Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 8/31/26

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**Jim Cramer** (0:43)
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I'm here to level the playing field for all investors. There's always a bull market somewhere, and I promise to help you find it. Mad Money starts now.
Hey, I'm Cramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Craymarca. Hello, my friends. I'm just trying to make you a little extra money here. My job is to entertain, but I'm going to do some teaching. So call me at 1-800-743-CBC. Tweet me at Jim Cramer.
As August comes to a grinding end, it's hard to believe that the reverberations of a hedge fund implosion could color so much of the month's action. We haven't seen something like this since the downfall of long-term capital in 1998 took the market apart. Thank heavens this one, Situational Awareness, that was the name of the fund, which at one time controlled $45 billion thanks to the liberal use of borrowed money, was contained to tech. If it had been bigger, the whole market might have been wrecked.
Instead, we got basically a solid month, where the Dow finished slightly higher, despite today, where the Dow dipped 347 points, S&P lost 0.33%, NASDAQ declined 0.12%. It's kind of a nothing day, and frankly what I'm willing to call nothing month. Now, I don't want to say that Situational Awareness, again, that's the hedge fund, has disappeared. The fund still has some assets. Still, the fallout from its collapse does finally seem to be unwinding. Still, when you look at the 10 best and worst performers, of the month, they're stark in their themes that include the unwind of the situational positions. Let's go over the winners first. First, let's start with the heavily shorted stock known as Moderna. Yes, there was a huge bet being made against these guys. Skeptics believe that its technology would never produce the breakthroughs that the bulls expected and were initially promised when the company came public. But this month, that's exactly what we got. See, working with Merck, Moderna has developed a vaccine for those who've beaten melanoma once. Now, this, my friends, is miraculous. So got a miraculous welcome. Do you know what? I think this could still have a huge potential to go higher.
Second is Palantir, which rallied 51%. My take is that Palantir should have ever been down to begin with, based on the rule of 40, that we typically use to judge this kind of business. When you add up the revenue growth plus the profit margin, the sum comes to 155
I don't know how you sell something with that kind of profitable growth. Situation awareness just despised Enterprise Software and Viva Systems. Number three, up 40%, is Enterprise Software writ large for the healthcare industry. I think it's bounced back in conjunction with all the other Enterprise Software companies that Situation Awareness believed would be destroyed by AI that haven't been. Once that hedge fund blew up, the whole group came roaring back, and Situation was no longer there to put pressure on them.
Hey, Salesforce had a similar rally up nearly 40%.
Now, here's one that openly took on the short sellers first, with rhetoric and then with numbers, which have not been hurt at all by what CEO Mark Benioff spoofed as the SaaSpocalypse. His blowout quarter obliterated the shorts.
I don't think they still know what hit them. Sometimes stocks go so low, they need even a little win to produce a percentage gain, and that's what happened with Paramount Skydance, which is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. Deal's been held up by State Attorney General, which somehow produced a nice bump for this one. I don't know, maybe Wall Street thinks they're paying too much. Gold has been strong all year, which is why Newmont, number six, rallied almost 35 percent. Now, I prefer Agnika Wheel. I just think it's got better land. But Newmont's a classic gold stock, and it's viewed as a proxy for the precious metal. That's what people want. Next, oh boy, here we go, ServiceNow, another classic enterprise sulfur stock that was supposed to be crushed by AI. At least that was a situational awareness idea. But it's done more than most to integrate AI into its everyday business, and it's done it successfully, which is why the stock's up 33 percent, and in August, it's another coiled spring, courtesy of situational awareness. See, the stock got pushed down two quarters ago, even as it was pretty good. The last quarter was even better, and with situational go on, the stock could roll with impunity. No one's knocking it down, making it look bad when it wasn't. Now, I don't know how this super micro keeps coming back, but no matter how much heat it takes for some of its employees helping the Chinese to get Nvidia hardware, it's still up 31 percent for the month of August. The market has no memory. The authorities perhaps have no teeth. We were told endlessly that no one could benchmark anything anymore, including tech, except for Anthropic and its Claude. Now, that supposedly made a research and advisory company like Gartner obsolete. Well, the stock was right in the crosshairs of the AI displacement thesis, but apparently their business is not in the crosshairs, which is why the stock bounced 31 percent to finish nine. Finally, crypto has had a big comeback this month. Of course, crypto isn't in the SP 500, but Coinbase is. Coinbase was up 28 percent. As the bell tolled, though, SanDisk topped the stock, a memory device play with a 28.9 percent gain. I'm including both of them because I like the context. The losers.