In a fresh appearance on CNBC's Squawk on the Street, Jim Cramer cautioned viewers to not be caught up by the energy that's gripped the US stock market since President Donald Trump resumed charge. "Things are happening very fast. And I want so much to slow it down," he stated. Cramer mentioned an article that mentioned "the burst of energy, some good, some bad," adding that not every remark made by the President is investment advice. He believes that "a lot of people want to do that. [treat all of Trump's remarks as investable]" They wanna do oil and gas, they wanna do with interest rates," he added and shared "They have to remember that he doesn't have the authority" particularly when it comes to determining interest rates.
Cramer further commented on the state of America's non-tech industrial economy and how it tied in with the President's desire for lower rates. According to him "I just think the industrial economy justifies everything that Trump wants to lower rates." Yet, as consumer spending has remained robust despite high rates, Cramer added that "the consumer economy, says don't lower rates." He believes that if the president took a look at "how great things are at small to medium-sized business. Where the real strength's coming since his election," he would be hard-pressed to press for further rate cuts.
Energy was another topic on the CNBC host's mind. Commenting particularly on natural gas and its demand in today's era of AI data centers, Cramer shared "People only want to be in this business. Want to own stocks in this business because it's going to be the biggest thing that we export." However, he believes that these investors need to ask themselves "Are we going to export so much that domestically because we need it for the data centers, that the customer's going to be squeezed by uh nat gas prices." The surge in exports and data center demand could very well lead to higher natural gas prices for consumers. According to Cramer "Nat gas could go to five. That would be something."
Not only is Cramer interested in energy, but the President ran his election on the promise of increasing America's oil production and requiring oil companies to drill more. However, the CEOs that he's spoken to "are all saying listen, we're going to hold."
"It's kind of a Braveheart thing," Cramer added. He believes "They're not going to break. And they all are kind of united, but they don't fix prices. Some people, the FTC felt that they fixed prices. That's nonsense. But I do think that they've all said listen we're making a ton of money. We're not going to go down the path the President wants. So there's going to be a test of wills."
Another topic that Cramer touched on was SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service. Starlink is powered by thousands of small satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) launched by SpaceX. Over the past year, it has grown its presence in the commercial aviation industry by providing airlines with internet connectivity. Cramer revealed, "You know the rap about Starlink I'm getting from, the push back that I'm hearing from some of the. . . that when you put em all up, like even when United starts, it's going to slow down the latency, they can't handle that."
One of the hottest topics on Wall Street these days is Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. Investors' worries about the firm's R1 model being purportedly cheaper than American models led to Wall Street's favorite AI stock crashing by a whopping 17% on Monday. However, Cramer dismissed the worries of US companies pouring too much money into AI on Friday. He shared that he wasn't worried "because I'm a huge believer that this is the industrial revolution, and there are going to be so many uses that you just have to be in."
A mere industrial revolution isn't the only reason why Cramer was dismissive of the firm that led the AI GPU stock to lose all gains made since October 2024. Commenting on the firm's GPUs and their potential he revealed:
"I think that what we're not thinking about, like when I went to Jensen Huang's panel on healthcare. It's so much bigger than anything involving AI PC. I mean they're really just talking about having the data to really attack every single disease and changing it from fatal to maintenance. You have tremendous number of people involved in trying to do that. Then you have Stripe there working with [the GPU company] to be able to do something revolutionary in finance. And then you have the banks working doing some revolutionary things trying to get people who're doing S1s. . . ."
Cramer also believes that Fed chair Jerome Powell will be 'perplexed' by the amount of spending in America. According to him:
"The amount of people traveling. The bump up to first class, from commercial, from the, you know what second class we'll call it, David. Uh, the amount of people just, the frequency at which people are having a dinner out. I don't know what to say, there's a burst of optimism that is being translated into spend. And particularly for younger people that I'm just flabbergasted about. It just can't stop!"
The spending has left him flabbergasted. "We're spending so much I don't know how they can cut!" Cramer explained. "I want them to cut . . . I wanted to cut like a thousand times!" he added.
Our Methodology
To make our list of the stocks that Jim Cramer talked about, we listed down the stocks he mentioned during CNBC’s Squawk on the Street aired on January 24th.
For these stocks, we also mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds invest in? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points. (see more details here).
A development team working together to create the next version of Windows.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the world's largest software company. It was one of the top-performing stocks in the early phases of the AI race due to its investment in and partnership with OpenAI. However, since its July 2024 peak, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)'s shares have lost 5.4% as investors sit on the sidelines to see the returns of its multi-billion dollar AI investments. The wariness hasn't stopped Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) from spending big bucks on AI, with CEO Satya Nadella sharing earlier this year that he 'has the money' for AI capital expenditure. Here's what Cramer said:
"I'm saying that Microsoft is on its heels, I know that you're okay it's up a little but take a look at what Microsoft's been year-over-year. Microsoft's not been a winner. Oracle was the winner because they, you know, the White House."
Overall MSFT ranks 2nd on our list of the stocks Jim Cramer talked about before DeepSeek wreaked havoc on the stock market. While we acknowledge the potential of MSFT as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than MSFT but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.