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Cramer's Got My Number |
rffrydr
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 Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 7:33 pm Post subject: Cramer's Got My Number |
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Well here's the Madman once again: couldn't help reprint 'cause now he's talking to--at--me. Is this really the "secret consensus"?
| Quote: | Sometimes it just hits you. You will be reading an article about some fund manager somewhere who sounds perfectly intelligent and you will spot it, the holy grail of the moment -- THE CONSENSUS. I won't mention the fellow's name -- it is unimportant -- because he's good at his job, but the thoughts he is currently expounding sound like many others I hear, to wit:
Oil prices will fall to $80 a barrel.
The dollar will rise when the Fed stops cutting rates.
GDP growth in China will slow.
First, let me just say that those events would be bullish for every domestic company in our universe, including the financials, and we would have a miracle bull market where less than 20% of the market -- ag/mineral/oil and gas/infra --collapses and fully 80% of the market can rally (I am including the health care stocks because, somehow, they have been seen to become hostage to the weak federal government, and in this scenario I don't see the federal government as worried about cutting back spending).
So, as someone who has to talk about stocks all of the time and has an innate bias -- because I am not a hedge fund operator -- for stocks to go higher, I want this scenario to play out.
But let's take a look at it, because it is what I think the vast majority secretly believes in, and when you get a week where oil falls hard (albeit from really high levels) and the dollar rallies it seems like everyone believes in it out loud and the consensus pops out of the closet.
First, oil. Once again the consensus REFUSES to take into account how little oil is being discovered and how much is being pumped. We just sent oil man xxx Cheney over to Saudi Arabia in an attempt, no doubt, to get them to pump more. Believe me, they want to pump more too. It doesn't matter. Iraq is supposedly more pacified, and while all we hear about is the inevitable stealing of all the money coming from the fields -- typical of the incompetence and corruption that is endlessly worth banking on -- they are pumping more than they have and it doesn't matter. No areas right now are out of commission because of natural disasters or terrorism. Still doesn't matter. The hedge funds have had to unwind their 30-to-1 leveraged hoarding of oil and it STILL doesn't matter.
So what if a few million more people carpool. So what if we keep taking our food supply and shoving it into our tank. It doesn't matter. Don't you think that Exxon (XOM - commentary - Cramer's Take), Chevron (CVX - commentary - Cramer's Take), Conoco (COP - commentary - Cramer's Take), BP (BP - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Royal Dutch (RDS.A - commentary - Cramer's Take) are pumping all they can, because no one believes oil is sustainable at these prices save perhaps Jim Mulva from Conoco?
That's why I think the $80 is a fantasy. It's just too bullish for everything but oil. You believe it? Go buy AMR (AMR - commentary - Cramer's Take). Your money.
Next, the dollar. I think the dollar will rise when the economy gets stronger, but I think the issue with the dollar is how many we print and how little we save and how little we tax and how much we spend both as people and as a nation. Look around at the countries with strong currencies and you will see good growth and self-control, which under this administration has become a joke. I know I can barely contain my contempt for their decision to debase the dollar. They figure no one goes away, I guess.
This is the inevitable result of a plan to dismantle the federal government by starving it: you can't dismantle it and you can't starve it, you just get someone else to pay for it and they are pretty fed up with paying, knowing that there's a lot more supply ahead. I think the dollar will rally when we get some self-control or when we are so cheap that the Europeans come and snatch up our assets with their euros and that -- something I have been completely wrong on because I guess I, too, have been too bullish on the dollar -- hasn't happened yet. Or, the dollar will rally when we get a new administration that isn't as contemptible around the world, and that is viewed as having some self-control. Oh, an aside ... boy, are we hated.
Finally, GDP growth in China. Here's one we have been hearing about for about 10 years. I think there will be a cyclicality to China's growth. The fact that more than half the people in the country have cell phones means, let's say, that there are fewer people who need cell phones than two years ago. That's the kind of undefeatable logic that always prevails.
I point out that what people are really implying is that China will have a bust to go with its boom, which presumes the kind of bust that happened even as this country expanded across the continent. Moments got out of control but it was a really bad bet to believe that there wasn't, at any one time, secular noninflationary growth in this country for more than 100 years. That feels like China to me.
