CNBC’s Jim Cramer remembers the days when kids bought the same brands as their parents, afraid that deviating would mean they were questioning their elders’ judgment.
But now, consumer patterns are suggesting that the exact opposite idea has taken hold.
“Customer loyalty? Hard thing to come by these days,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Now that the internet gives you the ability to comparison-shop for just about anything, younger people just reach for what’s on sale or what can create the most exciting experience. Those choices are roiling the whole market and I think a lot of investors fail to understand their implications.”
This millennial-driven shift has created a “void” where bank, housing, materials and health care stocks trade together, while hard-to-value stocks like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple and Alphabet reign supreme.
But that shouldn’t deter investors from investing in individual stocks, Cramer said.
“This is why so many professionals just say go buy an index fund, it’s too hard to pick individual companies. I come back and say, no it isn’t,” he said. “The mores and methods of the next generation are not unfathomable.”
After a brutal rotation out of the technology stocks that came on the heels of the Senate passing its tax reform bill, Cramer wanted to check in with tech.
Tech stocks recovered on Tuesday after Monday’s storm of selling, caused in part by investors trying to buy shares of domestic companies that stand to benefit from corporate tax reform.
So Cramer called on technician Carolyn Boroden, one of his colleagues at RealMoney.com and the brain behind FibonacciQueen.com, to help him get a better outlook on the tech sector.
“Specifically, we’re going to drill down into the action in the now-despised and left-for-dead roadkill that are Facebook, Apple and Netflix,” the “Mad Money” host said. “The big question: when we look back on this moment a year from now, will the pullbacks in these stocks look like fabulous buying opportunities?”
Cramer knows how hard it is to compare stocks using their individual valuations.
The only tools investors really have to value a stock are the given company’s total addressable market and its price-to-earnings multiple, or the share price relative to the earnings per share.
“In the end, valuing stocks is either totally straightforward or totally mystifying — one or the other,” Cramer said. “For a certain group of stocks, it’s much more of an art than a science.”
For example, investors trying to pin down the value of Netflix will run into trouble because the streaming giant barely has any earnings, Cramer said. But there are better ways to value the tech titans than just run-of-the-mill metrics, he said.
The rise of the cloud isn’t just a U.S. trend. It’s happening globally and growing rapidly in places like China, where CyrusOne President and CEO Gary Wojtaszek just closed a promising deal.
CyrusOne, a real estate investment trust that operates data centers, recently announced a partnership with Chinese data center company GDS.
“You have the FANGs here, you’ve got the TABs there. So between Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu, they kind of dominate that space. GDS is the primary provider to all those companies,” Wojtaszek told Cramer in a Tuesday interview.
The CEO said that the partnership, which included CyrusOne taking an 8 percent stake in GDS, was mainly “strategic” given the opportunities for both companies to help each other get international business.
“We had several meetings and we realized that we’re basically the same company, the way we engage our customers, sell to them. We have a dominant position in cloud like they do, and we thought there was an opportunity to work together,” Wojtaszek said.
Newly public company Alteryx is changing the way companies interpret their data, at least according to Dean Stoecker, the company’s co-founder, chairman and CEO.
“The analytic process in enterprises has been completely broken,” Stoecker told Cramer in an interview on Tuesday.
Nowadays, key business questions tend to be addressed by teams of data, IT and analytics experts, “all with disparate tools and technologies” and swaths of paperwork to boot, the CEO said.
“What we’ve done is we’ve put the thrill back into problem-solving,” Stoecker said. “I think that people are realizing that we’re living in this data deluge and they’re trying to get value and analytics out of that data. And our platform is the platform that allows people to prosecute analytics and turn every data worker into a discoverer of marginal profitability for the enterprise.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he zipped through his take on some callers’ favorite stocks:
Universal Display Corportation: “OLED is one of my favorites. I’ve been recommending it for 90 points. I want it to come down. You will not get a turn in OLED before you get a turn in Facebook, in Amazon, in Netflix and in Apple, so you wait.”
Magellan Midstream Partners: “I think it’s insanely valued. My charitable trust has been buying it right here. It is ridiculous. Yield 5 and a half [percent]. Everybody needs oil pipe from the Permian. They’ve got it. But you know what? I’m a lonely voice in the wilderness.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Facebook, Alphabet, Apple and Magellan Midstream Partners.
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Source: Tech CNBC
Cramer Remix: In this environment, it’s not hard to find individual stocks worth owning