It’s that time of year when business tycoons and influential world leaders gather in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. Speakers at this week’s meeting, which are addressing a range of global issues, included Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang on Tuesday and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde on Wednesday. President Donald Trump will speak by teleconference on Thursday. Larry Fink, CEO of the BlackRock club, is scheduled to be part of an economic panel on Friday. Among the list of nearly 3,000 participants are the principals of the Club’s four other holdings: two of our newest positions CrowdStrike and Goldman Sachs, and two portfolio veterans Microsoft and Salesforce. During a series of interviews with CNBC from Davos, the leaders discussed everything from cybersecurity to the generative adoption of artificial intelligence to the implications of Trump’s four more years in the White House. CrowdStrike On Tuesday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz discussed how the cybersecurity industry is changing as more and more companies integrate AI. The demand for cyber solutions will increase as businesses become more vulnerable to breaches, given how much data goes into AI models. Crucially, Kurtz also addressed the global IT crisis caused by CrowdStrike’s bugged software update in July. “We’ve documented the issues we’ve found. We’ve corrected them. And again, we’ve talked to customers. Broken bones heal stronger.” Kurtz said. “[Customers] know that’s not going to happen again.” With post-blackout lows of around $201 a share on Aug. 5, CrowdStrike shares, as of Wednesday afternoon, were trading up 88% at $377. The club launched a position on October 16 at about $308 per share In the cybersecurity sector, we also own other Palo Alto Networks, which also had a strong week Goldman Sachs CEO, David Solomon told CNBC on Wednesday that more Wall Street deals were on the horizon in 2025 under the new Trump administration, as potential investment banking (IB) clients are expected to face more few obstacles in pursuing mergers and acquisitions and other types of deals “There’s no doubt that the private equity and venture capital community has been on the sidelines for the last couple. years,” Solomon said. “From what we see from within the organization, the activity levels [and] the set of things that people want to bring to market should allow us to see a significant increase in the pace of deal activity in 2025.” The CEO added: “We’re coming out of a very, very tough regulatory environment across all industries . … Change in this is something that can be quite constructive. But that’s going to take time.” In afternoon trading, it has gained 12% since we started buying Microsoft shares. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s long-held CEO, talked Wednesday about how was AI The Impact on the Corporate Workforce While some worry about how the technology could lead to job losses, Nadella is enabling companies to restructure and redefine the roles they play, not only The company has floated offerings such as its AI virtual assistant, Copilot, but management recently said it would invest $80 billion in AI-enabled data centers in fiscal 2025 alone. productivity because in a sense AI really helps reduce the drudgery in a lot of our work,” Nadella said. “What AI does honestly is lower the floor and raise the ceiling for all of us. So that means [as] the level of expertise within an organization increases, productivity increases [too].” Salesforce Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff touted the success of Agentforce, the company’s new suite of AI automation tools. Because of Agentforce, Benioff said Wednesday that 2025 is the first year in the company’s history that it will not hire no new software engineers. It’s not because I’m not writing a lot of new products. It’s because our software engineers are 30% to 50% more productive than they were 18 months ago.” He added, “So this technology, agent technology, again, is making our engineers more productive. Our support engineers [are] more productive. [Our] salespeople are more productive, [and] our marketers are more productive.” Like Microsoft, Salesforce has also been a longtime Club name. (Jim Cramer’s charity is long CRWD, GS, CRM, MSFT, BLK. See here for a full list of stocks. ) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his portfolio CHARITY.AND THE TERMS AND PRIVACY POLICY ALONG WITH OUR DISCLAIMER THERE ARE NO OBLIGATIONS OR OBLIGATIONS CREATED BY YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTMENT CLUB NO.
Swiss police patrol outside the Congress Center before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 19, 2025.
Yves Herman | Reuters
It’s that time of year when business tycoons and influential world leaders gather in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.