Here are our 4 best stocks — and 4 worst stocks — of the first half of 2023

Technology stocks ought to take a bow. They were the standout performers in the first half of 2023, powering Wall Street — and the Club’s portfolio – higher over the first and second quarters in impressive fashion. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite recorded its best first half of a year since 1983, rising 32.7% through Friday’s session. In the three months ended June 30, the Nasdaq climbed around 13%. The S & P 500 rose 8.3% in the second quarter to extended its 2023 advance to 15.9%. It’s just the 11th time since 1950 that the S & P has recorded a first-half gain of 15% or more. For its part, the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted a positive first-half performance — but lagged significantly behind the S & P 500 and Nasdaq as it maintains relatively less tech exposure. After rising 3.4% in the second quarter, the 30-stock Dow stood higher by 3.8% year to date. Our portfolio largely followed suit. Our tech holdings, led by Nvidia ‘s (NVDA) ferocious rally, were the clear-cut winners. On the other hand, our biggest laggards varied across sectors — from retail to health care. In most cases, their weakness stemmed from a pivotal event, like disappointing earnings. Here’s a closer look at the Club’s best and worst performers in the first half of 2023, starting with the four winningest stocks. The winners NVDA YTD mountain Nvidia’s year-to-date stock performance. Nvidia occupies the top spot, with shares nearly tripling in value as they rose 189.5% in the first half of the year. The semiconductor firm, which is now worth more than $1 trillion, also was the top-performing S & P 500 stock in the first half. Investor optimism around Nvidia’s essential role in enabling artificial intelligence fueled the stock’s impressive gains. On the hardware side, Nvidia makes cutting-edge graphics processers used to train large-language models, like the popular ChatGPT. And its computing platform CUDA and pretrained models on the software side also create the company’s competitive advantage in AI . Demand for Nvidia’s AI chips has soared, which contributed to the jaw-dropping second-quarter guidance issued in May . It’s also why Nvidia was recently able to downplay potential new U.S. restrictions on chip exports to China : Demand everywhere else is so strong. The market has clearly taken note as estimates have been revised higher. Wall Street now expects Nvidia to earn $7.58 per share in fiscal 2024, according to an average of analyst estimates compiled by FactSet. Remarkably, that’s up 75% from the $4.34 per share analysts expected Nvidia to earn in FY24 at the end of 2022. After entering a correction phase last year, Nvidia’s gaming business has appeared to bottom, too, further boosting sentiment around the stock. META YTD mountain Meta Platform’s year-to-date stock performance. Meta Platforms (META) is both the No. 2 Club stock and S & P 500 constituent in the first half, gaining 138.5% over the first and second quarters. Meta rose 35.4% in Q2 alone. Investors have bought into the Facebook and Instagram parent’s “year of efficiency” story, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out Feb. 1 alongside the company’s fourth-quarter earnings . And it only took a few months for those efficiency gains to show up in the social media giant’s financial results . Meta’s solid execution has also been met with some encouraging signs in the digital advertising market after a downturn last year, and increasing traction in Reels, its short-form video feature to battle TikTok. Meta is wisely using AI to attract more advertisers through improved monetization, and to fuel its content recommendations for Reels to grow engagement. More generally, we see Meta as a likely winner in the AI race. PANW YTD mountain Palo Alto Networks’ year-to-date stock performance. Palo Alto Networks (PANW) advanced 83.1% over the first and second quarters, making it the third-best performing Club holding in the first half. In the second quarter, in particular, the cybersecurity stock rose about 28%. Palo Alto’s success this year has been driven by a number of factors, including its impressive stretch of profitability, which enabled the company to join the S & P 500 . Its inclusion became effective in late June, meaning index funds and ETFs that track the S & P 500 needed to buy PANW shares at any price to fulfil their purpose. Palo Alto also has benefited from cybersecurity being a resilient pocket of enterprise software budgets. The company’s platform approach appeals to value-conscious customers who want to consolidate their security spending to fewer vendors; Palo Alto’s offerings include physical firewalls and cloud-native products. This general trend around consolidation should help Palo Alto down the road, too. AMD YTD mountain Advanced Micro Devices’ year-to-date stock performance. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) rose 16.2% in the second quarter to bring its first-half gains to 75.9%, the fourth-best performance of any Club stock. The bulk of those gains came in the first quarter, during which AMD soared 51.3%. AMD’s best single-day performance in the first half fell on Feb. 1, the day after CEO Lisa Su said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that its struggling PC business was bottoming. That was an important AMD-specific development that helped send its stock up 12.6% in one day. More generally, the chipmaker’s stock has seen a huge lift from AI tailwinds across the technology industry. To that end, AMD’s second-best day this year was May 25, the day after Nvidia’s blowout earnings and guidance. AMD rose 11.6% in sympathy. While we see AMD’s chips playing a part in the AI ecosystem in the coming years, for now it’s a distant second to Nvidia . We took some profits in AMD in late May, believing its AI-fueled stock gains were getting ahead of any AI-related revenue contribution. What’s the common denominator among the first-half winners? Wall Street’s aversion to high-multiple tech stocks — a key theme throughout 2022 — changed with the turn in the calendar. Last year, value stocks were all the rage. Now, the market has shifted back to favoring growth, particularly growth tied to artificial intelligence. It’s