Jim Cramer is warning investors not to sleep on Microsoft 's ability to stay competitive. Most of the analyst community agrees — and so does at least one billionaire hedge fund manager. "The main reason we don't want to sell [Microsoft] is because they actually have the balance sheet to do what they want," Jim said on " Squawk on the Street " on Friday. "Tomorrow, they could do something that is s...
Jim Cramer is warning investors not to sleep on Microsoft 's ability to stay competitive. Most of the analyst community agrees — and so does at least one billionaire hedge fund manager. "The main reason we don't want to sell [Microsoft] is because they actually have the balance sheet to do what they want," Jim said on " Squawk on the Street " on Friday. "Tomorrow, they could do something that is so revolutionary that we could say, 'Why did we doubt them?" Jim's comments came after Bill Ackman's hedge fund, Pershing Square , revealed a sizable stake in the software and cloud giant. Shares of Microsoft popped roughly 4% on Friday after Ackman shared the update on X ahead of Pershing Square's quarterly 13F filing. According to FactSet, around 95% of analysts have a buy-equivalent rating on the stock. We're a bit more conservative, with our 2 rating hold on the stock. Ackman said the recent pullback in Microsoft shares, which are still down nearly 12% in 2026, was a rare opportunity to buy at a reasonable valuation. The hedge fund manager also said he is "encouraged to see Microsoft prioritizing its R & D efforts and investment in Copilot, its own AI agent embedded across M365, with direct involvement from CEO Satya Nadella." He added, "We believe these efforts will translate into improved product velocity and greater customer adoption over time." MSFT YTD mountain Microsoft YTD The disclosure of Pershing Square's stake in Microsoft comes at a time when software enterprise giants are getting knocked on artificial intelligence disruption concerns. Investors have been worrying that AI-driven efficiency gains could lead to workforce reductions, pressuring the seat-based model for its legacy offerings like Microsoft 365, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Ackman said his hedge fund began building its position in Microsoft back in February after a sell-off following its fiscal 2026 second-quarter results reported late January. Ackman also believes investors...
Cisco Systems ( NASDAQ: CSCO ) continued trading in positive territory for a seventh consecutive session on Friday afternoon, rising 2.03% to $117.88 as bullish momentum remained firmly intact. CSCO has rallied 26.07% over the past six trading sessions, far exceeding the S&P 500's 1.85% rise during the period. On a year-to-date basis, the stock has climbed 52.40% in 2026, comfortably outperforming...
Cisco Systems ( NASDAQ: CSCO ) continued trading in positive territory for a seventh consecutive session on Friday afternoon, rising 2.03% to $117.88 as bullish momentum remained firmly intact. CSCO has rallied 26.07% over the past six trading sessions, far exceeding the S&P 500's 1.85% rise during the period. On a year-to-date basis, the stock has climbed 52.40% in 2026, comfortably outperforming the broader market's 9.58% gain. The latest rally has been fueled by growing confidence following Cisco’s fiscal third-quarter results. Analyst Stephen Bersey upgraded Cisco to Buy from Hold, saying the company’s third-quarter results strengthened the case that its AI business is becoming a structural growth driver with a larger-than-expected financial contribution. In a note to clients, Bersey said he expects AI to account for roughly 6% of Cisco’s revenue in fiscal 2026 and 9% in fiscal 2027, driven by hyperscaler AI build-outs, enterprise networking upgrades, and campus modernization demand. In a recent article , analysts pointed to Cisco’s Silicon One strategy as a key differentiator, citing tighter supply-chain control and stronger exposure to accelerating AI demand. The advantages prompted several brokerages to lift price targets, with analysts arguing that Cisco holds a competitive edge over peers dependent on merchant silicon. However, Seeking Alpha analyst Jonathan Weber appeared more cautious, maintaining a Hold rating on Cisco despite the company delivering stronger-than-expected fiscal third-quarter results. Weber noted that Cisco beat Wall Street estimates on both revenue and earnings by roughly 2%, with shares surging 13% post-earnings and extending a nearly 50% rally over the past six months. While he acknowledged AI infrastructure spending as a meaningful growth catalyst supporting future performance, Weber cautioned that the stock’s sharp run-up has made its valuation less compelling at current levels. Broader sentiment remained mixed but leaned positive. ...
operofilm UBS attended Freshworks' ( FRSH ) Refresh user event on Thursday and highlighted key takeaways, which included a focus on Employee Experience and AI, as well as raised 2028 targets. The firm kept its Buy rating and $11 price target on the software company's stock. Shares of Freshworks rose about 6% on Friday. Freshworks' Employee Experience, or EX, refers to the company's suite of AI-pow...
