‘Accept the fact that stocks go down,’ Jim Cramer says of Nvidia

Nvidia (NVDA) — the top-performing stock in the S&P 500 so far this year — is unlikely to embark on a one-way march higher in the near term, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Monday.

Even with a more-than 4% pop Monday, to nearly $428 a share, the stock of the leading artificial-intelligence chipmaker is down nearly 9% this month.

“I want to warn people: Nobody likes Nvidia [long term] more than I do, but this stock is not rallying yet. It can churn maybe, flop and chop,” Cramer said in response to Wall Street’s latest bullish research on Nvidia. Morgan Stanley on Monday reiterated Nvidia as its top pick ahead of the company’s Aug. 23 earnings report.

Before its recent pullback, Nvidia’s market value had more than tripled this year amid a surge of optimism around its AI opportunity. Its year-to-date gains stand at around 192%, as of Monday.

Cramer said Nvidia’s cool down offers a lesson for investors: Stocks move in two directions.

“Just because a stock has a great product — we know that [Nvidia’s] got the graphics cards for AI — does not mean it can grow the sky,” said Cramer, whose Charitable Trust — the portfolio used by the CNBC Investing Club — has long owned Nvidia.

“I still like it. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m saying buy the stock [here],” he added. “We have stocks in this market that go down,” Cramer added. “Stop sweating the program, and just accept the fact that stocks go down.”

(Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long NVDA . See here for a full list of the stocks.)

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