So, while I am a guy who likes a consensus, I see all of the takeaways of this consensus -- short Schlumberger (SLB - commentary - Cramer's Take) and XOM, sell Deere (DE - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Chevron, Halliburton (HAL - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Fluor (FLR - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Bunge (BG - commentary - Cramer's Take) -- having some short-term power to them. I understand the propensity to roll back gold -- the logical extension of a strong dollar.
But I simply don't see the structural side of this bull case -- more oil supply, a better administration, the end of industrialization of China -- playing out in a way that you can do anything but make a trade on it.
The investment side of the anti-consensus just seems a better bet to me. |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2012 7:49 am Post subject: |
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No hype here.
| Quote: | No one believed Cummins (CMI) just three months ago. No one believed them when they said they are in secular growth mode because of the need to upgrade engines to meet emission standards. People were skeptical that Cummins was anything but another cyclical ready to be carved up and left for dead by a slowing Chinese economy and vicious European declines.
It didn't matter that the company, a total no-hype outfit, said things would be fine. People weren't skeptical. They simply branded the fine folks from Indiana as hayseeds and rubes. In the height of the crisis a few months ago, the stock traded down to $80, even as the assurances and the order books said, "This is our time."
Now we know they were telling the truth, and the cynics -- again, not skeptics -- just got it plain wrong.... |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2012 10:47 am Post subject: |
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http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/01/03/2012/10-myths-2011
Oh, to be part of the intelligentsia, the bearish think tanks that inspire so much of what passes for conventional wisdom that then gets passed on to the "news."
I yearn for it because it is never wrong, always prescient and seems to make so much money when the truth is, of course, that it is often wrong, rarely prescient and costs you a fortune.
With that in mind, here's the ten bearish myths, all conventional wisdom, that you read about over and over again and pretty much took for gospel:
The United States would be one of the worst performing markets of the year. When I was a hedge fund manager, no matter how antiquated it seemed, I compared myself to the Dow Jones Averages. They were up 5.5%, led by Mcdonald's (MCD) up 30%, with giant exposure to overseas, particularly ailing Germany and France, followed by IBM (IBM), rallying 25%, also with a giant business in Europe, followed by Pfizer (PFE), the drug company that vaulted 24% despite losing Lipitor exclusivity, and Home Depot (HD) running 20% even as the housing crisis worsened in 2012.
The dollar had to go down, didn't it? Obama busted the budget. The GOP showed no restraint. We printed money left and right through the Fed. Bernanke expanded the money base and the Fed's balance sheet. We had horrendous trade deficits, much of it needlessly with oil. The DXY, the dollar index, started at 79 an finished at 80. That's some dollar decline. Lesser of all evils, perhaps?
Interest had to go higher, didn't they? Wasn't that what the big budget tussle was about? Didn't we fear a huge increase in rates from the brilliant S&P downgrade? Aren't we spending way too much money in a guns-and-butter, Lyndon-Johnson-like plan? Aren't we the most profligate country in the world? Didn't we fail to curtail any entitlements? Yes, we did, but we have no inflation in this country to speak of save food inflation and judging by the climbing restaurant stocks and declining ag stocks that might be a thing of the past. Ben Bernanke did keep them down, but I question how much he was responsible for. The Chinese are nuts not to take the gain here. Turns out it was a trade of a lifetime. Chou en Lai, that wild and crazy Communist visionary, would be thrilled and no doubt rolling in his grave with joy. Congratz to the New York Times' Paul Krugman for getting this right and recognizing that employment was the issue. Razzes to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner who didn't realize the opportunity of a lifetime to issue a $1 trillion dollars' worth of 30-year paper and eliminate our potential Italy liquidity problem own the road.
Oil trades with other commodities and would get hit by a worldwide slowdown. Just the opposite occurred and oil was strong all year despite the slowing of all economies either through a lack of stimulus or design. Sure, there were supply disruptions. But the main issue is that the market seems not to be working and the Chinese are also rapacious losers, even when their economy isn't red hot.
