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. Rally fizzles: The major U.S. stock indexes faded in afternoon trading Wednesday, giving up their earlier gains in a volatile week. The S & P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.5% and 0.6%, respectively. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped about 0.7%. Before the reversal Wednesday, Wall Street had been on pace to claw back a little more of Monday’s steep losses. Tuesday’s solid session saw the S & P 500 and Nasdaq gain roughly 1% each and the Dow climb 294 points, or 0.76%. As we wrote Tuesday, declaring a bottom in this environment is not an easy task. Wednesday’s trading is driving that point home even more. We’ve continued to stay active on the trade front, buying more of Advanced Micro Devices and Wells Fargo on Wednesday morning and Nextracker a few hours later. Meanwhile, we trimmed Abbott Labs in the morning and Procter & Gamble in the afternoon. AMD is slightly higher Wednesday, but our other two chip stocks — Nvidia and Broadcom — were among our biggest laggards. It’s been a particularly turbulent period for the group. Cyber cheer: Leading the way within our portfolio is Palo Alto Networks , which added about 2% after peer Fortinet posted stellar quarterly results on Tuesday evening. Investors celebrated signs of more demand for cybersecurity offerings as Fortinet beat analysts’ earnings and revenue estimates. Shares of Fortinet soared more than 25% by the afternoon. Fortinet’s earnings serve as a good readthrough for Palo Alto’s upcoming release later this month. Although the two firms are competitors, Jim Cramer argued that “the fact that Fortinet had good business does not necessarily mean they are taking share from Palo Alto,” adding that “Palo Alto remains a strong buy for me. I think it’s terrific.” Fortinet’s earnings report also is welcome news for the entire cybersecurity sector after Crowdstrike caused one of the biggest IT outages in history with a faulty update last month. “We’ve had a glitch in cybersecurity ever since the problems with Crowdstrike, and people started thinking maybe this industry is more gloomy than we thought,” he said. For now, at least, Fortinet’s results seemed to brushed off these concerns. Up next: Eli Lilly is set to report before the bell Thursday, and all eyes will be on sales of its diabetes drug Mounjaro and weight-loss treatment Zepbound. That was always going to be the case, but rival Novo Nordisk’s earnings release Wednesday — dragged down by weaker-than-expected sales of its drugs that compete with Mounjaro and Zepbound — has managed to up the ante . It’s also Lilly’s first earnings report since its Alzheimer’s drug Kisunla secured U.S. approval on July 2. We’ll be looking for all the color management can offer on the rollout and sales expectations. Additionally, initial jobless claims are due out at 8:30 a.m. ET Thursday, providing the first major look at the U.S. labor market since the July jobs report Friday came in much weaker than expected. In last week’s jobless claims report, first-time filings jumped to an 11-month high. (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.
