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Hey, I'm Cramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Cramer. Other people make friends. I'm just trying to make a little bit of money here. My job is not just to teach, but also to do some entertaining. So call me at 1-800-743-CNBC or tweet me at @JimCramer. You can tell a heck of a lot about what's winning and what's losing on a huge day like today.
Sure, we know that the market surged on a vague meeting of the minds between President Trump and some key people, causing the Dow to surge 1,325 points. S&P soared 2.51%, and the Nasdaq rocketed 2.80%.
Now, we don't know how real this ceasefire is, how much is finesse, how much will be needed to be nailed down still. But we do know that oil just had its biggest one-day decline in six years, coming back down to the mid-90s, a pretty darn good sign that the ceasefire has a real chance to survive.
I think one of the great values of a day like today is a close scrutiny of the biggest gainers and losers in the session, because they give you a window to what can work when things are a little more calm, and more important, what can't work. Because if it ain't working today on a day like today, it probably ain't going to work at all.
First up, when I look at the biggest gainers in the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P, I see a mixture of interest rate sensitives, travel and leisure, and data center stocks. It's a little more eclectic than you might think. I mean, what are the biggest gainers in the Dow today? Sherwin-Williams, Caterpillar, Home Depot, Goldman Sachs. That's a pretty extraordinary set of leaders.
When you think about that, it's about a truce in Iran. When you see these four going up, it means investors believe that interest rates are coming down. By the way, they were coming down, and then they did go up near the end of the day. It's hard to fathom Sherwin-Williams being the winner from peace in the Middle East, isn't it? But hope springs eternal, as some might think the housing market could be thawing.
Now, this is the worst housing market when it comes to transaction volume in decades. The housing stock itself is 44 years old. That's the average age of a house. But when you see that pent-up demand, you think that people would go to Home Depot to get paint, the natural order of things. They aren't. Home Depot hit a two-year low just yesterday. It's been a terrible time for housing. Yet today, the stock shot up more than 5%.
The beginning of something new? I say you need a couple of persistent rate cuts before you can say that. Now, Caterpillar is different. Caterpillar's up there, and its presence is a reminder of how terrific this market can be. CAT represents infrastructure money, construction money, and data center money. It's been such a horse.
All aboard, because the company's got multiple ways to win. I think Caterpillar moved up on the prospect of more infrastructure, perhaps worldwide, more construction because rates came down, at least for most of the session. And of course, the data center, because you need CAT generators to back up the usual power sources.
I think the data centers may actually have hidden opportunities. You can string CAT engines, maybe even thousands of them, and tie them together, and then plug them directly into the natural gas patches we have all over the country and power data centers without raising electric rates.
How about this Goldman Sachs? All right. There are multiple reasons to own this stock once you think the coast is clear. I know there's plenty of money there. It could be destined for takeovers. Now I think there'll be a rush of deals. This administration is incredibly pro-deal. They never met a merger they didn't like, unless it involves the president's political enemies, that is.
And it represents a lot of advisory business for the investment banks. Now Goldman reports next week. I think it should be a good one. As we told members of the CNBC Investing Club, we've owned the stock for a long time. That said, some of the biggest gainers yesterday tell a different story entirely.
Right off the bat, you see Carnival. Now, the cruise lines are the first to be battered and the first to recover, as they're regarded as bargain vacations, and that's a realistic thing. United Airlines is there, too. Norwegian Cruise did well, too. Again, the travel segment. But after that, we have a cluster of names that become a fixture, and not a good one.
I know it's controversial, but SanDisk, Lam Research, Western Digital, Seagate, these are all techs of a certain sort, ones related to memory. A low-tech portion of the cohort that happens to be in high demand, happens to be in shortage. You need memory in the data center. Tons of it. People didn't see it coming.
SanDisk and Western Digital make the stuff. Lam Research makes the equipment that makes the memory. So the demand for that is off the charts. What's the matter with that? Simple. We want the data center to grow, but we want it to grow by putting bigger and better equipment into the warehouses full of servers.
I regard Western Digital and SanDisk as a tax on the system. They can just keep raising rates because there's not enough supply. Low intellectual property that makes building data centers more expensive, that makes the user pay more.
Fortunately, on the upswing, there are some high-intellectual-property fiber optics and networkers further down the new high, the large gainers list, but not enough to counteract the pernicious nature of the endless memory shortage. Okay, look, I want to see Nvidia on that list, not SanDisk. It's not happening.
