When a caller asked Jim Cramer for his thoughts on the fate of Snap Inc., he did not hesitate to give the social media company a dooming prognosis.
“Snap is the No. 1 reason why you want to own Facebook, because we thought that Instagram would be challenged by Snap. It turns out that’s not the case,” the “Mad Money” host said.
On Tuesday, shares of Snap fell to less than half of its all-time high as analyst downgrades related to the company’s ability to improve its advertising platform poured in.
Challenges from Facebook’s Instagram continue to push shares lower, despite Snap’s new roll-outs of a Maps feature and a daily news show with NBC.
The call came after Cramer reviewed Tuesday’s news of two separate deals: a potential merger between Discovery and Scripps Networks Interactive and spice company McCormick buying Reckitt Benckiser’s food division.
“While the potential Discovery-Scripps deal, at about $10 billion is more than twice the size of the $4.2 billion food transaction … these are happening for similar reasons. Companies, afraid of losing their relevance and their clout, are merging with their peers or rivals in order to produce stronger entities with more appeal to their masters, meaning their distributors and their ultimate customers,” Cramer said.
To understand why these two deals are so similar, Cramer compared the companies’ distribution methods: Just like you walk through aisles of a supermarket to find products, you scroll through cable offerings to find things to watch.
Despite various investing outlets inciting fear in the stock market about “single-stock risk,” Cramer has seen average investors coming out of the woodwork to buy strong individual stocks.
“I know there are tons of statistics showing an almost inexorable decline in interest in the stock market as a whole,” the “Mad Money” host said. “But there’s something afoot right now, right now after nine straight sessions where the Nasdaq has rallied a total of 4.7 percent.”
Lately, more people have been approaching Cramer not just for photos, but for conversations about his view on the market and on specific stocks he has recommended — a good sign, he said.
Investors may worry about what is causing the stock market’s monster rally, but Cramer insists that it is all about boring stocks like financial technology player Equifax.
Shares of Equifax, one of the country’s three biggest credit reporting agencies, have been on fire, rallying almost 20 percent in 2017 and far outpacing the S&P 500 index over the last five years.
How? Equifax makes money from the fees it collects from banks for checking customers’ credit scores, selling software to help banks do that, providing workforce solutions for companies’ human resources departments, and selling subscription-based credit monitoring and identity theft protection to individual consumers.
The company also uses data and analytics technologies to provide unique insights on over 820 million consumers and over 91 million businesses around the world.
Having skyrocketed 190 percent so far this year, Portola Pharmaceuticals’ stock seems to have regained its strength after Jim Cramer dubbed the biotech a disaster just over a year ago.
After Wall Street fell out of love with biotech stocks as a whole several years ago, the stock fell from the $50s to the teens in late 2015. But since the FDA recently granted its leading drug regulatory approval, the stock has been on fire, climbing to nearly $65 as of Tuesday.
“I don’t think it’s crazy to speculate about a potential takeover here,” the “Mad Money” host said. “If you’re looking to speculate on a relatively young biotech, you have got my blessing here, although ideally I think you should wait for the next market-wide pullback to give you a better entry point. Oh, and given the dearth of new drugs being created by the big pharmaceutical industry companies, I do believe that if Portola has a huge amount of success, it will garner the attention of the big dogs.”
And even if you are not one for speculation, FDA approval is a game-changer for Portola, as it will give the company more solid footing in a market still wary of development-stage biotechs, Cramer said.
Finally, Cramer sat down with Mike Mussallem, the chairman and CEO of Edwards Lifesciences, to hear more about how the medical device company is continuing to grow.
“There’s been a great evolution in technology, and surgery is still very important. And certain patients, really, their life depends on surgery. But this idea came about now almost 20 years ago and the first implant done almost 10 years ago, and it’s really revolutionized the treatment for these patients,” Mussallem told Cramer on Tuesday.
The stock of Edwards has run up 24 percent so far in 2017, so Cramer dug deeper to find out how Mussallem thought the company, which specialized in artificial heart valves, should best be valued.
“The way you want to think about it is the total cost of the procedure,” the CEO said. “It’s not very often where we have these incredible technologies where you get better outcomes, right, better mortality, less strokes, you get improved quality of life for these patients, which is a big deal, and you have better economics. This is one of those triple wins.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he sped through his take on some callers’ favorite stocks, including:
Pfizer: “You know, it’s fine. No one ever got hurt buying Pfizer. I’d like to see some new products out of there or a big acquisition or maybe the split-up that they’ve been talking about, but it’s not going to run away from you, believe me.”
Forterra: “Yeah, it’s a pipe company, and the problem with a pipe company is if you go back over the CSX presentation this morning, they said pipe sales, their actual cargo, are way down. I don’t want to be involved with that. Too much pipe involved with infrastructure. Let’s see what Nucor says when they report to see if there’s hope for infrastructure. I’m not clear.”
Disclosure: CNBC parent NBCUniversal is an investor in Snap.
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Source: Investment Cnbc
Cramer Remix: Snap is the No. 1 reason to own Facebook