Stock market investors have been on a roller-coaster ride this year. In March, the benchmark S&P 500 was down by as much as 9% from its peak, only to recover all of its losses and set several new record highs in April. The volatility comes as investors try to price in the economic consequences of the ongoing tensions between the U.S. and Iran, which have triggered wild swings in oil and other commodities.
But even with the S&P 500 trading at its best-ever level, not every individual stock has made a full recovery. Shares of Uber Technologies (UBER) and CrowdStrike (CRWD) are still down 24% and 17% from their respective peaks. Here’s why investors might want to buy them both.
Uber has a trillion-dollar opportunity in autonomous vehicles
Uber operates the world’s largest ride-hailing platform, in addition to highly successful food delivery and commercial freight businesses. Over 200 million people use its services every month, and their experience is about to change completely with the shift toward autonomous solutions.
Uber has partnered with more than 20 companies developing self-driving vehicles. They include Alphabet’s Waymo, which is already completing over 500,000 paid ride-sharing trips every week across 11 American cities, and Serve Robotics, which operates a fleet of 2,000 food delivery robots.
In addition to providing a more convenient experience for users, autonomous vehicles will transform Uber’s financial results. The company reported $193.4 billion in gross bookings last year, representing the dollar value of every ride, food order, and commercial delivery facilitated by its platform. But the 9.7 million human drivers in its network took home $85.4 billion, which was the single largest component of those gross bookings.
After deducting other costs, like the money paid forward to restaurants for food orders, Uber’s 2025 revenue was $52 billion. After stripping out operating expenses, the company’s adjusted non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) profit was just $5.2 billion. Simply put, Uber only pockets a fraction of its gross bookings.
Hypothetically, if every vehicle in Uber’s network last year was autonomous, the company would have kept a huge portion of the $85.4 billion it paid to human drivers. That would have instantly boosted its revenue and earnings, even if the platform didn’t take on a single new customer. Moreover, self-driving cars can operate around the clock, so they can take on more rides than even the best human drivers, which could lead to even higher overall bookings.
As a result, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi believes autonomous solutions represent a multitrillion-dollar opportunity for the company, so its stock could be a great long-term buy.
CrowdStrike plans to almost quadruple its annual recurring revenue
CrowdStrike is one of the world’s largest cybersecurity companies. It developed the Falcon platform, which is one of the industry’s only all-in-one solutions for the enterprise, protecting cloud networks, employee identities, endpoints, and everything in between.
Falcon is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), so it can immediately respond to threats without human intervention, and its algorithms are trained on over 1 trillion security incidents every day, so it’s constantly learning and improving. Businesses can choose from 33 different Falcon modules (products), so they can build a custom cybersecurity solution that fits their needs.
Last year, CrowdStrike launched a module called Next-Gen Identity Security designed to protect businesses when they deploy AI agents, which can be highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. It uses a “zero standing privileges” architecture to revoke access to critical digital assets for both human and digital identities when it is no longer needed. In simpler terms, it ensures no AI agent has indefinite access to sensitive data, so even if one of them is hijacked, the damage will be very limited.
Tools of this nature will be increasingly important as AI adoption grows, and adopting them is easy thanks to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Flex subscription option, which allows customers to add or remove modules as their needs change without having to renegotiate their existing annual cybersecurity contract.
CrowdStrike had $5.2 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) at the conclusion of its 2025 fiscal year (ended Jan. 31), which was up 24% year over year. Falcon Flex accounted for $1.7 billion of that ARR, and it grew by an eye-popping 120%, so this subscription option is proving to be extremely popular with customers.
Looking ahead, CrowdStrike believes it can grow its overall ARR by a whopping 284% to $20 billion by fiscal 2036, so investors who are willing to hold its stock for the long term could do very well if they take advantage of the recent dip.
— Anthony Di Pizio
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Source: The Motley Fool
