Visits: 3
The third quarter is wrapping up, September is coming to a close, and CNBC’s Jim Cramer can finally breathe.
“The third quarter’s in the bag and it’s been a good one — best in five years. Even September was good, and historically, that tends to be a rough month,” the “Mad Money” host said on Friday. “In fact, the market’s been so robust that you have to think long and hard about stocks that have lagged behind here.”
But barring the currently slumping stocks of Tesla and Facebook, Cramer was pleased with how the quarter turned out. With that in mind, he turned to his weekly game plan, which includes a market-critical report on Friday.
Online shopping service Stitch Fix, a new Cramer-fave, kicks off the earnings flow on Monday. The company is already profitable and rapidly growing its revenues, so Cramer expected a good result.
“One look at their website tells you exactly how powerful this story is,” he said. “Stitch Fix has that rare ability to convert users of the service into buyers of the stock — like Tesla, except it’s making money.”
While shares of Stitch Fix have fallen in the last several weeks on worries about competition from Amazon, Cramer saw the decline as an opportunity.
“You have my blessing to buy some Stitch Fix both before and after the quarter,” he told investors.
For the rest of Cramer’s game plan, click here.
One thing stood out to Cramer as he parsed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s complaint against Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk.
“When you read the complaint about what Musk did — basically fabricating this bid to take Tesla private out of whole cloth, precisely in order to smash the people betting against his stock — the thing that stands out is his hubris,” Cramer said. “He tried to destroy the shorts, and in the process, ended up destroying himself.”
What made matters worse, in Cramer’s view, was Musk’s reported refusal to agree to a no-guilt settlement with the SEC — a “slap on the wrist” that would have required Musk to pay a fine and step down as chairman of the board, but keep his role as CEO.
“The man is his own worst enemy,” Cramer said, noting that Tesla’s stock dropped nearly 14 percent on the news.
Click here for the rest of Cramer’s take.
John Donahoe’s cloud company may be focused on transforming work, but the ServiceNow chief draws a lot of inspiration from some of the world’s top consumer-facing apps, he told CNBC on Friday.
“Over the last 10 years, in the consumer mobile revolution, technology has transformed our lives at home with cloud-based applications like an eBay or a PayPal or a[n] Uber on our mobile phones,” Donahoe, who spent 10 years at eBay, told Cramer in an exclusive interview.
“But technology today at work is complex, frustrating, and with cloud-based platforms like ServiceNow, over the next five to 10 years, there is no reason why we can’t have the same kind of experiences at work as we have at home,” the CEO said.
Donahoe admitted that he’s “taking lessons” from his time at eBay and using “analogies in the consumer world” to drive improvements in the way companies use technology.
Watch and read more about his interview by clicking here.
As a data center pioneer, VMware has had a rich and “profound” history building value in the cloud, Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Poonen told Cramer in an exclusive interview.
“Studies have shown that a dollar spent on VMware resulted in $10 of economic value,” Poonen said on “Mad Money.” “So over our 20-year lifetime, we’ve accumulated about $50 billion of revenue, maybe a half a trillion worth of value.”
Poonen said that VMware’s embrace of the public cloud via its partnership with Amazon two years ago “was a turning point for the company.” Until then, VMware had been a key player in the software-defined data center, but with the rise of the public cloud, its core business was on track for heightened competition and possibly decline.
“We moved those headwinds of the public cloud to become tailwinds for us, and now, we’re beginning to see the future of VMware,” the COO told Cramer. “Now, ironically, customers are not just spending on cloud, mobile, security, but also on our traditional on premise business, which is great.”
To watch Sanjay Poonen’s full interview, click here.
As the Chief Philanthropy Officer and Executive Vice President of Salesforce.org, the cloud giant’s philanthropic arm, Ebony Frelix says she has “the best job at Salesforce” — or at least “one of the best.”
“My title and my role is really responsible for engaging the 30,000 Salesforce employees who want to give back and make a difference in their communities,” she told Cramer in an exclusive interview at Dreamforce. “We’re also responsible for the grant-making, all those resources that go back into the community to give back to the nonprofits that we care so deeply about.”
On Tuesday, Salesforce.org announced an $18 million contribution to its local communities, with $15.5 million going to San Francisco and Oakland’s public schools, $2 million going to battle homelessness and hunger and $500,000 going to San Francisco parks.
“Nineteen years ago, Salesforce was founded, and the 1-1-1 model was an integral part of that. So that meant 1 percent of our company’s equity, 1 percent of our employees’ time and 1 percent of our technology was going back into the community,” Frelix said. “So giving back is a part of our DNA. And out of that, our model evolved. It’s grown into so much more.”
To hear more about Salesforce’s philanthropic vision and Frelix’s mission, click here.
In Cramer’s lightning round, he flew through his take on callers’ favorite stocks:
Bojangles: “I totally understand why someone might think that [Bojangles is set up for a buyout or a sale], but the stock was up so much today that we can’t come on top of it. Because what’ll happen is I’ll recommend a stock and it’ll be up there on a takeover basis and on a fundamental basis it’ll end up hurting us. So I’m going to take a pass right here, but I understand the thesis.”
FedEx: “I think FedEx is terrific. I think that I’m not as worried about world trade as other people. They just don’t seem to be able to understand that FedEx is incredibly well-run, and I liked the last quarter despite the fact that others didn’t.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Facebook, Amazon and Salesforce.com.
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