When asked about toy company Mattel in the lightning round, Jim Cramer had to make the point that when it comes to toys, one company is the all-around winner.
“No, Hasbro,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Hasbro. [CEO Brian] Goldner has been on the show many times, and I still like Hasbro, even up here, more than I like Mattel. Mattel could have been a spec, but Hasbro is the real deal.”
Up over 44 percent year to date, Hasbro shares are enjoying the benefits of the toymaker’s deals with Disney for its princess, Frozen and Star Wars franchises as well as its forays into digital gaming and subscription services for board games.
With top analysts turning bearish on the stock market amid concerns about lofty valuations and rising rates, Cramer felt the need to right the record for the bulls’ sake.
“I want to address this reluctance to believe in the bull head-on by going over the top 10 reasons why investors always seem to have one foot out the door, despite the fact [that] we’ve had one heck of a run from the lows way back in March of 2009,” Cramer said.
One of the top objections Cramer hears is that the market has rallied for too long and is on its last legs, despite the fact that bull markets do not tend to die of old age.
“I simply can’t buy into the senile bull thesis,” Cramer said, pointing to three major market corrections in the last eight years to cement his point.
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Paul Singer’s Elliott Management both have eyes for Oncor, the largest electric utility in Texas, and CEO Bob Shapard has a sound process for deciding who will win in the bidding battle for his bankrupt company.
“You start with the current bid. Berkshire Hathaway’s a great fit for us, and they’d be very supportive of our investment strategy,” he told Cramer on Monday.
On Friday, Buffett’s investment company made a $9 billion offer for Oncor’s parent, Energy Future Holdings, valuing it at $18.1 billion.
“So in the eyes of Berkshire Hathaway, strong business, strong cash flows, [and a] real good investment opportunity makes us a great fit for Warren Buffett,” Shapard told Cramer.
Elliott Management, Oncor’s largest creditor, said Monday that it is considering a $9.3 billion counteroffer that would value the company at $18.5 billion.
For now, Shapard responded with reasonable caution to the reports of Elliott’s proposal.
Amazon Prime Day begins at 9 p.m. ET Monday, and Cramer has little doubt that the event will exceed even Wall Street’s grandiose expectations.
“The consensus here is that this makeshift holiday will produce gains of up to 20 percent year over year, new benchmark, which would make it a day that will live forever in brick-and-mortar retail infamy,” the “Mad Money” host said.
Analysts and investors alike see Amazon as a powerful challenger to traditional retail, and the e-commerce giant did not slow its domination ahead of the day’s main event.
Cramer’s take? “I say do this: let the retail stocks come down for another couple of days,” he said. “Let Amazon blow out the numbers for Prime Day. Let everybody cut estimates for all the others. But remember: Not all retailers are created equal.”
Cramer also sat down with Novocure Executive Chairman Bill Doyle to hear more about the company’s progress in developing its groundbreaking cancer therapy.
Aside from a stock rally of 130 percent year to date, Novocure has created new technologies called tumor treating fields that are gentle, non-invasive and offer patients fewer side effects and better quality of life than processes like surgery, radiation or drug therapies.
Following that, Doyle said Novocure’s progress has been incredible since the company came public a year and a half ago.
“Since then we’ve expanded our salesforce, we’ve expanded the number of centers that are trained to administer the therapy, we published our data in JAMA, one of the top medical journals, we received something called the NCCN, National Comprehensive Cancer Network, rating as a standard therapy, we introduced a new, smaller device, and I think most importantly, in April, we presented five-year data. There’s something magical in oncology about five-year data,” Doyle told Cramer.
And while Novocure is on its way to being able to offer its therapies officially through federal health care services like Medicare, Doyle said that management created a temporary loophole.
“As a company, we’ve made the decision to provide it to all Medicare patients while we wait for the government to catch up. So everybody in the U.S. has access to the therapy,” he said.
Finally, Cramer pitted Yum! Brands against its recently spun-off subsidiary, Yum China, to see which half of the delicious duo is outperforming the other.
At first, Yum China’s independent business looked promising, posting same-store sales gains after two and a half years of unnerving declines.
Since then, however, the company’s Pizza Hut business hit a wall, delivering flat performance in the second quarter of 2017, and margin guidance confused investors, sending the stock down 11 percent in a single trading session.
Meanwhile, Yum Brands’ KFC and Taco Bell businesses are performing very well in the United States and the company’s other global locations.
“If we put it all together, and I think it’s crazy that both Yum and Yum China are trading at basically the same price-to-earnings multiple, but not because of what we used to think was the case. You see, now, with Taco Bell so strong, I think Yum Brands is the true growth vehicle here, and after that last quarter, it’s clear that Yum China has some real problems with growth that need to be worked out before it deserves to trade at the same footing with its original parent company,” Cramer said. “When the split occurred, growth investors flocked to Yum China. Those seeking reliability went for the parent, Yum Brands. Now Yum brands has Yum China beat on both counts. It’s simply superior to the Chinese spinoff, and until that changes, I’m sticking with my recommendation that the original Yum is the one that’s worth owning.”
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Source: Tech CNBC
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