Jim Cramer's Best Blogs
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:
- random late-day action,
- three stocks with limited European exposure, and
- Apple and Google leading the way in tech.
for information on
RealMoney
, where you can see all the blogs, including Jim Cramer's -- and reader comments -- in real time.
Every Day We Start From Scratch
Originally published on Tuesday, Oct. 21, at 6:16 p.m. EDT
Gutted, gaffed and left for road kill. Isn't that what happened today? Horrible close, just horrible, and you have to wonder whether
Apple
(AAPL) - Get Report
, which
truly reported a magnificent number
, can turn the tide. Maybe it helps that
Yahoo!
(YHOO)
is at last flexible? I hope if they get a bid for double the share price, Bill Miller from Legg Mason doesn't try to kibosh it!
Then again, who knows from session to session? Each day has its own drummer, and we seem to start from scratch at the opening bell.
What went wrong today? Hard to tell. The Goldman pension piece scared the heck out of people, and it certainly weighed on a bunch of stocks. The auto news, continually terrible, doesn't seem to help.
But for the most part, I think it was just that last-hour nonsense that I have been saying is wrecking this market and turning it into a casino without rules or regulations. It was heartening, however, to read the Rev's
in the Columnist Conversation that the closes have netted out.
I learned my lesson from last Friday when we were up 300 and gave back 400 in a matter of minutes that you can no longer even rely on intraday direction for closing direction, something that had been pretty much a given until very recently.And relying only on an overbought market to make work is simply not bankable.
If you are like me, you are shaking your head wondering, where were those futures buyers who were taking things up from 2:30 to 3:00? What happened to them? How did they vanish like that? How could it not pay to sell the 2:30-3:00 rally Monday and totally pay to sell it today?
Here's the answer:
It's random right now.
And your only friend is discipline, the discipline to take gains and then watch em go higher, the discipline to start buying
only
on weakness and leaving plenty of room for your first buy to be wrong.
At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in stocks mentioned.
Strong Dollar Hurts the Global Players
Originally published on Wednesday, Oct. 22, at 3:32 p.m. EDT
Darned dollar's starting to kill the translators, the big overseas players.
Schering-Plough
(SGP)
has tried hard to build its business overseas, and boom! Look at that stock after a terrific quarter by any stretch of the imagination.
Merck's
(MRK) - Get Report
getting crushed, too, and that's a huge global company.
But three that might make sense here are
Altria
(MO) - Get Report
,
General Mills
(GIS) - Get Report
and
Unilever
(UN) - Get Report
. Altria, now somewhat brilliantly, sold the overseas business. It's the Marlboro man, not the euro man, and the numbers are safe. General Mills, unlike
Kellogg
(K) - Get Report
, isn't big in Europe and its expansion is in China. But it is still largely U.S., which sure is fabulous right now. And Unilever is a strong dollar winner with its translation.
We are going to see numbers come down huge soon on this dollar -- and you are also seeing gold get crushed as people buy back their dollar shorts and sell gold, as Europe's getting much weaker than the U.S.
The trend's not over. And if the Europeans don't cut rates, you are going to want to be long GIS/short K, long MO/short
Philip Morris
(PM) - Get Report
as great trades here. Oh, and to be sure, while I believe the prescription data may show some economic weakness as the
Journal
said, we are more socialized in medicine than the figures let on. Be more worried about the government bargaining over prices with drug companies than about economic weakness, which I regard as a bit of a canard. The publicity on certain drugs that were big sellers simply hasn't been great, and I think that's a more important theory.
At the time of publication, Cramer was long General Mills, Altria and Unilever.
Watch Apple and Google for a Turn
Originally published on Thursday, Oct. 24, at 3:25 p.m. EDT
Editor's note: Jim Cramer will present his 2009 stock outlook for the first time at TheStreet.com Investment Conference on Saturday, Oct. 25. Limited seating. Act now.
We don't have enough stocks for which we can say, "They have it, they figured it out, they are going to make good money
now
, not some amorphous time in the future."
I see two of them:
(GOOG) - Get Report
and
Apple
(AAPL) - Get Report
. They are delivering and delivering now.
Apple's got $23 billion in cash, it has tremendous products that are just getting traction -- the phone -- and it probably has more in the pipe that we don't even know about. In the meantime, think about
Sony
(SNE) - Get Report
today? They have nothing cooking at all.
LG
and
Samsung
are killing them. Think about
AT&T
(T) - Get Report
. They are subsidizing Apple, for heaven's sake. I mean, this company has everything cooking and it is
the
youth stock, meaning that kids love it, so the next generation will be buying their laptops, their desktops and their phone and their iPod. I think that's all she wrote for so many others!
Google is the only game in town. AOL,
Microsoft
(MSFT) - Get Report
and
Yahoo!
(YHOO)
are all scrambling, but I wonder whether can they catch Google unless they all combine. Again, it is generational. Google is
the
search engine for the kids, and I am amazed that despite Yahoo!'s ballyhoo, Google's still taking huge share.
Now, what's the point? As long as these two stocks languish, how in heck can
anything else
go up? How? These are the benchmarks.
I await their rallies before I start thinking that the
Nazz
can rally on its own.
Random musings
: John Roque negative on
CNBC
. He's got a great track record. Just great.
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
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