With the stock market locking in the largest weekly gain since March, CNBC’s Jim Cramer wondered if newfound optimism around trade and U.S.-China relations could continue.
“To some degree, I think that’s wishful thinking,” the “Mad Money” host admitted on Friday. “But, hey, wishful thinking worked when it came to the unlikely progress between North and South Korea, so maybe this optimistic spin on trade makes more sense than the pessimistic one.”
Cramer wasn’t sure how investors’ moods would change going into next week. But he knew what he would be watching, so with that in mind, he turned to his weekly game plan, which will include earnings from a struggling consumer foods giant: Campbell Soup.
The “Mad Money” host warned that Campbell, which reports Friday, could face difficulties as part of the market’s most beaten-down sector, the food group.
“The company’s worked mightily to become more natural and organic, but its older products are still what define the business,” Cramer said. “I know plenty of people who just hope Campbell will put itself up for sale.”
Sometimes, Cramer finds it useful to compare two completely different companies to find out what works and what doesn’t in a given market environment.
So, on Friday, Cramer looked into the stocks and businesses of luxury retail play Michael Kors and beer brewer Molson Coors to see which one would win out if they were stacked side by side.
“While both of these stocks got slammed last week, … they’ve had very different trajectories of late,” Cramer said.
In short, “Michael Kors has been leaving Molson Coors in the dust,” Cramer said. “I’d hate to see what Thanksgiving looks like at the Coors household: ‘Molson, why can’t you be more like your brother Michael?'”
Cramer didn’t rename his dog Everest to Nvidia for nothing — he did it because the company is a “remarkable” leader in the world of computing chips, he said on Friday.
“Nvidia’s a rescue dog, and I feel compelled today to rescue Nvidia, the company, from the narrative that I most feared: the one that says its stock is falling … because of a decline in cryptocurrency mining,” the “Mad Money” host said one day after Nvidia’s earnings report.
Beating analysts’ expectations on the top and bottom lines, Nvidia’s first-quarter report showed a slowdown in its cryptocurrency-mining segment.
When the price of bitcoin neared $20,000, crypto-fanatics bought Nvidia’s powerful, costly gaming chips to mine the cryptocurrency, “inflating the company’s bottom line in an unsustainable way,” Cramer said.
Nice Systems CEO Barak Eilam’s company uses data analytics and artificial intelligence to serve two key purposes: improving customer experiences and fighting financial crime.
The Israeli company, whose market cap is over $6 billion, has been leveraging cutting-edge technologies to both serve customers in the best possible ways, Eilam told Cramer in a Friday interview.
“The beauty of our cloud story is that we are not cannibalizing our own base. We actually use cloud in order to grow our total addressable market fivefold,” the CEO said.
“By developing CXone” — Nice’s flagship platform — “we actually now have the ability to grow into the cloud on a rapid basis, so our Q1 result is 33 percent growth,” Eilam continued.
For more on Nice Systems’ behind-the-scenes influence, watch Eilam’s full interview here.
Prologis’ recent acquisition of DCT Industrial Trust will give the logistics and e-commerce-focused real estate investment trust scale and save it money, Prologis Chairman and CEO Hamid Moghadam told Cramer on Friday.
“DCT is a company that we’ve always had a really high regard for, probably the closest strategy to Prologis in the U.S. and the highest quality portfolio of significant size that there was out there,” the CEO said. “What we want to do is use that platform to serve our customers better.”
Roughly 2 percent of the world’s GDP, or gross domestic product, moves through Prologis’ buildings. Moghadam said his newly enlarged company will also begin to leverage data to boost its prospects.
“We haven’t even started to scratch the surface on the information side and the information opportunity of the business,” he told Cramer. “We’re really re-engineering the customer experience, making it much easier for our customers to move in, to utilize the space more efficiently. And, really, the data side of the business is increasingly important.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he fired off his take on callers’ favorite stocks:
Illinois Tool Works: “I’ve been telling club members [that] you don’t have to worry. This thing is good. They had one division that was weak. As we explained it to ActionAlerts, it was just the auto and I think that they’re better than that. You shouldn’t be a seller. We bought some lower that we had sold higher and I want to stick with that view.”
Diamondback Energy: “I thought FANG [Diamondback’s ticker symbol] was good. People didn’t like the conference call. I thought the conference call was OK. I think I would use this decline to buy, buy, buy some FANG. Remember, oil is up on a spike, but I think it’s OK.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Nvidia.
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Source: Tech CNBC
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