Jim Cramer (22:09)
If you want to build portfolio of individual stocks, that's a big if. Since there's nothing wrong with getting all of your equity exposure from a cheap index fund that mirrors the SB 500, well, you got to be rigorous about it. Which brings me to my next rule. Do the homework. Listen, growing up, 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? What's the relevance of most of the things they teach in high school? How will it help you later in life? Why 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. 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 scold. 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 conference calls, reading research reports, they want no 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 and hold school of thought. The idea that you don't really need to do anything, any work. You don't have to keep track of what's happening at the company because hey, you're in it for the long also. So what? On the other hand, you 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 for heaven's sake. 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 CBC Investors Investing Club. And I still urge members to do as much of their homework as they can. The truth is, if you can't devote a couple of hours per week to your portfolio, you really shouldn't be messing around with 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 said, 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 all investing. You know what? I'm just going to own the buy and hold on to my CMG I 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 practice buy and hold got obliterated. That was easy. Buy and hold became popular again during the pandemic. 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 mean middle of that money and bye bye bye. Once again though, it got, 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, the SPACs. That's why I've always been evangelist for a new concept which is buy and homework instead. What is the homework though? Before you buy a stock, you should look, listen to conference calls, go to the company's website. I really like that. I tell you, I've been starting with that lately. Read the research. If you can get a hold of research, read the news stories. That's called Google. Everything's available on the web. Everything. You have so much more info available now, so much more knowledge that there's really no excuse. You aren't up there begging 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 beaten by professional money managers with good track records 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 someone who does no homework. Which is why so many experts tell you give up on individual stocks and put your money in a cheap S&P 500 index fund. Buy and hold is not a strategy, just lazy. Like I said, I am in in favor of index funds. For those who don't have the time. 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 in the same industry, they 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. Any given stock stock came down to the sector. But thanks to the rise of sector ETFs, that number's gotten much much higher. 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 of 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 sector risk. And that is diversification. I always say diversification is the only free lunch 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 it's diversification. Such a no brainer. If every advisor and commentator under the sun has been telling people to do it for years, how can anyone say still be under diversified? I think it comes back to the homework issue. A lot of people simply don't own, don't know what stocks they own. They don't understand what the companies do. So they end up with stocks that are finally some very similar. I mean they don't understand that one is dis drive company, the other is a semiconductor stock. 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 few calls from people who genuinely think that owning Fang is a diversified strategy. Hardly. With Facebook now, meta platforms, Amazon, Netflix and Google now you own variation of the same thing. Social, mobile, cloud, 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 as a portfolio made up of Chevron, Pioneer Natural Resources and I don't know what they give me. I use Halliburton or to too high yielding ones in a driller I always say no to a portfolio of J and 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 undiversified 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 be pretty much beat. Everybody right then is in a diversified fund. That is the nature of the beast. Even though I think it's ill founded. It's why Cathie 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. And those all stocks they tend to trade as a group. But that one huge year in 2020 made her a household name. And what's your household name? We do get it made in this business. Don't be wrong. I feel she's great at picking high risk growth stocks and she's never claimed to be running diversified for not once. I just want you to be aware that when you go all in on diversified 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 and P. My question for you is what does the greatest investor of all time think we should buy? Well first, I know Warren Buffett. I'm a TV guy who tries to do his best to teach you. But I thank you for that. Here is 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, join this CNBC investing club if you don't like picking stocks and let 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, tough one in. 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. All right. Whether you're an amateur or 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 follow for the CWC Investing Club. Think of it as a glimpse behind the curtain if you're not a member. So stay with creep. 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're often your own worst enemy. Don't take it personally on my own worst enemy, too. If you want to invest wisely, you constantly be fighting off your own worst impulses. We're not robots. We have emotions. And those emotions can 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. People do it constantly. A stock gets hammered, then investors sell to the hammering. 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 pain. So what do they do? They bolt. So now there's something instinctive about panic, about the desire to flee. If you're a Stone Age hunter gatherer who accidentally stumbles into a family of grizzly bears, Panic is a very helpful strategy. But it's not useful emotion when you're investing in the stock market. The truth is, there almost always be a better time to sell than whatever moment inspired you to panic in the first place. And don't I know it remember the spring of 2020 when Covid hit everything shut down the whole stock market collapse. The S&P 500 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 though, 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 enough, the SB was making new highs again by the summer. And once the vaccines came along that November, will the market just never look back? So the next time there's a big market wide sell off and you feel like fleece 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 a panic sell up is worth buying for the long term. Often 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 bounce, 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, speaking of hideous