CrowdStrike Holdings is the IBD Stock of the Day as the cybersecurity firm continues to rebound from a global IT outage last year. Amid industry buzz over generative artificial intelligence, CrowdStrike stock has gained 42% in 2024.
On the stock market today, CrowdStrike stock rose 1.5% to close at 488.45. Shares in the cybersecurity stock hit an all-time high of 517.98 on July 3, then pulled back ahead of its second-quarter earnings report.
From a traditional technical view, CrowdStrike holds an entry point of 507.26. However, there's an early entry around 483. CrowdStrike has formed a cup-with-handle base. Last week it broke a downward trend in its handle, creating the alternative entry point.
CrowdStrike stock trades above its 50-day moving average.
With the Dow Jones, S&P 500, Nasdaq composite and Russell 2000 all hitting record highs recently, the valuation of CrowdStrike stock is one issue. "Steep multiple is the chief debate, but CrowdStrike's growing dominance as a 'cyber-system-of-record' looks poised to only deepen/widen its (competitive) moat," said Citi analyst Fatima Boolani in a report.
Artificial Intelligence Push
The cybersecurity firm hosted an investor day in early September that coincided with its Fal.con customer conference.
"We continue to believe that agentic AI is a game-changing opportunity for cybersecurity, and CrowdStrike intends to lead in this emerging area of AI-driven security," said William Blair analyst Jonathan Ho in a report.
"(At Fal.con) CrowdStrike unveiled seven new cybersecurity AI agents alongside enhancements to its Charlotte AI assistant. These agents are specialized operators for security tasks like threat hunting, malware analysis, and more that act at machine speed while remaining under human oversight. The company aims to dramatically accelerate threat response and help overburdened security teams shift from reactive to proactive defense and to be able to keep up with the speed of adversaries using AI."
In addition, CrowdStrike has been upgrading security operations center (SOC) services with automation capabilities provided by generative AI technology.
"Management also emphasized the transition toward an agentic SOC that is powered by fleets of AI agents," Ho added. "The company is re-architecting the SOC from reactive alert management to proactive and outcome-driven operations. CrowdStrike's ability to deploy agents is based on its deep telemetry and unified Falcon platform, which strengthens its competitive differentiation."
Endpoint Competition Heats Up
CrowdStrike competes with Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Microsoft and others in the "endpoint" market. Endpoint security tools detect malware on laptops, mobile phones and other devices that access corporate networks.
The company is building a broad threat-detection cybersecurity platform that monitors endpoints as well as web/email gateways, web application firewalls and cloud business workloads. CrowdStrike has been pushing into the identity security market, where is competes with CyberArk, Okta and others.
Competition in the endpoint market has intensified.
"In the past year, the majority of the company's growth has been generated by cross-selling and up-selling new products to existing customers," said Bank of America analyst Tal Liani in a recent report. "Although newer modules continue to scale, their strong performance is being offset by slower growth in core endpoint.
CrowdStrike Stock: Key Financial Metric
At the recent investor day, CrowdStrike delivered fiscal 2027 guidance on a key financial metric above consensus estimates. Wall Street analysts have been focused on annual recurring revenue, or ARR. It's a metric tied to subscription services growth.
CrowdStrike reiterated that net new ARR growth will reaccelerate to 40% or more in the second half of fiscal 2026. It predicted 20% or better in fiscal 2027, which starts with the April quarter in 2026.
In addition, CrowdStrike reiterated a goal of $10 billion in subscription-based ARR by fiscal 2031.
Meanwhile, acquisitions are playing a big role as CrowdStrike and other cybersecurity companies build cloud-based service platforms.
CrowdStrike in July acquired Onum Security, a provider of real-time telemetry management. In September, CrowdStrike announced the acquisition of AI security firm Pangea Cyber for $260 million. In earlier deals, CrowdStrike acquired Flow Security, SecureCircle, preempt, Humio, Bionic and Reposify.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based CrowdStrike's IPO in June, 2019, raised $659 million. The company was founded by two former McAfee executives in 2011.
CrowdStrike Stock Technical Ratings
CrowdStrike stock holds a superior IBD Composite Rating of 89, according to IBD Stock Checkup. IBD's Composite Rating combines five separate proprietary ratings into one easy-to-use rating. The best growth stocks have a Composite Rating of 90 or better.
CrowdStrike stock has an Accumulation/Distribution Rating of D-plus. This rating analyzes price and volume changes in a stock over the past 13 weeks of trading. CRWD's current rating indicates more funds are selling than buying.
The rating, on an A+ to E scale, measures institutional buying and selling in a stock. A+ signifies heavy institutional buying; E means heavy selling. Think of the C grade as neutral.
The IBD Computer-Security group ranks No. 103 out of 197 groups tracked. Other top performers in 2025 include Cloudflare and Zscaler.
Follow Reinhardt Krause on Twitter @reinhardtk_tech for updates on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
