The Futures Are Still in Charge -- For Now

Exxon's (XOM - commentary - Cramer's Take) at the fulcrum. Clearly last good quarter. Clearly a company with year-over-year earnings declines. Clearly a company whose best year ever will have occurred.

But it is a part of the futures, and the futures want to go higher, and the market wants to go higher.

A total tug of war.

This stock is at the fulcrum because if you are buying the asset class that is stocks, you want the biggest stocks to be worth buying: GE (GE - commentary - Cramer's Take) and XOM and Microsoft (MSFT - commentary - Cramer's Take). Microsoft's doing the job; the others aren't.

To me, someone who finds the futures-buying unnerving, I would like to see Exxon go down on the fundies, having been marked up endlessly by the futures almost daily.

But the futures remain powerful and the marking up is still going on, and the hedge funds temporarily seem no longer on the margin cutting block.

Advantage asset class over fundamentals.

For now.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long GE.

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