Jim Cramer's Best Blogs

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- 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:

• how to play China's rate tightening;
• why the GM IPO was priced right; and
• how many investors are confusing the macro and the micro.

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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Game China's Tightening
Posted at 2:36 p.m. EST, Friday, Nov. 19

One of the best trades I can recall from the old days (when we were worried about the action post-Fed tightening), was to buy precisely the stocks of the companies that were meant to be cooled by the Fed. In other words, if the Fed were raising rates in order to stymie price increases by raising the financing costs of inventories, reducing speculation and cooling the economy, then you knew all the mineral, chemical and paper stocks would be hit.

But then what I always liked to do was buy them right after the tightening. Why? Because people either will believe that the tightening won't work -- that's a constant -- or it begins to dawn on people that you don't get a second tightening right behind the first one.

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In other words, picture yourself on Monday, a weekend after the Chinese tightening that drove down the prices of copper and oil. Do you think on Monday people will be thinking, "I bet they tighten again this week?" Or do you think they will say, "Game on." Do you think that Vale's(VALE) numbers will be cut? Freeport's(FCX)? Alcoa's(AA)?

Not a chance.

And that is why the stocks have been slowly recovering all day.

I think today's action shows me that, by Monday, China's tightening will be thought of as a failure or will not be thought of at all. Either case: game on, materials stocks.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long AA and VALE.

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The GM Deal Was Just Right
Posted at 9:37 a.m. EST, Friday, Nov. 19

Even when they get it right, they get criticized. This morning's reviews of the General Motors(GM) deal all say it was tepid or that it didn't do nearly as well as people thought, or that the Treasury reached in that last price move up.

This is nuts.

If they had priced this deal at $27 and it had opened up at $35, can you imagine the heat that would have been on about the "big giveaway" to the "rich investors" by the government? Can you imagine how the press would have said that the money left on the table was a disgrace?

Or let's say it opened at $33 and then broke price. How about that outcry? Government wins, and you the taxpayer lose. You bought from the government and you got hosed. That's some story. Greedy Geithner. Got more than they deserve. You got hurt.

Instead, they priced it just right. You made 2 points if you sold it at the opening, which is 2 points more than you had before, and it wasn't a disgrace or a rip-off for anyone. The deal was gigantic. You had to figure that we would get flippers no matter what. In fact I think that it was very well placed.

I didn't like how the deal was done. I think that there were many people who wanted a piece of GM who just didn't get it, and there could have been more demand if the Treasury had just been creative.

But given the traditional way in which it was done, the deal worked for everyone, something that's perfect if you are the seller and a great way to start owning or terrific way to scalp for the buyers.

The press is wrong: It was a Goldilocks deal.

At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in stocks mentioned.

Random musings: The Salesforce.com(CRM) move is so big because of rampant rumors that the first month of the quarter was soft. Of course the first month of the q was amazingly strong.

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The Fallacy of the Macro Trade
Posted at 6:11 a.m. EST, Thursday, Nov. 18

If the micro is good and the macro is bad, people short with abandon. But how about if the micro is good and the macro drifts to the background? What happens if we are happy if oil is rallying to $82 from $80 even as we were depressed that it just went from $85 to $82 with a pit stop at $80?

Or the CurrencyShares Euro Trust(FXE)? Now it is great that it is at 136 because it is not at 135? But when it was headed to 136 from 140 we hated everything.

This is why I keep telling people that in this era pick your best stocks and turn off the darned commodity futures except to be able to buy the stocks of companies you like at prices that you shouldn't logically be able to get.

Every grand sweeping pronouncement of this market's demise never seems to come from the companies or the stocks themselves. It is all about Ben Bernanke or oil or gold or the Baltic Freight.

However, this week shows the total fallacy of this kind of thinking. A combination of Irish woes, a decline in oil and copper, Chinese price controls, and bad headlines and letters to the editor about Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke took down the Retail HOLDRs(RTH) fund and its retail components to levels that were too attractive, especially given that these companies are unique beneficiaries of Chinese price controls, lower oil and QE2. In other words, every bit of the negative macro that people trade off of endlessly is positive for the RTH. Doesn't matter. Retail's a part of the S&P 500 and traders somehow, bizarrely, equate consumer spending only with the macro when that's been a failed strategy for several years now.

So what happens? All of the retailers that are supposed to be down in the dumps and doing terribly, retailers like Target(TGT), Urban Outfitters(URBN), BJ's(BJ), Home Depot (HD) and Lowe's(LOW), were actually performing spectacularly well. Most of them were much more like Ralph Lauren (RL) than Jones Apparel(JNY). The big negative bets were wrong.