Jim Cramer's Best Blogs
(Editor's Note: RealMoney is free to all TheStreet.com readers until Monday night. We hope you enjoy this article. If you would like to subscribe to RealMoney, please click here.)
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:
- the financial shakeout,
- pigheadedness and the U.S. energy policy, and
- Apple.
for information on
RealMoney.com
, where you can see all the blogs, including Jim Cramer's -- and reader comments -- in real time.
This Financial Shakeout Was Bound to Happen
Originally published on Wednesday, May 21, at 2:18 p.m.
Oh, doctor, is this market getting ugly. That whole big gain in retail is vanishing. The aerospace move is being repealed badly.
Boeing's
(BA) - Get Report
giving up so much gain, no doubt because of what is perceived to be the end of the American airline business -- people in "
" sure think so, and are winning with the strategy. I see pure defense aerospace stocks going down, too:
General Dynamics
(GD) - Get Report
and
Raytheon
(RTN) - Get Report
attract me, the latter an
name that's too cheap.
Some of this decline is a recognition that once again the financials are being cracked. No more
Fed
cuts? More bad loans? All of it. Plus new negatives on the brokers -- failed hedges.
Lehman Brothers
( LEH)!? Ouch.
The Fed meetings sure don't help, with the idea that the banks have to have another leg down because the employment projections are terrible.
I am watching
Washington Mutual
(WM) - Get Report
and
Citigroup
(C) - Get Report
and
Bank of America
(BAC) - Get Report
and
Wachovia
(WB) - Get Report
just get killed. No Fed cuts bailing them out this time!
The really nasty action today is shaking out all of those bulls.
It was bound to happen.
At the time of publication, Cramer was long Raytheon.
U.S. Obstinacy Means High Oil's Here to Stay
Originally published on Thursday, May 22, at 7:59 a.m.
The fault in Congress is not the oil companies, it is Congress itself. Just yesterday we saw the Bureau of Land Management issue restricted rules on drilling on government lands. Drilling for natural gas in Wyoming, a major resource, soon stops for small mating animals. It's a political third rail to talk about drilling off coasts for oil .We don't even know if it is there because it isn't worth exploring. Much of Alaska's off-limits. Vital animals.
We're a joke.
Think of it -- every country in the world is trying to find more oil wherever it can be found. Except for us.
We have two important alternatives to oil: natural gas and coal. We can't even pass rules for coal so that
McDermott
(MDR) - Get Report
knows how much emission is allowed and the utilities can bring in
Foster Wheeler
(FWLT)
to start the process of building reduced-emission coal. What good does it do if the rules come down next year, or ever, and the utilities have to scrap the cleaner coal plants they want?
Our auto companies are pretty much allowed to make any cars the traffic will bear. We have no rules for conservation at all.
NRG
(NRG) - Get Report
, which wants to build nuclear, took a step backward by launching a bid for
Calpine
(CPN)
. This is the only utility that even has a plan to build a nuclear plant in this country. Local folks block them. The federal government says, "Sure, it's fine, go ahead," like that helps.
And the only thing that Congress is fired up about -- besides beating up on hapless oil companies that have their assets being expropriated in the big oil drilling areas -- is making sure that the farmers get subsidies, the very cohort that is doing better than any other group of workers in the country.
It's pathetic.
I know it's a bubble. You know it's a bubble. We know oil went up too fast.
But we also know that there are no new finds beyond Brazil, and Brazil has made it so if there is a new find, you can't drill it because the rigs are almost all leased by
Petrobras
(PBR) - Get Report
. Can't find it; can't drill it.
Unless you are in America, where you aren't even allowed to look for it where it most likely is.
I think oil can come down. But I think oil is an "up stock" and the decline will be a buyable pullback and will remain that way until we either
find big, easy-to-drill fields, which I think is an impossibility, or
use less so the inventories build.
As of yesterday, despite the higher prices at the pump, that's not happening.
My take: Get used to it. Invest as if oil's going to be north of $100 for some time.
Otherwise you will underperform.
Random musings
: I had a disconcerting visit to
Dick's
(DKS) - Get Report
where nobody knew what the prices were of the things I wanted to buy. Talk about an anecdotal tell of a disaster! In reality, you could tell that discretionary sports are going to be crushed because
BJ's
(BJ) - Get Report
said that sporting equipment was one of the weakest areas. It's worth listening to that conference call to show what people are cutting back on.
At the time of publication, Cramer was long Foster Wheeler.
Good News Is Bad News for Apple
Originally published on Friday, May 23, at 8:57 a.m.
Painful to see upgrades and positives on
Apple
(AAPL) - Get Report
today. Painful because we don't need some great positive being subsumed by the negative on a day before a weekend.
There's just not enough here to make a stand, and the positives will be overlooked.
I like the price point of the new phones. If they have iChat, then I think it could make most of the
Motorola
( MOT) and
Nokia
(NOK) - Get Report
product lines extinct, and the goal of 11 million units will be low.
I had liked the stock
until
it ships.
But the stock is tired, the news is getting too well disseminated after the Goldman conviction-buy-list move, and Apple would have come in even more than it has without this positive news. I wanted it to come in, and I was hoping to get some more shorts in the name to take it to a higher level right before the release. This research borrows the buying power and panics the shorts well in advance.
Opco is really positive talking big, big iPhone numbers, which is again what we
don't
want to see -- stealing from the upside.
Why even bother to think like this? Apple's a psych-out and timing stock. It is clearly overvalued on the numbers.
We could have had a fabulous ramp on a nice day, allowing a little trimming as the excitement builds (I don't think you can have the maximum position on going into the launch anymore, because it is too well known and widespread because of research like this).
Instead we get bupkis.
I would let some go into any strength. The secret is getting more and more out of the bag.
At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.
Jim Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com's sites and serves as an adviser to the company's CEO. Outside contributing columnists for TheStreet.com and RealMoney.com, including Cramer, may, from time to time, write about stocks in which they have a position. In such cases, appropriate disclosure is made. To see his personal portfolio and find out what trades Cramer will make before he makes them, sign up for
Action Alerts PLUS. Watch Cramer on "Mad Money" weeknights on CNBC. To order Cramer's newest book -- "Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer),"
click here. Click
here to order "Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich," click
here to order "Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World," click
here to get "You Got Screwed!" and click
here for Cramer's autobiography, "Confessions of a Street Addict." While he cannot provide personalized investment advice or recommendations, he appreciates your feedback and invites you to send comments by
clicking here.
TheStreet.com has a revenue-sharing relationship with Amazon.com under which it receives a portion of the revenue from Amazon.com purchases by customers directed there from TheStreet.com.