Jim Cramer's Best Blogs

Editor's note: Jim Cramer will present his 2009 stock outlook for the first time at TheStreet.com Investment Conference on Saturday, Oct. 25. Click here for details.

Jim Cramer fills his blog on RealMoney every day with his up-to-the-minute reactions to what's happening in the market and his legendary ahead-of-the-crowd ideas. This week he blogged on:

• broken sentiment indicators,
• playing volatility, and
• the changing face of equities.

Click here for information on RealMoney, where you can see all the blogs, including Jim Cramer's -- and reader comments -- in real time.

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Sentiment Can't Measure This Broken Market

Originally published on Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 4:23 p.m. EDT

All my career, the sentiment indicators have worked. When you get anything near minus 10 on the oscillator, you have to be silly not to buy. When you get anything approximating 35% bulls on the Investors Intelligence survey, you have to buy.

We have almost double that negative on the oscillator and half as many bulls as that pathetic number.

Sentiment has become meaningless. It is incredible.

If we are going into a severe recession, some of the selling makes sense, but not all of it. As we pull back to 8500 on the Dow, we will be looking at stocks that are yielding 6% to 7% that are solid and can't be shaken. We will be finding stocks at prices that we will look back and think it was impossible to believe.

And then there will be another cohort where we will buy and then watch them go down again, because business is so soft.

I want to reiterate that the stock market for now is just plain broken. You can't have Occidental Petroleum(OXY Quote) down 15% like it is nothing. The company should be losing money with that kind of decline. Remember when I said on Monday that you can't have Exxon Mobil(XOM Quote) go up 10 because it can go down 10 just as easily?