There are some days in the market when taking cues from stocks’ movements can be detrimental, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Wednesday.
“I see stupid things happening all over the place, so I’m urging you not to jump to any conclusions based on the tape,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Remember, the big money managers who control the day-to-day gyrations in stocks get things wrong all the time.”
One example was Home Depot. Ahead of the retailer’s Tuesday earnings report, its stock opened down $2 as sellers braced themselves for what they expected to be a mediocre quarter.
To their dismay, the home furnishings giant reported a sweeping earnings beat with dramatically higher-than-expected same-store sales growth, a key metric for the retail sector. Same-store comparisons came in at 7.9 percent year over year when analysts were expecting 5.8 percent.
As a result, shares of Home Depot popped roughly 2 percent on the news.
“Now, if you were just taking your cue from the action you would’ve decided that Home Depot had a terrible quarter,” Cramer said. “Of course, Home Depot’s stock got dinged again today thanks to the market-wide sell-off and the usual worries about what Amazon’s going to do next now that it’s devastated the supermarket space with its newfound price cuts. But home improvement is still very much Home Depot’s wheelhouse. I think the stock’s a buy.”
Square’s latest venture into the world of bitcoin is less of a validation of the popular cryptocurrency than it is a testament to innovation, Square CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC.
“We’re a payment innovator. And therefore I think it behooves us to always know, where are our payments going?” Friar told Cramer on Wednesday. “When we develop products at Square, we spend a lot of time listening to what our customers want, and what we heard from individuals – so this isn’t sellers asking to accept bitcoin, this is individuals using Square Cash to make payments … saying, ‘We want an easy way to buy and sell bitcoin.'”
Friar said that companies like hers have no time for academic papers or studies. The fastest way to understand new trends is to actually build products around them, the CFO said.
Cramer has found that millennials both hate and love change.
They hate physical change, so much so that they’d rather pay for a $4.32 purchase with a credit card than have to keep 68 cents jingling in their pockets or wallets.
But they love other kinds of change, the kinds that make companies more efficient, more “green” and more cost-effective.
“I’ve spent a huge amount of time on this show trying to figure out how millennials tick because they hold the key to growth for so many industries,” the “Mad Money” host said. “You can’t run a consumer business without appealing to the younger generation, and I tire of all the so-called experts who find kids these days to be unfathomable. In truth, they’re anything but.”
After Flywheel rolled out its new Fly Anywhere stationery bike product for spinning at home, CEO Sarah Robb O’Hagan told CNBC that she didn’t think it would affect the community her company has built for its riders.
“The way we think about it from a business model standpoint is that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts,” Robb O’Hagan told Cramer on Wednesday. “We have 42 studios today. We’re quite bullish about the studio experience itself and rolling that out, but as you know, there’s a limit to how many locations in the U.S. you’re ever going to get to, whereas once you offer an experience like this, you’re building that brand equity that people hear about [and] go, ‘Hey, I’ve heard of that. I can’t get to a studio, but I can put it in my home.'”
Robb O’Hagan said that 100 million Americans work out at least one day a week, but Flywheel’s focus is more on the 40 million that work out five to six days a week.
That hyper-athletic bunch make up between 70 and 80 percent of Flywheel’s rider base, and the CEO said it’s her company’s target audience.
“We get the super-into-fitness people and we want to get more of them,” she said. “This is the cohort that’s spinning, they’re outdoor cycling, they’re running, they’re doing events. This is a lifestyle for them. And so when you think [of it as] share of wallet, we’re not just competing just straight, head-for-head with fitness dollars. It’s all the other things in that lifestyle, the equipment, that goes into it.”
As a leading provider of food services and equipment to major chains like McDonald’s, Starbucks and Pizza Hut, Welbilt has to have its finger on the pulse of the latest trends.
That’s why the internet of things is so important for the kitchen equipment giant, Webilt CEO Hubertus Muehlhauser told Cramer on Wednesday.
“What we’re doing right now is we’re connecting our equipment not only in order to be able to automate, but also to be able to upload information into the cloud that is very, very important for those operators,” Muehlhauser said.
Food operators use the data to analyze shelf lives, inspect their processes and find more efficient uses for things like fryer oil. But Welbilt also uses data, albeit for other uses.
“At the same time, it’s, for us, very important because we do predictive, preventive maintenance, so we would like to know which spare part is going to fail before it fails in order to guarantee up-time,” the CEO said. “That is the exciting development with IoT and we’re investing a lot of money into that.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he shared his take on some callers’ favorite stocks:
GoPro Inc.: “I thought GoPro would have a better quarter. I still think it might be OK, but boy, they did throw cold water on the whole darned situation in that last conference call.”
Charles River Laboratories Intl. Inc.: “People thought the quarter wasn’t that good. We should get [CEO] Jim Foster back on. I thought the quarter was OK. This is like Idexx Labs and like Henry Schein. Periodically, you get a quarter and people think it’s not that great, but I like that company.”
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Source: Investment Cnbc
Cramer Remix: Investors should take shelter in Home Depot’s stock despite today’s action