The Investing Club’s top 10 things to watch in the stock market Thursday
The Club’s top 10 things to watch Thursday, Feb. 12 — Today’s newsletter was written by portfolio analyst Zev Fima and reporter Morgan Chittum. 1. Wall Street is on track for a higher open after the three major averages ended yesterday in the red. Oil, gold, and the 10-year yield are all ticking lower this morning. The January consumer inflation report looms tomorrow. 2. Jim Cramer marveled at the rally in industrial stocks in a column this morning for Investing Club members. Club holdings like DuPont , Honeywell, GE Vernova and Eaton have all been on a tear in 2026. Our biggest gainer in the group has been DuPont, up roughly 28% year to date. JPMorgan hiked its price target on DuPont to $57 from $50 after first-quarter earnings on Tuesday. 3. Club name Cisco reported a strong quarter and raised its outlook for the year last night , but shares are nevertheless down about 7% in the premarket. Cisco is a victim of high memory prices crunching gross margins and the weight of high expectations considering the stock was hovering near highs. We trimmed our position ahead of the report to protect against this outcome. 4. Samsung said it has begun mass production of its next-generation high bandwidth memory offering, known as HBM4, and has shipped commercial products to customers. That is welcome news as the AI computing market needs all the HBM it can get, as Cisco’s earnings release painfully reminded us. 5. Anthropic is set to close a $20 billion funding round that values the AI startup behind the Claude models at $350 billion, Bloomberg News reported . It’s important for the broader AI trade that private LLM players like Anthropic and OpenAI can successfully raise funds. These fund-raising rounds will ultimately help pay for the cloud providers’ massive data center investments and key areas of the market, like chipmakers and energy-related industrials, depend on continued compute demand. 6. Case in point: Club name Meta Platforms announced it’s breaking ground on a new data center outside of Indianapolis that will cost more than $10 billion and deliver 1 gigawatt of compute capacity. With Meta saying its 2026 capex will be between $115 billion to $135 billion, projects like these illustrate where that spending is going. 7. American Electric Power reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results before the open, as the Ohio-based utility continues to benefit from high electricity demand. AEP signed agreements for 28 GW of load capacity since October, bringing total energy commitments to 56 GW by 2030. To meet this demand, AEP noted it’s secured over 10 GW of gas turbine capacity from major manufacturers, like GE Vernova. 8. Citi hiked its price target on Club name Home Depot to $450 from $407, and kept a buy rating on the stock. That implies a roughly 15% upside from yesterday’s close. We’re still waiting on the housing market to become a meaningful tailwind for Home Depot. 9. JPMorgan downgraded Kraft Heinz to a sell rating and cut its price target to $22 from $24, following the packaged food maker’s lower-than expected organic sales and earnings outlook for the year. Analysts also worry that Kraft Heinz’s plans to grow U.S. volumes is an uphill climb. 10. Citi upped its price target on McDonald’s to $375 from $371, with analysts believing that share gains will accelerate following strong fourth-quarter results. The fast-food giant has leaned into value offerings and promotions, and it has paid off. Sign up for my Top 10 Morning Thoughts on the Market email newsletter for free (See here for a full list of the stocks at 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.
