2026 laggards shine in Wednesday's mixed stock market that kicked off the third quarter

Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Stocks kicked off the new month , the third quarter, and the second half of the year on a mixed note. The market experienced a reversal session, with AI leaders and data center infrastructure buildout stocks falling while software and the hyperscalers rebounded. The single biggest story Wednesday — Meta Platforms ' plans to build out a cloud computing business to monetize its data centers and other AI infrastructure. Shares soared over 10% on the news — first reported by Bloomberg and then confirmed by Jim Cramer — easing concerns that Meta was overspending on AI. That has been one of the biggest overhangs on the stock this year. Thus far, Meta was only monetizing AI through its advertising, which is a great business but can be cyclical and was not enough to justify using all its cash flow. Meta was the only major hyperscaler without a cloud business ( Amazon has AWS, Microsoft has Azure, and Alphabet has Google Cloud), explaining why Jim has said several times ( including in his latest Sunday column ) that it needed a data center business. All four hyperscalers are holdings in the portfolio. One part of the Meta story that still needs to be figured out is what this means for chip demand. …