CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Thursday that investors risk missing out on the market’s biggest opportunities by focusing too much on the past. The key, he said, is to secure profits along the way.
“History doesn’t always repeat, it doesn’t always rhyme, and sometimes we just don’t understand what’s going on,” the “Mad Money” host said. “That doesn’t seem to stop the bears from bringing up history as a way to scare you out of your stock.”
Cramer said investors should learn from past market cycles, but warned that relying too much on historical comparisons can obscure what fundamentally has changed. he pointed to Nvidia, Ciscoand working day As an example of how he thinks skeptics are applying old lessons to new situations.
“There are always a lot of seemingly intelligent skeptics in any market who hardly want to be called bears, enlightened historians, or at least think of themselves as such,” Kramer said. “I can’t stand these people.”
As for Nvidia, Kramer said skeptics are questioning the company’s new efforts to create securities backed by its computing power because the value of semiconductors has historically fallen rapidly. But Cramer pointed to Neocloud and argued that Nvidia’s GPUs are different from chips from decades ago. core weave announced this week that it will be renting six-year-old NVIDIA GPUs through 2029 at higher prices than before. CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator told CNBC on Wednesday that Nvidia’s software updates are helping extend the useful life of these chips.
“There has never been anything like that historically, but how can history repeat itself when the details are so different?” Kramer asked rhetorically Thursday.
He also pointed to Cisco, whose stock price has plummeted by about 90% after becoming the world’s most valuable company during the dot-com boom. Kramer said that when Cisco finally surpassed its dot-com era stock price in December 2025, skeptics warned that history would repeat itself. Rather, the stock has risen more than 40% since then, reflecting how the company has changed, he said.
Workday is another example, he said. Stocks have been weighed down by concerns that AI could disrupt traditional software companies, but reports that Silver Lake is in talks to take Workday private challenges the bearish view that these companies are doomed to lose value, he said.
Kramer acknowledged that the AI and data center boom will reach its peak at some point. But his argument is that past booms will eventually end, so investors shouldn’t avoid owning tech stocks in the meantime.
“That doesn’t negate all the pre-peak gains in data centers,” he said.
