score. And then? When you're ready, trade US stocks and ETFs with no commissions. That's right. I am always right. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Sell or assessment fee not included. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a transaction-based service fee of $100. See full list of Fidelity.com/commissions, Fidelity Broken Services LLC, Member NYSE/IPC. Homes.com knows that when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or condo. It's about the home. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location and neighborhood. If you have kids, it's also schools, nearby parks and transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in-depth information they need to find the right home. And when I say in-depth, I am talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings and student-to-teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just the house, this is everything you need to know, all in one place. Homes.com. We've done your homework. My mission is simple. To make you money. I'm here to level the playing field for all investors. There's always a more market somewhere. And I promise to help you find it. Man, money starts now. Hey, I'm Kramer. Welcome to Man Money. Welcome to Kramerica. I'd love to be one of my friends. I'm just trying to make a little money. My job is not just to entertain, but to put it all in context, so call me at 1-800-743-CMC or tweet me at Jim Kramer. I am constantly on this show telling you that discipline always trumps conviction. I tell it to you over and over and over again. In other words, no matter how much you may love a stock, no matter how enthralled you are with the underlying story, if the rules say sell. Sell, sell, sell. You sell it. One thing I've learned from my investing career, no matter how much you might believe in something, you violate the rules of the road at your own peril. That's why we obey them religiously with the Channel Trust, and they become our core guide for the CNBC investing club, which I want you to be in. But where the heck do these rules come from? It's not like they were handed down from one high and carved into stone towers. Hey, they're at the lowest five commends for the history of the world part one. They're not like the lowest of physics. You can't just deduce them from serving the way markets works that you can do, say, gravity. No, the rules come from my experience. That's right, from my experience. I spent over 40 years in this business, and in that time, you better believe I've learned some powerful lessons. In many cases, I did. I did have to learn them the hard way. And because I don't want you to repeat my mistakes, because I want you to have the benefit of my whole career. Tonight, I'm going to lay out some of the most important rules for investing, and they are indeed timeless. Some of this stuff may seem basic, but again, you forget the rules of your own peril. Back on my own hedge fund, I occasionally convinced myself that it was okay to make an exception to have a cheat day, so to speak, to endure my discipline justice once, for some reason, to seem compelling at the time. And whenever I broke my own rules, I almost always got burned. It's like that old joke about the doctor, the guy who goes to the doctor, and he says, "Hey, God, talk, listen to me." It hurts when I stretch out and shake my hand around to which the doctor says, "Don't do that anymore." So what exactly should you be doing or not doing as the case may be? All right, let's take down my most important rules for investing. We're going to start with the first one, which is bull's make money. Bears make money. Pigs. Well, they get slaughtered. Look, I say this all the time because that's because so often in my business, I've seen moments where stocks went up and up and up so much that people were intoxicated with their gains, and they're geezers. However, it's precisely at that point of intoxication that you need to remind yourself that you don't want to act like a pig. I've first heard this phrase in the old trading desk, "The legendary Steiner part is an amazing old hedge fund." I've been having a big run in some stock, and the brilliant muckles aren't going to tell me that I've made a lot of money, perhaps too much money. And maybe I was being a pig. I had no idea what I was talking about. How do you make too much money? I was just grateful I had quite a major gain. Of course, not that long ago, not that long after. We got a vicious sell off, and I gave back everything I made and then some. And that's when I enshrined the bull's make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered at thesis as one of my own rules, and it's now so deeply ingrained that I got a barnyard full of sound effect buttons to tell the whole story. The bull, the bear, the pig, and of course, the beard. Just to be clear, bulls don't have them in opposition. The same idea applies to investors who press their bets too shortly, too aggressively, on the short side. We've had some major declines over the years, but other than the dot-com bust in 2000, and then the financial question was in 2008, 2009, most stocks bounced back pretty darn quickly. Even in the Fed-induced meltdown that started at the end of 2021, you had to turn positive by the fall of 2022, because if you pushed your luck by staying short too long, you got sent to the slaughterhouse. So the question is, how do you know when you yourself were being a pig? Look, allegedly, there's no such thing as stupid questions, only stupid answers, but honestly, you really don't need me to tell when you're being a pig. The Nasdaq more than doubled from March of 2022 in February of 2021. If you didn't feel greedy up there, you didn't need an investment faster, you just need a psychiatrist. If you took profits, you sidestepped the huge decline. If you let your winners ride, well, you gave a lot, if not all the money, back. The financial question was even more stark. If you were walking around owning a huge amount of stock in 2008, as the banks started to drop only flies, what you were beyond, piggyish. Why is this so important? Simple. One of my chief goals is to help you stay in the game. Do that's the hardest part of investing. It's holding one through the difficult periods, taking short-term pains so you can have long-term gains, which is what's happened in stock, one for a century. The people that wiped out in 2022 were the dot-com collapse before they tended to be the ones who never took anything off the table. They never felt greedy, and their piggishness, well, they never felt it, and so they got slaughtered. Being cautious and ringing the register near