Here’s our Club Mailbag email [email protected] — so you send your questions directly to Jim Cramer and his team of analysts. We can’t offer personal investing advice. We will only consider more general questions about the investment process or stocks in the portfolio or related industries. This week’s question: Hi, I have 18 stocks. My top 5 holdings are as follows: Apple (39.89%), Nvidia (16.6%), Eli Lilly (8.2%), Broadcom (7.56%) and Costco (6.76%). The rest have portfolio weightings below 5%. Apple and Nvidia are “own, don’t trade” stocks, so should they be kept as they are, or shrink down? If I have to sell them, is it better to pay less in taxes or keep the cost bases lower? I am really confused when it comes to taking profits. Thank you. — Jennie (Founding Member) Great question. First, let’s address our idea of “own, don’t trade” stocks. We’ve recent a lot of questions about this since kicking off 2024 with a trim of both Apple and Nvidia (and other big winners) . When we say you should own and not trade a stock, it doesn’t mean we will never sell shares. These stocks — currently just Apple and Nvidia — received this designation because we have massive amounts of conviction in their long-term success. However, discipline trumps conviction. And our discipline requires two things here: to stay diversified and to not be greedy pigs. Apple may have been the underperformer of the Magnificent Seven in 2023, but shares rose nearly 50%. That gain pushed Apple’s weighting in the portfolio to 5.6%. To main a diversified portfolio, we don’t want any of our positions, even Apple, to get much bigger than 5-6%. So we trim to keep the weighting in check (more on this later). Nvidia wasn’t too heavily weighted, at 2.34% prior to the trim Tuesday, but the stock was up almost 240% in 2023. It was also up 203% since the last time we trimmed the chipmaker at $157.60 per share in January 2023 (excluding a February 2023 sale made for charitable…
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