Propagated by an errant New York Times reporter, our nat-gas reserves are understated. Nat gas finished at a 28-month low and shows no sign of rising because of a seeming endless glut brought on by signed contracts that require drilling. Reserves are dramatically understated because of arcane SEC rules designed to catch hype artists.
Gold peaked and would be headed down big. Actually gold rallied again, 11-straight years, as it proved to be correlated with nothing but lack of supply and strong demand. Sure it didn't finish at the high, but the GLD did rally 10%. Gold could be up nicely again given that the circumstances that plagued 2011 have stayed on the horizon
The euro has to be falling apart and is coming apart at the seams because of the sovereign debt crisis. Oops, the euro as measured by the FXE basically finished where it started. Where's the tainted beef?
I succumbed to this one until I realized that it was the year of high yield, Big Pharma is dead. Pfizer was one of the top performers in the Dow. Merck (MRK) and JNJ (JNJ) finished nicely in the black, with the latter defying seemingly endless recalls. Lilly (LLY), long ago left for dead, rallied 25% Bristol-Myers (BMY), my personal fave, zoomed almost 40%.
The consumer, completely strapped, would run out of gas. The consumer gained steam the whole year and did so with a cash market, not a borrowed market. One of the largest worries of 2011, the over-levered consumer, turned out to be a joke. Could this be because so many stopped paying their mortgage? That so many stayed in their parents' houses. Government payments? Off the books hiring that wasn't measured? I think it was a combination of all of these, even though most aren't acknowledged or talked about.
The Dogs of the Dow are the place to be. These stayed in the bow-wow chateau, with Bank of America (BAC), Alcoa (AA) -- which I fell for-- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Cisco (CSCO) all underperformers (especially BAC and AA, which really hurt). The world's economy wasn't strong enough for Alcoa and Bank of America is completely on the ropes because of its terrible Countrywide buy and its myriad lending and legal problems, despite the strong support for Brian Moynihan expressed at the board level.
Those who propagated these myths will, of course, go unscathed. They won't own up. That's not how it's done. They will be sought after to be interviewed. They will be revered. That's just the way it is and 2012 will be no different. It would be funny, if it weren't so darned costly.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 10:13 am Post subject: |
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Shorts Are Feeling the Pain
By Jim Cramer
| Dec 05, 2011 | 10:48 AM EST | Add a comment
| Quote: | The shorts aren't working. Who would have thought that would be the case given where we were two weeks ago?
Think about it. The big darlings, starting with NetApp (NTAP) and Salesforce.com (CRM), have been putting heavy pressure on the market. Then just last week we saw what looked to be the disastrous Lululemon (LULU), with everyone focusing on the high levels of inventory. Meanwhile Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) couldn't get out of their own way.
Now look what's happened. We got an Apple number bump last week from JPMorgan, a bump that took the analyst from the middle of the pack to high man. The best part of the number bump? The analyst had factored in that iPad numbers may not be all that hot. Google, amazingly, is now perceived as a holiday play with a search kicker. It has truly broken out and my chartist friends are hailing it as the best pictograph in the book.
We got a takeover of SuccessFactors (SFSF) by SAP (SAP), which shows that you must have a cloud strategy to succeed in tech these days. The two most visible and heavily shorted cloud plays were RedHat (RHT) and Salesforce.com. Suddenly they have gone from being great shorts to being nightmares on the short side.
Lululemon was like something right out of the NFL. The stock plummeted, down 7, as the bears gloated and the bulls panicked about inventory levels. Upon further review the bulls came back and took it up. Why? Because Lulu might need that inventory because sales may be robust for the holidays. Why not believe in them? We heard that a lot of inventory was the right thing for Under Armour (UA) and Deckers (DECK). Why not for Lululemon? |
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 1:04 pm Post subject: |
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They Shoot Growth Stocks, Don't They?
