As the stock market rose sharply on Thursday, CNBC’s Jim Cramer pinpointed a key component of the bull case that helped equities climb. the lack of “explosive” Trump tweets.
“We didn’t see a threat to Russia,” the “Mad Money” host said. “We didn’t get a tweet about an attack on the FBI or special prosecutor Robert Mueller, other than a riposte against the New York Times about what the president called fake reporting.”
While Trump’s silence on Russia doesn’t necessarily mean that the White House won’t retaliate against Russia, which may have supported the Syrian regime in a recent chemical attack, stocks certainly benefited from his relatively calm Twitter feed, Cramer said.
Cramer also labeled Amazon “the best stock to own when the president doesn’t tweet” thanks to its 1.5 percent jump on Thursday.
To be a good investor, you have to be able to handle uncertainty. But even the most predictable events can lose you money, Cramer warned on Thursday.
From Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration’s possible collusion with Russia to the recent gas attack in Syria, Cramer saw potential decline triggers all over the stock market.
“I’m not a political person. It’s my job to try to figure out what future events might impact the market,” Cramer said. “And if Trump fires Mueller or gets into it with the Russians over Syria, the impact will be negative.”
Both events could sidetrack key earnings reports, send interest rates lower and push oil prices higher, creating headwinds for oil-dependent industries and fueling investors’ worries, he said.
“I say if you haven’t put any money to work during this volatile period, why not wait for a better entry point?” Cramer suggested.
U.S.-China tensions over trade may have abated for now, but with China ready to escalate at any moment, Cramer wanted investors to be prepared for potential pain.
“Stocks like Caterpillar have been rebounding nicely after getting absolutely eviscerated over the past few months. I say wait a second. Not so fast,” the “Mad Money” host said.
While shares of Caterpillar have more than tripled since their early 2016 lows and business at the construction equipment giant is booming, Cramer warned that it does a lot of business in China.
And despite the stock’s rally after China President Xi Jinping struck a more conciliatory tone on trade in a recent speech, Cramer saw Caterpillar as an obvious target for Chinese retaliation.
“You should swap out of CAT and swap into United Rentals, URI, the big domestic machinery rental play,” he recommended. “United Rentals gives you the same great earth-moving and construction equipment exposure that Caterpillar does without any of the China related risk.”
Here’s why Cramer would buy United Rentals’ stock over Caterpillar’s.
As a veteran of the technology space, Manny Medina, CEO of privately held cybersecurity company Cyxtera, is seeing global risks abound as the world digitizes.
“The world is extremely dangerous,” Medina told Cramer in a Thursday interview. “This is something that is not going to go away. It’s going to get continuously worse and worse and worse.”
But Cyxtera, which helps companies secure their data infrastructures and conduct cybersecurity-focused analytics, is working to protect the world’s excess of information.
“Today, … you need to use different methods of protecting the different infrastructure. One of the greatest advantages of our software-defined perimeter is that you use the same technology to protect your infrastructure regardless of where it resides,” Medina said. “I think there’s a whole transformation happening in security and we are very, very glad to be right at the forefront of it.”
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, commonly known as GDPR, is boosting business at software companies like Talend, CEO Mike Tuchen said in a Thursday interview with Cramer.
The regulation, which goes into effect in a month, states that European citizens own their data. As such, any company providing a service using consumer data, like Facebook, doesn’t own the data of European citizens, Tuchen explained.
“So if a European citizen says, ‘I want to see all the data that you have about me,’ they have to show it to them,” the CEO said. “We solve exactly that set of problems for companies in Europe. And so what we do is we allow them to pull together all the information they have about their customers in one place.”
And even though GDPR was approved in 2015, companies haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of how the regulations will affect their businesses. For Tuchen, that’s where Talend comes in, and he said it’s given business “a bump.”
“What’s funny is we’re seeing companies are really just now getting to the meat of their GDPR phase,” Tuchen told Cramer. “For a regulation that goes into force in one month, you’d think that this big push would’ve happened a year ago. Not really so much. But it is really in full stream right now.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he flew through his take on some callers’ favorite stocks:
Realty Income Corporation: “Don’t need it. Don’t need letter O. Don’t need it. Don’t need a real estate investment trust. I need to have income. I need to have growth. Doesn’t have both.”
iRobot Corp.: “Last quarter was really bad, man. It was bad. I don’t need you in that. That thing is just too hard to own. It’s cost a lot of people a lot of money.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Amazon.
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