the top ended up keeping you in the gym, and this is in New York because well, catching me old at the top is just so impossible. Just catching you at the top, that's great. That's why I mind people every day. Have you taken any profits? Have you booked anything? Why are you being a pig? Because you never know when the stocks you own are going to crash. You never know when the market could be wiped out. You can't have certainty. Stock market doesn't let you have certainty. If you assume stocks will keep going up forever in a straight line, well, you are in for the house of pain. Everyone would own stocks if that were the case, and we know they don't because it's so risky. Sure, there'll be times when stocks just going go up and up and up, they just keep going. When I coined the term "fang" over a decade ago for Facebook, which became meta-platforms, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, which became Alphabet, I love them all. But I did give up on Amazon after an incredible run. I was trying to be disciplined. Yeah, they did continue to move up another 50%. I did feel it felt like a pig after the stocks were extremely popular run. But when I felt like, huh, I felt like a fool after I kept galloping. You've had the feeling, you know what it's. That's just the price you have to pay for following the rules. I had been a pig, but the pig kept on it. Didn't get slaughtered. Forts that we got back in Amazon for the travel trust, when then President Trump kept bashing him for ripping off the post office. Remember that? Probably even don't. But it was torture to watch it go up without being able to get back in. Now, you need to recognize, though, that for every huge pile of cash that gets left on the table with a situation like Amazon, you're sidestepping gigantic losses, that the kind of which you would have had if you would have left everything on the table in 2008 or late 2021, experiences that turn two generation of investors against stocks. And hopefully, I'm trying to preserve the last one. So never forget, bulls make money, pig, bears make money, but pigs. No, pigs. Yeah, you get it. And I'm going to keep repeating forever. I'm going to give you use the sound effects because it is test that important. How about rule number two? This is one that people, I see them on the street. Almost everyone says this to me when I ask them if they've taken, made some sales. Rule number two is it's okay to pay the taxes. Look, no one ever likes paying taxes. I don't, you don't, but like death, taxes are inevitable and unavoidable. Yet the aversion to paying taxes on stock market winning so often borders want the pathological. So many times people have gigantic gains, but they simply refuse to take any profits because they don't want to incur taxes that cut into their winnings. Never mind, the capital gains rates are pretty darn low versus ordinary income. Wall Street's litter with the broken hearts of investors who made this mistake. Several years ago, for example, I went to a presentation from a prominent hedge fund manager who recommended buying Macy's because of its real estate value. The stock had already run out. That's a great deal before the presentation. And it was ripe for some profit taking, regardless. But I know people who'd owned it for years with hefty profits and they didn't want to bring the register because they would have to write a check to Uncle Sam and of course they were thinking about how much that real estate was worth. Next thing you know, Macy's saw it stock getting cut in half and it wasn't a two-for-one split. The whole shopping mall space had hit a tipping point courtesy of competitors from the Amazon and the darn thing got obliterated. Those who didn't want to share their profits with the IRS ended up with no profits at all instead of hoping to stock and go to 100 because it might have a lot of real estate. So I want you to make your piece of the tax man. Some gains are simply unsustainable. A profit on paper is not the same as a profit in your bank account. Gains can be ephemeral. You haven't made any money until you ring the register. The last thing you need is to worry about capital gains tax and taxes. When it's time to sell, sell. In short, stop fearing the tax man. Start fearing the lost man. You won't regret it. The bottom line, remember my first two rules, bulls make money, bears make money but pigs get slaughtered. Don't be greedy. Be disciplined. And don't be afraid to pay the tax man on profits that you've burned. Let's go to Tyler in California. Tyler. Hey, big leah from California. How are you doing, Jim? I'm doing well. How about you? I'm doing good. Thank you, sir. I don't know how many times I've sold a position in the next day or two, watched it reverse. So I'd like to know is when is a good time to just reevaluate and cut my losses? Okay, I think that this is a terrific question and don't feel bad because I obsess in the losses for the travel trust. And I know when I bother Jeff Marx endlessly, I go down this. We're down there. We've got to do it. What you do is try to look at it once. Okay, just once because I don't want you to get down. You're going to miss other opportunities. And what you're looking for is a change at the margin. It's something set on the quarter on the quarterly conference call. You don't want to just get up in the morning and say, you know what? I don't like the way that acts. I'm taking the loss. Wait for something definitive. And if there is a bump up, don't be afraid to trim the position no matter what. How about Robert Minnesota, Robert? Hey, Jim. Thanks for taking my call. My pleasure. Yeah, when I retired, my company let me keep my 401, which is in a time dated fund at the corporate rate, which is very cheap. But it has limited choices. My question is, should I switch it over to a managed fund with another company like Piddellity or et cetera, at a higher standard rate, but has more options? Look, I'm a big in favor of the S&P 500 index fund. I think that'll be terrific. That's what my retirement's in. That's what your retirement should be in. I think that'll be fine. I love diversification. Remember my first two rules. Full fake money. Pairs make money. But pigs, they get slaughtered. Don't be greedy. Be disciplined. And don't be afraid to pay the tax spend on profits you earn. We love taking profits. Coming up from portfolio maintenance, learning how to do your homework, I'm hitting my investing rules that I think are the key to mastering this market. You don't want to miss them. So stay with Kramer. Don't miss a second of Mad Money. Follow @chimcramer on X. Have a question? Tweet Kramer #MadMensions. Send Jim an email to madmoney@cnbc.com or give us a call at 1-800-743-cnbc. Miss something, head to madmoney.cnbc.com. When you're hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search, match. With Indeed, Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening, and messaging to connect with candidates faster. 