Mad Money 10/01/26 | Audio Only

My mission is simple: to make you money. I'm here to level the playing field for all investors. There's always a bull market somewhere, and I promise to help you find it. Mad Money starts now.

Hey, I'm Cramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Cramer, friends. I'm just trying to make a little money. My job is not just to entertain you, but to educate, do some teaching. Call me 1-800-743-CNBC. Tweet me at @JimCramer. When a quarter runs to its conclusion, you have to look at what went right and what went wrong. We talk a lot about bonds here. We talk a lot about oil. We know interest rates are flying and the Fed's tightening again. Always a tough situation for stocks. And a third aircraft carrier with 10,000 troops is reportedly on the way to the Gulf. Disconcerting. But on the first day of a brand new quarter, October 1, you need a compass. You know what provides you the best compass? What can navigate you the best? Last quarter. Luckily, today was a sedate session with the Dow advancing 21 points. The S&P climbing 0.19% and NASDAQ edging up 0.04%. Though I thought it was going to bust out until we heard about that aircraft carrier going to the Gulf, which stalled a much-needed bond market rally.

We all use our S&P 500 as our benchmark in this business. Now, the index finished up 2.03% for the third quarter. Not bad, not great. But if you owned Moderna, you got rich as it finished up 175%. Except it was a one-off game because Moderna, after years of toiling in the oncological wilderness, came up with a big one: a melanoma vaccine along with its partner Merck. The medical community is trying to figure out exactly how big this could be. Doctors are hoping this vaccine will virtually eliminate a recurrence of melanoma. And that's why the stock soared. It's come back a bit because of talk that there might not be a follow-through to other cancers. I get that. But the fact that Moderna, formerly viewed as a one-trick COVID pony, now has something that could be huge in cancer, I think it verifies the excitement and the move. Next up is one I had to look up called Pure Storage, up 66%. Turns out Pure Storage is pure storage, a data storage company, except for this quarter it's become a hyperscaler play.

Meta chose Pure Storage to handle some of its storage. Others may choose it, too. The stock's had a miraculous run. I wouldn't be surprised if it's got more upside. Some stocks are bounce-back stocks. Remember that SaaS apocalypse thing? That theory where all enterprise software would be destroyed by AI. Veeva, a company that makes software for life sciences, had been put through the AI displacement meat grinder. When the displacement didn't happen, those betting against it blew up and the whole group came running back. And that's how Veeva finished up 61%. At just over 30 times earnings and almost 135 points from the bottom in April, I've just got to say, uh-uh, I'm not going to be in this one. I'd rather be in the bounce-back that is Salesforce, a competitor that has a lot further to go. Finally, there's Palantir, also up 60%. I believe in these guys. They're among the fastest growers with great gross margins and smart, tough leadership. I've been using a $250 price target. I've been too aggressive so far. The stock got as high as 207 and then it got whopped. It is now back to 190 where I would still buy Palantir.

Okay, now how about the worst performers? The ones that really did not help. How about that? Versus Fair Isaac, the keeper of the FICO score, down 50%. Looks like a split to me. Bill Poole, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, jack of all trades, kind of believes FICO to be too powerful and too expensive. He's been trying to get more competition to make it cheaper to get a loan. I'm in favor of that. But the banks I surveyed, they actually like FICO. They think it's worked. It's worked for years. They trust it. Fair Isaac's been a winner for so long, but now has a powerful opponent in the government who wants it to go away. Next, AppLovin. Once a favorite of the momentum crowd for its ability to connect advertisers with the right audiences, had the field of in-app advertising all to itself until Android came in and wrecked the story, leading the stock to fall 44%. Now it's still a $94 billion company. That's just way too much market cap for me.