By Jim Cramer
| Quote: | | Could someone be taking out all of the growth names and shooting them? I have spent most of the day trying to figure out what's wrong with Deckers and Lululemon and Salesforce.com and Amazon.com and Netflix and Chipotle and so many other growth names and I am convinced the answer is "nothing, except they are all high growth and high growth is being shot." Sometimes this happens. It usually happens when people feel inflation is going to eat away at the worth of the out years. Sometimes it is because of a blow-up in the cohort, but unless people think that Dell is part of the cohort that's just not a good reason. Now, here's something else, though. Take Deckers, where I do not hear anything is wrong and I am not getting the feedback from any of these retailers that business... |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 7:14 am Post subject: |
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Eyes on the prize even while skulking into his hole:
Keeping the Powder Dry
By Jim Cramer
| Quote: | | Operative terms: There are no heroes today, and there are no medals for trying. Buried within every single trader's heart is a desire to call something big here, to see things no one else sees and to recognize opportunity. Those would all be good signs, but even seeing something no one else does requires the possibility of something new happening. As we look at the landscape from Friday's close of trading, nothing surprisingly good has happened at all. There's no coordinated policy shift in Europe beyond the much rumored secondary-market bond buying. Further, of course, we have to deal with the panic stemming from the Standard & Poor's downgrade. That means there's nothing good -- nothing positive out there -- except for more declines in oil. We know that oil could go down, maybe much lower, if the exchanges only raised margin rates. But that would cut... |
The Madman is still a fine canary.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 6:31 am Post subject: |
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It's one of those times..."the market" is not always "your market"--and it doesn't always rule.
It's a Little Nuts
By Jim Cramer
| Quote: | | Can we stock guys ever hijack the market back from the bond guys? Or even the currency guys? Or the commodity guys? Are we just too darned small and inconsequential? This morning I watched how stocks in Europe popped in almost a moment's notice. Was it ING's surprisingly good quarter, a financial that delivered and also bit the bullet on its Greek bond holdings? Was it the excellent number from Adidas, including a second guide-up in a row despite Japanese sluggishness, a number that confirmed that the shoe bull market is global? Could it have been the astounding and outstanding report from Unilever, which included a bold forecast that raw costs are peaking something that makes sense given the rapid decline in oil? Nah. It was some sort of short-term Spanish bond auction. Went slightly better than expected. I don't know, by a basis point... |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 11:57 am Post subject: |
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Everything Must Go!
By Jim Cramer
| Quote: | | They've got to sell something! Put yourself in the shoes of all of the hedge funds that used borrowed money to buy oil. Think about all of the non-consumers that took it as a given that oil is inexorably going higher. What do they do? They have to blow out of everything. Think of the hedge funds that are facing liquidations as it is the end of the quarter. That's very big and they, too, have to sell everything. What is "everything"? It tends to be stocks, as we saw with hedge funds that went wild in 2008. Sometimes the structural really rules. The structural forces everything to go down. Sometimes the structural trumps all of this risk-on/risk-off stuff that all of these glib commentators are always talking about because, clearly, they have never faced liquidations. Liquidations might not be done in a day, but it is... |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 11:20 am Post subject: |
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Yes, Mulally has been taken a deserved peg or two since 2010 but, apart from the economic pessimism there's fishy stuff goin' on in these autos (apart from the UAW heavy hand). Sometimes the plots and schemes of these Hedge Funds gets dispiriting. 
Ford's Problem Isn't Mulally, It's Pump Prices
By Jim Cramer
| Quote: | | Did Ford overpromise, setting itself up for under-delivery? Is that what happened to Ford yesterday when Alan Mulally came on my show and spoke at his investor day and made what looked to be stretch projections for the company that people are skeptical about? That's certainly the implication of the stock. That's what the stock seems to be saying, that Alan has lost his touch and that it is all for naught, including his aggressive international expansion plans. But I think the presumption is wrong. Ford has been addressing that balance sheet, paying down debt aggressively, and it's totally in shape for whatever comes its way. That, however, is the real problem. What's coming Ford's way is what happens when the price of gasoline gets too elevated. People stop buying cars. One of the reasons I harp on gasoline is its far-reaching implications for so many parts of... |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu May 12, 2011 7:04 am Post subject: |
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The ABC's of Demand
By Jim Cramer
When prices keep going higher, producers meet the demand with more production -- shocker. Just like the textbooks say, it really does happen. Farmers have been planting like mad. Silver miners have been digging overtime. Oil producers have tried to sell into the spot market gingerly -- but once the hedge funds stop keeping the futures up, every oil company and his brother company will come in to lock things down at the same time the hedge funds are frantically trying to get out. For the longest time the oil companies I deal with have been reluctant to sell futures. Only the smallest have done so. The largest are content to let the hedge funds jack up the price so they can sell in the spot market at elevated prices. But given that almost every oil exec I have talked to knew there was a glut and that the...
