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Look, tech is trying to make a stand here. It's just not the tech that's led us for the last few years. We've been conditioned to think that tech will be led by an Alphabet or an Amazon, an Nvidia, a Meta, a Microsoft, but those have almost been millstones around investors' necks. I keep hearing about a mega-cap meltdown. Kind of true.
Today, though, we saw a lot of second-tier tech stocks make moves, make stands that, while still connected to the data center, were not the same old, same old that have not been able to maintain rallies and have stopped giving investors good performance. The averages reflect the shift, with the Dow down 197 points, S&P gaining 0.36%, but the Nasdaq jumping 0.83%.
It was a day that made you feel that if you just stick with tech, you can ride it all the way back to higher ground. That's all well and good, except it's been that way every time since most of these stocks peaked five or six months ago. Those of us who still like tech — and I know a dwindling number — took heart that both AMD and Arista Networks reported very strong quarters after the session tonight.
Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, will be on Squawk on the Street tomorrow. Oh, I bet she has a terrific story to tell. Jayshree Ullal, the CEO of Arista Networks, said terrific things about the data center networking on tonight's call. I want to think that these are not one-offs, and that just because they aren't mega caps, they do still matter.
I want to believe that the non-magnificent tech can lead us. But I also know that there are concerns we must be aware of before we get too cocky about one session's set of positives.
First, we know that there are exit polls taken all over the country, and a lot of hedge funds know how these exit polls go. Some would say the top of this tech market occurred when we started to realize that data center builders had managed to alienate most of the voters around the country. I think that what some exit polls must be saying this evening is that the data center-neutral politicians are ahead, and therefore it may not be the shutdown that so many think.
Oh, that would be used for the burial of the data center story. I think, and have thought, that data centers are fungible. If you don't want them in your state or your county, they'll go to another state and another county where they can be used as a honeypot. There will be canceled projects for sure.
And even though these stocks have come down a great deal, over 50% in some cases, I still don't think that the stocks of neoclouds like IREN or Nebius reflect that yet. Although it is front and center when it comes to the trajectory of the bellwether CoreWeave.
The old data center builders looking for subsidies came in cavalierly and became bad corporate citizens, in some cases raising electricity and in some cases spoiling local water. These days, data center builders come to town early, not to get subsidies, but instead to give gifts to local communities. They find out what towns need, and they help take care of the local interests that make a town click.
All data centers now can be closed loops so they don't impact the water. Their owners can subsidize electric bills, bringing them down for other ratepayers. They bring jobs to places that haven't had new jobs in years. There are lots of towns that actually need those subsidies. I am not saying this isn't an issue. I am saying that enough towns need the subsidies that there'll be plenty of sites still.
I just don't know what will happen to the ones that are already sited but are in states that will now want to ban them starting tomorrow. Now, that won't hurt Amazon because Amazon can buy its way into new towns without a problem. But it will hurt an IREN or Nebius or Core without anything to fall back on, and they'll be scrambling — something that's not reflected in the stocks of at least the first two.
I do think that no matter what, to have an election behind us is terrific news for a group that collectively has been the house of pain for months now. Other than the data center, the election may not be all that important to the vast majority of companies. Gridlock's been good for the market, and it looks like that's exactly what's going to occur.
If the Justice Department individually tries to block winning Democrats from taking their seats, I'm sorry to say that the market really won't care. Whatever ties up the government is good for stocks.
Then there is the war. Our market was indecisive at the open today because we had learned of a limited US strike against an Iranian island facility near the Strait of Hormuz. We also learned this was one of many limited strikes recently, which made me think — I don't know about you — that are multiple strikes still limited?
The market is saying today that you can take the war off the table. That's been a wrong judgment for ages, hasn't it? But the market frequently misjudges President Trump's musings about the war and routinely gets the next actions of the Iranians wrong, too.
But when the president said that the US would cut off aid to Israel by the end of the year, that was perceived as a sign that the war may be over sooner than you think. A mixed judgment.