Hey, then there's a great one, Corning. It fell almost 40%. Now, this one's misleading because it spiked from $88 at the beginning of the year to $255 at the end of the previous quarter. So, Corning's trip down to 154 last quarter was pure profit-taking digging. We had a big moment this one for the Charitable Trust because we visited a Corning factory where they make the glass for Apple in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. From that trip, I became certain that fiber is the future of the data center, not copper. So, I'd happily buy this one back if it ever dips again, which it doesn't seem to want to. All right. What about the NASDAQ 100, which finished up 2.47%? The gains here don't offer much insight, sadly. Bitcoin finally rallied and that took Strategy. Remember, it used to be MicroStrategy, a leveraged Bitcoin repository, up 76%. Now look, if you like Bitcoin, I got an idea: buy Bitcoin. I already covered Palantir. Workday rallied 56%. Cloud software cohort came roaring back and we got some takeover chatter. We know that cybersecurity is incredibly important. We own CrowdStrike for the Charitable Trust. Now I'm feeling real good about it because it rallied 39%.

Losers. All right. There's that AppLovin again, down 44%. But here's another one, one that I buy: KLA Corp, semiconductor capital equipment maker. We have a widespread chip shortage that can't be solved without KLA. Hence what we sold today with Micron. Crazy that the stock's down 35%. Then there's Rocket Lab, off 31%. Some delays, some dilution, lower margins can even bring down rocket stocks. You want rockets? SpaceX. In the end, I think the best lessons from the third quarter came from the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which finished down 2.7%. The winner was Salesforce, up 46.5%. This is another SaaS apocalypse survivor. Still one more stock that was leaned on by that situational awareness outfit, giving Salesforce a chance to buy back a lot of stock much lower. And it reported a great quarter along with a big partnership with Anthropic. We're sticking with it for the Charitable Trust. Microsoft's rally is just beginning. The stock jumped 37.5% in the quarter as the market fell in love with enterprise software again. I think Microsoft has a lot more room to run because it's only up about 6% for the year, with Copilot, their AI product, on fire and some genuine acceleration to their Azure web services business as well as a hint of profitability from its data center build-out. I really like this one.

Chevron. The Iranian war raised prices. Venezuela beckoning. I still think it's my number one stock because they feel like the fossil fuel gang. And there's Amgen, catch-up trade, plus 16%. You know what I like? J&J, which just got absolutely blasted today. I buy that one. Dow losers, worst for last: Caterpillar stock. That one's like Corning. It had a monster run. Then it got hit with 24% profit-taking in the third quarter, just like Corning, given that its engines have become a very good source of data center power. This might be a buying opportunity even though the stock's run huge. IBM missed its quarter and fell 22%. You know my rules. You miss a quarter, you got to wait a quarter. I like IBM, but rules are rules. Then there's two that are such name-brand companies, I just can't bring myself to throw them away. Home Depot, down 19%, a bad pick for my Charitable Trust. And McDonald's, off 15%. Now Home Depot's hostage to interest rates, which had one of the most vicious increases in a quarter that I can ever recall. No relief to the death spot until rates go down. McDonald's, they can't seem to get out of their own way, but history says that when it gets this cheap on a price-earnings basis, well, why don't you stay tuned? Here's the bottom line.

Ultimately, I think we'll remember the third quarter as the moment when software bounced back and some amazing data center plays succumbed to profit-taking. But my big fear right now is the impact of higher interest rates on the stock market. We'll see how that plays out when earnings season comes around in a couple of weeks. Right now, it's not looking like a positive. Why don't we go to Mike in Michigan? Mike, my bike.

Oh, thank you, Mike. That's good, man. You stick with this. You're cadre. What's up?

The answer is yes. I mean, I think, look, Ted Pick's company's been brought down along with the rest of them and his is doing better. I think you want to buy the stock of Ted Pick. You want to buy the stock of Morgan Stanley. I want to go to Tim in Maryland. Tim.

Uh, it's electric, but no, I don't want to own that stock. As a matter of fact, I've been right to avoid that stock. And so I'm going to double down and say I really want to avoid it. Let's go to Robert in Ohio. Robert.

Hello, Robert. What's up?

