Five Bullish Wild Cards

We work in a business that is stacked with wild cards. When something's wild, anything can happen. We can pretty much card-count the negatives: airline stocks being punished, insurance stocks getting clobbered, media stocks losing big revenue, retailers being set back further from a loss of consumer confidence. But how about some positive cards that could trump those negatives, or at least, equal them and make the bull case not seem so unfathomable? Here are five wild cards that could play in the bulls' favor.

1. Oil. Everyone thinks the price of oil is going higher because of the possible terrorist response. I think that's wrong. It is more likely that the American government is going to pressure Saudi Arabia to flood the world with oil. I wouldn't be surprised to see a dramatic drop in oil prices. In fact, I am so worried about this happening, that if the oil service stocks spike, I am going to trim my Halliburton(HAL Quote - Cramer on HAL - Stock Picks) and Schlumberger(SLB Quote - Cramer on SLB - Stock Picks). You can feel the pressure that the Bush administration is putting on the Saudis from here!

2. Massive deficit spending. The government now has an excuse to put people to work at high-paid jobs, safety jobs as we gear up for a new world where our security will resemble the security of Israel, the only country in the world that truly takes terrorism as a given. We are well-equipped, after paying down so much of the deficit, for this kind of spending without fanning inflation.

3. IT spending. We have been looking for something to ignite information technology spending. We had the Internet, we had Y2k and we had email and Windows. Now we have a need for redundancy and sophisticated home computing that could create a new wave of spending. You can bet that every major corporation in the world is beefing up its storage and back-up capacity right now, regardless of the bottom-line damage it might do.

4. The fix. I am reluctant to write about the fix because Wall Streeters are famous conspirator nuts and I don't want to add to it. But let's face it, in 1987, on the day after the Crash, the Big Blue-Chips staged a rally that, for all purposes, was indeed "staged." The large brokerage houses combined to manipulate the XMI, an index that mirrored the Dow, into a furious rally that brought the market out of its funk and broke the downward momentum long enough to make people feel emboldened. The rally, which turned Terrible Tuesday (that term will never again be used for anything but 9/11)into Turnaround Tuesday, was followed with buybacks by the big companies in the Dow that kept the market higher.

Don't you think that can happen again? Now that companies can execute buybacks at the opening, you could see a combination of futures manipulation upward (only takes four houses working together to make it happen) with follow-on buyback orders and you will get this market higher.

5. The Bush factor. I think a lot of people who went into this thinking President Bush might not be able to figure out what to do or was over his head now are rethinking that position as he stays on his message. The notion that we can stop partisan bickering and get something done bilaterally in Washington to move the country could change the psyche radically. I know that I, who have been negative on the market as of late, feel inspired by the guy and the spirit coming from Washington, D.C. That's something that, if continued, could lead to a better market down the road.

You can see the potential for what one executive told the Washington Post might turn out to be a "national epiphany." That's a p/e raising event, not a lowering event. As I tried to explain in my own semi-coherent way on "Business Center" last night, we could rally around this administration in a way that we have not seen happen in years, and we can begin to think of Washington and the government as the good guys again.

Too Pollyana? Let me tell you, if anyone foretold the events of the previous week, you would have said he was too negative, too macabre, too over-the-top. Why not consider that some combination of these wild cards could come up?

Stranger things have and did happen.