The negative reaction to Apple's earnings weighed on the market. More on that later. And there were bears mauling Palantir as well. But tech buyers were buoyed by how well a $10 billion block of Oracle shares were placed. Oracle, which had promised that this is the last fundraise for three and a half years, sold nearly two-thirds of the shares to 10 large shareholders, and the deal priced at $116.
Then today, the stock flew to 126, up 6%, as these fund managers believe Oracle's word. I think the Oracle block trade gave lots of investors hope that we have found a level where investors at last can come in to buy at least tech without as much risk as a few weeks or months ago.
So then the big question is going to be tomorrow: have the tech stocks come down enough that somehow they are okay to be bought? I heard that all day, but I've also heard it every day for the last three months. It is a bit mind-numbing.
Perhaps the market is simply shifting in. Maybe buyers will be okay if they are not buying tech stocks that are issuing huge amounts of debt or equity. Has there been enough pain, though? That's what you have to ask yourself before you know we've got a real bottom. I thought Friday's session caused a huge amount of despair.
But the one thing really lacking is what I call a crescendo. What's a crescendo? It's something that the late, great Mark Haines, terrific anchor here, and I used to talk about all the time.
We noticed a pattern time and again where the market or some powerful group in the market will be going down, down, down for weeks on end, with occasional hopeful sessions interspersed, maybe like today. Those optimistic days will be followed by days like last Friday, where there is just such a revolting session from start to finish that it just makes your heart sick.
What would cause that pattern to end? Well, usually it's not a whimper, but a bang, where the stock market gets crushed in the morning and pulverized midday before then rallying on big volume to finish higher at the end. A down opening and an up close on big volume signified that the sellers were at last done and the bottom would be put in.
Perhaps this time there will be no crescendo. Maybe yesterday, when the Nasdaq 100 finished in correction territory for the first time, that signaled bottom. Maybe we can rally on the backs of the non-mags like AMD and Arista, and we can just leave behind those big-cap techs that need to raise more and more money just to stay in the data center race.
Here's the bottom line. I like that the election will soon be behind us. That's a positive. I think that's going to end up being good for the data center stocks no matter who wins. I would like to wait for the crescendo before I commit too much money back to tech, because so many other areas are working, including an area that I'm going to talk about later in the show.
But did tech really bottom? The Trust owns plenty of stocks that will profit from the very rare crescendo bottom if we don't get a true move up. One thing's for certain: it'd sure be a breath of fresh air if we could just rally without that Magnificent Seven for once.
Rewarding companies with great balance sheets and terrific earnings is a heck of a lot better than betting on companies that are bleeding with red ink and companies that forgot how important it is to make more money than you spend. Let's go to Evan in New Jersey. Evan?
Hi Jim. I was hoping to hear your thoughts on Roblox after the earnings report.
Too disappointing. You know, we've got so many companies that reported really good numbers and stocks are down gigantically. Let's focus on those. Those are the ones that I feel have a little more immunity when things go bad and go up when things go good. And that's what we're looking for right now. History says a crescendo in tech is worth waiting for, so it would be okay to wait.
On Mad Money tonight, as investors are rotating out of tech, I'm digging into why the life sciences sector could benefit. Don't miss my analysis. Then, I'm sitting down with the CEO of CrowdStrike to discuss how the company is combating cybersecurity threats on a global scale.
Plus, with fall in full swing, I'm getting the latest on outdoor apparel with the CEO of Columbia Sportswear to see if their brands can climb to new heights. So stick with Cramer.
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The tech sector and the AI infrastructure trade, well, they're decidedly out of favor right now. Nasdaq 100 entering correction territory yesterday. But as investors have rotated out of tech, they seem very eager to buy almost any other type of stock that can offer outsized growth.
All right, today we had one of those sessions that actually was pro-tech, but those have mostly been one- or two-day wonders since the peak in June earlier this year. So investors have been looking for growth in other haunts. One group that's been the beneficiary of this rotation out of tech is a small number of companies that we call the arms dealers to the life sciences industry.
These are suppliers to biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well as research laboratories and other companies doing life science research. They sell everything from high-priced, extremely complex equipment used in the drug development process to consumables like test tubes and types of basic chemicals used in everyday lab procedures.
