We recently published a list of Jim Cramer Discusses These 11 Stocks & President Trump. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE:YUM) stands against other stocks that Jim Cramer discusses.
Jim Cramer’s latest appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street saw him continue to comment on the semiconductor industry. While chip stocks, primarily those geared towards data center AI computing, were the biggest winners of the AI revolution, things took a sharp turn last month following the DeepSeek selloff. Now, investors are continuously wondering whether the billions of dollars earmarked for data centers will actually materialize.
However, while the selloff occurred in 2025, Cramer’s co-host Carl Quintanilla pointed out that chip stocks were range bound since the latter half of 2024. In response, Cramer shared that investing in these stocks had “been very very difficult, because frankly, they’re one of the segments that you don’t want to be in.” This is because he believes that “There seems like there’s too much competition” amongst the companies. This includes the firm responsible for the Snapdragon processors “going against” the British design house owned by Softbank. Other examples shared by Cramer include the design house going against Dr. Lisa Su’s chip company and America’s largest and only integrated chip maker simply “flailing,” with Wall Street’s favorite AI GPU stock lately coming “under attack.”
This turmoil leads the CNBC host to conclude that “you’ve got a group David, that is frankly verklempt is the word I was searching for.”
Cramer also commented on research papers and industry participants pointing at the continually dropping AI training costs. Commenting specifically on a Stanford paper saying researchers training a cloud model for 5o bucks, he sardonically remarked “I think by the end these guys are going to make it so that, they pay you to take it. I mean there’s a little absurdity going on here.”
Another topic he discussed in quite detail during the show was the auto industry. Elon Musk’s car company and the firm that makes the F-150 truck fell as trading opened on the back of factors such as weaker demand in Europe and auto demand in America. Cramer believes that the latter firm’s CEO “Jim Farley is a great spokesman for the auto industry. He just said look, it’s a disaster what it is. Obviously, it’s going to hurt them.” Discussing President Trump’s sanctions against Mexico, Cramer pointed out that they would be particularly painful for Farley’s company due to its Mexican production base. Cramer added that a new direction in the tariff debate might see the President take aim on Japan and South Korea.
According to him:
“He [Farley] did. . .at one point say and I thought it was very important for the American people, said, we are having this conversation, well Honda is importing six hundred thousand units in the US with no incremental tariff. Why is Toyota able to import point five million vehicles in the US with no incremental tariff? I mean there are millions of vehicles coming into this country that are not being applied. Now I think that’s what I would go to the President and say.”
Cramer also shared his take on Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum. “Claudia Scheinbaum’s ratings, I was looking at hers yesterday, the President of Mexico,” he shared. “Through the roof, in the eighties. Because they feel that she offered a credible solution, which is to sit down and talk with the President,” 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 February 6th.
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 chef in a kitchen preparing a fast food meal of chicken, pizza and burgers.
Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE:YUM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q3 2024: 34
Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE:YUM) is one of the largest fast-food chains in the world. It owns well-known brands such as KFC and Taco Bell. More than half of the firm’s revenue is US-based, making it susceptible to any consumer downturns. Over the past year, Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE:YUM)’s shares 13% but had it not been for a 9% jump in February, the shares would have gained a mere 3%. So why did the stock soar? Well, Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE:YUM)’s fourth quarter saw its global sales recover to levels seen before the Middle East conflict and its US sales jumped on the back of value means driving consumers to Taco Bell. Here is what Cramer said:
“David [David Gibbs CEO] gave us, he’s got some hero brands, I thought it was just an excellent quarter. Excellent. And he’s, you know look, that stock is another stock that’s kind of done nothing, but the multiple’s high and today we got really really good numbers. I was really impressed. And I want him to win too. That’s a very cheap stock cause it’s a franchise stock.”
Overall, YUM ranks 6th on our list of stocks that Jim Cramer discusses. While we acknowledge the potential of YUM 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 time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than YUM but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.