Confounded by Nabors

The patch is a puzzlement. Nabors (NBR - commentary - Cramer's Take) preannounced a dreadful quarter a week ago and the stock got pummeled to $28. Since then oil's fallen horribly, one of the worst weeks the commodity has ever suffered -- and Nabors is up a dollar.

Up a dollar!

How can that be?

Perhaps you could say that the natural gas business, which Nabors is levered to, isn't as bad as we thought. But we have to believe that if we get warm weather again in the next couple of weeks, nat gas will get hammered, and the weather forecast is for warm weather.

Or maybe it's the buyback, which Nabors said would be incredibly aggressive.

Either way, if I didn't know any better, I would say that the drilling group may have found some purchase here and the shorts have, once again, made the bad bet when they pushed down the Oil Service HOLDRs (OIH - commentary - Cramer's Take) to panic out the longs this week.

I don't believe I can come up with a long case for Nabors. But these last 10 days annihilated the short case, for sure. And it calls into question everything we might think about how stocks discount the future in the near term.

At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in any of the stocks mentioned in this post.

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