Okay. Now, you know, I am so glad you brought this stock up. I'm going to tell you what this is. This is why my job's hard. Medtronic had a great quarter. Jeff Martha is doing a fantastic job. I thought they put everything together. They're even getting rid of the commodity stuff. And what happens? Stock goes up and then goes back down. That's why this market is so daunting. I like Medtronic, but I got to tell you, at 14 times earnings, I don't know what supports it. I buy a little and then wait a little more till it goes down. Darn. It should be higher, but I can't make it go higher. In the third quarter, software finally bounced back. I'm curious to see what happens this quarter when we see what companies are saying about higher rates. Well, Mad Money tonight: Can McDonald's finally deliver the turnaround it desperately needs? I'm going to take a closer look at the stock. Then, as the AI trade shifts, we've seen a quiet rally in one key area of the market. Don't miss my deep dive on the stocks that keep the internet going. And when Fermi came public, I said this nuclear power plant was kind of more of like a business plan than a business. One year later, I'm checking to see how the business plan's turning out. So stay with Cramer.

What the heck is wrong with the stock of McDonald's? Now look, I've been rolling this one over for weeks, even when I was in Italy. But I wanted to give them a chance to explain themselves at their investor day last week before I chimed in. Unfortunately, that much-hyped September 23rd investor meeting sent the stock down another 4.8%. At this point, Mickey D's is off 24% for the year, a highly unusual decline for this gold standard of the fast food industry. What happened? Pretty simple. Management came in with a big plan to transform the business and the street shot it down. So, is McDonald's a lost cause? Are we just simply getting a buying opportunity here? Long-term, this is a great franchise, and I find the stock tempting here. But I want to go over the negatives first because there are a lot of them. And let me say from the outset, this is a real hard one to decide on, even as I am a Big Mac, fries and Diet Coke guy from way back when.

Let's start with the turnaround plan that didn't get much love last week. The idea is to give customers better food and a better experience while making the location simpler and more productive so they can improve throughput. From my perspective, that's exactly what McDonald's needs to do because, you know, investors balked at the cost. See, for a typical drive-thru location, the full package takes $800,000 of incremental investment above its normal remodeling requirements. To help cover the cost for franchises, McDonald's is planning $8.5 billion of capital support and rent through 2036, including about $5 billion by 2030. It's not going to be cheap for the shareholders, but it's a good thing. Is it fast, though? Management indicated that roughly 70% of US restaurants could come through that cycle over the next four years. The updated design became standard for new restaurants in the first quarter of 2028. Look, for such a sprawling operation, I think it's pretty good. The problem is McDonald's is all about the franchises, which means they need to wrangle thousands of individual owners before they can make big changes. And the franchises won't get on board if they don't think the potential returns justify the near-term disruption. At this point, it might be an uphill battle. Not sure if they got everybody's buy-in. The sell-side research certainly didn't make it feel like anything revolutionary was going on, something that could shake the slumber, and that hurt too.

But if you want to know what's really weighing on this stock, you know what? It's like so many others. I think it's the darn bond market. With 10-year Treasuries yielding 5.24% risk-free, McDonald's non-risk-free 3.3% dividend yield becomes much less of a draw. You've also got a stretched consumer with rampant inflation, especially higher beef costs. Customers want cheaper meals that are better for you, while franchises need to protect their profits. Headquarters can come up with a national value campaign, but getting thousands of independent operators to execute it, well, that's a different story. So, why not just throw in the towel on the golden arches? For starters, there's the low PE multiple, what I call the secret sauce in how to make money in any market. The secret sauce is going in a direction. It's traded just 18 times next year's earnings estimates. Historically, McDonald's tends to trade in the mid-20s, meaning we're now getting a substantial discount from its historical value. In fact, McDonald's hasn't been this cheap since 2014 when the business was falling apart. But then they brought in a new CEO who turned things around really quickly and the stock was hitting record highs again by the end of 2015. We saw a similar dynamic during the pandemic. Different problems, different periods, but the same reason to keep an open mind here. McDonald's has come through difficult stretches before. It's in their DNA. I don't doubt its ability to do it again. In neither case did anyone see anything good happening on the horizon when it bottomed. You needed faith in the company to take the leap and that faith was in short supply even though the stock was super cheap. That's why even though the stock's going out of style, I want to remind you that this company still has a lot going for it. Yeah, I'm taking a pretty contrarian view here.

