Cyber giant jumps 9% after the best quarter in its history
The cyber company beat analyst forecasts for revenue and profit, raised its guidance for the rest of the year, and attributed the growth specifically to the growing fear of artificial intelligence capabilities. What is behind the 67% rally since the beginning of 2026 - and does the stock price already reflect all the news?
Shares of the American cyber giant CrowdStrike jumped by about 9% in after-hours trading last night, after the company reported what it defined as the strongest quarter in its history. Revenue totaled 1.47 billion dollars, a growth of 26% compared to the same quarter last year, and net profit beat Wall Street forecasts. CEO George Kurtz linked the results directly to the wave of demand for information security products in the era of artificial intelligence.
Beyond revenue growth, the Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) - a metric that reflects expected income from existing customers - reached 5.84 billion dollars as of July 31, an increase of 25%.
Net profit climbed to 322.9 million dollars compared to 237.4 million in the same quarter last year, and beat the analyst forecast of 302 million dollars. Both revenue and ARR exceeded analyst estimates, which had expected more moderate growth in both metrics.
Kurtz attributed the success to a shift in market consciousness. "The quarter was the best in CrowdStrike's history," he said, "the Mythos moment translated into a broad acceptance of the insight that adopting artificial intelligence requires security."
This refers to the Claude Mythos model launched by Anthropic earlier this year, which is described as excelling in detecting and exploiting security vulnerabilities. The fear of capabilities of this type has made cyber a central focus in the technology industry, and sector stocks stood out positively even when a significant portion of software stocks were trading lower. "Every organization will operate on an AI basis, and its security is the biggest market opportunity in our history," Kurtz added.
The main growth engine is the flagship platform Falcon, which unifies protection for endpoints, cloud, identities, and central security management. The flexible licensing model Falcon Flex, which allows customers to purchase a budget in advance and deploy it among different modules, recorded a record volume with more than 935 new accounts.
According to CFO Burt Podbere, the quarter generated record free cash flow and a record order backlog for the next quarter. Against this background, the company raised its forecast: ARR of up to 6.19 billion dollars in the coming quarter, compared to 5.79 billion that analysts expected, as well as an improved forecast for the 2027 fiscal year.
Alongside the positive picture, investors are entering an expensive stock. Even before the jump in after-hours trading, the stock had already risen about 67% since the beginning of 2026, so the expectations embedded in the price are very high.
Such pricing leaves little room for error: any future disappointment in growth rates or forecasts could be met with sharp declines. It is also worth remembering that CrowdStrike is still restoring its reputation after the global malfunction of July 2024, which disabled millions of computers around the world - the current rally is to a large extent a recovery story.
CrowdStrike is included in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indices, and therefore it sits - often without the saver being aware of it - in the pension portfolios, provident funds, and advanced study funds of many Israelis who follow American indices.
A jump like the current one also flows into local pension savings. On the other hand, that same exposure illustrates the growing concentration of Israeli savings in expensive American technology stocks - an advantage in periods of growth, and a risk when the trend reverses.
