On Friday, Mad Money host, Jim Cramer, shared his perspective on how investors might approach the stock market given the current economic uncertainty.
“You gotta make a list and decide what you can live with and what’s simply too dicey to buy. That my good friends, is how you have to think about stocks right now if you’re willing to be a slave to this crazy market in order to try to pocket what you can during this difficult period.”
READ ALSO: Jim Cramer’s Game Plan: 15 Stocks to Watch and Jim Cramer Discussed These 12 Stocks.
Cramer emphasized that before making any trading decision unless the plan is to hold it long-term and ride out near-term turbulence, investors should run what he described as a “gauntlet” of significant considerations. The first question he raised is whether the company in question does business in any foreign country. While it is common for investors to be cautious about China these days, Cramer pointed out that any nation could suddenly draw the ire of the U.S. president.
“Now, it’s one thing to be worried about China, but it’s another to recognize that any country could at any time find itself on the president’s bad side. And once they get on his bad side, any American company doing real business there, finished.”
Cramer stressed the importance of avoiding companies that rely on international operations or resources. The second point on his checklist involved evaluating whether a company is cyclical, essentially, if it is vulnerable to swings in the broader economy. Highlighting the scale of the current trade friction, Cramer pointed out that the United States is effectively embargoing $439 billion worth of goods from China. He noted that it is likely to push inflation to levels not seen in a very long time. He added:
“It’s hard to disagree with that assessment and I say that as someone who generally supports a trade crackdown on the Chinese government.”
Our Methodology
For this article, we compiled a list of 10 stocks that were discussed by Jim Cramer during the episode of Mad Money aired on April 11. We listed the stocks in the order that Cramer mentioned them. We also provided hedge fund sentiment for each stock as of the fourth quarter of 2024, which was taken from Insider Monkey’s database of over 1,000 hedge funds.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
Jim Cramer is Bullish on These 10 Stocks
10. CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 77
Cramer commented on CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) as he said:
“Finally, they’re a little pricey but I want to own some cybersecurity companies and the trust owns two of them because they can’t really be tariffed and they have no natural enemies, including states that have sided against us in the trade war. For the cybersecurity firms, countries with state-sponsored hackers like China, they are an annuity stream. We have not one, but two for the trust, as I mentioned, Palo Alto, PANW, and CrowdStrike, CRWD. And I’ve got to tell you, either one is just terrific. Just terrific.”
CrowdStrike (NASDAQ:CRWD) offers cybersecurity solutions, with the Falcon platform being a key product. The platform includes a full set of tools focused on endpoint protection. TimesSquare Capital Management stated the following regarding CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“Among the wide variety of Information Technology companies, we prefer critical system providers, specialized component designers, systems that improve productivity or efficiency for their clients, and others that are growing their shares of corporate IT budgets. CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) provides cybersecurity solutions. Its unified platform offers cloud-delivered protection of endpoints, cloud workloads, identity, and data. The company delivered solid fiscal third quarter results that exceeded the high end of guidance and boosted its share price by 22%. Notably, there was resilient gross revenue retention that highlights CrowdStrike’s best in class product offering. New business win rates remained consistent and trending upwards. Following its mid-July outage, many customers have upgraded to the Falcon Flex program, which enables them to adopt a broader product offering.”
9. Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 83
Coming to Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW), Cramer commented:
“Finally, they’re a little pricey but I want to own some cybersecurity companies and the trust owns two of them because they can’t really be tariffed and they have no natural enemies, including states that have sided against us in the trade war. For the cybersecurity firms, countries with state-sponsored hackers like China, they are an annuity stream. We have not one, but two for the trust, as I mentioned, Palo Alto, PANW, and CrowdStrike, CRWD. And I’ve got to tell you, either one is just terrific. Just terrific.”
Palo Alto (NASDAQ:PANW) delivers cybersecurity solutions that cover network protection, cloud security, and virtual firewalls. It also offers tools for threat detection, prevention, and response across different systems and services.