Now, we love to see this, as we've long admired these particular companies, but many of them had what we'll call a few lost years in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Now, that was due in part to inventory gluts that took a long time to get through, as well as a few lean years for the IPO market, which matters because that's where many biotechs get their funding — IPOs, funding that later gets spent on these suppliers.
Now, just as that was starting to end, the industry had a new challenge from the arrival of the Trump administration, which many thought would be a negative development for the new drug approval process. That turned out not to be the case. The administration seems very pro-new drug, and investors seem to have gotten past the negativity of that and are eagerly buying these companies.
So let's tick down a few of our favorite names in the space, so you have them. To start, we're going to highlight Agilent Technologies — that's letter A — which provides a full range of instruments, software, services, and expertise to customers of life sciences, diagnostics, and even some other commercial markets.
Agilent shares have been absolutely on fire. Just incredible. Up 50% over the past six months, including a 29% gain since we last spoke to the company's fantastic CEO, Padraig McDonald, late May.
During that conversation, McDonald told us that the company was seeing a great benefit from the reshoring of manufacturing to the US, especially for drug manufacturing, as well as building strength in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Now, here's a good example: GLP-1, diabetes and weight loss drugs, where Agilent helps with both the production and the testing of these medications.
And while it's perhaps not why investors are buying the stock right now, we should also note that Agilent has exposure to the AI buildout too, as they do a lot of testing for semiconductor manufacturing as well. What we care most about is that Agilent has had excellent numbers recently. They're on track to deliver 8% revenue growth, 11% earnings per share growth in 2026, both of which represent an acceleration from their 2025 results.
Agilent reports later this month, but we have no reason to expect anything other than strong numbers from this quiet powerhouse in the life sciences space.
Next, the life sciences arms dealer that we feel best about right now is Thermo Fisher Scientific, TMO, who's the largest player in the space. More than $250 billion market cap. This company's one of the best partners to the life sciences industry, selling everything from big-ticket equipment to consumables, diagnostic services.
It offers the type of product that drug developers need for some of the most advanced types of medicine, like cell and gene therapies, mRNA medicines. Additionally, after the acquisition of a company called PPD about five years ago, Thermo Fisher has an in-house clinical research organization, CRO, which drug companies can use to run their clinical trials for development-stage treatments.
All right, TMO shares are up roughly 49% for the past six months. Remember, all the tech money's going to these, and we know the business is strong because we just spoke with CEO Marc Casper last week about how Thermo Fisher had delivered an excellent set of third-quarter numbers — a beat-and-raise report accelerating organic growth in the reported quarter.
We hope that you saw that interview because we thought it was profoundly important. It's one of the reasons why we wanted to highlight the strength of this group tonight. Aside from discussing just how well his company's doing, Casper confirmed in that conversation that there's something big happening in the life sciences industry.
The FDA seems to have gotten more interested in both encouraging innovation for new medicines and, probably most important, speeding up the new approval process. The other thing that we're seeing is a real desire to learn about how can we do things more quickly. Right.
Right, because patients are out there waiting for medicines, and the FDA is saying we're not going to compromise safety, which is a great thing. But if there are better ways to develop a medicine, we want to understand it as a regulator, and where it's appropriate, they want to adapt to the technologies that exist today.
That's huge. Not only does it directly rebut the prevailing thesis from last year that the FDA is supposed to be opposed to innovative drug development, it also gives us hope for much more drug development, which of course means more business for these arms dealers.
Now, two more quick ones, both of which reported just this morning. First, Waters Corporation has always been a strong, underappreciated company in the space. They made an aggressive move to become an even bigger player last year when they combined with Beckman Coulter's biosciences and diagnostic solutions business in what's known as a reverse Morris trust transaction.
That deal is working out phenomenally well for Waters, whose shares are up nearly 50% over the past six months, including a nearly 5% gain today after a very strong third-quarter report with even better guidance for the fourth quarter, including an outlook for 7 to 9% organic growth.
