Despite his decades on Wall Street, sometimes CNBC’s Jim Cramer is downright bewildered by how strongly the market trades regardless of the news flow.
“In a stampeding bull like this one, the level of optimism can feel borderline delusional,” the “Mad Money” host said. “There’s a total suspension of skepticism, along with a widespread belief that everything works out for the best. It’s really the stuff of novels, not reality, where the bad morphs into the good and the negatives turn into positives.”
But in a bull market seeing green, Cramer is concerned that a case could be made for any sector or stock, blinding investors to the pitfalls that might lie underneath.
“Yes, these are indeed the times that try bears’ souls for certain — that is, if they even have souls,” Cramer said. “Logically speaking, many of these moves should not be happening. The action’s way too positive, but then again, you could also argue that maybe we’ve all just been too negative for too long. And until the bears start acknowledging, en masse, that things are better than they thought, this rally could be far from over.”
When stocks run higher in spite of tragedy and turmoil, CNBC’s Jim Cramer finds it helpful to check in on the CBOE Volatility Index, the market’s fear gauge commonly known as the VIX.
“When investors are scared, the VIX shoots higher; when they feel confident, the VIX goes lower,” the “Mad Money” host said. “When you look at the action in the VIX relative to the action in the S&P 500, it can give you a great deal of insight into where stocks might be headed.”
Market experts have called last month the “least volatile” September ever. While Cramer pointed out that the VIX has only been actively traded for 13 years, he has noticed its low readings.
So Cramer turned to technician Mark Sebastian, the founder of OptionPit.com and Cramer’s colleague at RealMoney.com, for help sorting out the action in the VIX’s charts.
For a long time, CNBC’s Jim Cramer actually liked the stock of the now scandal-ridden Wells Fargo.
“Long story short: we loved the stock of Wells Fargo for the very thing that ultimately got them in trouble: the cross-selling. We thought the bank had this unique business model where it was able to cross-sell products to individuals who do more than just open a savings account,” the “Mad Money” host said.
In light of Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan’s heated testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, Cramer looked back at the bank’s once-captivating model.
BioTelemetry President and CEO Joe Capper told Cramer on Tuesday that his company, which makes connected heart monitors that feed information to the cloud, likely won’t suffer as technology giants like Apple look to enter the connected health care space.
“You’re seeing some of these consumer-oriented products or consumer-oriented companies talk about products in this space. I think it’s wonderful,” Capper said.
The CEO said that connected devices could help wake people up to potential heart irregularities before they start exhibiting more serious symptoms.
“It grows the whole market. And they’re going to go see a physician [who’s] going to run a clinical-grade product that has far greater detection capability, FDA-approved, to verify. I actually think it’s a great move,” Capper said, referring to his company’s own product.
As the CEO of the second-largest payroll processor in the country, Paychex’s Marty Mucci has his finger on the pulse of small- and medium-sized business sentiment.
“We’re growing very consistently in small business job growth right now, and we’re seeing wages up, which is a very good thing, obviously, for the consumer, those employees, buying more and I think that’s going to add to business confidence,” Mucci told Cramer on Tuesday. “And you see from the company side, really, our HR outsourcing is one of the fastest-growing segments of our business and that’s adding more to the clients that we already have.”
But more important to Cramer was the recovery in the hurricane-stricken areas of Texas and Florida, for which Mucci had a fairly positive outlook.
“We feel that, for Houston and Florida … probably for the next month or so, we’ll see businesses down. The hours worked we saw drop dramatically, obviously. But then, typically, depending on whether those businesses can come back or not, but we think they will, you’ll see an uptick, frankly, in small business as landscapers and roofers and all of those contractors come into those areas to help them recover. So we really think that that’ll probably offset the downsizing of some of the businesses,” the CEO said.
In Cramer’s lightning round, he rattled off his take on some callers’ favorite stocks:
SunCoke Energy Partners L.P.: “I don’t trust it. It’s got a yield that’s too high for the master limited partnership kinds of stocks. I’m going to say ix-nay on SunCoke Energy-nay, although I got a beautiful orange hat when they came public.”
AeroVironment Inc.: “I actually like the stock for the unmanned aircraft stuff. You know I like the defense contractors, too. Eaton has a charge box [for electric cars, as the caller was looking for an electric vehicle charging play], but Eaton has a lot of other stuff going with it. I like your choice. It’s not cheap, by the way.”
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Source: Tech CNBC
Cramer Remix: The stock market rally may be far from over