operofilm UBS attended Freshworks' ( FRSH ) Refresh user event on Thursday and highlighted key takeaways, which included a focus on Employee Experience and AI, as well as raised 2028 targets. The firm kept its Buy rating and $11 price target on the software company's stock. Shares of Freshworks rose about 6% on Friday. Freshworks' Employee Experience, or EX, refers to the company's suite of AI-powered software designed to improve how employees work. Analysts led by Taylor McGinnis said that key product announcements and strategic emphasis centered on EX and AI, with comparatively less focus on Customer Experience, or CX. At the event, Freshworks raised its 2028 revenue and Annual Recurring Revenue, or ARR, targets by about $100M to over $1.3B (from $1.2B+) and over $1.4B (from $1.3B+), respectively. This outlook assumes sustained mid-20s growth in EX (grew 25% constant currency in the first quarter of 2026) alongside a deceleration in CX to low-to-mid-single digits (down from 4% constant currency in the first quarter of 2026). "Given ongoing macro uncertainty and the transition to an AI-driven world, we think the achievability of this outlook will be a debate and FRSH will likely need to prove out execution against these targets before gaining credit in its stock. FRSH also increased its FY28 FCF margin outlook to 32–34% (from 28–30%), implying ~550 bps of expansion from its FY26 guide of 27.5%, and lowered its FY28 SBC outlook to 13–14% of revs. We’re maintaining our FY28 revs estimate at $1.2B, reflecting a need for greater conviction in the sustainability of EX growth at these levels," said McGinnis and her team. The analysts noted that they talked to customers, partners, and management at the event, and feedback was broadly positive around Freshworks' ease of use, intuitive user interface, or UI, and attractive pricing, particularly for smaller organizations, while larger competitor platforms like ServiceNow ( NOW ) were still seen as too complex or expensive. "...
All 46 Council of Europe members sign agreement ‘deplored’ by human rights organisations The UK and 45 other European countries have signed an agreement that explicitly endorses plans to send unwanted asylum seekers to third country hubs. A political declaration from the 46 members of the Council of Europe, the body that oversees the European convention on human rights (ECHR), said states had an “...
All 46 Council of Europe members sign agreement ‘deplored’ by human rights organisations The UK and 45 other European countries have signed an agreement that explicitly endorses plans to send unwanted asylum seekers to third country hubs. A political declaration from the 46 members of the Council of Europe, the body that oversees the European convention on human rights (ECHR), said states had an “undeniable sovereign right” to control their borders. Continue reading...
Mainstream and digital markets are on a collision course, with Nasdaq sitting at the center, Nasdaq President Tal Cohen said at the Consensus 2026 blockchain conference in Miami.
Mainstream and digital markets are on a collision course, with Nasdaq sitting at the center, Nasdaq President Tal Cohen said at the Consensus 2026 blockchain conference in Miami.
urbazon/E+ via Getty Images Water ETFs have recently come onto my radar thanks to their lower valuations relative to the broader market, and as I seek diversification away from the inflated multiples of big tech. I also foresee three forced-spend cycles that will meaningfully re-rate these ETFs higher across the board. These include the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), EPA-mandated P...
urbazon/E+ via Getty Images Water ETFs have recently come onto my radar thanks to their lower valuations relative to the broader market, and as I seek diversification away from the inflated multiples of big tech. I also foresee three forced-spend cycles that will meaningfully re-rate these ETFs higher across the board. These include the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), EPA-mandated PFAS remediation, and surging data center water infrastructure demand. This article will explain how each of these catalysts will play out if my analysis is correct. In sum, despite some regulatory uncertainty and headwinds, I rate FIW as a 'Buy' to ride through the IIJA and PFAS compliance windows, which could achieve appreciable risk-adjusted returns for investors. Overview The First Trust Water ETF ( FIW ) tracks the ISE Clean Water Index ( HHO ). The index derives a substantial portion of its revenues from the potable water and waste water industries in the U.S. FIW recently came to my attention thanks to its modified market cap, and tiered weighted structure, which I believe put its in a strong position to take advantage of some structural tailwinds that I outlined in the introduction to this article. Particularly due to rising hyperscaler water demand. Companies must first have a minimum market capitalization of $100 million to be considered for inclusion in the index. From this eligible pool of companies, the top 38 companies are then selected and ranked by market capitalization, assigned into five different tiers, as can be seen below: Ranks 1-10 (largest): 4% each, 40% of the index. Ranks 11-15: 3.5% each, 17.5% Ranks 16-20: 3% each, 15% Ranks 21-30: 2% each, 20% Ranks 31-36: 1.25% each, 7.5% The biggest stocks by market cap still get the most weight at around 4% each for the top ten. However, it diverges significantly from a pure cap-weighted index where the largest stocks would be massively overrepresented in the fund's return profile. What I like about FIW's tier...
