Sometimes, CNBC’s Jim Cramer gets frustrated with how frequently stock market stories are framed as lose-lose situations for the bulls.
From the marketwide panic around the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield crossing 3 percent to worries about rising oil prices to buzz around a strengthening dollar, Cramer argued that a lot of the negative headlines are often just haphazard deterrents to investors who want to buy stocks.
“Should you sell stocks because the dollar hit a five-month high? Meh,” the “Mad Money” host said on Wednesday.
“My whole point: it is so easy to scare you,” Cramer continued. “It is so hard to set you at ease. I think stocks may be due for a pause — sure, we’re up a lot — but it’s only because they’ve run so much, not because of these often-bogus negative stories.”
After Cramer watched the stocks of Micron and Macy’s spark what amounted to a broad-based rally on Wednesday, he knew he’d have to explain how this odd surge occurred.
Sometimes, he explained, big-picture worries about the bond market, rising oil prices or trade talks can sully market performance and put pressure on equities.
“Other times, though, there’s a vacuum of information, a real dearth of ‘what matters,’ like we had today,” Cramer said. “In this situation, we can actually care about individual companies and what they have to tell us, provided that these companies are important enough to their sectors that they can give us tremendous pin action,” or affect the movements of related stocks.
That’s exactly what happened with Micron and Macy’s, Cramer argued.
When PayPal became one of the first companies to let merchants accept cryptocurrencies, one major issue emerged, PayPal CFO John Rainey told CNBC on Wednesday.
“Because of the volatility of the cryptocurrencies,” the merchants were seeing swings in crypto that threatened the viability of their businesses, Rainey told “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer.
“If you’re a merchant and you have, let’s say, a 10 percent margin on a product that you sell and you accept bitcoin, for example, and the very next day it moves 15 percent, you’re now underwater on that transaction,” Rainey said in the exclusive interview.
“So what happens, or what was happening, is they were immediately moving that to a more stable currency,” the CFO said.
Rainey also explained to Cramer how PayPal is doubling down on the idea of helping the “unbanked” — people who don’t use typical financial services — by chasing one key customer group.
Tableau Software’s seven-word mission statement is simple: “We help people see and understand data,” the company’s President and CEO, Adam Selipsky, told Cramer in a Wednesday interview.
Unsurprisingly, Tableau’s latest product, Tableau Prep, does just that, slashing the time it takes to prepare data for analysis in half, Selipsky said.
“With Tableau Prep, we’ve taken that simple, intuitive, easy-to-use yet powerful Tableau formula and applied it from analytics over to data prep,” the CEO said.
Preliminary data from analysts at Schwab, an investment management company that partners with Tableau, showed that the beta version of Tableau Prep was already cutting their work time.
“It’s only [been] a few weeks, but the early results are showing that they’re cutting 50 percent of the time out of data preparation,” Selipsky said. “That’s hours per week for an analyst. It’s really exciting.”
With the stocks of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon all close to 10 percent off their 2018 highs, Cramer doubled down on his recommendation to own the defense plays.
“Here’s the thing: we know Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are doing extremely well, and this is before the monster new defense budget even kicked in,” Cramer said. “All three companies were fairly conservative about what this budget might mean for their business, which to me suggests that this stuff isn’t necessarily baked into their stocks here.”
Moreover, with the stocks trading at 17 and 18 times next year’s earnings estimates, the “Mad Money” host argued that their stocks are incredibly cheap given their growth prospects.
“Bottom line? If you liked Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon before the quarters, you should like them even more down here,” he said. “My favorite? Hey, look, I like Raytheon the most [thanks to] its white hot Patriot Missile program, but there’s a solid case for owning all three of the big dogs right here.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he flew through his take on callers’ favorite stocks:
Foot Locker: “I think Foot Locker’s OK. I like Nike even at a 52-week high, all-time high, because what I saw from … [our] chartist at RealMoney makes me feel very, very good about it.”
Frontline: “I have never liked the very large crude carriers and I’m not going to change my mind right now. Boy, have people done poorly in those.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of PayPal and Raytheon.
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