Meta's latest move in the AI talent war — plus Cramer's 4 quick hits on the market

An important development from the financial markets: Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Stocks pulled back on Friday , capping off another volatile week. Weakness in the hyperscalers — Amazon , Alphabet , Meta Platforms , and Microsoft — weighed on the major averages.

The S & P 500 is on pace to lose more than 1%, while the Nasdaq is headed for a decline of over 2%. The Dow is roughly flat on the week. Semiconductors and AI infrastructure stocks bore the brunt of the early selling pressure, though several names, including Micron , Sandisk , GE Vernova , Eaton , and Qnity Electronics , rebounded as dip buyers stepped in.

Economic Details

4 quick hits from Jim: People are broadening their tech purview to aerospace, as it is catching bids everywhere. GE Aerospace is up nearly 3%, while Club name Honeywell Aerospace is up more than 2%. You can pick one tech stock, but don't buy it until the end of the day, as I fear that those on margin will have to panic or go.

Healthcare is going to be right for some time. I even think stocks like Abbott Labs have to be examined. But Johnson & Johnson is the way to go, as I think it can really break out here, as it was a spectacular quarter.

We raised our price target on the Club stock. Industrials are going to be hard because of the exposure to data centers. Go with the transport stocks instead.

Analyst Views

Go with FedEx and FedEx Freight . (In the simplest terms, transportation stocks are companies that move goods and people. ) Another sign of the intensifying AI talent war : Longtime Amazon Web Services executive Dave Brown is leaving after 19 years and is in talks to join Meta, according to multiple reports.

Brown led AWS's compute and machine learning services division, overseeing key AI infrastructure offerings, including Amazon's custom Trainium AI chips. When the Investing Club interviewed him earlier this year, he argued that the future of AI infrastructure will be won by improving "price performance," delivering more computing power at a lower cost through custom silicon. If customers "can find a chip and a processor that allows them to get more performance for fewer dollars, well, that's a very strategic advantage for their business," Brown said.

That philosophy has become more important as AI models grow more computationally intensive and power-hungry. If Brown brings that expertise to Meta, it could strengthen the company's ambitions to eventually build out a cloud computing business, a strategy that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said is "definitely on the table" at the company's shareholder meeting in May. Jim confirmed earlier this month that Meta plans to sell computing power to outside customers to create another revenue stream.

Financial markets are tracking the development closely as investors assess the likely impact.