On Thursday, Jim Cramer, the host of Mad Money, discussed that a sudden shift in Federal Reserve expectations, strong retailer earnings, and healthy Thanksgiving-weekend spending helped revive consumer-stock sentiment despite gloomy confidence surveys.
“Although we got a quarter-point rate cut from the Fed yesterday, for much of November, it looked like the rate cut was off the table. We kept hearing the Fed officials talk about persistent inflation, signaling they were inclined to skip a rate cut in the December meeting. But in late November, that changed. In fact, you can pretty much trace the bottom to the Friday before Thanksgiving when the president of the New York Fed said he thought there was room to cut rates, citing weakness in the labor market. Went from expecting no more Fed help to believing that the Fed was still… on our side overnight, which breathed new life into all kinds of consumer stocks.”
READ ALSO Jim Cramer Expressed Thoughts on These 14 Stocks and Jim Cramer Highlighted 7 Stocks in Light of the Fed Rate Cut
Cramer added that it reminded him not to get caught up in the constant guessing game around Fed moves the way so many people do. At the same time that expectations were changing, he said, several of the country’s strongest retailers reported upbeat quarterly numbers. On top of that, he pointed to the Thanksgiving stretch from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, noting that sales growth during that period held up well.
“Now, this is important because it cuts against the narrative from most consumer confidence measures, which have been very weak. Now, I’ve warned you about this before. What consumers say in polls about how they’re feeling is often very different from what consumers actually do with their money. People are very clear that they’re not feeling too great about their finances, but they’re still spending like normal, at least when it comes to holiday shopping.”
Our Methodology
For this article, we compiled a list of 12 stocks that were discussed by Jim Cramer during the episode of Mad Money aired on December 11. We listed the stocks in the order that Cramer mentioned them. We also provided hedge fund sentiment for each stock as of the third quarter of 2025, which was taken from Insider Monkey’s database of 978 hedge funds.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? 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 427.7% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 264 percentage points (see more details here).
12 Stocks on Jim Cramer’s Radar Recently
12. Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 74
Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is one of the stocks on Jim Cramer’s radar recently. Cramer highlighted the change in the company’s valuation over time, as he remarked:
“At the top, in 2000, Cisco’s forward price to earnings multiple was somewhere near, over 130. That’s ridiculously high for any market. That should have been a clarion call. Now, Cisco is valued at less than 19 times forward earnings now, literally less than a sixth of its peak valuation in the dot-com era. These days, it’s viewed as a stable, growing tech company that helps clients manage their networks and keep them secure. That’s a much more prosaic version of Cisco than we were being pitched 25 years ago. I know it well because my hedge fund owned Cisco for years and made a killing in it…
Of course, Cisco turned out to have made you nothing if you stubbornly held on to it. We sold it as well as almost all of our other stocks in March of 2000, shortly before the top… This time, though, we got long Cisco for the Charitable Trust, precisely because of how cheap it is and how CEO Chuck Robbins has reinvented the company. We don’t invest in irony for the trust. We invest in companies, and this company’s at the heart of the AI revolution. Yet, it doesn’t get the respect or the price-to-earnings multiple that its compadres do despite accelerating product order growth and a rock-solid balance sheet.
In the latest quarter, Cisco’s earnings jumped 10% on an annual basis. Revenue increased 8%. These are good numbers, people, for a stock that trades at just 19 times earnings. I keep hearing that the AI revolution will end like the dot-com revolution in 2000, a disaster. It’s true that there are plenty of fully valued companies now, but time and again, they reported higher than expected earnings, and it turns out, they only looked fully valued on estimates that were too low. So many turned out to be cheaper in retrospect, including Cisco.”
Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) creates networking, security, and collaboration tools that help organizations stay connected and protected.
11. MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 109
MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI) is one of the stocks on Jim Cramer’s radar recently. Toward the end of the lightning round, a caller sought Cramer’s thoughts on MELI, and here’s what Mad Money’s host had to say in response:
“That is such a good company. I was an original investor in it, and I had to give up stock. Obviously, I’m not doing any stocks. That is a good one.”
MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI) runs an online marketplace and financial platform that lets users buy, sell, and pay for goods and services. Janus Henderson Forty Fund stated the following regarding MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI) in its third quarter 2025 investor letter:
“MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI), another detractor, is a leading online retailer and financial technology company in Latin America. The company has recently faced increased competition from other online retailers such as Amazon and Shopee. Investors worried about the impact of the increased competition on MercadoLibre’s margins and profitability, and the stock declined. We continue to believe MercadoLibre is the dominant operator in a Latin American region where e commerce and financial technology are underpenetrated. We maintained our position.”