down days, I got another rule that can help you handle big declines. Ready? When the stock market 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 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 slowing, the markets 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. And when I say defend, I mean you can't treat a declining market like it's a buying opportunity in 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. Yet when the market gets negative, you need to get more selective and and focus your efforts. That's why I rank all my Channel Trust stocks at all times for investing club members. Ones are stocks I buy right now, twos are stocks I buy in a weakness, and threes, while threes are all. Sometimes it is some strength, but if you can 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 on to the whole complex. Pick the best tech stocks, the ones you want to buy into weakness and toss out the rest. Raise cash. Use those newfound cash reserves to buy the stocks of higher quality tech companies at lower prices. That's right, the non essentials, the ones that have no catalysts and that you only owned because you wanted exposure to a bull market. They get to heave ho immediately when things turn bearish. Sell, sell, sell. 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've loved for quite some time. But eventually, after you experience enough difficult markets, you realize just how valuable this process is. Because it can protect you from a lot of pain. The house of pain. I never, never try to battle more than a few losing names at once. Don't buy. Don't buy. It's painful. So remember, you have to take on a lot of stocks that are going against you. I'll wear you. It'll wear you down, I promise. It's just exactly what it's going to do, making it more likely that you'll 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, hammer and tongs, or any of those other cliche phrases that went out of style ages ago but still sound really solid. The bottom line now 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 into weakness. Vicious negative markets can give you buying opportunities, but you need to focus your capital on your absent favorites rather than chasing bargains in third rate merchandise that actually deserves to trade lower. Matt 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 to be very careful because you're the one with the most power to derail your financial future. Look, 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 protect you from the kind of misjudgments I used to make when I was young and inexperienced. The same rules we preach constantly in the CNBC investing club. Rules like don't own too many stocks. Back at my latest fund, I would spend three hours every day analyzing the mistakes of the day before. I'm not 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 4am and 7am 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, let's say, 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. In short, when we owned fewer stocks, we tended to make more money. That's why ever since I won't buy a stock without first taking a deeper, different one off the table. Even my Chapel Trust, which is the only way I can play these days. Yet 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 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 constraining. You'll end up selling some stocks that are good for stocks that aren't as good. It does happen. Hey, hindsight 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 a portfolio really work for you. Hey, by the way, the time I lost the most money is headquartered from manager up 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, okay? Either one. It's always possible to have too many positions. Rule of thumb, if you're just investing for yourself and you own more than 10 stocks, you should probably pare something back so you you can have too many stocks. But you know what? It's very hard to have too much of cash. Which brings in 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 100%. Or they think the market stinks, so they decide to short 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 you want as much as you want and then raise some cash. Put it in cash. Don't buy. Put options on the stocks you own or find other stocks to short against your current positions. That's just. 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 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 a lousy market. Let me tell you a little story. I was one of the biggest options traders on Wall Street For a Time. And I can tell you that when I bought Put Options to hedge my positions, I almost always lost money. When did I make money? When I bought Put Options to profit from low quality companies with shortfalls or stocks that seemed severely overvalued versus the fundamentals. If you dislike the market, you don't need to bend yourself into a pretzel to hedge against downside risk. Just sell some stocks and go into cash, which is literally short term treasuries of the less than a year 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 wrong. I say cash is for winners, especially if you think that there's a major disaster ahead. And I don't care what interest you earn on that cash. Now. I grew 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 Chapel Trust back when I could. I didn't short stocks just for sake of having some short exposure to balance 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 into 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 don't like to tape or 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 the show is answering questions directly from you. Tonight I'm bringing in Jeff Morris, 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 just insight and our background 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 join 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 and what I taught at Goldman Sachs was it's one of the great free 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 that may be a reason not to. But always reinvest. And it works for high dividend stocks like a consumer packaged goods stock or even tech stocks too, that offer a dividend. It's a good thing to have. It's another way to dollar cost average into positions as well. I remember going over this with my late father where he was adamant, you just take the money and run. And I tried to show him and managed to convince him, no, take the money and be back in reinvest. Now we're taking a question from John in California. 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, I make no bones about it. We have all the research in the world. And what's one of the great things, 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 mad dash and I talk about what maybe the most important research calls the day. So we're blessed with that. Right now let's go to Nino in Maryland who asked, is there a P multiple that won't, 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 discipline and said that I wouldn't pay more than 20 times earnings, I would have kept out of video for a decade. Because Nvidia is about 4 future. 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. Great point. I mean, when people look at the 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, the stocks would be triple. So anyway, thank you, Jeff. I like to say, as always, bull market somewhere. Promise. Try to find it. Just for you right here on Mad Money. I'm Jim Cramer.