Apple's All About Events, Not Earnings

We've been where we are right now for leadership. In much of the 1990s, it was Cisco (CSCO - commentary - Cramer's Take), Intel (INTC - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Microsoft (MSFT - commentary - Cramer's Take), with an occasional help/hurt from Oracle (ORCL - commentary - Cramer's Take) and a "maybe significant" from Nortel (NT - commentary - Cramer's Take) or Qualcomm (QCOM - commentary - Cramer's Take).

Now it's Apple (AAPL - commentary - Cramer's Take), Research In Motion (RIMM - commentary - Cramer's Take), Google (GOOG - commentary - Cramer's Take) and MasterCard (MA - commentary - Cramer's Take), the last not tech but somehow represents a kind of financial tech that people get behind endlessly. Periodically we key off of Hewlett Packard (HPQ - commentary - Cramer's Take) and IBM (IBM - commentary - Cramer's Take), but if you only use one stock to know which way the wind blows, it's Apple.

First, I want to say that you shouldn't mind this narrow-minded focus. Whole bull markets have been powered by narrow-thinking portfolio managers just following the herd and then taking their cue from it to buy other stocks.

Apple's an event stock, not an earnings stock, which means you can keep buying it until the event. You can't justify buying Apple at all on earnings. It's entirely product introduction and shortage-based. RIMM's one, too. Again, hard to fathom. The animal spirits demonstrated for both yesterday confounded those of us who do homework because these were all telegraphs. The iPhone's in short supply and loved. The new BlackBerry is good, did anyone think or hear otherwise?

I have advised owning calls on these stocks, deep-in-the-moneys out several months, trading around them with common on spikes because they can be fickle.

Yesterday was a good day to sell the spike. But any pullback, particularly on Apple, must be bought because the iPhone reiteration will most likely be the tech product of the year.

Once it's out, though, the fervor will cool, and then it might be on to the next stock, at least for a while.

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

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