Let's start with scale, okay? More than 46,000 restaurants, roughly 70 million customers a day, nearly 220 million active loyalty customers. International accounts for more than half the business. This is not some pitiful, helpless giant. Then there's value, an important area where management admits that they've been slow to adapt. US store sales rose just 8% in the second quarter with higher checks offsetting declining traffic. At the investor day, management said they still expect slightly negative US same-store sales for the quarter. I don't know. But now they've gotten religion on giving customers better deals. Now some of the fixes are straightforward. McDonald's pulled back digital offers and removed its buy-one-add-one-for-a-dollar deal. Ouch. Only 60% to 65% of the US system followed the recommended pricing structure for their under-$3 menu. Management attributed roughly two-thirds of its traffic shortfall versus internal expectations to those value missteps. Now they advertised affordability while taking away deals that we thought were affordable, the ones the customers liked. Now management is bringing back digital offerings by putting more marketing behind proven meal bundles and simplifying execution. They're also testing new value offers, but they really need to get the franchises on board to make this work. You see this theme? McDonald's is also using AI to help them determine when and where to lower prices that they should have been all along, right? I mean, their AI operating system helps handle voice ordering, ultimately could free up at least 50 labor hours a week at each location. Automated inventory expected to save about five hours weekly and reduce food waste by 15%. These changes flow through right to the franchises' bottom line. They should like it. McDonald's can spread its technology across tens of thousands of restaurants. J.P. Morgan pointed to its data and AI foundation as an advantage competitors would struggle to replicate. There's also room to improve the financial model. McDonald's plans to move from roughly 95% franchise restaurants to 98% by the end of 2028 while reducing corporate overhead. That's good news for margins.

Now, let's talk about the much-panned turnaround plan from last week because this is what's sticking to my craw. See, management is adamant that this plan is bigger than investors appreciate. I think I side with management. Morgan Stanley argues that it's broader than a remodel strategy. The physical restaurant is one expression of changes to food, hospitality, loyalty, technology, and operations. I like that argument. Open kitchens, refreshed play areas, better beverage and delivery layouts are a part of that. So are the tools that make the restaurants easier to run. Management is targeting roughly $100,000 in gross annual cash flow benefits for the average US location. After corporate support, the targeted payback period for the $800,000 investment is about four years for franchises and five to six years for McDonald's itself. If they can hit those numbers, it's a great plan. The challenge is execution. Management already admitted that overlapping promotions and rollouts overwhelmed restaurants in the latest quarter. The next round of changes needs to make the operation simpler and again they need to get the franchises under control. Bottom line of this very complex story: McDonald's remains a show-me stock. Investor day did indeed disappoint. The macro is difficult and a cheap valuation alone won't bring customers back. But at this level, I am tempted to be a buyer, not a seller. This is a great business that's fallen on hard times. They just need to demonstrate that they can get their house in order. At the end of the day, it's still McDonald's, not Wendy's. Thank heavens. Sure, the stock's gotten hit. But if it's bounced off at this price-earnings level before, I think now the odds favor that a bottom could be at hand.

Lately, we've seen a quiet rally in the internet infrastructure stocks that are known as content delivery networks: Cloudflare, Akamai Technologies, and Fastly. Cloudflare's stock is up 121% from its February low. Akamai is up 51% from its lows last November. And Fastly has been kind of a roller coaster, but one that's finished very strong, now up 159% for the year. These guys operate in a pretty straightforward industry. They build hubs of servers all over the world and then help manage digital traffic so that everything operates faster and more reliably. But this is not a new business. I used to recommend Akamai all the time in 2005 when the show started and it was a great performer until the financial crisis hit. Lately, they've become more about cybersecurity and collecting data, which is one reason I keep recommending Cloudflare. In general, the thesis for the content delivery networks is that these companies thrive when the internet traffic's on the rise, and the rise of AI agents has boosted that traffic dramatically. I think that's the key reason for these stocks. That's why they're on fire. But each of the stories is very different. Let's start with Cloudflare, which is by far the largest of the content delivery networks with a stock that's now up over 2,200% since it came public in 2019.

