After years of breaking down market moves for investors — often times at the risk of being wrong — CNBC’s Jim Cramer is taking a stand against market commentators who play it safe, but never really help the average stock-picker.
“If I came out here every day and said it was the seventh inning of the bull market, would anyone really mind? That’s the kind of cautious nonsense that you could’ve said every day for the last 30 years and it’s always lapped up … by journalists,” the “Mad Money” host said on Tuesday.
Cramer argued that it’s all too easy for commentators to “equivocate,” detailing both sides of a problem but not offering a solution, or to put themselves permanently in the bullish or bearish camp, which he said is “equally unhelpful.” Similarly, it’s easy for someone to tell investors to stay away from stock-picking altogether, he added.
“The problem is that none of that is actually advice that is at all helpful for regular investors,” Cramer said. “You have to try to explain the risks and the rewards. You have to try to help people avoid gigantic downside, even if the market can come back over a five-year period, as was the case from 2007 to 2012.”
Right now, Cramer believes that stocks have “a lot of risk and not a lot of reward,” something he knows people don’t necessarily want to hear. But, in his view, honesty is more useful to individual investors than eternal optimism.
“If you want wishy-washy opinions or permanent bullishness, believe me, you’ve got a lot of different options to choose from,” he said. “But as far as I’m concerned, that kind of analysis is not very useful. I’d rather try to get it right and help people, which is why I come out here every night, including tonight, and tell you the truth as I see it, even when it causes me to get pilloried on social media, and even when I get it wrong, either through a lack of understanding or simple bad luck.”
The stock of Apple is “front and center” in this bear market, and the weakness won’t unwind until investors get more clarity on what the future holds for the iPhone maker, Cramer said as stocks rose on trade optimism.
“In this tough, tough market, as long as we don’t know if there’s a real iPhone slowdown, and until the president takes Apple’s iPhone off the trade table, you can’t expect an end to the pain,” he argued.
In an interview published by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Trump said the United States could slap 10-percent tariffs on iPhone and laptops imported from China, a possible negotiating tactic that nevertheless tanked Apple’s shares.
Meanwhile, reports about iPhone production slowdowns, most of which cite confidential sources familiar with the situation, have thrown Apple analysts into a tizzy and put further pressure on the stock. In less than two months, Apple’s stock has lost 25 percent of its value, or roughly $200 billion.
Cramer, whose charitable trust owns shares of Apple, has said that stocks could reverse course and end their bearish phase for good if President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping strike a positive tone in their meeting at this week’s G-20 summit.
Even so, the market can’t fully recover without a turnaround in the stock of Apple, he said.
Click here for his full analysis.
Salesforce.com is in peak performance mode as companies shift their operations to become more digital and cloud-reliant, the software giant’s Chairman, co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC on Tuesday.
“I don’t think the company’s ever been stronger or been in a better position, and the reason why is every company that we’re dealing with is going through a huge digital transformation and every digital transformation begins and ends with the customer,” he told Cramer in an exclusive interview on “Mad Money.”
“If you don’t have a digital, one-on-one relationship with your customer, you’re just not going to be that successful,” the CEO added. Click here to read more about Benioff’s take on Salesforce’s latest quarter and to watch his full interview.
Benioff also said that companies that don’t value trust as a top priority are going to have trouble keeping their customers moving forward. Click here to read more about his take on big tech responsibility and to watch his full interview.
After inspecting the charts of the Cboe Volatility Index — a market measure sometimes referred to as the “fear gauge” or the VIX — volatility expert Mark Sebastian thinks that the market could soon exit its bearish phase.
Stocks have been trading choppily since early October, mainly on uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s tariff policy and the Federal Reserve’s plans for raising interest rates. The declines, led largely by shares of big-cap technology companies that reported earnings that Wall Street saw as underwhelming, have caused panic in the market.
But Sebastian, an expert in market panic, the founder of OptionPit.com and a colleague of Cramer at RealMoney.com, told Cramer on Tuesday that the VIX’s charts suggest the worry among investors has subsided.
“[The] charts … suggest that it’s time to start doing some buying,” Cramer said. “[Sebastian] thinks you might not get another chance as good as this one for the rest of 2018. I don’t know if he’s right, but don’t you find it heartening when you consider how right Sebastian’s been in the past?”
Click here to read the full analysis.
Sometimes, it’s worth keeping an eye on long-term winners, even if their short-term outlook is grim. That’s why Cramer highlighted Constellation Brands on Tuesday, a popular beer maker with a stock down over 40 basis points from its high.
“I think the market has turned on beer specifically and alcohol in general. Why? Because of disappointing sales at Anheuser-Busch InBev,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Crazy thing? That’s a competitor that I think it’s losing share to Constellation. But in a bear market, who the heck cares?”
But Constellation, which has invested $4 billion in Canadian cannabis producer Canopy Growth, remains a long-term powerhouse as its Corona and Modelo brands continue to take market share and its leg up in the marijuana space takes shape, Cramer said.
“I am confident … that Constellation’s the best way to play beer and bud,” he said. “So if you have the patience, if you’re willing to accept some short-term pain in expectation of longer-term gain,” you might consider investing.
In Cramer’s lightning round, he fired off his answers to callers’ stock questions:
MongoDB Inc.: “Those guys are smart guys. We’ve had them on. I like them very much. I think it’s a great stock here and I think that people are underestimating the power of what they’re doing for enterprise software, which is on fire.”
Analog Devices Inc.: “Analog had a good quarter. A lot of people felt that there’s some sort of slowdown in their business. It was not bad and I think the stock’s a buy.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Apple.
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