In this article NVDA MSFT AMZN META NOW TXN DELL Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT US President Donald Trump speaks during a law enforcement leaders dinner, celebrating the start of National Police Week, in the Rose Garden at The White House in Washington D.C., on Monday, May 11, 2026. Aaron Schwartz | Bloomberg | Getty Images President Donald Trump reported thousands of financial tr...
In this article NVDA MSFT AMZN META NOW TXN DELL Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT US President Donald Trump speaks during a law enforcement leaders dinner, celebrating the start of National Police Week, in the Rose Garden at The White House in Washington D.C., on Monday, May 11, 2026. Aaron Schwartz | Bloomberg | Getty Images President Donald Trump reported thousands of financial transactions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars — including large purchases and sales of tech giants Nvidia , Microsoft , Amazon and Meta — in the first three months of 2026, new disclosure forms reveal. Trump's filings with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show more than 3,700 transactions, with the total amount for each listed as a range rather than an exact figure. The transactions, which became public on Thursday, are valued at between $220 million and $750 million cumulatively, according to Reuters . Trump's biggest purchases and sales skewed toward the tech sector, the filings showed. Among three dozen transactions valued between $1 million and $5 million in the first quarter of 2026, Trump bought securities of ServiceNow , Nvidia, Adobe , Microsoft, Oracle , Broadcom , Motorola , Amazon, Texas Instruments and Dell , the filings show. Trump's four largest sales in that period were also tech-heavy: He sold between $5 million and $25 million worth of Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta securities on Feb. 10, according to the documents. Dozens of other transactions took place that same day. The timing of some of the president's transactions overlapped with news from the companies whose stock he was buying or selling, the news outlet NOTUS reported Thursday. One week after Trump's Feb. 10 purchase of between $1 million and $5 million of Nvidia stock, for instance, that company announced a major chip deal with Meta. The president also bought between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock one week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nv...
ariya j/iStock via Getty Images Ovintiv Stock Analysis Data by YCharts When it comes to oil and gas names, I've spent most of my time writing about Matador Resources Company ( MTDR ), Tourmaline Oil Corp. ( TRMLF ), and a handful of royalty names, including Dorchester Minerals, L.P. ( DMLP ). Ovintiv Inc. ( OVV ) was nowhere on the list. The story was too messy, the basin count was too high, and t...
ariya j/iStock via Getty Images Ovintiv Stock Analysis Data by YCharts When it comes to oil and gas names, I've spent most of my time writing about Matador Resources Company ( MTDR ), Tourmaline Oil Corp. ( TRMLF ), and a handful of royalty names, including Dorchester Minerals, L.P. ( DMLP ). Ovintiv Inc. ( OVV ) was nowhere on the list. The story was too messy, the basin count was too high, and the market had spent the better part of five years not paying for any of the restructuring. That changed in February , when OVV closed the NuVista Energy acquisition for $2.7 billion , and again on April 9 when the company closed the $3 billion Anadarko sale and hit its debt target. What is left is a Midland plus Montney pure-play with net debt at a manageable level and a capital return policy that hands back 75% of free cash flow. The stock has rallied from the low $40s in January to $58 today, but it still trades at a lower EV/EBITDA than Tourmaline despite a higher FCF yield. I think there's another 30%-plus in this name between now and the Anadarko close. Buy under $60 per share, as I argue below. Ovintiv is a Two-Basin Business, Finally Ovintiv Corporate Presentation Ovintiv, under its former CEO Doug Suttles, was running a six-basin shotgun strategy, which took a year to dismantle. Now the company has sold its Bakken and Uinta assets, and its NuVista acquisition brings in roughly 90,000 barrels of oil per day, equivalent to the Montney basin, which interlocks with legacy Ovintiv acreage (across Pipestone, Wapiti, and Karr). NuVista looks like a smart move, adding about 600 derisked Montney locations plus another 300 sitting on multiple benches, per the company's post-deal corporate presentation . That extends the runway in a liquids-rich basin well into the 2030s. While I like this move? The Montney is premier, liquids-rich land. NuVista's well, we're already outperforming Ovintiv's legacy acreage in the same area by roughly 15%, according to the company. Second, gas m...
