In this piece, we will look at the stocks Jim Cramer recently discussed.
In a recent appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, Jim Cramer discussed potential actions by the Federal Reserve in response to President Trump’s tariffs. Trump has denied having any plans to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, and Cramer commented on the historical context of the current tariffs and Powell:
“Anyone who knows Powell knows that he’s a deep historian of the marketplace. And he’s obviously looking at Smoot-Hawley, the tariff in 1930 and that’s, you could argue, a 33% tariff. And arguing a second that this is higher, and that he knows history, and he knows that Smoot-Hawley was what was one of the things that caused the Great Depression. So, unless you’re ahistorical, you can’t disagree with him.”
The CNBC TV host also discussed how people who were alive during the Smoot-Hawley era are no longer with us so it’s impossible to put it in a real-life framework. According to him:
“Well I mean, we do have Grapes of Wrath, David. Now I think that truth lies in novels. It’s very hard to get the real truth unless you go to novels. . . alright, when you’re a journalist covering homicide, like I was, my editor . . .I try to do this, he goes, Jim that’s for, only fiction can tell the truth about homicide. You just tell the facts. What I’m saying is that if I look at the fiction of what happened in the Great Depression, I have a better feeling than when actually look at the statistics.”
Cramer also stressed that the recent stock market selloff meant that the Magnificent 7, as a term, continued to be irrelevant. “We don’t use that anymore that’s gone,” he said. “Yeah that’s gone. Yeah I don’t know it’s not like the Mag 7. . .no we’re done with that, Mag 7, whole thing. Now it’s the Wild Bunch. . . we’re switching, it’s no more, I mean honestly, Wild Bunch was actually a better movie,” Cramer said.
As for AI, Cramer believes that “[t]his is a winner take all, loser takes none, just like Google was, this is a 200 billion dollar business. Whoever gets the mind share… right now I have every one of these. I’ve got Grok, I’ve got Gemini, I’m not going to go, believe me, one year from now, I’m only gonna have one. And right now it’s Grok.”
On diplomacy, he shared that the “one thing we haven’t done yet is gunboat diplomacy. I’m waiting for that.” So what is Jim Cramer’s gunboat diplomacy? Well, according to him:
“You put something in the straits of. . of every strait, yeah. . the Straits of Hormuz and then of course the Strait of Taiwan. . gunboat diplomacy, the pursuit of foreign policy objectives through conspicuous displays of military especially naval power.”
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 April 17th.
For these stocks, we also mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. 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 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
7. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q4 2024: 162
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides customer relationship management products and services. Its shares have lost 26% year-to-date, and in his previous remarks, Cramer has commented that while he doesn’t like seeing Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s stock lose a hundred dollars from its high, he believes that the firm’s AgentForce AI contracts aren’t sufficient to make a large income statement impact. Here are his latest thoughts:
“[On Citi cutting MSFT price target] I know. Azure low end of the guide is bad. I know that CoPilot, you got that one man wrecking crew of Benioff [CRM CEO] coming out, trashing that all the time. Meanwhile, I had someone on my conference call yesterday, for the club, saying that they’re in the house of pain because of Salesforce. That’s been, it’s been a long time since you were in the house of pain with Salesforce.”
6. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q4 2024: 166
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is still the most valuable company in the world. However, multiple headwinds in 2025, such as delays with AI-powered software rollouts and President Trump’s tariffs on China have hit the shares hard. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s stock has lost 18% year-to-date and slipped by 23% in the days after the tariffs came into effect. In his previous comments, Cramer has defended Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and even commented that he’s viewed as a “lapdog” for the company. Here are his latest comments:
“I just think that if you’re one of these, you’re gonna write a check, if the Justice Department allows you, to Apple and say, listen I want to be the only provider.”
“Okay here’s what I’ve said about Apple. They’re spending 500 billion which gives them absolutely nothing other than the right to be able to build here in the United States which is the same thing that NVIDIA did. I will tell you this. I think that the stay [tariff pause] is going to turn out to be chimerical. I think it’s going to be chimerical. Because they’re so. . .mercurial and arbitrary there I think, and nothing means anything. They can say, well I just think they’re giving them a stay. You know, Lutnick comes out. If you remember the, the cadence, they get the stay on Friday, then Lutnick comes on Sunday talk shows and basically says well that means nothing. You know so I come back and I say, well what certainty do I have?”