Now, lots of things are loved on an up day, but as you imagine, there are not a lot of hate spread around. And when you find it, let's just say it's eye-opening, maybe eye-popping. Some of these losers are real obvious. No surprise Chevron's the worst performer in the Dow today, right? I mean, hey, listen, given that oil's down roughly 15%, live by the price of oil, die by the price of oil.
Verizon's right there, too. Hard to figure this one out. Might be connected to the coming IPO of SpaceX, which owns Starlink. IBM's a bit of a mystery, too. The last quarter, okay, so it was a tad suspect, but I think the buy on this mild pullback is the right thing to do.
Then we have the killer, the one that matches up with the biggest losers in the Nasdaq: Salesforce, down almost 4%. Geez, you'd think that this enterprise software stock could catch a break. I think it has the best agentic software that allows Einstein's people to come alive, answer questions flawlessly, also has a modern way to communicate with Slack.
But Salesforce has a bunch of silos that have software-as-a-service models, and anything in that space is considered guilty until proven innocent, thanks to the rise of AI. Even if it makes no sense at all. I want you to think of it like this.
If companies are paying by the worker for software-as-a-service, and AI allows them to have fewer workers, then you have to say to yourself, how can Salesforce make as much money as it used to? I get that. Plus, who knows if Anthropic can help you code a Salesforce knockoff with lightning speed? I get that. I just don't know how existential it really is.
We had the same narrative with Workday, another one that was down badly today. It's a software play that could be duplicated by AI gremlins. It was down 6.5%. Then there's Intuit, which keeps getting hit, down 5% today. They're the guys buying TurboTax. Now, you don't normally see this stock getting run over during tax season. It's not even that expensive. But the sellers sell nonstop.
Now we see something obvious. Diamondback, that's the most aggressive driller in America, that's down less than 5%. That's expected. LyondellBasell and Dow, commodity chemical makers. They're benefiting from the man-made petrochemical shortage caused by the war.
Now, a lot of give-ups from those two. But you know what? I'm not so sure how easy that is to give up on these, as some of the endless price hikes were caused by destroyed plastic refining taken out of capacity. Those facilities won't come back anytime soon. I'm a believer that you can own Dow or LyondellBasell. Wow, I'm out there.
But here's the bottom line. When you go through these lists of the best and worst performers, you can see what's worth owning when things calm down and what's untouchable when the market gets hammered again. You know what the professional money managers will reach for. It's a great way to figure out what can take you higher and what's just a plain old dead end.
Let's take questions. Let's go to Gabriel in Illinois. Gabriel, hi Jim. How are you today? I'm doing well. How about you? Good. Thank you, Jim. I always listen to you and all the guys on CNBC. So I really appreciate everything you guys do all day long. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let's go to work. Let's go to work.
I wanted to ask you about Restoration Hardware. I know they're having some difficulties and a lot of money that they owe. But what do you think for the long term, maybe 12 or 24 months out?
Okay. So, Gabriel, here's the problem. Look, I like RH. I love going there. I know Gary Friedman, but I also like a good balance sheet. And it no longer has a good balance sheet. And I don't recommend stocks on this show with balance sheets that I find questionable, because that always, in 21 years, has come back to hurt me. Always. So the answer is I can't recommend it, as much as I like their stuff. Let's go to Mike in Louisiana. Mike, Mike, Mike.
Jim, hello from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Oh, really? Okay, there you didn't know that. Okay, what's going on?
This consumer staple stock is at multi-year lows due to poor results and poor near-term outlooks, but as a longer-term play, how do you feel about General Mills?
You know, I was talking with the team earlier, I was talking to Jeff Marks about that. And I saw Smucker, SJM, report a good quarter and it went up for about a minute and then it just got crushed. I can't recommend a stock, General Mills, 6.67% yield. It does not stop the decline. I'm going to have to say no. I don't have a reason to recommend General Mills. So I'm just going to have to say pass. Pass. Wow.
All right. Make sure you go through these lists of the best and worst performers. It's really fun. It's the best way to see what's worth owning when things calm down and what's untouchable. And by the way, you learn something every time you do it. Oh, Mad Money tonight. Oh, here's a big one. CrowdStrike is one of the companies partnering with Anthropic on his buzzy new frontier AI model.
