Wednesday’s sell-off can be blamed on Turkey, China and commodities, but investors should take advantage of cheap stocks instead of worrying, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said.
The Mad Money host said the sell-off isn’t as “special as it seems” because the root causes like Turkey and Macy’s shouldn’t be a long-term concern for investors.
The ongoing spat between Turkey and the United States about the detention of an American pastor has led the countries to levy tariffs on goods on each other. This issue will go away once President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan find some kind of compromise and Turkey releases the pastor, according to Cramer.
And while the Turkish lira might have rallied on Wednesday, the country’s ongoing problems meant that Europe took a hit because many of its banks have lent to Turkey, which is in the middle of a debt crisis.
The relationship between Europe and China means that Europe’s sell-off carried over to China because of Turkey. Adding to China’s problems is the trade conflict with the U.S., a slowing economy and regulation of the internet and technology company Tencent.
According to the Mad Money host, the U.S. market shouldn’t be worried about the Turkish debt crisis.
“Our linkage to Turkey is almost nil,” Cramer said. “At this point it’s mostly just man-made headline risk.”
U.S.-related news that sent the market down included Macy’s reporting a weaker-than-expected quarter, which sent its stock plummeting, and Kimberly-Clark raising prices on Kleenex and Huggies.
Cramer advised investors to remember that commodities are now plummeting after companies worried about soaring prices. For Macy’s, that means that the gross margin issues that it saw this quarter shouldn’t affect the numbers being up for the year, Cramer said. Overall, lower commodity prices mean that gross margins won’t decline, a good sign for U.S. companies.
The Mad Money host also warned investors looking to buy during the sell-off to stick to high-flying stocks like Amazon and Facebook at a discount.
“Should we just buy everything then? No,” Cramer said. “The charts are bad and the technicians are losing it. Lots of stocks are held by weak hands, people who don’t know what they own.”
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