Olivier Le Moal/iStock via Getty Images Apparently (empirically speaking), my analyses on covered call ETFs such as the JPMorgan Nasdaq Equity Premium Income ETF ( JEPQ ) ( JEPQ:CA ) are a little controversial. Because I am a total return investor, I place little weight on the monthly dividend flow, so if my perspective is that at the moment the ETF will neither outperform the main indexes nor pro...
Olivier Le Moal/iStock via Getty Images Apparently (empirically speaking), my analyses on covered call ETFs such as the JPMorgan Nasdaq Equity Premium Income ETF ( JEPQ ) ( JEPQ:CA ) are a little controversial. Because I am a total return investor, I place little weight on the monthly dividend flow, so if my perspective is that at the moment the ETF will neither outperform the main indexes nor protect against a drawdown, for me it’s a sell rating (like I had in my last article ), signaling that I prefer to avoid this ETF. The logic here is actually simple: If I think the Nasdaq ( QQQ ) is very cheap and offers good asymmetry, it just makes more sense to get direct exposure to QQQ than to buy JEPQ or even the Goldman Sachs Nasdaq-100 Premium Income ETF ( GPIQ ). If I think QQQ is very expensive or “threatening” to have a substantial drawdown, I would also prefer to avoid JEPQ and go directly to a safer ETF, such as some short-term treasury ETFs. Besides having this protection characteristic, I also need to mention that for dividend investors, short-term treasury ETFs still have the characteristic of recurring dividends without the same drawdown risk as an ETF such as JEPQ. But I am not writing this article to give the exact same opinion as the past article. I am, in fact, writing to give an upgrade to the JEPQ rating. And the reason is implicit in the logic I mentioned in the previous paragraphs: I believe that QQQ is close to fair value, so I do not believe in either an abrupt re-rating in the short term or in such a relevant decline; because of this, these covered-call ETFs can both ride some of the gradual advance that the index may have in the next quarters and also improve this return through the income from the options. A Word About QQQ Right Now One of the main reasons that made me change my mind about JEPQ is QQQ's valuation. And now, I believe we are at a very reasonable level, or at a fair valuation, if you will. The 10-year average of QQQ's forward P/E is ...
Figure AI Inc. ’s humanoid robots sorted packages for around 50 hours nonstop without intervention, Chief Executive Officer Brett Adcock said, a milestone in showing their ability to take on everyday tasks. “There’s absolutely no teleoperation into this,” Adcock said Friday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Sometimes when the robot takes a turn to the left to grab packages, it moves its left h...
Figure AI Inc. ’s humanoid robots sorted packages for around 50 hours nonstop without intervention, Chief Executive Officer Brett Adcock said, a milestone in showing their ability to take on everyday tasks. “There’s absolutely no teleoperation into this,” Adcock said Friday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Sometimes when the robot takes a turn to the left to grab packages, it moves its left hand out of the way upwards. You’ll see this behavior happen every single time the robot turns for packages.” His comments underscored Figure’s contention that the robots were working autonomously in a live-streamed demonstration that drew millions of viewers. The trial triggered Internet speculation about whether they were working on their own, after the video showed incidents such as hand gestures that were interpreted as signs of human control. The robots operated using Figure’s Helix 02 software running fully onboard, with no remote human involvement, Adcock said. Over about 50 hours, the robots processed close to 60,000 packages at human speed with almost no downtime on a moving belt, he said. The system runs on four-hour battery cycles, with robots automatically signaling for replacements when power runs low before walking off for wireless charging while another unit takes over, according to Adcock. Closely held Figure is now manufacturing between 60 and 70 humanoid robots weekly at its facility, reaching several thousand units annually as it scales production, Adcock said. The Sunnyvale, California-based company has designed the entire hardware stack in-house while also training all AI neural networks internally as part of a fully vertically integrated approach, he said. Figure’s robots currently operate at roughly human speed of about three seconds per package, with a goal of reaching 90% success rates when packages flip for barcode scanning, Adcock said. The company’s largest bottlenecks are data for training neural networks and manufacturing capacity rather than ca...
Shares of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) are climbing in midday trading on Friday, up 4% to around $424.65 while the broader NASDAQ slides. The move stands out because nearly every other high-beta technology name is heading lower in the session. The NASDAQ 100 is down 1% intraday, with selling pressure concentrated in the names that have led ... Microsoft Rises 4%, Resists NASDAQ Downtrend
Shares of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) are climbing in midday trading on Friday, up 4% to around $424.65 while the broader NASDAQ slides. The move stands out because nearly every other high-beta technology name is heading lower in the session. The NASDAQ 100 is down 1% intraday, with selling pressure concentrated in the names that have led ... Microsoft Rises 4%, Resists NASDAQ Downtrend