TheStreet.com TV Recap: Bear Stearns Short Trade Over
While
Bear Stearns
(BSC)
is not necessarily a buy right now, investors should not be shorting the stock either, Jim Cramer said on TheStreet.com TV's Wall Street Confidential
Web video Thursday.
In a recent
New York Times
article, reporter Landon Thomas says that Bear Stearns did have a talk with Warren Buffett when the stock was at $100 regarding a possible sale of the brokerage firm, said Cramer. Now the stock has moved up, and it seems Buffett is "price sensitive."
"The more important thing is to step back and realize that when you have a stock that can go up 10 points on just the idea that there would be an investment, it's entirely possible that what's really happening here is that there may very well be a lot of interest," Cramer said. "You don't go up 10 points idly."
Cramer said people fail to understand that when Salomon Brothers got in "big trouble" in a previous decade, Buffett did take a position, he said. "I think Bear's in much better shape than when Salomon Brothers got the position from Buffett."
Cramer said he knows there are a lot of people who are positioned to short the brokers after the
Merrill Lynch
(MER)
number-cut by Goldman Sachs.
There has been a lot of "end of the quarter knockdown of brokers" so investors in the hedge fund community can say they were short the brokers and long stocks like
Research In Motion
(RIMM)
,
Apple
(AAPL) - Get Report
and
Garmin
(GRMN) - Get Report
, Cramer said.
However, "the idea that Bear could get an investor is now realistic, and now anyone who is still shorting Bear Stearns
should realize that trade is over," he said. But at the same time, there is no reason to own Bear Stearns here. "
"Goldman is the only one whose numbers were up," Cramer said. "I would just own
that one." Cramer does own
Goldman Sachs
(GS) - Get Report
for his charitable trust,
Action Alerts PLUS.
At the time of publication, Cramer was long Goldman Sachs.
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