Finally, let's take a look at a company called Revvity, which is the relatively new name for the company formerly known as PerkinElmer. About three years ago, in the midst of the post-COVID morass for this industry, PerkinElmer broke itself up, selling its applied sciences, food, and enterprise services business to a private equity buyer and rebranding the remaining diagnostic and life science business as Revvity.
Candidly, it took the investors a few years to fall back in love with Revvity, but they sure seem to have done so. The stock is now up roughly 69% year-to-date, including an 8% gain today after a beat-and-raise result of its own.
Here's the bottom line. All right, so we know that tech can be out of favor, but if you can only offer growth away from tech, then investors will eagerly buy the stock. That's why we look at these arms dealers to the life sciences industry: Agilent, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waters, and Revvity.
All right, they're not household names, but they're exactly what's working right now. They are the new techs, the ones that seem to be replacing the data center as the theme. If that's the case, then I know they have a lot more room to run. Let's go to Anthony in my home state of New Jersey. Anthony?
Hi Jim. Thanks for taking my call. I'm doing the investment club in September, and I really love being a part of the community that you're building.
Thank you. And that's exactly what it is — a community of people who want to learn, and we do teaching. Thank you.
Absolutely. My question is about Eli Lilly. I took my first small position last month, and it's up about 11%. When you start a new position, sometimes it's at elevated prices simply because of the timing of when you first invest in the stock. So, do you think new investors like me should add Lilly at these levels, or should we wait for a drop?
What you do is you take a position. Let's say you want to buy 100 shares: buy 25 straight out, and then you wait for a decline. If you don't get the decline, you're fine. You got a nice short-term gain. But I don't like to buy all at once because if it does drop down because of rotation or something wrong, then what happens is, next thing you know, you got a terrible basis.
And if you have a terrible basis, you're more than likely going to kick out the story rather than buy more. So small buy at the beginning, and then buy in a pyramid on the way down. That's the way I've done it all my life, and it's worked very well for me.
All right. Tech may be out of favor now, but these arms dealers to the life sciences industry are exactly what is working. Much more Mad Money ahead. CrowdStrike just unveiled a new kill switch designed to stop AI agents in their tracks. I'm getting the details straight from the CEO.
Can Columbia Sportswear just beat earnings expectations? They didn't. But with the consumer uncertainty still looming, can it weather the storm ahead? I'm checking with the CEO. And Apple delivered an earnings beat last night with the stock on hammer. Anyway, what gives? I'll tell you why. I'm not sweating. So stay with Cramer.
We just had CrowdStrike on last week, but in the world of cybersecurity, that feels like a year ago. Since then, for example, Binance disclosed a $6.3 billion cryptocurrency theft that the FBI has attributed to North Korea. Today, at the company's Falcon European Conference in Barcelona, CrowdStrike debuted a new technology they're calling the AI kill switch.
It sounds like a major breakthrough, and earlier today I had a chance to check back with CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz about the news. Take a look.
George, everyone's told me there's no such thing as a kill switch — that we can't shut things down with agents, that they are on their own, and they're faster than we are and smarter than we are. Is today the day where we say that's no longer the case because of something that CrowdStrike has?
That's correct, Jim. If you think about it, everyone is building AI agents, but they never had the off button, and now they do. And this has been something we've been working on since we launched our Guardian product, which has been a smash hit at our Falcon in the USA at the end of the summer. Now we're in Europe, at Falcon Europe.
But the biggest thing that customers were asking for is, we need a kill switch. This is what we've built, and we're so excited to be announcing it today. And it's going to be an incredibly important part of making sure that AI agents run and operate safely.
George, I don't want to overstate this again. I mean, when you talk to the people behind Anthropic and OpenAI, they say, 'Listen, you know, accept the fact that we don't have it. Accept the fact that they can run wild. I wish they couldn't.' What you're saying is that if I hire CrowdStrike and I have agents and I think the agents are doing something wrong, I can stop it, and I can stop them cold.
And this idea that they are in charge, or they're faster than we are, smarter than we are, is off the table if I hire CrowdStrike.
