Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Comeback continues: The S & P 500 is rallying for the fifth session in a row, up nearly 4% this week and almost completely erasing all of last week’s brutal sell-off to start September. Tech stocks are the big winner, with semiconductor companies such as Nvidia , Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices all posting double-digit percent gains this week. All three chipmakers are Club holdings. Jim Cramer said earlier Friday that Nvidia received a do-over from Wall Street . The overall tech sector in the S & P 500 has climbed more than 7% week to date. It is closely followed in second place by consumer discretionary, which is up just over 6%. Its strength could be the result of investors believing that the Federal Reserve’s upcoming rate cuts will help ease the labor market and boost consumer spending. Energy was the lone sector in the red week to date as U.S. oil futures struggled, trading below $70 per barrel. Financials also were underperformers, up roughly 0.6% this week, after a brutal session Tuesday in reaction to a downbeat update on interest income from JPMorgan’s chief operating officer at a conference. Love for Lilly : An analyst call we didn’t get to on the Morning Meeting was Citi resuming coverage on Eli Lilly with a buy rating and a price target of $1,060 a share. There wasn’t really anything new and revelatory in the report, which could partially explain why the stock is trading lower on Friday. Lilly shares outperformed Thursday after announcing plans to invest $1.8 billion in manufacturing across two facilities in Ireland. Of that investment, $1 billion will go to increase production of biologic active ingredients, including the one in Kisunla, Lilly’s recently approved treatment for early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease. We haven’t heard a lot about Kisunla since the Food and Drug Administration cleared it in July , but this announcement is a good indicator of Lilly’s thinking about its long-term trajectory. The other $800 million is going toward expanding a facility that makes GLP-1 diabetes and obesity treatments. We welcome news like this because Lilly’s aggressive push to expanding manufacturing of GLP-1s creates a competitive moat that shallow-pocketed peers cannot match. Since 2020, Lilly has committed more than $20 billion to build, expand and acquire manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Europe. Fed up next: The big event next week is the Fed’s two-day policy meeting, which wraps up Wednesday. Of course, all eyes are on this September meeting because the central bank is widely expected to lower rates for the first time since 2020. But that’s not the only reason it is important. Members of the Fed’s policymaking arm, the Federal Open Market Committee, also will update their 2024 to 2026 economic projections. The most scrutinized aspect will be the so-called dot plots, a chart of individual central bankers’ expectations of where rates are headed in the future. We can debate the actual value provided by the dot plots, but it still offers clues into how many interest rate cuts members are forecasting into year-end and 2025. (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.
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street.
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