Cybersecurity Stocks Surge Amid Sector’s ‘Resilience And Isolation’ Within Tech Industry

As the stock market swung back upward Wednesday — with President Trump announcing a 90-day pause on tariffs targeting many countries besides China — cybersecurity vendors were among those seeing major stock price gains.

As the stock market swung back upward Wednesday — with President Donald Trump pausing tariffs targeting many countries other than China — cybersecurity vendors were among those that saw surging stock prices.

Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike saw its stock price jump 16.3 percent to close the day at $378.01, while shares in Palo Alto Networks climbed 13.4 percent for a closing price of $173.02.

Other cybersecurity vendors that saw stock price gains of more than 10 percent Wednesday were SentinelOne (15.7 percent), Zscaler (14.2 percent), Fortinet (13.3 percent) and CyberArk (11 percent).

Those cybersecurity stock price increases were above the gains of the overall S&P 500, which closed up 9.5 percent Wednesday after President Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs against many countries. China remained an exception, and even saw steeper tariffs from the Trump administration announced Wednesday.

The cybersecurity sector’s emphasis on software should shield it to some degree amid the Trump administration’s continuing tariff policies targeting China, analysts have said, but the segment also enjoys a number of additional unique advantages compared to other parts of the tech industry.

In fact, the growing appreciation of the security market by investors has already been evident due to a number of factors, including the sector’s relatively insulated position within tech, according to Shaul Eyal, a managing director and senior analyst at TD Cowen.

“I believe investors are gradually realizing the mission-criticality of cybersecurity, its resilience and isolation from the rest of the tech arena given inelastic demand which is driven by regulatory demands, growth in data volumes, and government spending aside from corporate spending,” Eyal wrote in an email to CRN Wednesday.

Such factors have been seen for years as making cybersecurity likely to be more recession-proof than some other segments, even apart from considerations around tariffs impacting physical goods.

Whether it’s escalating regulations around security and data privacy or cyber insurance policies that necessitate spending on cybersecurity, many organizations today do not have a choice about allocating significant budget to cybersecurity, Forrester’s Jeff Pollard said in a previous interview.

Other considerations include the massive risks of a data breach or disruptive ransomware attack, as well as the need to demonstrate security and privacy competence in order to win deals with customers, experts have said.

Taken together, all such factors make cybersecurity “likely [to] outperform other subsets of tech” even amid economic upheavals, Wedbush Securities’ Daniel Ives wrote in a note to investors this week.