After oil giant BHP Billiton sold off the rest of its U.S. shale holdings, CNBC’s Jim Cramer did not shy away from the massive impact he thought it would have on the overall industry.
“From our point of view, is that these held-for-sale oil and gas assets will be the determinant of the entire pricing environment for domestic acreage going forward, and therefore for the stocks themselves,” the “Mad Money” host said.
And as crude teeters on the brink of either collapse in the price of oil or collapse in the value of U.S. shale properties, Cramer said this deal would be monumental in determining oil’s fate.
“With these BHP assets for sale, we can find out what this shale acreage is worth. Estimates for the properties [are] all over the map. Suffice it to say that if there are bidding wars for these assets and they fetch anywhere near $10 billion, then every oil stock we follow is way too cheap and you’ve got to buy them hand over fist. Anything less than $7 billion, they get a big leg down,” Cramer said.
Cramer is the first to say that Tuesday’s rally is arguably as unimportant as Monday’s sell-off.
“I want to say it had more substance given its magnitude,” he said. “But we are in a totally erratic moment in a totally erratic month where I truly believe one day never seems to beget the next. But that doesn’t mean we can’t ponder why we went up to measure the meaning of this rally.”
So rather than writing the rally off as a random August swing, Cramer found 12 factors that could be reviving the bull market.
Shares of Salesforce may have ticked down after the company’s earnings beat, but CEO Marc Benioff was entirely forward-looking when he discussed his cloud giant’s prospects with CNBC.
“We’re really seeing this incredible new capability that’s driving so much growth in enterprise software, artificial intelligence, and Salesforce is the first to deliver artificial intelligence in all of our products that are helping our customers do machine learning and machine intelligence and deep learning using Einstein,” Benioff told Cramer on Tuesday.
Einstein, Salesforce’s A.I. platform, was rolled out in 2016 as the company turned its focus to cutting-edge developments in the world of software, Benioff said.
“I think everybody understands how important the cloud is. It’s the single most transformative technology in enterprise software today. I think everybody understands mobility because everybody’s got a cellphone and lots of apps and seen how they’ve moved off of PCs and onto mobility,” Benioff said. “Einstein is Salesforce’s AI platform that is really the next generation of Salesforce’s products and it’s in the hands of all of our customers right now and making a huge difference. It makes them have the ability to make much smarter decisions about their business each and every day.”
On a day where the major averages rallied and the FANG stocks bounced back, Cramer wanted to track how one stock can have huge sway over the broader stock market.
That’s why the “Mad Money” host went off the charts to see how Netflix, one-fourth of Cramer’s acronym for the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, now Alphabet, weighs on the rest of the cohort and market.
So Cramer turned to Bob Moreno, the publisher of RightViewTrading.com and Cramer’s colleague at RealMoney.com, for a closer look at Netflix’s power over the Nasdaq 100.
Moreno likened it to the butterfly effect, a concept created by MIT mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s.
Finally, Cramer sat down with George Barrett, the chairman and CEO of Cardinal Health, a massive pharmaceutical wholesaler and medical supply distributor.
The generic pharmaceuticals market has stalled of late, but Barrett said this was a symptom of the industry’s cyclical nature.
“It’s been a difficult environment this year,” Barrett told Cramer on Tuesday. “Having said that and having been in the world of generics for quite some time before I was here at Cardinal Health, these are sort of cycles that we’ve seen before. This was a period in the last couple of years between about 2014 and 2016 where we saw pretty marked inflation, and that’s more unusual, actually, historically. So I think the pattern that we’re seeing is more typical. What’s been striking, though, is the steep curve up and the steep curve down, and that is very hard to adjust to.”
That being said, Barrett explained that Cardinal Health reaches some 80 percent of hospitals and over 60 percent of pharmacies in the United States, and its management has been working on reforming its model to make it more relevant to the current medical landscape.
“We’ve built a portfolio over these last five or six years that really, to us, is robust and balanced and touches all of the health care system in a way that is aligned with the future of health care,” the CEO said. “We know that we’re seeing changes. There’s consolidation among the players, convergence among different kinds of health care players, movement towards a more pay-for-outcome or pay-for-value [model] as opposed to just pay a fee for service, so we’ve built a model that we think is more attractive to our customers.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he shared his take on some callers’ favorite stocks:
Hasbro: “This thing is so overdone on the down side, I’ve got to tell you, it’s incredible. It wasn’t even an important quarter. I’m hitting the bull button and saying buy, buy, buy.”
Corning: “You know, I saw a downgrade last week because people were saying that there’s just too many TVs in the system. If that’s the case, then why isn’t Best Buy down? So I’m telling you, I’m more inclined to buy than sell Corning.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Facebook and Alphabet.
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Source: Tech CNBC
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