12 Stocks Jim Cramer Recently Talked About In His “Idea-Driven” Market

5. Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q1 2025: 102

Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST) is a sizable American electricity company whose shares have gained 28% year-to-date. The stock has benefited primarily from investor interest in AI and the expected increase in power demand. Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST)’s presence in the nuclear power generation industry and its partnership with Microsoft have linked the stock’s performance to AI-induced power demand in the US. However, the shares have lagged other AI energy plays such as Talen as investors have wondered about Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST)’s ability to land major deals with big AI companies. Cramer commented on the stock in the context of an idea-driven market:

“I just think that we need to recognize that we are not in a Fed market, we’re in a market where people say, you know what, those data centers need a lot of power. Oh, well let’s buy Vistra, let’s buy Constellation Energy. . . This has not happened since the 90s, David. And there’s a plethora of people who are fighting this and not realizing, because they’re so index oriented. They don’t realize what is really happening here is that people are focusing on themes.”

Cramer discussed Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST) in detail in February when the shares had lost more than 7% year-to-date in the aftermath of the DeepSeek selloff. Here’s what he said:

“How about the walloping in the nuclear power utilities like Vistra and Constellation Energy? These stocks are on a rollercoaster and right now they’re on the downside. They, they trade like they weren’t even wearing their seat belts. When you’re going down, which is what you know what happens, you fly up and then you land on your head. Microsoft had a hand in the froth here too, except this time at least it was negative. See these momentum utility stocks, all data center plays won’t be as important if Microsoft’s actually cutting capital expenditures for data centers, which is also what we heard on Friday. Why the heck do we need to bid up the stocks of tangential utilities when maybe we don’t even need to worry about the regular utilities? Maybe they got enough power, of, of course, we don’t need Constellation or Vistra.”