Syeda Seirut Javed
4 min read
We just published the list of Inside Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust: 10 Stocks He Actually Owns, and Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) ranked 9th on this list.
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.
Palo Alto Networks made our list when Cramer named it as one of two cybersecurity stocks his Charitable Trust owned. His response to a Mad Money caller gave us a public record of the holding and his view of its place in the portfolio.
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.