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Plus, when you're ready for the ultimate sign of friendship, start a show together with your included Paramount Plus subscription. Walmart Plus members save on this plus so much more. Start a 30-day free trial at walmartplus.com. Paramount Plus is central plan only, separate registration required. See you Walmart Plus. Terms and conditions. Breaking news. The peanut butter group and chocolatey corp have merged to create PBC Inc. And the byproduct of the merger is the new delicious jiff peanut butter and chocolate flavored spread. I got the press release and get this. Critics tried to say it creates a monopoly on cravability. But obviously, it's not illegal to be irresistible. Calling it now, this will revolutionize the snack industry and the contents of my pantry. Visit pbcincorporated.com to try the flavor merger of the century, jiff PBNC. At the end of the day, we're only human. If you remember only one thing about being an investor, that's it. Nobody's perfect. Everyone's fallible. And it's inevitable that we're going to make mistakes. It's just the nature of the business. That's why if you want to own individual stocks, you need to follow a set of rules. Rules that are designed to protect you from yourself, which brings me to my next commandment. And this is a really important one. Never buy all at once. I can't stress enough. Do not enter any circumstances by your whole position at once. This is something you can see us put into practice constantly in child trust. One more reason I think you should join the CVC investment club is shameless promotion. Buy all at once is your folly. No broker likes to fool around with partial orders. No financial advisor has the time to buy stocks pathetically over time. The game is to get the trade done at one level in a big way. Make the statement buy, boy do I hate statement buys. Get to position the sheets or in the portfolio now. I don't like that either. Where I stand, it's all wrong. 100% wrong. You should never buy all at once and you should never sell all at once. Instead, I need you to stage your buys, work your orders, try to get the best price over time. Why? Okay, when I first started as a professional, I really wanted to prove to everyone just how clever and smart I was and how right I would be. So if I felt like buying say caterpillar, okay, I said buy God, I'll buy it now big all at once. Make a statement because I was so sure of how right I was. Put me up on 50,000 cat I'd scream as if I was the smartest guy in the universe. When I think back about that young Kramer, mostly full head of hair by the way, all I can say is that I was one arrogant son of a gun, arrogant and wrong. What was my mistake? If you go to my 50,000 shares of caterpillar, you don't pick them all at once. That's pure Ubers. What happens if it goes down? You feel like a dope and a micro down. That's my rule. Never buy all at once. Instead, I should have bought cat in increments of say 5,000 shares gradually over time during that day, trying to get the best price I could. You put it in a small position and you cross your fingers, hope it goes down so you can buy more at a lower level to get a better cost basis. You know what I said? I don't mind when it stock goes down if I can buy more. Now I know there are trade institutions, you know. I don't want to say trade in size, as we used to call it. Probably still do. But I still invest in my travel trust. And whenever we have a new name, we buy in spoil increments. Say 500 shares at a time to get say a 2,000 share position over the course of multiple days, probably again at lower prices. That's right. We like it if our stocks go down so we can get an even better cost basis. And when you lay out this whole process to members of the club, it makes sense. When you buy all at once, you're basically declaring that the stock absolutely won't go any lower. That's crazy. Nobody has that kind of insight all the time. Buying gradually in stages is about recognizing that our judgment is valuable. So why don't more people do it my way? Why don't investors, if they want 500 shares in ExxonMobil, decide to buy it on a 100 sharing course? Why won't they? I think it's because they want to be big too. They don't want to waste a broker's time. Your broker wants to get the trade done. I know why brokers hate it when my old hedge fund would place incremental orders. But it's just plain youbers to put a major chunk of your net worth into any stock all at once. Who knows? Maybe it'll go into freefall and of course it doesn't just apply to having a broker. It applies just to electronic trading too. At the same time, many others simply want to pull the trigger on the whole position and then get it over with it. They don't want to agonize over each increment. Wrong again. That's why you need to resist feeling like you're making a statement. Buy when you purchase a stock. I'm putting so billions of shares of stock in my time, both my old hedge fund for my double trust. Do you know how often I got in the absolute bottom? How often the last price I paid was the lowest and then it was off to the races? I mean maybe one trading 100 and I'm pretty good at this game. So resist the arrogance. Buy slowly. Even by over a couple of days, if you ask those, I do for the child trust. You merely beat youbers every time. Next rule. I need you to buy damaged stocks, not damaged companies. Let's say the mall's having a sale and you pick up a piece of merchandise, only to find out that it's broken when you get home. Maybe it doesn't work. Maybe there's a hole in it. In the real world, you can return that merchandise and get your money back. There are guarantees in warranty, school world, mainstream. Wall Street is different. If you buy a stock that turns out to be a defective company, yeah, it ain't the losses. There's no money back guarantee, caveat emptor. And that's why you need to be very careful to distinguish between broken stocks, names that are down for no particularly good reason, and broken companies, which absolutely deserve to see their stocks trade lower. Sometimes damaged companies can be easier to certain. And look, when nearly everybody got their COVID vaccinations and we put the pandemic in the rear view mirror, all sorts of COVID winners fell by the wayside. Some of them were unfairly