It's time for Nvidia to take a page out of Apple's playbook and do more for investors

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It's time for Nvidia to take a page out of Apple's playbook and do more for investors Published Mon, May 25 20261:53 PM EDTUpdated 16 Min Ago Jim Cramer@jimcramer First, welcome to all who have joined us for the first time. Your participation in the CNBC Investing Club means a great deal to us. We aspire to get it right for you, in the same way a wonderful Club member explained this weekend as we gardened together. He couldn't believe how much he had learned and how much he had prospered from it. I can only express gratitude to him. Here's why — from 1983 to 1987 at Goldman Sachs and from 1987 until 2001 at Cramer & Co, I succeeded in the process of making money for the richest people in the world. It meant little to most of them. I was part of some allocation. I crushed it, for lack of a better verb, but I got thanks from only one soul — a very rich and creative one — and no one else. But that's not the way it works now at the Club. My gardener friend expressed joy in learning about stocks. It wasn't because the cost is a microscopic percentage of what I used to charge. It was because he could figure out why stocks went up and down. We discussed the disappointment with Microsoft and whether it should be kicked out. I expressed my doubts about the company in the age of artificial intelligence and what it could do to the core, clunky Windows product, but I doubted that Amy Hood, the incredible CFO at the cloud and software giant, would tolerate that much underperformance. I pondered whether I had come to be too close to Marc Benioff, a special man who invented a company with a product that I loved, and here I am talking about Salesforce with its $40 billion in revenue. It's a small position in the Club portfolio and now a painful one. I want to give Salesforce and struggling Nike one more quarter — and then, I will have to try a lunch of "crow a la mode." Nike gets the chance if only because the last quarterly conference call gave it the slim right to endure the endless pain. It's up or nothing. Mostly, we talked about the winners, including our two "own, don't trade" names, Apple and Nvidia . The quiet upward propulsion of Apple is a great joy. It closed at a record high of nearly $309 per share on Friday — now up roughly 13.5% year to date. However, who wouldn't worry about the coming retirement of the spectacular CEO Tim Cook ? There are enough irons in the proverbial fire that the CEO-in-waiting, hardware specialist John Ternus, should be able to feast off the continual earnings conflagration. How about Nvidia? Let's talk about it. Nvidia still brings me great joy. I got an egg, ham — sadly not Taylor Ham — and cheese this weekend. On my order, the cook wrote not my name but "Nvidia" on the ticket — another proud Club member. I was tickled. But we are in a "what have you done for me lately business." I wish, during the transaction, I could have explained what must happen to get this stock to hunt again. It is undeniable that with this quarter, Nvidia has, indeed, lost its luster. It was a true blowout, but it sent the stock noticeably backward, which means that an earnings surprise for this behemoth no longer mattered. The skein of stock success has ended. The market cap is well-worn. The world heavyweight stock champion title is soon to go to another. It was swell while it lasted. Or should there be a question mark at the end of that sentence? I am not sure. But it got me thinking. What do you do about being the best, at having a tremendous surprise, and yet landing with more than a dud? You can, of course, say that the stock is up from $180 and that its ascension to a record close on May 14 of nearly $236 ( less a week before earnings last past Wednesday evening) was built not to last. I can handle that analysis, but we are talking playoffs here, and you are only as good as your last endeavor. Other stocks won. Is it time for us to admit defeat and strip the stock of its "own, don't trade" appellation? Perhaps. But I think it is time for the company to begin a different course, one having to do with its capital allocation — a strategy that has served Apple so well all these years. A long time ago, Luca Maestri of Apple became the first CFO to truly understand the power of raw, hard cash on the balance sheet and what it could mean for shareholders. My life and times with his more than 10-year regime were, at times, tempestuous, mostly because of my ignorance and adamance in the need to grow by acquisition. I had suggested once, a long, long time ago, that Apple should buy Netflix , something that I now think comes under the category of being lucky, not good, considering that it hung at $25 billion at the time. With a rigorous outfit like Apple, you can only live a short period of time on that prompt. Organic g