Well, that's right, Jim. With our Falcon technology, as I've talked to you many times in the past, we are at the epicenter of where AI agents are running. We see when the agent is created, we see what identity it has, we see what tools it's calling, and we have the ability to stop the agents in their tracks, both on the endpoint as well as integration with network devices, including one of our own AI gateways that we launched at this event today.
So it's the combination of the platform that we've built — having visibility where AI actually runs, as well as being able to kill these connections across the network. So you put the two together, and it's a very potent package.
All right. Now, I want to understand again — I'm a little obtuse in this because I've been told none of this can happen. If I hire you and I'm worried about my agents, they can be stopped. How about on the defense and also on the offense? In other words, let's say I'm a company that has really smart agents, but they figured out how to infiltrate somebody else — I can shut them down.
If I am a client and I am worried about someone getting into my system, I can shut those bad actors down too. I can do it on both sides.
Correct. And let's talk about that for a minute, Jim. Because for the last 30 years I've been in security, which is keep the bad guys out. It's always about the outside: keep them out, keep them out. And now, really for the first time, security has moved from security — keep them out — to safety: how do you actually allow agents to work within an organization?
And enabling agents to work safely is a massive market opportunity for CrowdStrike. So we have AI capabilities to prevent these breaches from happening on the outside, and we also have the capabilities to make sure that agents are basically doing what they are instructed to do. If they go outside of those guardrails at runtime, we can kill those agents.
And that's very important because when you think about the model and the lab creators, they're building it in a lab, they're training it a certain way. But when it hits the real world, it doesn't always operate that way. This is the reason why cars have airbags: if there's an accident, you're going to protect the occupant. And I think the kill switch is going to be mandatory for companies going forward.
You have to have the ability to kill these agents if they go off the reservation, right?
Yeah. Will it be possible to get insurance if you don't have the kill switch? I imagine insurance says, 'Look, we're not going to do it. You got to get a kill switch, or else we're not going to give you protection.'
Well, I think there's going to be a lot of guidelines and focus on making sure that companies have that. They're going to have to go to their auditors. They're going to have to prove that the agents can be stopped if there is an issue. And this is going to be just table stakes.
You see a lot of governments, a lot of states talking about the kill switch, talking about regulations and legislation around this. And we're going to be there for our customers to make sure that they have the ability to operate their agents in a safe manner, that they can understand what these agents are doing, why they're doing it, and then if something goes wrong, they have the ability to stop those agents in their tracks.
All right, George, let me challenge you. You're Binance. You hire CrowdStrike. The government of North Korea is dedicated to stealing all your customers' crypto. Are you telling me that if I hire CrowdStrike, the government of North Korea will not be able to get my stuff?
Well, Jim, what I'm telling you is that we routinely see North Korea activity, and we routinely stop it. If you look at what they're doing in this particular threat actor group, this is something that we've seen reported on and stopped many times.
But it's important to remember that the epicenter of these sort of attacks is on the endpoints, on the workloads. And if you can have a laptop that's compromised, if you can have identity that's compromised, bad things will happen. This is why we've built this technology, and we've deployed it at many of the largest enterprises around the globe for these particular threat actors.
In fact, we actually worked with the FBI, and you may have seen that a few weeks back, where we identified a complete laptop farm, multiple ones, by the North Koreans. They're very good at what they do. And in this particular group, they're focused on stealing money, as well as many of the other parts of the North Korean government, stealing identities of users and then being able to monetize that.
All right. In February of this year, you came on our show three times, and you said that when you hear that these big hyperscalers, modelers in this case — yes, of course, when you have Anthropic saying, 'Listen, we can protect you, we will have cybersecurity' — and you said that's kind of ridiculous, that you can't just have cybersecurity and be the company that is trying to be protected, because no one will offer you insurance.
No, it's just not going to happen. They kept insisting that you didn't need CrowdStrike. Insisting. And they were completely wrong. The stock was cut in half over and over again. You said they were wrong, and they were wrong. Is this another one where they're going to keep insisting? No. Uh-uh. That guy, don't pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Are they going to continue that stuff, that nonsense that we all had to deal with?