punished, but many of them got obliterated because a big chunk of the business disappeared as we knew what would happen. Take soon video, a company took the world by storm during the worst days of the pandemic. To the point where it became, well, let's say the very name became a verb. We would zoom just like we googled. But once we got quality vaccines, the growth opportunity evaporated, the company struggled to use all the money it made during the pandemic to pivot into something else in a huge cash position. Then gradually, as competitors caught up, very tough to go up against Microsoft and Google and Cisco. Zoom only punched from 588. It's all time high in October of 2020, down to the mid 70s, less than two years later. There were points on the way down where people assumed it had to be a bargain. But every time they did, they got burned because you can't call a bottom in a stock. This didn't free fall of the business is changing and getting slower. We saw something very similar to all the financial tech stocks that had roared during the period of ultra low interest rates. The concept of the pandemic, lots of buy now, pay later, alphas, a firm, which is one of the better ones. But once the federalors are warned that it would start rapidly raising interest rates, the whole business model was called into question. This group was annihilated. The worst of these was a company called Upstart, which is really supposed to facilitate loans, but they started leaving many of these loans, which is on the balance sheet, just as the Fed caused current risk of skyrocking. The stock plummeted to get this from just over 400. It's late 2021 peak, capital OT's less than two years later, before eventually rebounding somewhat from its lows. On the other hand, sometimes the stock will sell off for reasons that have nothing to do with the underlying company. It could be caused by ETFs or problems overseas or Washington worries, just because the stock is damp doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything wrong with the underlying business, damaged stock, not damaged company. So how do you distinguish between a broken company and a broken stock? Complicated. A complicated question. What I like to do is develop a list of stocks I like very much. I call this the bullpen. Am I investing in club charitable trust portfolio? We give you the bullpen all the time. When Wall Street throws a sale with a whole market coming down, we use that as an opportunity to pick up the stocks on our list, made in the calm of no trading versus the battlefield of them in the market. So we know these stocks ahead of time. So we know there's nothing wrong with the underlying companies because we've done the research ahead. But the bottom line is you never really know. That's why this rule works in tandem with the last one. Never buy a positional at once because what you think is really a damaged stock might turn out to be a damaged company. If you take your time, you're much more likely, my ups are much less likely to end up with a large quantity of broken merchandise. And remember, there's no money back guarantee. The word on the street is to have you enter. They have money's back after breakfast. Walmart Plus members save on meeting up with friends. Save on having them over for dinner with free delivery with no hidden fees or markups. That's groceries plus napkins plus that vegetable chopper to make things a bit easier. Plus, members save on gas to go meet them in their neck of the woods. Plus, when you're ready for the ultimate sign of friendship, start a show together with your included Paramount Plus subscription. Walmart Plus members save on this plus so much more. Start a 30-day free trial at walmartplus.com. Paramount Plus is central plan only, separate registration required, see Walmart Plus terms and conditions. Earning your degree online doesn't mean you have to go about it alone. At Capelli University, we're here to support you when you're ready. From enrollment counselors who get to know you and your goals, to academic coaches who can help you form a plan to stay on track. We care about your success and are dedicated to helping you pursue your goals. Going back to school is a big step, but having support at every step of your academic journey can make a big difference. Imagine your future differently at Capella.edu. If you want to build a portfolio of individual stocks, that's a big gift since there's nothing wrong with getting all of your acquisition from a cheap index fund that mirrors SP500. Well, you got to be rigorous about it, which brings me to my next rule, to the homework. Listen, my kids hated doing the homework. They thought it was punishment. Sometimes when I looked at what they were studying, I could see where they were coming from. And what's the relevance of most of the things they teach at high school? How will it help you later in life? They even bother. Of course, that's a terrible attitude. As a parent, I always encourage my kids to study because you never know what you'll turn out to be interested in later in life. But I bring this up because I think many of you have the same attitude to the homework you need to do in your stocks. You suspect it might be just as irrelevant to your portfolio as schoolwork seemed to my kids. When I tell people that they need to listen to these, let's say, Starbucks conference call or know what the analysts are expecting from Netflix, they don't want to hear it. They think I'm being a school, but that's not true. You need to do the work if you're going to own those kinds of stocks. When I remind people that doing the homework means listening to the conference calls, reading research reports, they want to know part of it. They look at me as if I'm some sort of old-fashioned teacher who's asking for way too much in this busy 21st century world. That's just plain wrong. Only stocks without doing the proper research, frankly, is lunacy. But people still do it, and they do it for a couple of different reasons. On the one hand, there's the buy-it-hold school of thought. The idea that you don't really need to do anywhere, you don't have to keep tracking what's happy with the company because, "Hey, you're in it for the longest or so what?" On the other hand, you've got people who just don't have the time to be diligent. For those of you who don't have the time, I got a simple solution. Get someone else to manage your money, forever saying. Or do what most experts tell you to do and invest in a low cost S&P 500 index fund. Or there is a third option, find someone else to help you do the homework for you while teaching you to be your own portfolio manager, which