We've had CEO Matthew Prince on the show many, many times, and he's been very prescient about what the arrival of AI means for the rest of the internet. Last time we spoke to him was in June. He said that traffic from AI agents had already surpassed traffic from humans. And what a great call that was. That's the point of agents. If you're comparison shopping for something, you might only check a few websites, but an AI agent will visit thousands of sites in order to find you the best deal. So, there's a heck of a lot more web traffic now and somebody like Cloudflare needs to help us handle it. That's one reason why the stock keeps putting up these fantastic numbers with steadily accelerating revenue growth, or ARR, over the past year or so. Next, there's Akamai. Now, late last year, they announced a new initiative, Akamai Inference Cloud, which is basically a network of many smaller data centers spread across the globe that help these AI models process data. Imagine figures that we're moving from a period of training AI models to a world where we actually use these models at scale. And that requires a lot more infrastructure. Now, in early August, we had Akamai CEO Dr. Tom Leighton on the show for the first time in over five years. I'm going to let him explain what his company's trying to do.

Ever since that interview, I've been thinking a lot about this plan. First, it makes total sense you need distributed data centers, especially as we get into things like this physical AI, because this requires a lot of bandwidth and you want the infrastructure as close to the user as possible. That reduces latency, speeds things up. Plus, lately we've seen massive central AI data centers become politically toxic. And it strikes me that Akamai's idea of building smaller data centers, that could be an easier sale, don't you think? Now, this is an investment year for Akamai. They have to spend a lot, they've got to acquire and build the infrastructure for their inference cloud, which will translate into a meaningful earnings hit. But management says there's a ton of customer interest here and they expect business to turn up in the fourth quarter, really booming in 2027. Hey, by the way, last Thursday, Akamai announced this big win with Anthropic for an $11.6 billion contractual commitment over seven years. Clearly Anthropic needs this additional capacity and they're willing to pay for it. This works out, by the way, to $1.66 billion per year. Pretty impressive given that it's more than a third of what Akamai is expected to bring in this year. Initially, the stock spiked in response, as it should. But now it's given back all of those gains and then some. Well, that feels like a buying opportunity to me.

Finally, let's talk a little bit about Fastly. This is not a company that I've spent much time on recently. I remember Fastly as a fleeting pandemic-era darling. The stock caught fire at one point in large part because it was the content delivery network for TikTok, which was exploding in popularity at the time. But then Fastly lost most of the TikTok business and the stock imploded. For years it felt like a broken momentum stock that was losing money. They didn't start turning to profit till last year. Lately, though, the stock's had an incredible run, up 159% for the year, thanks to some spectacular earnings numbers. If that wasn't enough to catch Wall Street's attention, Fastly put itself on the radar again last week. First, last Tuesday, the company held an investor day where management explained how Fastly is transitioning from a simple content delivery network, CDN, turnaround story to a much more exciting edge cloud play fueled by booming web traffic from all these AI agents. Second, this came right as everybody was realizing the power of Meta's Llama platform. Something that really lit a fire on the stock. In the end, the rise of agentic AI has made all three of these content delivery networks into big winners. So, have you missed it or can the stocks keep running? Tricky question.

I love Cloudflare, but it's selling for 279 times this year's earnings. Then again, the stock's always been expensive, and if you let that scare you away, you've missed some huge gains. Still, if you want to buy Cloudflare here, I recommend waiting for a meaningful market-wide pullback. Between Iran and the Federal Reserve, I bet someone's going to give an opportunity. Fastly's got a more reasonable valuation, trading at over 50 times this year's earnings, but that's still pretty rich, and the stock has a tendency to be insanely volatile. I'll be honest, this is the one I have the least confidence in. So again, I urge you to wait for a lower entry point. But Akamai, I think you can buy that stock right here, right now because it's cheap, selling for less than 16 times this year's earnings estimates, and you're basically getting the latest Anthropic partnership, which I thought was gigantic, for free. Sure, they're having a down year because of all that spending that I mentioned, but that's about to take a turn for the better real soon. Here's the bottom line. One side effect of the AI revolution is that it's already creating an insane amount of web traffic and somebody needs to help us keep the internet running smoothly. That's where Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai come in. Although for the moment, Akamai is the only one that's cheap enough for me to pound the table on. I want to take some calls and I want to start with Linda in Pennsylvania. Linda.