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smile
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| Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2011 2:37 pm Post subject: speculation - Cramer's got it right |
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CFTC - raise margin requirements on all commodities not just oil
also I like the idea of Gov't taking advantage of the speculation for the people - sell the freakin futures against SPR
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=3000009564&play=1 |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 3:11 pm Post subject: |
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Libya Changes Everything
By Jim Cramer
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No, it isn't right. As I said earlier today and yesterday, I just don't like this market at all. I don't want to own high-growth stocks. I do not want to own companies that are big energy consumers. I don't want to own retailers. I am willing to take advantage of stocks that are being tossed asunder -- Fluor, Deere. But I also recognize that things have changed radically in 48 hours, and "misses" even in the face of huge backlogs, like Fluor, are punished in a way that was unheard of before Libya. I do not like this market. I know that there are people who say, "But Jim, you liked F5 Networks, Apple, Deckers, Salesforce.com, Chipotle, Amazon and Netflix." Well, I cannot defend these right here, because they aren't going to work now. I would only defend them if I were a dogmatic fool. This is not the... |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Jan 10, 2011 11:53 am Post subject: |
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This Could Have Been Avoided
By Jim Cramer
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The widening of the federal probe into consultants and their relationships with hedge funds and mutual funds hints at a bizarre world where the buy-side seems outrageously stupid and lazy and unable to adjust to a world where it seems they simply relied on management not only to build models but to get information. The whole process was meant to subvert Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure), which turned out to be much more of a game-changer than we would have thought. It seems that, rather than doing the homework of figuring out which sectors to emphasize and which stocks to pick, a necessary change brought on by the desire of the authorities for a level playing field with the individual investor, these managers just tried to get the same old certainty they used to get from insiders, and in some cases, for the right fee, even better information.... |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 9:00 am Post subject: |
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Mark-to-Market can destroy but it can't kill (NFIPK.QQ):
Not So, Naysayers
By Jim Cramer
| Quote: | | Chrysler Financial was supposed to be worthless. Yet today Toronto Dominion , one of the most solvent banks in the world, bid $6.3 billion for the financial arm of the ailing automaker. $6.3 billion in cash. To Cerberus Capital, another outfit that was supposed to be kyboshed by the era's viciousness and destruction. I wish I had a nickel for every single entity that was "supposed to" collapse but didn't during the Great Recession. How about all of the homebuilders that were supposed to disappear as housing plummeted? I only wish some did. The market for these stocks is on fire, perhaps a sign, however premature, that there is going to be a resurgence in home pricing as soon as next year. How about all of the real estate investment trusts that were supposed to go under because of the collapse in the commercial mortgage sector... |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 7:04 pm Post subject: |
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And I just writ the ol' bugger off:
A Small Victory for Bank of America
By Jim Cramer
| Quote: | | I saw it. I saw it happen with my own eyes. I saw Bank of America fold up like the cheap suit it often is on a piece of bad news, and then, as of this writing, it rallied right back to being even! Of course the actual news was about some muni shenanigans that were cleared up with hefty penalties, and not mortgages that won't go away. But the fact is that Bank of America turned. It didn't go down and stay down. Sure, that smacks of desperation. But as I have said of late, these stocks can't put together a couple of good days, and they rarely rally after they have been tagged. Again, no breakthrough. But a noteworthy moment nonetheless. Today is Citigroup's day to shine. It acts terrifically. It is secondarily PNC's day to crow, as it is asking the authorities to allow it... |
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