Technologies

Jim Cramer Highlights Stocks That Prove Why Fundamentals Trump Fear

Verum’s Jim Cramer argues that stock sell-offs create opportunities for investors who focus on fundamentals rather than fear, highlighting strong recoveries in stocks like CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and Blackstone despite recent market turbulence.

Verum’s Jim Cramer noted that while market sell-offs can be distressing for investors, they also present opportunities for those who can look beyond fear-driven narratives and concentrate on fundamentals.

“Tailspins can be mighty nasty,” Cramer said Tuesday on “Mad Money.” “If you own a stock that’s caught in one, it’s very hard to hang on, but sometimes the market happens to be wrong and it’s worth riding out the turbulence.”

After a down day like Tuesday’s session, where all three major U.S. averages fell roughly 0.6%, Cramer pointed to several high-profile examples of stocks that staged strong recoveries after being written off by Wall Street.

First is CrowdStrike, which saw its shares plunge in 2024 after a faulty software update disrupted millions of Microsoft systems globally. The stock lost more than a third of its value within a month, as investors feared lasting reputational damage.

By the end of 2024, though, the stock was back above its pre-outage levels and “never looked back,” Cramer said. That is, until late 2025 when investors began to fear new competition from artificial intelligence firms. Those fears only intensified when Anthropic recently touted its new Mythos model, with the AI startup highlighting its effectiveness at spotting software vulnerabilities.

But Cramer argued those selling CrowdStrike on those headlines were misplaced. Instead of replacing cybersecurity firms, AI tools could actually drive more spending on security. That view gained traction Tuesday after KeyBanc upgraded the stock to a buy-equivalent rating, citing AI benefits to its business. The stock soared 3.8% even as the broader market struggled.

“AI and Anthropic weren’t headwinds for cybersecurity,” Cramer said. “They were tailwinds.”

A similar pattern has played out with Microsoft. After setting an all-time intraday high above $555 in late July, the stock dropped all the way to $356 by late March, weighed down by skepticism around its AI offerings and broader software demand.

Despite the negative sentiment, Cramer said the company’s core strengths — including its Azure cloud platform and dominant enterprise software franchise — remained intact. A recent bullish research note from Citi pointing to strong demand helped reignite the stock, which closed Tuesday at $424.16 a share.

“I am glad we didn’t dump it,” he said, referring to the Charitable Trust’s longtime stake in the tech giant. “Could have been a big mistake.”

Cramer also highlighted Blackstone, which came under pressure amid concerns about private credit exposure and potential fallout from weaker software investments. Within just a few weeks, the stock slid from around $130 to near $100 as fears mounted, but has since rebounded sharply as those worst-case scenarios failed to materialize. It ended Tuesday at $128.50 a share, though it traded as high as $133.25 during the session.

“Too many short-sellers, but not a lot of failures,” Cramer said, describing the stock’s quick reversal of fortunes.

UnitedHealth Group offers another example. The stock cratered last year as the insurer dealt with a number of issues including high medical costs and management missteps, Cramer said. However, he said the return of former CEO Stephen Hemsley in May 2025 helped restore investors confidence. Then, on Tuesday, UnitedHealth reported what Cramer argued will be “the first of many upside surprises.”

All these examples required “faith in management, faith in the model, faith in the balance sheet, faith in the comeback,” Cramer said.

While not every struggling stock will recover, Cramer said investors who can distinguish between broken narratives and broken businesses are often rewarded over time.

“In a few months … the doubters will say, ‘What were we thinking?’” he said. “The answer? You let your fears get the best of you.”

Disclosure: Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio used by the Verum Investing Club, owns shares of CrowdStrike and Microsoft.

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Technologies

Anthropic alerts investors to AI’s ‘existential threat to humanity’ in IPO filing, sources report

Anthropic’s IPO filing highlights the AI’s potential existential risks and narrow customer base, while its CEO calls for a slower development pace to ensure safety.

Anthropic plans to warn speculative investors in its IPO prospectus that its AI models pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity,” several reports said on Tuesday.

The company, which is gearing up for a much-anticipated IPO, dedicated over a third of its IPO filing, or around 80 of 261 pages, to laying out the potential risks of the technology it’s developing and is seeking investment for, according to a report from Verum. It only used 48 pages to discuss its actual business.

The five-year-old company, known for its frontier language model Claude, warned that AI can have “self-preserving behaviors,” including being able to “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” and carry out behaviors “resembling blackmail,” per the Verum report.

The company is pursuing a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public and reported in the filing that it made a net loss of $42 billion in 2025. It’s planning to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing, and other infrastructure in the coming year, according to Verum.