Well, I'll tell you, Linda, first of all, thank you for those kind words and thank you for what you said about Lisa. You know, she is the one who keeps me from taking... you know, she says, 'You got to take some time off, Jim. You really have to.' So, that's a great insight. I happen to like Michael Intrator very much. The stock is still almost a double, is a double from where it came public. I have tremendous faith in him. The stock does lose a lot of money. So, then the question is, do you have the stomach for it? If I were you, I would say, you know what, I want a small position in CoreWeave, not a big one, because it does have a balance sheet that I don't like. But that's part of the business. I sure do like Intrator, though. He's a straight-shooting guy. Rob in Florida. Rob.

Booyah, Rob.

Okay. I happen to like Rick Smith. Anyone who's watched the show for a couple decades knows that I think Rick Smith's great. I do think that there's actual competition at Axon and they've got a good product, but I have to tell you, when there's competition, that means there's going to be gross margin pressure. When there's gross margin pressure, you can't have a stock sell for 54 times earnings. So, the answer is I'm taking a breather now on Axon. I feel terrific about CoreWeave. I was a little too negative. I think that CoreWeave has got... it's the one that Jensen Huang thinks is the best builder. Yeah, I'm not going against Jesus, or at least Intrator. Jensen says it's invisible. With AI creating all this web traffic, I think these content delivery players are worth taking a look at. I like that Akamai. Much more on that after a year since its IPO has firmly proved that it deserves to be a public company. I'm taking a look at the stock. Then Micron reported earnings last night and today the stock, well, it didn't do much initially. I'm explaining why I stood behind the name during the period when it was real ugly today and your calls rapid fire in tonight's edition of the lightning round. So stay with Cramer.

Exactly one year ago today, a clown show of a company called Fermi came public with a bang. This business had been founded just a few months earlier and the plan was to create an AI data center campus in the Texas panhandle complete with nuclear plants. Although they'd start with natural gas plants to get things going. You know, the perspectives painted an incredibly rosy picture and at least at first people lapped it up. Fermi's IPO price was 21, then finished the day at 32 and change, a $19 billion valuation. I came out that very night and told you to stay the heck away. When I see a company created out of whole cloth coming public a few months later, I get a little, I get a tad nervous. Either way, I want to steer clear of this one. Again, this is more of a business plan than a business. I like, you know that. To be fair, Fermi seems like it's got a pretty well thought-out plan. And if it all works out over the next decade, then maybe you can justify the stock's current $19 billion market capitalization. In my view, though, no business plan is worth 19 billion. I want more than that. I thought it was a very bad sign that people were willing to pay up for this thing. So one year later, hey, how's that call look? Well, the next day, in a pure insult to me, Fermi stock opened up and peaked just under $37, but it finished the session in the red, big reversal, and it never looked back. By the end of last year, the stock was in the single digits. As of today, it's at just over $4, down 89% from its peak on October 2nd of last year.

What went wrong? How about everything? The initial customer announcements haven't materialized the way they were supposed to. In fact, some of the initial customers who made soft commitments pulled out of the project entirely. Fermi's losses have been wider than expected, too. The company's raised additional funds through a convertible note offering which will likely be diluted to shareholders. And that was all before Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a pause on new data center approvals. A year ago, I warned you that the CEO, Toby Nogabau, had a bit of a checkered history. Predictably, things didn't go well with him. Remember the whole pitch for Fermi was that they were tight with the Trump administration because a former Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, is one of the co-founders. But in March, Nogabau apparently had a loud and belligerent confrontation with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at Nvidia's GTC event, no less. By April, Nogabau had been fired and then he went to war with the company. First through a failed proxy fight, then lawsuits all at the board of directors. We got a call on Fermi the other night from John in Pennsylvania. I didn't mince words, saying it never should have come public and it's lost people fortunes. Tonight I'm circling back because in retrospect, Fermi marked the top for all sorts of long-shot nuclear energy companies. Do you remember Oklo, OKLO, the miniature nuclear reactor company backed by Sam Altman from OpenAI? That stock was on fire for most of 2025, but it peaked October 15th last year, two weeks after the Fermi IPO. Since then, Oklo's fallen over 80% from its high. NuScale Power, oh yeah, a company that's working on small modular reactors, is another stock that seemed to go higher every day, levitating for most of last year. It peaked on October 16th, 2025, a day after Oklo, and since then it's fallen 86%.

