Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap: Top Cheap Growth Picks (Final)

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- "Cheapness is in the eye of the beholder," Jim Cramer told the viewers of his "Mad Money" TV show on Monday. And there are only a couple of beholders that matter: the hedge funds and mutual funds, and the acquirers. "No matter how inexpensive a stock might appear to be, it won't go higher unless it can attract hedge fund and mutual fund buyers or a takeover bid in this environment," he said.

Cramer said that tech stocks and bank stocks are only "theoretically cheap," but the perception that they're of great value doesn't take the beholders into account. The tech stocks that are considered cheap, for example, are the ones "being destroyed by Apple(AAPL)." And while bank stocks are inexpensive historically, Cramer wondered if the "best of the best," such as JPMorgan(JPM) and Goldman Sachs(GS), are languishing, "do I really want a bank in my portfolio?"

Cramer called these stocks "value traps" that might look cheap on paper but have no real growth. Instead, the cheap stocks are those with the strongest earnings momentum, and the two cheapest in the market are Netflix(NFLX) and Amazon(AMZN).

Netflix and Amazon are considered cheap because they have the potential for big earnings beats down the road. "If things go right and they keep delivering," Cramer said, "these names will turn out to be much cheaper than the value stocks."

Cramer said he spends so much time talking about growth because that's how to anticipate what the big hedge funds and mutual funds will buy. "We don't care about what looks cheap to us," he said. "We need to know what''s cheap to them."

We care what hedge funds and mutual funds think because "their buying can move up these stocks immensely," Cramer said.

As for takeover targets, it's difficult to identify them, and "without a catalyst of a deal, they most likely won't move up on their own."

"Cheapness is in the eye of the managers who put money to work every day," Cramer said. "You have to think like them if you want to find stocks that are ultimately going higher."

Executive Decision

In the "Executive Decision" segment, Cramer welcomed back to the show Herbjorn Hansson, CEO of Nordic American Tanker(NAT), an oil tanker company that beat earnings per share by a penny this morning and raised its dividend to 30 cents from 25 cents in the previous quarter.