CNBC’s Jim Cramer said that while comparisons between today’s market and the dot-com bubble are getting louder, one key difference stands out: Wall Street is punishing stocks even more aggressively than it did in 1999.
“We keep hearing the drumbeat again that 2026 is 1999,” the “Mad Money” host said. “But the difference between now and 1999 is that this market will not stop punishing companies that let it down…It’s not safe at any level.”
of S&P500 and Nasdaq Composite Both rose 0.19% and 0.10% on Monday, closing at record highs. But behind the scenes, Kramer said, the market is becoming increasingly polarized, with investors flocking to a narrow group of artificial intelligence winners and harshly punishing companies that live up to expectations or simply fail to impress. The sell-off was accompanied by “a level of fear we’ve never seen before,” he added.
He pointed to several health care and medical technology companies that have been heavily divested.
Abbott LaboratoriesThe company, which he called “one of the greatest American companies of all time,” narrowly missed profit expectations and is down 34% this year.
“This is Abbott Laboratories, just in case,” Kramer said. “The market that punishes Abbott is the one that despises anything that has nothing to do with technology or data centers.”
Danaher It also took a hit after what Kramer called “a barbaric situation with some not-so-nice neighborhoods.” The stock is down 27% this year. He added that companies: boston scientific, intuitive surgery, medtronic, ResMed, strikerand zimmer biomet also hit a new low.
At the same time, Cramer said investors are overly excited about artificial intelligence and data center stocks.
“It’s like a portfolio manager deciding to abandon all stocks that aren’t related to AI,” he said. “They’re holding on to data centers because the demand is so strong that data centers are thought to have little economic sensitivity.”
Still, Kramer argued that today’s market dynamics are much more extreme, and cautioned against making direct comparisons to the dot-com era.
“The problem with the dot-com analogy, as I’ve explained repeatedly, is that it doesn’t hold up,” he says. “The bottom line is that some socks are hated and some stocks are loved. Right now, the haters are being hated too much and the loved ones are being loved too much.”
