The fact that so few stocks have been driving the market’s latest advance has CNBC’s Jim Cramer worried.
“[It’s] beginning to call into question whether we have an advance at all,” the “Mad Money” host said Monday. “Yes, it’s this small, this weak, this pathetic and this limited to FANG and friends and some of these small caps that we talk about.”
And while Cramer hasn’t shied away from recommending FANG — his acronym for the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, now Alphabet — in the past, he knew the market needed more to sustain a rally.
“Why did we lose so many good stocks? Because of tariff headlines, I think,” he said. “The media’s pronounced the global expansion over, that’s what’s happened. In response, buyers are crowding into the smaller cap domestic companies that do well when the U.S. employment is strong and into the secular growth tech companies that don’t need a robust global economy, especially the cloud and cybersecurity plays and, yes, FANG.”
But that’s not how Cramer saw it, and unless a major manufacturing CEO tells him otherwise, the “Mad Money” host said he’d stay the course.
Cramer is growing tired of rampant negativity in the stock market, especially when it weighs on the major averages despite the fact that the economy is still strengthening.
So, on Monday, the “Mad Money” host pitched an idea to Wall Street’s doomsayers.
“I would create a gloom index. It’s a group of stocks that exemplifies this overwhelming pessimism,” he said. “Yep, we need an ETF — obviously, it should trade under the symbol GLUM.”
“The bears can sell it whenever they’re feeling down and out,” he continued. “Those of us with a little more composure might actually consider buying it or shorting the GLUM index.”
Marijuana dispensary operator MedMen sees major hurdles in operating in Oregon, Washington and Colorado, where pot is medically and recreationally legal, co-founder and CEO Adam Bierman told CNBC on Monday.
Bierman, whose company functions in California, Nevada, New York and Florida, called the first three fully legal U.S. weed markets “horrible markets to be in” in an interview with Cramer.
“[It’s] good for business that those are tiny markets that, in the grand scheme of things, maybe matter not that much,” the CEO said.
“What’s really important to understand is every market since those markets came online [has] been supply constrained, so limited licenses and, most importantly, especially for the MedMen’s case, the most arduous retail zoning restrictions known to man,” Bierman continued.
For more on Bierman’s interview and his company’s prospects, click here.
The slew of technology-focused initial public offerings this year has Cramer focused on a key question: how hot is too hot when you’re invested in a red-hot IPO?
As businesses increasingly find themselves in need of enterprise-level software, a host of tech companies like DocuSign and Zuora have come public in the last few months to serious fanfare.
“But the problem with stocks that go up and then up and then up some more is that, sooner or later, they become very expensive,” the “Mad Money” host warned on Monday. “So, on a decidedly subpar day for the averages, … I think it’s worth considering whether these recent software IPOs have gotten overheated.”
Privately held online ordering platform Olo, which just landed a partnership with Amazon Prime, is seizing on the largely millennial-driven growth in digital ordering.
The company, which focuses on food delivery but is now expanding to retail, has grown from having 12,000 restaurants on its platform in October 2015 to 48,000 today, CEO Noah Glass told Cramer in a Monday interview.
Glass attributed the strength to “more consumers getting the app, more consumers getting comfortable using on-demand services, thinking about the app as a remote control for buying things.”
The company’s Amazon partnership will center on Amazon Restaurants and will hopefully boost Olo’s already staggering growth, with digital ordering up 31 percent year-over-year at its existing restaurant clients.
Olo will also start leveraging a new platform, Olo Dispatch, to serve retailers.
“Everybody wants to get things delivered faster. It used to be that two-day delivery was fast enough. I mean, what if you could get things delivered same hour? For 13 years, we’ve been working with an industry that demands that kind of speed,” Glass told Cramer. “What Dispatch does is it coordinates the prep of the order with the driver coming to collect the order and, on average, it’s a 12-minute delivery time from the store to the door. So now we’re opening that up for all retailers, not just restaurants, and allowing retailers to compete with online retailers on convenience by delivering same hour.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he rattled off his take on callers’ favorite stocks:
CenturyLink: “I liked the merger, but I still feel that every time I’ve gone away from Verizon and AT&T, I have hurt people. That’s what the 11 percent yield is about and I’m just not going to bless that stock even though I know that acquisition was pretty good.”
Momo, Inc.: “You’ve done well in that. Well, you know I’m recommending Baidu, I’m recommending Baozun and my favorite is Alibaba and that’s all. I understand JD[.com] and this one are working, but I’m not able to pull the trigger.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet.
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Source: Tech CNBC
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