End of the Liquidation?

Feels done to me. The liquidation or liquidations of hedge funds that were playing the great oil and gas and fertilizer trades of 2007-early 2008. You can see the futures, the oil and natural gas futures, not going down anymore, and ExxonMobil (XOM - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Chevron (CVX - commentary - Cramer's Take), the big liquid guys, bottoming. I would bet that whoever is tossing things out to make the fifth-day-of-the-month deadline -- when most money is supposed to be returned for redemptions -- is either done for today or has been margined out, as the margin clerks like to finish their job before 2 p.m.

Betting when a liquidation is over is a tough game. We have no real insight about it. But the decoupling of the futures and the stocks, with the futures no longer going down and the big liquid stocks already bottoming, could signal that the lion's share of the horrible selling could have climaxed.

I know I was afraid I would miss it and just bought some National Oilwell Varco (NOV - commentary - Cramer's Take) based on the terrific comments by Schlumberger (SLB - commentary - Cramer's Take).

I just figured I had to take some on, because the valuations are pretty cheap vs. the comments that we just got from Schlumberger about a firming of prices. SLB is the most honest of the bunch, no reason for them to smoke us.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long National Oilwell Varco.

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