Depressing Research Presents an Intriguing Possibility

I took a most disheartening trip through the S&P chartbook over the weekend. This was a time-honored tradition that I stopped doing when I quit as a full-time manager, but I have had to restart because things have gotten so darned hard.

I was bent on doing what Steve Smith talks about elsewhere in his great column on the site, looking for non-financials that seem interesting.

I found almost nothing. All of the stocks with consistent growth -- the Baxters (BAX - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Bards (BCR - commentary - Cramer's Take), have multiples north of 20. The Colgates (CL - commentary - Cramer's Take), Cokes (KO - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Pepsis (PEP - commentary - Cramer's Take) are down but not down enough, with the former being really expensive. The limits of price improvement seem stacked against you.

The ag/oil/coal complex is badly overextended, making you feel that this oversold pullback hasn't given you enough decline, although I like those.

In fact, the only charts that were really any good at all, the only ones that looked like they had bottomed, were the ones that got us into this jam in the first place: KB Home (KBH - commentary - Cramer's Take), Lennar (LEN - commentary - Cramer's Take), Pulte (PHM - commentary - Cramer's Take), Centex (CTX - commentary - Cramer's Take). They looked GREAT!

The book, in other words, was no solace in looking for "cheap" stocks.

But -- and this is a big "but" -- what if the housing stocks have bottomed? I find it so hard to believe ... we have had none go belly-up. Citigroup (C - commentary - Cramer's Take) just the other day said it was cutting back on mortgages. Thornburg's (TMA - commentary - Cramer's Take) almost gone. Who the heck knows what is going on with Fannie Mae (FNM - commentary - Cramer's Take)?

To me, only an oscillator that is on the verge of going minus 5 -- the extreme where I have always on this site since its inception said you have to buy and cover shorts -- sent me on such a mission to pore over so many charts.

Mission not yet accomplished. But at least I am open-minded enough to look.

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

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