Visits: 4
When CNBC’s Jim Cramer heard from a caller weighing the pros and cons of investing in Home Depot, Lowe’s and Floor & Decor, he wondered why things needed to be so confusing.
“Why do we overcomplicate things? We’ve got Home Depot. We’ve got a new manager who’s real good at Lowe’s and we’ve got Floor & Decor. What, are we going to own them all?” the “Mad Money” host asked on Friday.
Instead of trying to balance owning shares in all three home improvement retailers, Cramer recommended going for the best of breed players.
“Home Depot, at $190, I said was unbelievable. And you know what? I’m reiterating Home Depot and I have to tell you, if Lowe’s comes down, [it’s] probably worth buying, too,” he said. “But don’t buy them all.”
Cramer couldn’t resist patting himself on the back for his prediction that if Friday’s job results were strong, they would embolden President Donald Trump to intensify his administration’s trade war with China.
Sure enough, the better than expected jobs report was followed by another warning from Trump to China. The president told reporters Friday that he was “ready” to place tariffs on another $267 billion worth of Chinese goods on top of the $200 billion worth of goods already under scrutiny.
“Why does this matter? Because the president’s predictability on trade has created a ‘good news is bad news’ dynamic,” Cramer said. “Good news for the economy causes the White House to ratchet up trade tensions, which is viewed as bad news by the stock market.”
Given the tit-for-tat history of the U.S.-China trade debacle, Cramer figured that the Chinese government would issue a response to Trump’s barb over the weekend.
“You should expect a response from China over the weekend, and that does not bode well for Monday’s thinly traded session,” Cramer warned. (Monday marks the start of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.)
He added that shares of big industrial and technology companies with business in China would likely suffer the consequences.
“Be ready for a bit of a sell-off. Might be a good buying opportunity if the pain spreads beyond the Chinese-focused stocks,” the “Mad Money” host said, turning to his weekly game plan.
Ten years after a U.S. financial crisis debilitated world markets, financial services and ratings conglomerate S&P Global is putting processes in place to prevent it from happening again, President and CEO Douglas Peterson told CNBC on Friday.
“One thing that’s interesting that we’ve added in from those days is ways to connect the dots,” Peterson said in an exclusive interview with Cramer.
“We have ways that our sovereign analysts, our financial analysts, our corporate analysts, energy, commodities, etcetera — they get together and they talk, not just in the region, but also globally,” the CEO said.
S&P Global — the sprawling corporation behind Standard & Poor’s, S&P Global Market Intelligence, S&P Dow Jones Indices and countless other benchmarks and financial technology services — became embroiled in the aftermath of the 2007 and 2008 recession.
The company’s Standard & Poor’s Financial Services division paid more than $1.3 billion in 2015 to settle a lawsuit led by the Department of Justice that accused the segment of defrauding investors using inflated ratings that miscast the credit risks associated with mortgage-backed securities.
Now, Peterson said his company’s over 1,500 analysts around the world are being more diligent about looking for worrisome trends.
To watch and read more about his full interview, click here.
Concerns around a slowdown in the U.S. housing market haven’t offset business at Houzz, a rapidly growing online home improvement platform and CNBC Disruptor that helps consumers seek out products and professional designers.
In an exclusive interview with Cramer, Houzz co-founder and CEO Adi Tatarko said that the trends her company’s market research department has been tracking in the space were “actually unbelievable.”
On the homeowners’ side, “the level of consumer confidence is at a high since 2000, so everybody’s expecting this year to continue the trend of the last three years and they do plan massive renovations of their homes,” she said on “Mad Money.”
“On the trade side, it’s that level of confidence,” Tatarko continued. “They do think that the business will grow at least 10 percent this year and for small businesses, the construction and design, this is pretty meaningful, 10 percent. So, very optimistic.”
That optimism has led Houzz, a data-focused platform that Tatarko described as being technology-first, to bolster its now-global business.
“Just between North America and Europe alone, we’re talking about $1.2 trillion that lives offline but [is] gradually moving, probably, online,” the CEO said. “And we are leading this transformation with technology, so it’s a huge opportunity.”
To watch and read more about Tatarko’s interview, click here.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk may have caused a Friday firestorm for smoking marijuana on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, but nowadays, smoking marijuana accounts for only about half of U.S. drug use, cannabis CEO Ben Kovler told CNBC on Friday.
“‘Flower’ is the word for the cannabis segment, the category, that you smoke. Back in the old days, you found flower in a plastic baggie and that was weed. Now, … only about 50 percent of the product is smoked,” Kovler, who founded and is now CEO of cannabis product distributor Green Thumb Industries, told Cramer in an interview.
The other half is consumed via branded, packaged products, Kovler said. Branding has been a particular point of focus for GTI, whose RISE Dispensaries are snagging licenses in highly regulated states where marijuana is medically legal.
Those products are “consumed to give an American consumer an elevated or enhanced lifestyle – better night’s sleep, lack of pain, nice night out, several different alternatives,” Kovler said. “There is a tidal wave of demand for this product.”
Watch his full interview here.
As little as the 6 percent drop in Tesla’s stock on Friday had to do with the business itself, Cramer still had a sense of the root of the problem.
“When a stock makes a remarkable move in a single session, it’s usually all about one thing: execution,” he said on Friday. “The thing about execution, though, is that it’s very much a double-edged sword.”
Companies that live by execution can also die by execution, the “Mad Money” host warned. In the case of Tesla and its CEO’s weed-and-whiskey flub, he said it came down to an “unforced error” in which Musk came off careless to the fact that marijuana use is still federally illegal.
It also roiled Tesla’s bonds, which slid to an all-time low on Friday.
“At the end of the day, execution is everything in this business, and a company with great execution will likely see its stock go higher,” Cramer said. “And if your CEO seems to be losing it, you should expect to be punished by both the stock and the bond market.”
In Cramer’s lightning round, he shared his take on callers’ favorite stocks:
UnitedHealth Group Inc.: “No, no. They had a record high but then they finished lower. That’s going to bring out sellers. They’ll probably take it down to, like, $261, $262. Look at Centene, too. Let that one come in and then buy, buy, buy.”
Pitney Bowes Inc.: “I don’t think that they’ve been able to pivot effectively, frankly. I think that they’re still like the old days. And you know with digitization, you’ve got to roll with the punches.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of UnitedHealth Group.
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