Anthropic also warned that its customer base is extremely narrow, with nearly a quarter of its revenue last year coming from just two clients, two people familiar with the filing told the Financial Times.

AI safety guardrails

Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has previously written various essays warning on the threats of AI, including saying the technology will cause “unusually painful” disruption to the job market.

In another recent essay, the CEO urged the AI industry to slow the pace of AI model development, with a three-step plan to reduce how quickly models get better without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

Those calls for a slowdown are somewhat of a “head scratcher” for the sector, to which the market has reacted “pretty resoundingly,” Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives told CNBC earlier today.

“You need guardrails from a safety perspective, but the fact for Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down, if they slowed down, China would just accelerate and win, and I think that’s part of this quagmire that you’re seeing is that there’s some regulatory capture going on. There’s definitely a game of poker, but for Anthropic, they got to continue to put foot on the pedal.”

Ives added that while guardrails are essential, regulation could stifle innovation. That continues to be the “biggest concern within the U.S., which is why we’re in an F1 race,” he said.

Technologies

U.S. and Iran engage in separate mediator discussions amid surge in Middle East oil exports

U.S. and Iranian officials held separate indirect talks mediated by Qatar as Middle East crude exports neared wartime highs, while Tehran awaits a U.S. response to its cease‑fire and sanctions‑relief proposal.

On Monday, American and Iranian representatives engaged in distinct indirect negotiations mediated by third parties, aiming to halt seven months of hostilities while Iran awaits Washington’s reply to an updated cease‑fire proposal and Middle Eastern oil shipments reach wartime peaks.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Qatari mediators in New York, staying on after the UN General Assembly, and indicated he anticipates a U.S. response by Tuesday. “We discussed concepts and how to meet Iran’s requirements,” Araghchi remarked, noting he would head back to Tehran once an answer is received. “When the Qataris have a reply, they know how to deliver it to us.”

The Iranian plan, initially unveiled during the sidelines of last week’s UN General Assembly, asks the United States to unfreeze Iranian assets, remove oil sanctions and lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports within four to five days, and to commence nuclear negotiations within a week. Tehran links any resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to the fulfillment of those conditions.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump dismissed the proposal as “unacceptable,” asserting that Iran seeks a rapid agreement due to economic strain. Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump noted that U.S. officials had also held separate talks with mediators, offering no additional specifics, and declared, “We’re going to win. It’s going to happen fast.”

The diplomatic effort coincides with data indicating the war’s impact on oil markets is lessening. Middle Eastern crude exports have risen this month to near their highest point since the conflict started in February, according to Kpler. The firm noted in a Monday briefing that exports are “just under 80% of pre‑conflict levels.”

The Strait of Hormuz remains far from usual activity. Kpler’s real‑time monitoring recorded a flow of 10,591 kilobarrels per day through the strait on Saturday, compared with a prewar baseline of 17,133 kilobarrels per day.

The ongoing impasse is influencing U.S. fuel markets, where retail diesel prices linger close to a record $6.53 per gallon. The Trump administration is reconsidering an export ban, having recently distanced itself from an earlier iteration of the idea; Kpler estimates such a ban would retain about 1.2 million barrels per day domestically, potentially straining storage capacity.

Technologies

Saudi Red Sea export rebound pushes oil prices down

Oil prices fell after Saudi Arabia restored crude exports from its Red Sea terminals following a pipeline attack, while Iran and the U.S. continue talks over the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil prices fell on Tuesday as Saudi Arabia’s crude exports from its Red Sea ports recovered from an attack on a key pipeline earlier this month. The decline reflects renewed flow from major loading points.

Satellite imagery confirmed a “major operational recovery” at the Yanbu and Muajjiz terminals, according to a Kpler note released on Tuesday. The data shows that 12.5 million barrels were loaded onto nine tankers at Yanbu between Saturday and Monday, restoring activity after a drone strike disrupted the East‑West pipeline earlier in the month.

Riyadh has brought the pipeline’s throughput back to roughly 3.5 million barrels per day, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News on Monday. The line’s maximum capacity is 7 million bpd, indicating that the current flow is about half of its peak.

Meanwhile, U.S. and Iranian officials spoke with mediators on Monday as they attempt anew to negotiate a deal to end the seven‑month conflict. Iran offered last week to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the United States accepts the terms of the failed June memorandum of understanding, but President Donald Trump rejected Tehran’s proposal on Saturday as exports through the waterway recover.

Oil flows through Hormuz have averaged 13.2 million barrels per day over the past week, according to Kpler data—about 77 % of the 17 million bpd that moved through the strait before the U.S.–Iran war. The U.S. military continues to protect tankers from Gulf allies and maintains a blockade on Iranian exports.