worth noting that three of the four first-half winners also were standout performers in the second quarter, specifically. If our list were to only focus on top-four Q2 performers, Nvidia, Meta and Palo Alto would’ve made the cut, while AMD would’ve been replaced by Eli Lilly (LLY). The drugmaker’s stock soared nearly 37% in the second quarter, after declining 5.8% in the first quarter. Its strong April-through-June gains were fueled by promising Alzheimer’s drug-trial data and a range of encouraging news around its obesity-and-diabetes therapies . The laggards FL YTD mountain Foot Locker’s year-to-date performance. Foot Locker (FL) shares fell 28.3% in the first half of the year, the biggest decline for a Club stock during that stretch. After rising 5% in first quarter, Foot Locker shares plummeted 31.7% in the April-through-June quarter. Foot Locker’s disappointing first-quarter results , reported on May 19, were the primary reason for its bad first-half performance. The stock fell 27.2% in a single session in response, closing at $30.21 per share. Foot Locker had closed the prior session at $41.52 per share, meaning it was slightly positive for the year after closing Dec. 30 at $37.79. We invested in Foot Locker as a turnaround story , so we had low expectations going into the first-quarter print. Still, the actual results and lowered full-year guidance proved to be worse than we expected. The bottom line is Foot Locker’s situation got materially worse after management rolled out its “Lace Up” strategy at an investor day in March. The Club, like many others on Wall Street , had been impressed by the plan outlined during that event. To get the stock going, proof will be in the pudding. The business turnaround will need to start showing some momentum. EL YTD mountain Estee Lauder’s year-to-date stock performance. Shares of Estee Lauder (EL) dropped 20.9% in the first half of 2023, making the high-end cosmetics company the second-worst Club stock over that timeframe. After a less-than-1% drop in the first quarter, EL shares fell about 20% in the second quarter. China’s economic recovery has not lived up to expectations, which contributed to major inventory issues at Estee Lauder’s important duty-free stores because products weren’t selling as well as hoped. This dynamic led Estee Lauder to issue a very weak fourth-quarter outlook on May 3 , sending its stock down 17% in one session. Estee Lauder’s China opportunity over the long term still looks attractive. But more immediately, the big question for investors is what the company’s fiscal year 2024 guidance will look like. We expect it’ll take a few quarters to work off that excess inventory. We’re willing to be patient with the stock — and even bought some on weakness in mid-May — because we don’t think Estee Lauder’s brands have lost appeal. It’s easier to work through inventory issues when brand reputation is still intact. HAL YTD mountain Halliburton’s year-to-date stock performance. The third-worst first-half performer is Halliburton (HAL), which fell about 16% during that stretch. The oilfield services provider actually saw its stock gain 4.8% in the second quarter, but was stuck in the bottom four after a 19.6% first-quarter decline. Weakness in oil prices, tied in part to economic uncertainty, has been a drag on Halliburton and other energy names. West Texas Intermediate crude ended the second quarter under $71 per barrel, about $10 below where it started the year. Updates from Halliburton haven’t been terrible in 2023 — delivering quality fourth-quarter numbers in January with an update to its cash-return policy that links a portion of future dividends and stock buybacks to free cash flow. Then, in late April, its first-quarter results were solid , too, with management talking up cash returns and its outlook on demand. However, an overhang on the stock has been investor concern about services pricing, and whether a key tailwind for Halliburton in recent years is fading. If true, that’s good for our exploration-and-production companies like Coterra Energy (CTRA), but less so for Halliburton. HUM YTD mountain Humana’s year-to-date stock performance. Humana (HUM) dropped 12.7% in the first half of 2023, rounding out the bottom-four Club stocks between January and June. Well into the second quarter, Humana’s stock was essentially flat for the year — it closed Dec. 30 at $512.19 per share and then at $512.63 per share June 13. Then UnitedHealth Group (UNH) warned about elevated medical costs among seniors , driven in part by a rise in outpatient procedures. Managed-care stocks were slammed, including Humana, which tumbled 11.2%, to $455 per share. Humana has failed to gain traction since, ending the second quarter at $447.13 per share. On June 16 in a securities filing , the company indicated that it also is seeing an uptick in surgeries and other medical services. While HUM encouragingly reaffirmed its full-year earnings guidance, the company now expects its benefits expense ratio, a closely watched industry metric, to come in toward the top of its full-year guidance range. The common denominator among the worst-performing Club stocks is a bit less obvious than with the winners. But with three of the four losers, we can point to major events that really torpedoed sentiment around the stock: earnings for Foot Locker and Estee Lauder, while UNH’s warning for Humana. All three companies had major pivot points within the second quarter that prompted investors to head for the exit and changed the narrative around the stock. Halliburton’s presence in the bottom four, in some sense, represents the still-present recession fears among a segment of the investment community, and what happens when there’s concern that a big Covid tailwind – pricing power – might soon recede. If our list were focus only on the second quarter, Halliburton would have been replaced by Disney (DIS), which fell 10.8% in April-through-June period; the other three would’ve made the cut. The media and entertainment giant’s stock ended the second quarter nearly 12% below where it traded before its fiscal second-quarter results were released May 10. DIS shares tumbled nearly 9% the next day . (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long.) 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.