is what we do with the CVC Investing Club. And I still urge members to do as much of their homework as they can. The truth is, if you can't do it a couple of hours per week to your portfolio, you really shouldn't be messing around with the individual stocks unless you join the investing club, which is what we're meant for. Investing may not be a full-time job like trading. But it's definitely a part-time hobby. That's it. It's the buy-and-hold premise that's a lot more pernicious. Back during the 1990s, buy-and-hold became the be-all and end-all of all investing. You know what? I'm just going home to buy-and-hold on to my CMGI because it's got to go back to 100 where I bought it. Yeah, I mean, the experts told you that if you hold things for the long term, everything will work out. Of course, I went to zero. But this philosophy took a real blow during the financial crisis, when so many people who practiced buy-and-hold got obliterated. That was easy. The house of fame. Buy-and-hold became popular. Again, during the pandemic, it keeps popping up. Anytime there's just a nice, smooth period. When the market was flooded with cheap money, and almost everything worked, right? I'd be middle of that money and bye-bye-bye. Once again, though, it got you burned when the Fed finally started tightening in 2022, and the cheap money just vanished. A lot of people who bought and held the SPACs got crushed because there was nothing worth holding. That was just a travesty of the SPACs. That's why I've always been evangelists for a new concept, which is buy and homework instead. What is the homework, though? Before you buy a stock, you should listen to the conference calls. Go to the company's website. I really like that. I haven't started with that lately. Read the research. If you can get ahold of research, read the news stories. That's called Google. Everything's available. The web. Everything. You have so much more info available now, so much more knowledge. There's really no excuse. You're right up there, bang it at the Goldman Sachs Library for some micro-fee statement from three months ago, as I did four decades ago, right down the block here. You have everything right at your fingertips. But if you fall back on a buy and hold strategy for any group of stocks and don't pay attention, I can assure you that you'll be soundly beating my professional money managers with good track makers who are actively searching for high-quality stocks all the time. More to the point, I'm quite certain that any index fund can beat somebody who doesn't know homework, which is why so many experts tell you, "Give up on individual stocks and put your money in a cheap recipe 500 in your index fund." Buy and hold is not a strategy. This is lazy. Like I said, I am in favor of index funds for those who do that at the time with the predilection. The next rule is another essential that I harp on constantly. Diversify, diversify, and diversify. Always be diversified. That controls risk. Imagine risk is really the holy grail of this business. What's the biggest risk out there? It's called sector risk. Stocks of the same industry tend to trade together, especially at extreme moments. In the old days, only about 50% of the action in a given sector came down to this, and a given stock came down to the sector. But thanks to the rise of sector ETFs, that number's gotten much, much harder. Some cases like 80, 90%. I don't care how great a tech stock was in 2000. If you had all your eggs in that one basket, you got scrambled. I got to prevent that. Same with the financials in 2000. I got to prevent that. The oils in 2014 through 2016. And of course, tech during that discrete period in 2022, that was so horrible. And there's only one thing that can keep you from getting nailed by sector risk. And that is diversification. I always say diversification is the only free lunch in this business. It's the only investment concept that works for everyone. If you mix up enough different sectors in your portfolio, at least five, well, I'll tell you, you won't be wiped out when the one group gets obliterated. Something that happens far more often than you might think. But a diversification is such a no-brainer. If every advisor and commentator under the sun has been telling people to do it for years, how can anyone still be underversed by it? I think it comes back to the homework issue. A lot of people simply don't know what stocks they own. They don't understand what the companies do. So they end up with stocks that are fairly similar. I mean, they don't understand that one is a disk drive company. The other is a semiconductor style. It just drives me crazy. Hey, you know what? Also, others have zero respect for the history of the bear and how it attacks individual sectors. I still feel quite a few calls from people who genuinely think that owning fang is a diversified strategy, hardly. With Facebook down meta platforms, Amazon, Netflix, and Google and Alphabet, you own variations of the same thing. Social, mobile, cloud, and they trade together. That's what I call faux diversification, or another example. No matter how much I might like the oil stocks at any given moment, I can't count on the portfolio made up of Chevron, Pioneer, Natural Resources, and I don't know what they give me. I use Halliburton or two high-yielding ones in a driller. I always say no to a portfolio of J&J, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers, and United Health Group, even as I like all four companies. They just leave you way too exposed to health care risk that could overwhelm the whole group all at once. Having an underversified portfolio is not just an amateur mistake though. Many professionals don't like to be diversified because of the bizarre way the money management business works in this country. If you concentrate all your bets in one sector, that sector takes off, well, you'll pretty much beat everybody right then. There's a diversified fund. That is the nature of the beast, even though I think it's ill-founded. It's why Kathy Wood of ARK Invest could be the best money manager of 2020, then far from the best in 2021, and among the worst 2022. Her flagship ARK innovation fund went almost all in on high-risk growth stocks. That's not diversified. Those all stocks tend to trade as a group, but that one huge year in 2020 made her a household name. Once you're a household name, well, you do get it made in this business. Don't be wrong. I know people with Kathy Wood, she's great at picking high-risk growth stocks, and she's never going to be running to diversified portfolio. Not once. I just want you to be aware that when you go all in on an