I'm hearing all about the partnership that you must know about, you must learn about, when I sit down with the cybersecurity company CEO. Then ahead of the Masters this weekend, I'm teeing off a few of my favorite golf stocks to see whether the fairways can expect to see more green ahead. We picked some good ones last year.
And fintech stocks are all the rage right now. But which ones are fit for your portfolio? I'm taking a deep dive into one that you called in. It's called Bread Financial. And I'm telling you if it's toast or is toast another stock. Stay with Cramer.
Don't miss a second of Mad Money. Follow Jim Cramer on X. Have a question? Tweet Cramer #madmentions. Send Jim an email to
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Yesterday, Anthropic, the AI lab that's the parent company of Claude, made a rather dramatic announcement. They've been working on a new frontier AI model called Mythos. And during the process, they realized that it's incredibly adept at spotting what are known as zero-day vulnerabilities. Basically, software flaws that even the developers don't know about.
Rather than release Mythos into the wild, where criminals could use it to hack into everything, Anthropic established something called Project Glass Wing, bringing together a bunch of tech companies and cybersecurity firms to fix this stuff. For example, they brought in Cramer fave CrowdStrike, which we own for the Travel Trust.
Lately, I've been trying to explain why CrowdStrike can't simply be replaced by these AI platforms. And I think Anthropic actually just did a perfect job of making that point for me. But don't take it from me. Let's check in with George Kurtz, the founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, to learn more about what's going on here. Mr. Kurtz, welcome back to Mad Money.
Thank you, George. Now, zero-day, we got to go over these because this is what we're talking about, zero-day vulnerabilities. And what I want you to do is explain what a zero-day vulnerability is and why these flaws are so important to find and match and then patch now.
Well, Jim, this has been the bane of the security industry for a long time. So as you might imagine, humans write code now. Computers write code, but for many years humans wrote code and humans make mistakes. So the code that they actually write has security flaws that can be exploited or taken advantage of by the adversary. And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of these security flaws. Many of them go unnoticed for years or decades.
And obviously having a technology like Mythos and a large language model that can find these and surface these is a good thing for patching your vulnerabilities, but could be a bad thing if the adversaries got a hold of it and used it for malicious purposes.
Now, what I'm trying to figure out is how Project Glass Wing started. And when I read it, I thought to myself, George had to have a hand on this, because I don't know if even the great people who run Anthropic knew as much as you do about these things.
Well, I think it's a reflection of what we've been doing with Anthropic behind the scenes, and I think our position in the security industry at large. I've said to you many times, you can't have AI without security. And I think there's a recognition of that. We're the experts at it. The security industry at large has a lot of information about this, and in particular CrowdStrike does.
And if you're a net data creator, which we are, our agents, our security agents and sensors create data. We have a unique data set. You need that data for AI. And one of the biggest things that's holding back AI adoption is security. Right now, I can tell you, Jim, I'm with 30 of our top customers at our customer advisory board meeting, and the number one topic is securing AI so they can go faster.
To the point where management teams are actually measuring how many people are using AI in their organization and scorecarding, giving them grades on it, if they're not going fast enough. So that's the kind of deal that we're dealing with, you know, that's how big of a deal it is and why we're part of the solution here.
Well, why hasn't anyone found these vulnerabilities before?
Well, they're very complex. So in the old days, you'd have humans go through code, then you've got automated solutions that were around for a long period of time. But I think what we're seeing here with Mythos is that it has a fantastic ability to chain vulnerabilities. So a program isn't as simple as just one piece of code, right? There's all these dependencies and what's known as libraries, and it can look across the entire codebase.
And it can actually identify and chain vulnerabilities together, where one issue, one minor issue might be small in the grand scheme, but when you chain them together and you link A to B to C to D, then you have a massive security exposure. And it's very good at that because that's what it understands, and it could operate at large scale to find those. And that's where it gets really scary if it falls into the wrong hands and the adversaries doing that on their behalf.
Well, I listen to that and I say to myself, how in heck did people think that your business would somehow be hurt and disrupted by Anthropic when it sounds like that without your business, they can't even release this product?
Well, absolutely. I think what you look at, what we're talking about AI, and again, Jim, these are concepts that we've chatted about before. I just want to simplify. You're going to have a higher volume of attacks because AI is out there. It's going to find vulnerabilities that have never been found before, and you're going to have less time to actually patch these vulnerabilities. So higher volume, less time. This is a simple equation.
