Take Profits, but Stay in the Market

Sure, people can take profits. We are overbought now. The profit picture is going to be terrible for a lot of companies, from soft goods like General Mills (GIS - commentary - Cramer's Take) to hard goods like Emerson (EMR - commentary - Cramer's Take).

But the firmament has changed. The consumer has just been given a huge shot in the arm, a chance to get a 4% mortgage or a 4% refinancing that could change the spring selling season and make it worthwhile to spruce up your house again.

Instead of thinking, "How can I sell my home in this environment?" people will be saying, "You know what, I will spruce it up, and then the buyers will come."

I wanted the government to get into the mortgage business temporarily and offer 4% mortgages for everyone, not just a program for those who some insist on calling deadbeats and who I say are just overstretched homeowners.

It didn't happen.

But now the banks can do it. They can take rates down huge because of what the Fed is doing, and they can make so much money on these loans, they are going to be dreaming about doing it.

And Toll (TOL - commentary - Cramer's Take), Lennar (LEN - commentary - Cramer's Take), Pulte (PHM - commentary - Cramer's Take), Centex (CTX - commentary - Cramer's Take) and D.R. Horton (DHI - commentary - Cramer's Take) become trades as their businesses get new life breathed into them.

So, you sell the market, you take profits in the short squeezes, whatever, but you must recognize that all the news about housing and mortgages going forward will be positive, and while much of the news is in the stocks, they have just become awful shorts, soon to be made worse by the reinstitution of the uptick rule.

Random musings: Hartford Financial (HIG - commentary - Cramer's Take), MetLife (MET - commentary - Cramer's Take), Prudential (PRU - commentary - Cramer's Take) -- these are all excellent squeezes that could go on another day or two. Same with Aflac (AFL - commentary - Cramer's Take).

At the time of publication, Cramer was long GIS.

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