underversified portfolio, it is likely to blow up in your face a couple of times in a few years time. Here's the bottom line. Whether you're an amateur professional, you always need to do your homework and keep your portfolio diversified. This is the kind of routine maintenance that protects you from monster losses down the line. Remember, if you can keep your losses to a minimum and let your gains run, you almost always come out ahead. But don't try to rationalize those losses, because stocks don't always come back to even or anywhere near that. Let's go to Trey in Texas, Trey. Jim, the second greatest investor of all time, Warren Buffett, says individual investors like me should just buy the S&P. My question for you is, what does the greatest investor of all time think we should buy? Well, first, I'm no Warren Buffett. I'm a TV guy who tries to do his best to teach you, but I thank you for that. Here's what I have to say. I think it depends on your time and predilection. I think you put away your first 10,000 in an index fund. If you like picking stocks, let's do it well together. Join the CNBC investing club. If you don't like picking stocks and let's someone else do it for you. But if you want to be involved, I will help teach you to be a good investor. I can do that. I've done it for a very long time, and fortunately, I've been very successful. Let's go to Ann in Indiana, Ann. Hi, Jim. Thanks for taking my call. You're quite welcome, Ann. What's up? I'm a club member, but I've been thinking about this lately, and I wondered if you could talk more about suspending our judgment and letting the market take a stock up, even when a CEO does something they said they're not going to do, or a company makes a bunch of mistakes, but they have very little competition, or a CEO makes big mistakes that seem to take a long time to fix. Well, this is a tough one, Ann, because I've made this mistake. I've stuck with people for too long. I keep thinking, give them another try. Almost every case it hasn't been worth it. Almost every single case, including situations I'm in now. Alright, whether you're an amateur or a professional, you always need to do your homework and keep your portfolio diversified. There's much more ahead. I'm putting my four decades of experience to work, sharing the key rules we call for the CVC investing club. Think of it as a glimpse behind the curtain if you're not a member. So stay with Craping. I don't want to go all zen in the art of portfolio maintenance on you, but when it comes to managing your own money, you are often your own worst enemy. Don't take it personally. On my own worst enemy, too. If you want to invest wisely, you constantly need to be fighting off your own worst impulses. We're not robots. We have emotions. And those emotions can really throw you off your game. Which brings me to my next rule for investing. Nobody ever made a dime by panicking. Panic is not a strategy. If people do a constantly, a stock gets hammered, they'd invest your sell to the halvery. The market gets crushed on a huge down day. People bail at the end of the day. In short, something gets annihilated and people can't take the painting. So what do they do? They bolt. There's something instinctive about panicking about the desire to flee. If you're a stone age hunter, gather who actually stumbles into a family of grizzly bears, Phoenix is a very helpful strategy, but it's not useful in motion when you're investing in the stock market. The truth is, there'll always be a better time to sell than whatever moment inspired you to panic in the first place. Don't I know it. Remember this spring of 2020 when COVID hit everything shut down. The whole stock market collapsed. The SP500 lost a third of its value in a little over a month. And for months after, almost everybody in the business was convinced the world was ending. That April, the legendary market historian, Larry Williams gave us the all clear. He was looking at other countries and realized we'd mostly be out of lockdown by mid-May. He told you to buy into the teeth of the panic, not flee with the panickers. Sure not, the SP was making new eyes again by the summer. And once the vaccines came well in that November, will the market just never look back? So the next time there's a big market wide selloff, and you feel like fleeing and never touching a stock again, I want you to do something for me. I want you to take the opposite side of your own trade. The most rewarding trades you can make are those where the decks have been cleared out by terrified folks using market orders who just don't get that the exit doors aren't as big as they think they are. Mind you, I am absolutely not saying that every stock that gets hit with the panic itself is worth buying for the long term. Often when people freak out about an individual company, it's with good reason. But I am saying that after a big decline, you usually get some kind of bats, which gives you a better moment to sell if that's what you want to do. Even when things are really bad, bargain hunters will usually take it up from its lows, and that's when you get out. So the next time you want to dump everything, take a deep breath, and wait for the rebound before you sell. Hey, speak your videos down there. I got another one that can help you handle big declines. Ready? When the stock bargain gets unrelentingly negative, remember that he who defends everything defends nothing. It was when Frederick the Great said that centuries ago, and you know what? It's just as true now. So he who defends everything defends nothing. What exactly does it mean? It's about how you evaluate your holdings. When the market's flying and many stocks are in bull mode, you don't need to worry about most of your positions. The more exposure to a bull market, well, let's just say the better. But when things get difficult when you're on the defensive, you need to recognize that many of the stocks you bought during better times might not fit this new environment. In short, when the economy is slowly and the market is getting slammed, you can't hang on to everything you might like. If you try to defend all your positions in a market that turns against you, that's a recipe for getting blown out. When that's a defend, I mean, you can't treat it declining market like it's a buying opportunity every single stock in your portfolio. If you do that, you'll quickly run out of capital, leaving you unprepared to buy more if we go lower still, and we usually do. Yeah, when the market gets negative, you need to get more selective and focus your efforts. That's why I wrangle my travels to trust stocks at all times for investing club