After a tech-filled week at CNBC’s 1Market in San Francisco, Jim Cramer started thinking about one of his favorite high-growth names in the space: the stock of Netflix.
Up 66 percent year to date, Netflix’s stock is the best performer in the S&P 500. Better yet, shares of the streaming giant have climbed over 1,000 percent in the last five years.
“But after spending a week in Silicon Valley, I realized something kind of crazy. Right now, the thing the experts love most about Netflix is its massive library of original content. Yet, not that long ago, this was the single most hated part of the story,” the “Mad Money” host said.
The naysayers were so forceful that investors who listened might have assumed that Netflix was effectively burning money, accelerating its inevitable downfall, Cramer said.
Now, the market has almost universally accepted Netflix’s content library as its greatest strength — a far cry from what Cramer heard the experts say for years.
“These days, we all accept that when Netflix spends $7.5 to $8 billion on non-sports content this year — more than Viacom or CBS — it’s a good investment, good because this programming is what fuels the company’s explosive subscriber growth,” Cramer said. “And new subscribers are the magic ingredient that sends this stock to new highs.”
If Cramer had to choose one word to define this stock market, it would be “challenging.”
“Challenging, as in stocks can be up right from the get-go, then we give up the ghost, then the averages come roaring back, except we do it with fewer stocks rallying and many names left behind,” the “Mad Money” host said on Friday.
“Welcome to the post-highs market where there are simply too many headwinds swirling, from rising raw costs … to the West Wing revolving door to failed takeovers and suddenly unhelpful government intervention,” he continued.
But even with all of the negatives, Cramer knew one thing for certain: the earnings are strong and full of upside surprises, and that’s what’s keeping the market from tanking.
With that in mind, the “Mad Money” host turned to his weekly game plan, complete with earnings from Oracle, Children’s Place, Nike and more.
With U.S.-China trade relations teetering as the Trump administration ramps up its rhetoric on potential tariffs, United Technologies CEO Greg Hayes told CNBC that any escalation could have something of a ripple effect on his business and its customers.
“We don’t want to see a trade war with China,” Hayes told Cramer in a Friday interview. “We import a lot from China. They import a lot of aerospace parts from us and specifically from Boeing. As you know, Boeing is the biggest customer that we have on the aerospace systems side.”
Shares of Boeing, which buys aircraft systems and components from United Technologies, have sunk since the president signed a proclamation implementing steel and aluminum tariffs.
Hayes emphasized to Cramer that “nobody wins” in a trade war, and addressed the potential for a breakup at his massive industrial company.
As New Relic proves its ability to help companies deploy their software faster and with fewer errors, founder and CEO Lew Cirne shared a compelling data point about his biggest clients with CNBC.
“One of the interesting things we’ve seen about our customers is the more a customer spends with New Relic, the more likely they are to grow their spend with New Relic. So customers who invest in us and have the capacity to grow with us grow faster,” Cirne told Cramer on Friday.
With new corporate clients that include major airlines and popular phenomenons like 23andMe, Cirne said the enterprise world is waking up to the advantages of New Relic’s cloud-based monitoring services.
“That’s the fastest-growing segment of our business. It’s now 52 percent of our business,” the CEO said. “We feel like it’s going to underpin the growth strategy for years to come.”
The consumer packaged goods space isn’t known for its innovation, but Cramer has found that for an industry leader like Clorox, it’s innovate or die.
“Clorox may look like one of the most boring businesses known to man, but it’s an innovation machine,” Cramer said.
After his interview with Clorox CEO Benno Dorer, Cramer knew he had to come up with investing advice for homegamers who wanted to seize on the company’s growth.
“As much as I like the company, there’s no denying that the consumer staples are very much out of favor with the Wall Street fashion show right now, and that goes double for Clorox, as the latest quarter was sub-optimal to say the least,” Cramer said.
“If you’re impatient, stick with the technology names,” he advised. “However, for those of you who love innovation but fear the volatility of tech, Clorox is exactly the kind of stock that could be worth buying slowly and patiently into expected weakness.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he zoomed through his take on some callers’ favorite stocks:
Control4 Corp: “Too competitive an area. We’re going to have to say ix-nay on that one.”
Sunrun Inc.: “It’s been a good solar stock, which is actually quite surprising. My problem is that this stock has run a little too much.”
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