Not long ago I was coming back from a haircut, a rare trip for me outside the New York Stock Exchange, and I heard a man’s voice calling me from the curb just behind Fearless Girl, a sculpture by the artist Kristen Visbal that I never fail to grin at when she catches my eye.

“Jim, can I shake your hand?” the man asked.

One day I will get over the fact that nice people want to stop and talk to me, tell me how they are doing in the market or how much they like “the show.” I always have time to say hello or give a fist pump, even a hug if demanded.

This time, it was a man named Jeremy, who said, “I want to show you something.” His wife said, “It’s something that has allowed me to retire.” Jeremy opened an app filled with stock listings, and he jabbed one line, a line that said “Nvidia, $2,545,000.” Jeremy told me that’s what I made for him. That’s what allowed his wife, a schoolteacher in New Hampshire, to retire.

“I can’t thank you enough,” he said. To which I replied with the most logical of points: “Jensen deserves the thanks, not me.”

I was referring to Jensen Huang, the CEO of my finest stock pick ever, the tiny semiconductor business that is now one of the world’s three largest companies, jousting with Microsoft and Apple over the past couple of years for the honor.

How did Jeremy know to buy Nvidia when I mentioned it? For the same reason tens of thousands of people bought Nvidia on June 20, 2017, when I told the world that I loved the company so much that I renamed my dog after it. That rescue mutt had been known for years as Everest, but enough of that.

Taking into account a couple of stock splits the company has had since then, Nvidia traded at just under $4 at the time. Less than $4 invested that day would have gotten you $136 by the end of December 2024. Meaning $1,000 would have turned into $34,622—and $10,000 would have grown into a $346,218 win. Not too bad. But how did I realize that this company would become a $4 trillion holding? I renamed my dog to finally get people’s attention on what I thought, hoped, and truly believed would be the greatest stock story of all time.

Everywhere I go now—at home or on vacation (and not just domestically), I meet people who thank me for Nvidia. I want to talk about it here not because I am a genius—I am decidedly not—but because it all comes back to process. Let me show you my work so you can have the confidence to seize on my process and build your own.

One of my earliest (of hundreds of ) pushes for Nvidia on Mad Money was on September 30, 2009. My interest in the company’s story, which I’d known years earlier but never paid much attention to, had been piqued by, of all places, a Best Buy conference call. The electronics retailer had discussed how netbooks were becoming a big growth category, so I looked up who was making the graphic processing units, or GPUs, for those types of computers. I learned that Nvidia—a company I had previously known only as a gaming chip maker—was the leader in the space, and I recommended the stock.

Taking into account splits, it was at 38 cents at the time. Jump ahead a few months, to June 2010. That was when I first had the chance to interview Nvidia’s CEO, a young guy named Jensen Huang. He wore a motorcycle jacket. He didn’t seem like an executive. He seemed like a gamer. A video gamer.

I mostly liked that he wasn’t the same as everyone else I interviewed. He didn’t seem to care much about anything other than fast chips. I was instantly smitten. I redoubled my efforts to talk up the company’s stock after an interview I did a bit later with the CEO of Audi North America. I had come to his showroom to ask some questions, because the cars are universally considered to be well made. When the interview ended, I asked him why his cars ran so well. He said, “It’s the technology.”

I knew not to be satisfied with that answer. After what might have qualified as badgering, I finally got him to tell me who made the components.

“Nvidia.”

“Impossible,” I said. “But they make gaming chips,” I replied.

He wanted to know if I thought he was making it up. And I knew then that there was something special here. Nvidia had in fact pretty much cornered the market on speedy chips, not just in game consoles but in cars, too. I just hadn’t realized it. The Audi CEO told me that Nvidia’s chips were lightning fast, much faster than Intel’s.

I couldn’t wait to get back to the office and dig in deeper. I couldn’t wait to connect with Jensen Huang and learn more.

But he wasn’t an easy man to get to know. I emailed. I told him quarter after quarter what a terrific company he had. But I didn’t hear back. Not until I mentioned to him that my daughter was doing service work helping troubled teens not far from where he grew up in Oregon did he respond—and he did so in an incredibly gracious way.

What I saw when I went to Nvidia’s headquarters was nothing short of phenomenal. Those gaming chips, the ones that ended up in the Audi? They were going to revolutionize the world. They were going to be used for something called artificial intelligence, real science-fiction devices that could generate near-lifelike images through mathematical computation and then make them perfect.

There were periods between 2020 and 2022 when I recommended Nvidia multiple times a week or, between my three shows, multiple times a day. I couldn’t help myself. How could everyone not see what was about to occur? A machine aided by a Nvidia chip could see, it could hear, it could think!

And then, one day, in November 2022, a man named Sam Altman, an old friend of Jensen’s, came out with ChatGPT, some six years after Jensen had hand-delivered Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer to OpenAI back in 2016. The world changed. One day it seemed that only a handful of people knew about AI. Then millions did, an astoundingly quick adoption.

The rest—including in May 2023, when Nvidia had the biggest positive earnings surprise a company has ever delivered, beating expectations handily and then offering a quarterly revenue forecast that was $4 billion above expectations—is history.

“But how can I find the next Nvidia?” you ask me. Okay, okay. You can’t afford an Audi, not that the head of Audi North America would help you anyway. You didn’t know that Nvidia’s chips could be used for more than gaming. You didn’t believe in a guy in a black leather jacket. How could you have spotted this one?

The answer is that even if you can’t spot Nvidia, you can spot something that will make you rich, I promise you. Every once in a while—not never, decidedly not never—an Nvidia comes along.

When I was a kid at Goldman Sachs, back in the mid-1980s, there was a fellow who ran the research department named Lee Cooperman. I was so young back then that I still had hair. I idolized Lee, and still do, because he never stopped having and talking about new ideas. One day, Lee said to me, “You ought to tell your clients to buy shares in Berkshire Hathaway.” My head was spinning. What did he mean? That was a clothing company, right? Did he wear their shirts? He was testing me. No way that Lee, one of our nation’s greatest investors, would ever be telling me to buy shares of a shirt company, would he? The one with the advertisement of the man with an eye patch? (I was thinking of Hathaway shirts, a fine company until it went broke in 2002. Not a great investment.)

Rather than show off my ignorance, I asked him, “Why that company?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Warren Buffett. Go read his annual report, let me know.”

I read it. Then I read it again. And again. Then I went back down to the research floor and told Lee I saw what he meant. “Then tell your clients to buy it.” That’s just what I did. After the fifth time, I gave up. The stock was selling for $1,400 a share, and who the heck wanted to buy a $1,400 stock? Certainly not anyone I was talking to. So I just dropped it. Never made another call on it because of the resistance to the price tag. Now that it is north of $700,000, that original price tag per share seems like a ridiculous reason not to buy the stock, doesn’t it?

Again, you could say not fair: You had a genius tell you about Berkshire Hathaway. You spotted Nvidia from your day-to-day Mad Money work. Guilty on all counts. But how many times have you heard of Warren Buffett in the past 10, 20, 30, or 40 years? And you could always recall the name of my dog; everybody could.