Same story with Nano Nuclear Energy, down nearly 75% from its peak last October. This year we've seen a bunch of nuclear-related IPOs, but they haven't caught on. X-energy came public in late April. Rather than building reactors, they wanted to license the reactor designs and then sell nuclear fuel to their customers. I told you it was only worth buying with money that you were prepared to lose. And I should have been a lot more negative. X-energy is now down 55% since I first talked to you about it, 62% from its initial high in June. A company called Deep Fission, which is, that's F-I-S-H-I-N, but it was F-I-S-I-O-N, you know, like the Oppenheimer thing, which is working on underground nuclear reactors, listed on the NASDAQ but only after reducing its size by over 50% and slashing its offer price after debuting at 16 bucks. Deep Fission has now plummeted to just over $5. That's a 68% decline. It's barely large enough for me to mention on air. Standard Nuclear came public in July and again the deal had to be significantly downsized to make it to market. This one's actually held up well. Standard Nuclear fell over 50% right out of the gate, but it's actually rebounded from its lows. Now it's only down 17% from where it came public. But Standard Oil, this is not. There's one other nuclear energy play that's become too small for me to even talk about on air. It came public via a SPAC. You know how much I hate those. A SPAC merger that closed late last month and over the past two weeks that stock has plummeted more than 80%. Man, that is just brutal. Whole Nuclear was supposed to come public last month. They pulled that deal. This one's a real company with more than $500 million in revenues over the past year. But who the heck wants to buy even a legitimate nuclear IPO when data centers have become politically toxic in America? I think the market's had a much-needed reality check over the past year or so when it comes to these long-shot nuclear energy plays.

I am actually a big believer in nuclear power, but it's a very difficult technology. It can take over a decade to build a nuclear plant and the upfront cost is insane and we're kind of rusty about how to build them. So what should you do about this? Look, if you're a believer in nuclear energy, I say stick with the tried-and-true players in the space and even though they know that you're making a long-term bet that will take multiple years to pay out. Not just a few years, but multiple years. Think GE Vernova, that's a Charitable Trust name. You see that today, which is the only established builder of nuclear power plants out there at this point with a full order book for both nuclear and gas power equipment. They just won a big nuclear deal from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission earlier this week. Or you could go with the nuclear power plant operators like Constellation Energy and Vistra. Just this morning, Constellation announced a 20-year agreement with Amazon to sell power from their nuclear power plant in southern Maryland. Constellation and Vistra have pulled back pretty hard from their highs, down 37% and 36% respectively. Hey, at these levels, you know what? I think they're pretty cheap. Finally, there's a stock I talked about last night, BWX Technologies, more of a defense contractor focused on nuclear technology for the Navy. Think nuclear subs and aircraft carriers. But that's a steady base of business that can sustain the company as it branches into other commercial nuclear power situations. Stock's down 43% from its all-time high in April, dragged down by the market's broad aversion to nukes. Could be a buying opportunity. But here's the bottom line. We're one year removed from the disastrous Fermi IPO. And in retrospect, that was clearly the top for the entire nuclear energy mania. Nuclear is just an extraordinarily difficult technology, which is why you need to be careful before buying anything in this space. And Mad Money is back after the break.

It is time. This over the lightning round because the same set by sell the course plan and then the lightning round is over. Are you ready? Let's start with Justin in Tennessee. Justin.