Not long ago I was coming back from a haircut, a rare trip for me outside the New York Stock Exchange, and I heard a man’s voice calling me from the curb just behind Fearless Girl, a sculpture by the artist Kristen Visbal that I never fail to grin at when she catches my eye.
“Jim, can I shake your hand?” the man asked.
One day I will get over the fact that nice people want to stop and talk to me, tell me how they are doing in the market or how much they like “the show.” I always have time to say hello or give a fist pump, even a hug if demanded.
This time, it was a man named Jeremy, who said, “I want to show you something.” His wife said, “It’s something that has allowed me to retire.” Jeremy opened an app filled with stock listings, and he jabbed one line, a line that said “Nvidia, $2,545,000.” Jeremy told me that’s what I made for him. That’s what allowed his wife, a schoolteacher in New Hampshire, to retire.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he said. To which I replied with the most logical of points: “Jensen deserves the thanks, not me.”
I was referring to Jensen Huang, the CEO of my finest stock pick ever, the tiny semiconductor business that is now one of the world’s three largest companies, jousting with Microsoft and Apple over the past couple of years for the honor.
How did Jeremy know to buy Nvidia when I mentioned it? For the same reason tens of thousands of people bought Nvidia on June 20, 2017, when I told the world that I loved the company so much that I renamed my dog after it. That rescue mutt had been known for years as Everest, but enough of that.
Taking into account a couple of stock splits the company has had since then, Nvidia traded at just under $4 at the time. Less than $4 invested that day would have gotten you $136 by the end of December 2024. Meaning $1,000 would have turned into $34,622—and $10,000 would have grown into a $346,218 win. Not too bad. But how did I realize that this company would become a $4 trillion holding? I renamed my dog to finally get people’s attention on what I thought, hoped, and truly believed would be the greatest stock story of all time.
Everywhere I go now—at home or on vacation (and not just domestically), I meet people who thank me for Nvidia. I want to talk about it here not because I am a genius—I am decidedly not—but because it all comes back to process. Let me show you my work so you can have the confidence to seize on my process and build your own.
One of my earliest (of hundreds of ) pushes for Nvidia on Mad Money was on September 30, 2009. My interest in the company’s story, which I’d known years earlier but never paid much attention to, had been piqued by, of all places, a Best Buy conference call. The electronics retailer had discussed how netbooks were becoming a big growth category, so I looked up who was making the graphic processing units, or GPUs, for those types of computers. I learned that Nvidia—a company I had previously known only as a gaming chip maker—was the leader in the space, and I recommended the stock.
Not long ago I was coming back from a haircut, a rare trip for me outside the New York Stock Exchange, and I heard a man’s voice calling me from the curb just behind Fearless Girl, a sculpture by the artist Kristen Visbal that I never fail to grin at when she catches my eye.
“Jim, can I shake your hand?” the man asked.
One day I will get over the fact that nice people want to stop and talk to me, tell me how they are doing in the market or how much they like “the show.” I always have time to say hello or give a fist pump, even a hug if demanded.
This time, it was a man named Jeremy, who said, “I want to show you something.” His wife said, “It’s something that has allowed me to retire.” Jeremy opened an app filled with stock listings, and he jabbed one line, a line that said “Nvidia, $2,545,000.” Jeremy told me that’s what I made for him. That’s what allowed his wife, a schoolteacher in New Hampshire, to retire.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he said. To which I replied with the most logical of points: “Jensen deserves the thanks, not me.”
I was referring to Jensen Huang, the CEO of my finest stock pick ever, the tiny semiconductor business that is now one of the world’s three largest companies, jousting with Microsoft and Apple over the past couple of years for the honor.
How did Jeremy know to buy Nvidia when I mentioned it? For the same reason tens of thousands of people bought Nvidia on June 20, 2017, when I told the world that I loved the company so much that I renamed my dog after it. That rescue mutt had been known for years as Everest, but enough of that.
Taking into account a couple of stock splits the company has had since then, Nvidia traded at just under $4 at the time. Less than $4 invested that day would have gotten you $136 by the end of December 2024. Meaning $1,000 would have turned into $34,622—and $10,000 would have grown into a $346,218 win. Not too bad. But how did I realize that this company would become a $4 trillion holding? I renamed my dog to finally get people’s attention on what I thought, hoped, and truly believed would be the greatest stock story of all time.
Everywhere I go now—at home or on vacation (and not just domestically), I meet people who thank me for Nvidia. I want to talk about it here not because I am a genius—I am decidedly not—but because it all comes back to process. Let me show you my work so you can have the confidence to seize on my process and build your own.
One of my earliest (of hundreds of ) pushes for Nvidia on Mad Money was on September 30, 2009. My interest in the company’s story, which I’d known years earlier but never paid much attention to, had been piqued by, of all places, a Best Buy conference call. The electronics retailer had discussed how netbooks were becoming a big growth category, so I looked up who was making the graphic processing units, or GPUs, for those types of computers. I learned that Nvidia—a company I had previously known only as a gaming chip maker—was the leader in the space, and I recommended the stock.
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