We recently published a list of 10 Stocks on Jim Cramer’s Radar Recently. In this article, we are going to take a look at where CME Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CME) stands against other stocks that are on Jim Cramer’s radar.

On Thursday, Jim Cramer, the host of Mad Money, addressed the growing concerns surrounding the current tariff policies. He questioned the effectiveness of these tariffs as he asked:

“What’s the deal with these heavy-handed tariffs? Look, I’ve never been a dogmatic free trader. I believe in fair trade, a pretty fierce belief just so you know and we can only get that by lowering the boom on our trading partners who rip us off as a matter of policy.”

READ ALSO Jim Cramer’s Take on These 10 Stocks and Jim Cramer’s Lightning Round: 8 Stocks in Focus

Cramer explained that while he has always supported the idea of tariffs in principle, especially when they are part of a well-thought-out strategy, he expressed frustration over how the new trade regime is being executed. He said he was taken aback by how poorly the administration was rolling out these changes, which he felt lacked a clear and coherent plan. Cramer then pointed out what James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, said about how the White House is calculating tariffs.

“The White House simply took our trade deficit with each country and then divided it by that country’s exports to America. Then they cut that number in half to determine the tariff rate we’d be slapping on the country in question.”

Cramer noted that just hours later, an unnamed official from the White House confirmed this and  described it as “the sum of all unfair trade practices, the sum of all cheating.” Cramer called it ill-advised. Later in the day, President Trump made a statement suggesting that he might be open to reducing tariffs if presented with “phenomenal” offers. However, Cramer raised an important question: “Who determines what those offers are, and what do they even mean?” He admitted that he had no clear answer to that question.

“Here’s the bottom line: I wish I could get behind this new tariff regime because I’ve never been a free trader ever. But the White House doesn’t seem to understand what it’s trying to do and the not-really-reciprocal tariffs we got yesterday could do tremendous damage to the US economy, of course including the stock market, without changing the bad behavior of our trading partners. To me, this has become a lose-lose, which is very tough to accept because I wanted tariffs to change things, not to wreck things.”

Our Methodology

For this article, we compiled a list of 10 stocks that were discussed by Jim Cramer during the episode of Mad Money aired on April 3. We listed the stocks in ascending order of their hedge fund sentiment as of the fourth quarter of 2024, which was taken from Insider Monkey’s database of over 1,000 hedge funds.

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).

CME Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CME)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 73

When a caller pointed out the 2% gain in CME Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CME) stock on Thursday, here’s what Cramer had to say:

“Totally terrific stock. I’m going to throw in ICE. That’s exactly where you have to be. That’s fintech without credit risk.”

CME Group (NASDAQ:CME) operates markets for trading futures and options contracts on a variety of products, including interest rates, equity indexes, commodities, and metals. The company also provides clearing services, trade processing, risk mitigation, and market data services.

Parnassus Investments stated the following regarding CME Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CME) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:

“CME Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CME), a leading global derivatives marketplace, advanced for the year but trailed the broader market’s gains. Elevated market volatility drove higher trading volumes across asset classes, boosting revenues. However, concerns around competition and decelerating earnings growth weighed on the stock’s valuation. In Financials, we sold CME Group, an operator of futures and derivatives exchanges that faces slowing growth and rising competition. CME Group, a leading operator of futures and derivatives exchanges globally, faces slowing growth and rising competition. We reallocated our investment from CME to Eli Lilly in order to take advantage of the pharmaceutical maker’s greater growth potential.”

Overall, CME ranks 3rd on our list of stocks that are on Jim Cramer’s radar. While we acknowledge the potential of CME as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than CME but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.