You know, on average, it takes about five days for an adversary to create a working exploit when there's a vulnerability that's announced. Five days. This is going to go down to five minutes, right? So this whole cycle of finding a vulnerability and patching is going to get totally disrupted and thrown on its ear.
And what you need are technologies like CrowdStrike to create mitigating controls where as you're patching these things, you still have protection in place and you've got a control to keep yourself safe and prevent these adversaries from taking advantage of it. So it's only really going to accelerate the adoption of security technologies like CrowdStrike.
All right. Now, can AI replace cybersecurity totally eventually? I mean, or is it always got to be somebody else that is overseeing?
Well, I mean, AI is a part of the solution. I started the company using AI. It was machine learning at the time. We use large language models. We created large language models on our own. We've got small language models. And the thing that's important to realize, Jim, we actually can take advantage of Mythos ourselves from a defender perspective.
So think about this. They've created a fantastic model, and what we're talking about is finding vulnerabilities and the adversaries potentially using it. But now, for the first time, the advantage from a large language model perspective has been tilted toward the defenders, and we get to use that model as well to defend against these adversaries, and we get to use it without the guardrails.
So we get the full power of the model to be able to defend against these, and that's only one element, of course, of what we've built over the last 15 years. But that means it's a great partnership, and we're excited. I was talking to Dario this morning from Anthropic, the CEO, and it was all about the partnership and how we continue to work together, and that's why we're excited to be part of this announcement.
Well, do you think that there is going to be one of those things where we are going to find out who really is just another SaaS company and who is something that we should not even regard as being software, like your company? I've been trying to get people to understand that CrowdStrike is not software. It's something entirely different. I only use the term appliance. That's like the old days. But there are some companies that are not valuable. Is that not true? That are in your business that are not valuable.
Yeah. Yeah. Jim, there's two types of companies. You know, there's one company that's going to be disrupted where you're just taking data in and you're kind of visualizing it and slicing and dicing it, if you will. And there's others that, like CrowdStrike, are net data creators. Our software agent, our security agent or sensor creates security telemetry.
We see what's happening across literally millions and millions upon millions of endpoints and workloads around the world, and that data is incredibly valuable. That's what we use to train our models, and you can't get that by going to Reddit. You can't get that by scraping data off the internet. So we've spent 15 years building this sort of massive data moat.
And again, we get the benefit of using that with our customers and leveraging these models that are available like Mythos as well as the models we've created. So that's why it becomes very sticky, and you're going to have the have and the have-nots. We certainly believe we're in the have category because it's very difficult to replace our agent, what we've built, plus our cloud infrastructure, plus the 15 years of domain knowledge.
Security expertise actually matters, Jim. And you can't just roll in and say you're a security expert because you know how to use Claude Code or something along those lines.
Well, when you put together Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, other than Palo Alto Networks and you, I don't see these. I think these other guys are victims. They're not predators.
Well, the other folks involved, it's great that we've got the biggest companies in the world, but we're one of two security companies, pure-play security companies that are there, and the largest software security pure-play. So we're delighted to be part of this. I think again it goes to the validation point of where we play in the ecosystem as being an important element to securing AI.
And as I said, you know, companies want to go faster with rolling out AI. Obviously, the model creator, the frontier labs want more AI in the consumption, and the ability to consume tokens is just amazing. If you've played with any of these technologies, you know you can zip through tokens very quickly, and everyone wants to use it, but you have to secure it.
And you want to go faster, and security is going to be an accelerant to rolling out AI and making companies successful, making the lab successful, and making the security companies like CrowdStrike successful as well.
Well, I'm glad you came on because I think people are starting to realize it's not that Anthropic is going to destroy you. It's that you need to be, it's symbiotic. You have to have you, or else then I think that whoever brings them in could really hurt. They don't want that. That was what was so great about Glass Wing. They were very open about it. They can't do it alone. So I want to thank George Kurtz from your 30-person conference.
Yeah. I mean, we got just in one day we got 30. We have another 30 rolling in. Again, these are some of our biggest customers around the world, and they're here because they give us ideas. They tell us what they want, and they help form our roadmap. And good things happen when you listen to your customers, Jim.
All right. Thank you, George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, and thank you for explaining everything to us. We do need to learn about this, and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Mad Money's back after the break.
Coming up, the azaleas are in bloom and the green jackets have been pressed, so settle in for a round of Cramer's favorite golf stocks. Next.