members. One's there's stocks I buy right now, two's there's stocks I buy at a weakness, and three's, while three's are out like sellers. Sometimes it is some strength, but if you get out, it's good. That way I'll know which stocks I should defend when things get tough and which ones I'll cut and run with and use that as a source of capital for something better. So let's say tech's getting hammered, but you think it's going to rebound. It's important that you don't try to hang onto the whole complex. Pick the best tech stocks, the ones you'll want to buy at a weakness, and toss out the rest of your cash. Use those newfound cash reserves to buy the stocks of higher quality tech companies at lower prices. That's right. The not essentials, the ones that have no catalysts and that you only loaned because you wanted exposure to a bull market, they get to heave hoe immediately when things turn back. We used to call this circling the wagons around your best names in my old hedge fund. The first few times you do it, you'll curse yourself because you might be ending up putting down stocks that you love for quite some time, but eventually if you experience it at a difficult market, you'll realize just how valuable this process is because it can protect you from a lot of pain. The house of pain. I never try to battle more than a few losing names at once. Remember, you have to take on a lot of stocks that are going against you, I'll wear you down. It's just exactly what it's going to do. Make it more like you don't crack under your pressure and dump everything near the bottom. It's simply human nature, but you have to fight human nature tooth and nail hammering tongs where any of those other cliche phrases that went out of style ages ago, but still sound really solemn. The bottom line, great investors know how to ignore their emotions when those emotions get in the way of making money. So, the next time the market gets slammed, please don't panic. Nobody ever made a dime by panicking, but also don't double down your whole portfolio in the weakness. Vicious negative markets can give you buying opportunities, but you need to focus your capital on your absent favors rather than chasing bargains in third rate merchandise that actually deserves to trade lower. Man money is back after the break. Welcome back to tonight's Check Yourself before you wreck yourself additional man money. I'm a big believer in the idea that once you get some money saved up, you are in control of your own financial destiny, but that also means you need very careful because you're the one with the most power to derail your financial future. The mistakes will always be part of the investing game. I just want to do my best to ensure that you don't make the same mistakes twice or three times or endlessly. That's why I got rules. Rules for investing and protecting from the kind of misjudgments I used to make when I was young and inexperienced. The same rules we preached constantly in the CMC investing club. Rules like don't own too many stocks. Back up I would like to spend three hours every day analyzing the mistakes of the day before about kidding. One reason I'd retire, at least for my own well-being, that was a major task. One that I complete every morning before anyone else came into the office, generally between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. Some people are night out, so I'm an early morning out. I would analyze every losing trade. You don't need to analyze the winners. They take care of themselves, right? And then try to figure out how I could have made more money or lost less money more importantly. I was, for lack of a better word, maniacal about it, and after a couple of years, I had an epiphany. I realized that good performance could be linked directly to having fewer positions, owning fewer stocks. And sure, when we own fewer stocks, we tended to make more money. That's why, ever since, I won't buy a stock without first taking a different one off the table, even for my travel trust, which is the only way I could play these days. Don't just buy shares in more and more companies. You need to limit your holdings. That's a great discipline and you should adopt it, pronto. All the bad money managers, I know, have hundreds of positions. How the heck are you even supposed to keep track of all that? All the really good managers, I know, have a few names, and they know inside and out those names, which means they can confidently buy them on the way down. That's why I say, please don't own too many stocks. I know it can be good training. You'll end up selling some stocks that are good for stocks that aren't as good. It does happen. Hey, hindsight, it's 20-20. But take it from me. As someone who owns stocks for over 40 years, it's far more likely that you'll be selling marginal companies in order to get better, bigger, and in better stocks. That's how to make portfolio really work for you. Hey, by the way, the time I lost the most money is a head from manager. My sheets, that's my position sheets, were thick as a brick. When I made the most money, my sheets were well, one sheet of paper, double space, and I made hundreds of millions of dollars. So please remember, when you're a pro or an amateur, either one, it's always possible to have too many positions. A little thumb, if you're just investing for yourself and you own more than 10 stocks, you should probably pair something back. So you can't have too many stocks, but you know what? It's very hard to have too much of cash. What's the reason of my next rule? Cash is for winners. The widespread aversion to cash in this business breaks my heart. At times, cash is such a perfect investment that it drives me crazy. How so few people ever recommend it? Now, they hate the market, so they're only 95% long instead of a higher percent, or they hate the market stinks, so they decide to steward a few high flyers against their longs. No, no, no. As an investor, that is absolutely the wrong way to approach things. You don't like the market? You don't like any stocks? Then sell stocks. That's a measure one, as much as one, and then raise some cash. Put it in cash. Don't buy put options on the stocks you own or find out the stocks are short to get your current positions. That's just that stuff that makes it's just too hard for you. The odds simply do not favor you winning on both stocks the short and the long. It's a strategy whose goal is mediocrity. But if you can raise some cash and put it to work at lower levels, that's the best way to protect yourself against the lousy market. Let me tell you a little story. I was one of the biggest options shares on Wall Street