Inside Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust: 10 Stocks He Actually Owns

Jim Cramer started his Charitable Trust in 2005 with $3 million of his own money. According to CNBC, Cramer’s own investment is at risk, and the trust distributes its investment income and realized capital gains to charity. The CNBC Investing Club gives subscribers a way to follow that portfolio. Members can see how much of it Cramer has committed to each stock, when he adds to a position or sells shares, and how he and his team explain those decisions. For investors who count on dividend checks, it’s worth a closer look at which of those companies kept paying shareholders even when business slowed.

Disseminating his investing lessons on Mad Money, Cramer described one way he builds the trust’s cash reserves. When a stock rallies, he sometimes sells part of the position. If the shares keep climbing, the trust still owns shares it can sell at a higher price. If the market falls, he has money to buy companies he likes better. He went on to say:

I’m saying I believe it’s essential to raise some cash during or after a rally, emphasis on some. Really, that’s the goal. I don’t care how much you like your stocks. Not selling something to raise cash when the market’s making it easy for you is downright reckless. With the Charitable Trust, I’ve taken my cash position at times up to around 20% when I sense too much euphoria. When the market eventually pulled back, put that… cash back to work in stocks we liked a lot more than the ones we previously sold.

By September 1, the trust held more than 15% in cash, and Cramer was cutting its exposure to data centers. In the same month, he singled out one chip designer he wished the trust had held on to longer, even though it had made a sizable profit on the shares. On November 11, he acknowledged that some of the shares he had sold were already trading higher. He still expected AI spending to grow. What concerned him was how many businesses in the portfolio depended on the same construction boom, from chipmakers to suppliers of networking and cooling equipment. He was willing to miss some of the upside to bring that risk down.

Methodology

We identified 10 stocks Jim Cramer has publicly said the Charitable Trust owns. For each, we examined what he told viewers about the investment and the business developments shareholders have had to weigh since. We listed the stocks in ascending order of the hedge fund sentiment of each stock, according to Insider Monkey’s Q2 database of over 1000 hedge funds.

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Inside Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust: 10 Stocks He Actually Owns

10. CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD)

CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) signed an agreement on November 3 to acquire Fiddler AI, which helps companies monitor how their AI agents behave. On the same day, the company announced a Falcon Guardian feature that can shut down an unauthorized AI agent and block it from running again. For a company letting software act on its behalf, those tools address two needs. A security team may have to stop an action immediately and then find out why the agent attempted it.

Subscriptions generated $1.40 billion of CrowdStrike’s $1.47 billion in fiscal second-quarter sales. Annual recurring revenue, the yearly value of its recurring business at quarter-end, rose 25% to $5.84 billion. It is worth noting that the company recorded a $33.2 million operating loss under standard accounting rules.

Cramer was already taking profits in cybersecurity in August, when he explained how he had handled the trust’s stakes in CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. On October 1, Cramer said the trust still owned CrowdStrike after the shares rallied 39% in the third quarter. He described what he thought buyers were beginning to appreciate about cybersecurity as other software stocks also recovered.

9. Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) 

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) is selling companies a way to test their defenses continuously. On September 22, its Unit 42 security team introduced a service that uses AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI to look for weaknesses, test whether an attacker could exploit them, and help security teams prioritize repairs. For customers accustomed to commissioning periodic security reviews, the reason to pay for ongoing testing is that changes to a network can introduce fresh vulnerabilities between reviews.

Palo Alto’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue rose 34% to $3.41 billion. The annualized recurring value of its next-generation security business reached $9.10 billion, but operating income under standard accounting rules fell to $172 million from $497 million a year earlier. The November 18 earnings release will give investors a first look at whether operating income recovered in the new fiscal year.

A Mad Money caller wanted Cramer’s opinion of SentinelOne. Cramer already owned Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike through his Charitable Trust, so the question for him was what a third security stock would add. In answering, he went a step further and considered whether the trust needed both stocks it already owned.