The Pragmatic Optimist

The Pragmatic Optimist

Our Top Cyber Picks For 2026

How CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Rubrik, Zscaler & Others Are Positioned For Next Year

Amrita Roy's avatar
Uttam Dey's avatar
Amrita Roy and Uttam Dey
Dec 08, 2025
∙ Paid
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Last week was pivotal for cybersecurity, where we heard from CrowdStrike CRWD 0.00%↑, Okta OKTA 0.00%↑, and Rubrik RBRK 0.00%↑. Going into the earnings, we had sent an ER preview post last week, where we had rated “hold” on both CrowdStrike and Okta before earnings and a “buy” on Rubrik.

We have now heard from the above companies, where both CrowdStrike and Okta had muted price action post earnings, while Rubrik was up 23% 📈 on Friday after posting its earnings the day before.

👉👉In this post, we are going to follow up our Cybersecurity deep dive from June with our updated analysis on the state of the cybersecurity landscape going into 2026 and our investment thesis on some of the key cybersecurity players that are on our watchlist.

This includes the above companies along with Palo Alto Networks PANW 0.00%↑, Fortinet FTNT 0.00%↑, Zscaler ZS 0.00%↑, and Cloudflare NET 0.00%↑, with our updated price targets, conviction scores, and ratings that you can find in our AI Stock Rec Tracker.

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Note, out of the 7 cybersecurity players that we will discuss in the post, we currently own Zscaler at a 3.92% capital allocation in our TPO Portfolio. In our post last week, we had outlined our investment strategy with Zscaler after its 14.5% decline post earnings.

📢 Also, this morning, we conducted another set of Live Trades, bringing our total capital invested to 75% of our initial planned capital of $30,000 by increasing our position sizes in three existing positions in the TPO Portfolio, which you can also track in the AI Stock Rec Tracker.

With that said, let’s dive right into it. 👇👇


Let’s Set The Stage

Starting at a high level, when we look at the YTD performance of the general performance of the cybersecurity landscape in 2025, as measured by the Amplify Cybersecurity ETF HACK HACK 0.00%↑ and compare it to the S&P 500, we can see that the former actually lagged market performance this year.

Yet, when we look at the YTD performance of the 7 cybersecurity names under our coverage, we can see that there is a clear bifurcation between Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Rubrik, which are significantly outperforming compared to the remaining cybersecurity players as well as the S&P 500 on a YTD basis, as can be seen below.

The question is, do we expect a similar trend next year? Or will the cybersecurity laggards stage a comeback?

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