for time, and I can tell you that when I put options to hedge my positions, I almost always lost money. When did I make money? When I put options to profit from low quality companies with shortfalls, or stocks that seem severely overvalued versus the fundamentals. If you dislike the market, you don't need to bend yourself into a pencil to hedge against downside risk. Just sell some stocks and go into cash, which is literally short-term treasuries of the less than your variety. People start talking about how little cash earns, although it's a lot more lucrative when the Fed's tightening, or they say it can't be it can't be in cash. That's for losers. No, that's just plain and wrong. I say cash is for winners, especially if you think that there's a major disaster hit and I don't care what interest you earn on that cash. Now I go up at a different time. I only shorted stocks when I had an edge. I can't short it all right now by contract, not even for the travel trust, but back what I could. I didn't short stocks just for sake of having some short exposure to bounce out my longs. I don't care about not having enough exposure. I care about losing money. I was an exception in the money management business. That was my focus. So if you don't like the market, if you think there's nothing compelling to buy in a weakness, then just raise cash. Go sit on the sidelines and wait for the situation to improve. Believe me, it's never the wrong call. When you're the only good taper, you can't find anything that truly makes sense for you. The bottom line, always be careful not to own too many stocks and not to have too little cash. Stick with Kramer. I always say my favorite part of this show is answering questions directly from you. Tonight I'm bringing in Jeff Marx, my portfolio analyst, partner in crime. Help me answer some of your most burning questions. Couldn't usually have some tough ones. For those of you who are part of the investing club, Jeff will need no introduction. For those of you who aren't, I hope you will be soon. I would say that Jeff's insight and are back and forth helped me to do a great job for mad money viewers as well as members of the club. Jeff and I do this sort of thing during all our monthly meetings where we give you an in-depth look at our latest portfolio decisions. We talk about every single stock and answer your burning questions. If you like this to be something to keep up with, I need you to enjoy in the club. And thank you, by the way, to people who stopped me on the street who love the club means the world to me. So let's start with a question from Michael, my home state of Pennsylvania, who asked, "What do you think about dividend reinvestment strategies?" Okay, so Jeff, one of the first things I learned in my electronic Goldman Sachs was it's one of the great few lunches of our business. You just keep letting it ride. And I have seen in my lifetime the dramatic amount of money you make from the dividend reinvestment. Yeah, absolutely. That's how you take advantage of the power of compounding by reinvesting those dividends quarter after quarter. Now, unless you need the income, of course, depending on where you are in your life, that may be a reason not to, but always reinvest. And it works for high-dividend stocks like a consumer package good stock. We're even tech stocks too that offer dividend. It's a good thing to have. It's another way to dollar-cost average into the position as well. I remember going over this with my late father where he was, you know, Adam and you just take the money and run. And I tried to show him and manage to convince him, "No, take the money and be back in reinvest." Now, we're taking a question from John in California and asked, "What are your source of information related to stocks in the overall market economy, sources that you go to daily?" All right, well, look, I make no bones about it. We have all the research in the world. And what's one of the great things that the luck that we have is we get everybody's research. And I tend to let that control things as, by the way, when I do the main dash. And I talk about, well, maybe the most important research calls of the day. So we're blessed with that. All right, now let's go to Nino in Maryland who asks, "Is there a P multiple that we won't buy above in each sector?" Well, this is really tricky because when you're in tech, we have to use out years. So, for instance, in video, if I had disciplined and said that I wouldn't pay more than 20 times earnings, I would have kept down a video for a decade because in videos about futures. Yeah. And I think you also have to look at a company's growth rate too. It's all relative P is so you can compare the growth rates relative to their multiples. I don't think there's necessarily one that would keep me out. But also on the other hand, you can't look at a low multiple and two and say that's a good bargain because sometimes there's value traps. Value traps, there are low multiple for a reason. They could have declining earnings or there just might be another issue fundamentally at a company. That's a great point. I mean, when people look at the automobile stocks, they've historically had very low multiples and just trade on dividends. If they ever really got the growth of a Tesla, it's awesome. So anyway, thank you, Jeff. I'd like to say this always bull market somewhere. I'm trying to find it just for you right here on Mad Money. I'm Jim Kramer. All opinions expressed by Jim Kramer on this podcast are solely Kramer's opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC, NBC Universal, or their parent company or affiliates and may have been previously disseminated by Kramer on television, radio, internet, or another medium. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Jim Kramer as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. Kramer's opinions are based upon information he considers reliable, but neither CNBC nor its affiliates and or subsidiaries warrant its completeness or accuracy and it should not be relied upon as such. To view the full Mad Money disclaimer, please visit cnbc.com/MadMoneyDisclaimer. Earning your degree online doesn't mean you have to go about it alone. At Capelli University, we're here to support you when you're ready. From enrollment counselors who get to know you and your goals, to academic coaches who can help you form a plan to stay on track, we care about your success and are dedicated to helping you pursue your goals. Going back to school is a big step, but having support at every step of your academic journey. Can make a big difference. Imagine your future differently at Capella.edu. [BLANK_AUDIO]