Jim, I don't think so. Because one of the things that we actually announced today is the collaboration with Anthropic on being able to protect Claude Code. Claude Code actually runs in a container. And I can tell you how it happened, because our customers went to Anthropic and said, 'We need CrowdStrike before we can deploy AI. We have to have CrowdStrike in these containers instrumenting what they're doing.' And we worked with them. We're the first to market with this, and we're proud of the collaboration.
But I think the market, customers, labs, everyone realizes that security plays an incredibly valuable role in making sure that you can actually use AI. It's not going to be all solved by one company or by the labs. It's a collaboration with companies like CrowdStrike working together with our customers who are demanding CrowdStrike, and the labs, and putting it together and leveraging the trust that we've built for many, many years.
So that's part of what an ecosystem looks like, I think. You know, people have figured that out. We're working collaboratively with the labs, and our goal is to make sure that our customers are protected. But I think it says volumes that customers would not roll out AI without CrowdStrike.
Last question: why have you been able to do this when everyone says you can't do it? I mean, are you smarter? Is your team better? I've dealt with the Palantir guys. They'll just tell you, 'Listen, we're smarter and better.' I've never heard George Kurtz come out and say, 'The reason why this works is because we're smarter and better.' What do you have that the other guys don't have?
Well, I think we spend a lot of time with customers listening to them, Jim. You know, at the end of the day, if you do the basics better than anyone else, you're going to be a world champion. And this is what we're focused on. We're listening to what our customers are asking for. One of the number one features was kill switch.
And because of the architecture we built — I've talked about it for how many years on your show — we've started with the right architecture, we can understand where these agents run and what they do. And as Jensen said, it's an engineering problem. We've engineered how to create a kill switch, how to turn these agents off, and how to leverage them effectively and safely.
And we've got great people. We've got smart people. We got great customers who tell us what they want, and then we engineer that into the platform that was built for this agentic moment.
Wow. Well, George, I have to tell you, I think it's what we've all been waiting for. I'm not saying rip up the S-1 warning signs on Anthropic. I am saying people would be crazy not to hire you. How about that?
Well, Jim, as we always say, we're here to stop breaches. That's our mission. We don't have a mission statement. We want to make sure we keep our customers safe.
Excellent. George Kurtz, CrowdStrike CEO. George, thanks for coming on the show.
Inviting me back after the break.
Coming up, can shares of Columbia keep your portfolio warm this season? Cramer's asking the CEO next.
Last Thursday, Columbia Sportswear, the outdoor apparel and footwear company behind Columbia, Sorel, Mountain Hardwear, and Prana, delivered a really strong quarter, gave this stock's comeback another push after years of kind of struggling to gain much ground. Shares are now up more than 25% this year, nearly 10% since the report.
Columbia reported a 38% earnings beat off a $1.28 basis, better-than-expected sales and gross margins, and also raised the low end of its full-year sales and earnings forecast, although some analysts were looking for more than the fourth-quarter profit outlook. We'll get into that in a second.
The big question is whether Columbia could turn that progress into sustained growth here at home, where sales were still down slightly year-over-year. So let's check in with Tim Boyle, Columbia's chairman and CEO, to find out. Mr. Boyle, welcome back to Mad Money.
Hey Jim, thanks for including me on the show today.
Oh, absolutely. Now, Tim, overseas really extraordinary. China, Europe really good. How do we get US going? Because I think the stock has had a really nice move here, and if you get US going a couple percent, I think the stock can go to 100.
Well, listen, from your words to God's ears, but I'm hoping that we will have that. You know, I think there's some reluctance because of our reliance on Q4, and we had a little bit of a hiccup in our deliveries. So actually, Q3 in the US would have been better had we had more timely deliveries.
But I think we're in good shape, and we're in a position to produce for fourth quarter, and we're very excited about our opportunities there.
All right, let's talk about — okay, let me just tell you, because I did a lot of work ahead of the interview, I'm seeing more color and more personality in the products, and I am thinking that maybe you're going — you know, some of your best technical stuff is now looking a little bit fashion-forward, and it's working.
