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As better-than-expected earnings results drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average more than 500 points higher on Tuesday, paring last week’s losses, CNBC’s Jim Cramer became cautiously optimistic about the fate of the rally.
“When the Fed bears are away, the stock bulls will play,” the “Mad Money” host said. “As long as the Fed doesn’t mandate a slowdown, you get what we had today and what I bet we could have tomorrow.”
While several technical indicators had signaled to Cramer that the sell-off could be short-lived, some key fundamental factors paved the way for the Dow to see its best trading day since March, he said.
One of them was Netflix‘s earnings report, in which the streaming giant showed accelerating growth in revenue and in net subscriber additions, a closely watched number among Wall Street analysts and investors.
“Netflix reported incredible subscriber growth: 32 percent better for international, 62 percent stronger for domestic,” Cramer said. “Now, that’s crazy good.”
Cramer added that Netflix’s earnings beat not only provided “further fire” for the rally but, more importantly, proved that FANG — his acronym for the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, not Alphabet — was still alive and kicking.
“If Netflix is good, all of FANG — even the lagging Facebook, which I now kind of like — will trade higher. They’ll trade higher tomorrow,” he said. “Congratulations on Netflix. Others gave up on it. Other people buried FANG. Other people decided that FANG was dead. You know what? Wrong!”
Click here for more of Cramer’s analysis on Tuesday’s rally.
In volatile times for the stock market, investors need to know the best-positioned stocks in each sector for when they want to do some buying.
That’s why Cramer has been rolling out sector-by-sector power rankings, his selections of the top five most investable stocks in each market group based on their prospects.
After tackling the communications services, consumer staples, consumer discretionary and energy spaces, Cramer turned to health care.
“If, like me, you’re worried about a Fed-mandated slowdown, … you absolutely need some health-care stocks in your portfolio. It’s a terrific industry. This is a group of stocks that doesn’t need a strong economy in order to thrive,” Cramer said. “You don’t stop taking medicine just because the economy slows down. Just like the consumer staples, the health-care names are as close as it gets to recession-proof.”
Click here for Cramer’s five favorite power players in the health-care space.
As strong as Tuesday’s rally was, it may not mark the end of the sell-off that ravaged stocks in last week’s trading, Cramer said.
Looking at the Cboe Volatility Index, also known as the market’s “fear gauge” or the VIX, Cramer and volatility expert Mark Sebastian determined that stocks could see another leg of pain even after Tuesday’s surge.
“While today’s up action looks fabulous, Sebastian points out that it doesn’t mean the pain is over,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Today, we’re melting up. Sebastian thinks that the volatility index has peaked for the moment, but as we saw in February and the summer of 2015, the day where the VIX peaks is not necessarily the day where the S&P 500 bottoms.”
Put simply, volatility refers to the amount of uncertainty in the market’s prediction of changes in a stock or index’s value. The VIX measures expectations of near-term volatility by tracking S&P 500 option prices.
When the VIX goes higher, it tends to mean that investors are getting more worried about the market and making bets to protect themselves.
Click here for Cramer and Sebastian’s full analysis.
Canada’s full-fledged legalization of adult cannabis use will be a “watershed” moment for the marijuana industry, and the momentum will extend far beyond the official legalization date, Cramer said.
“I think that legal marijuana might be the most disruptive force since Amazon,” Cramer said on Tuesday, one day ahead of Canada’s legalization deadline.
“That’s right, when you look at every industry where pot could potentially compete, there might be as much as a half a trillion dollars in sales that are going to be disrupted, everything from carbonated beverages, beer, sports drinks, tea, coffee, tobacco, [and] snacks [to] all sorts of medications,” he continued.
Cramer’s $500 billion estimate came from speaking with business leaders in the cannabis industry, many of whom agree that marijuana has the power to disrupt major industries including alcohol and pharmaceuticals.
Click here for more on the plant’s disruptive power and the stocks Cramer prefers in the world of weed.
Autonomous vehicles and an artificial-intelligence voice system named Dom are among the tech initiatives international chain Domino’s Pizza has planned, its CEO Ritch Allison told Cramer in a Tuesday interview.
The AI system, an interactive chat-bot that is being piloted at some of Domino’s locations and can recognize natural voice, is “learning,” “growing” and “getting better” in the trials, Allison said.
“A lot of restaurant players and a lot of players in pizza are constant members in the ‘Product of the Month’ club, and we got out of that club a long time ago and started focusing on things that were interesting and innovative that we could do to engage our customers,” the CEO explained.
The pizza space has been in flux for some time amid a public spat between Papa John’s founder and namesake, John Schattner, and the company’s board of directors.
But Allison didn’t stray far from Domino’s message of continuing to focus on technology and outpace its rivals when asked whether his company could capitalize on Papa John’s woes.
“It’s a really fragmented category, as you know. We’re the market share leader in pizza, but we still only sell about one out of every six pizzas in the U.S. So we’re staying focused on our strategy and our execution and not really on the short-term ups and downs of any one particular competitor,” the CEO said. “If we stay focused on the things that we’ve been doing, then we’re going to continue to take share from competitors small and large across the industry.”
Click here to watch Ritch Allison’s full interview.
In Cramer’s lightning round, he flew through his take on callers’ favorite stocks:
JetBlue Airways Corp.: “You know what? I like United Continental, even up 5 [percent], and I have chosen not to really push any other of the airlines until I get better data. I like United Continental and then I would go with American, then I would go with Delta and then I would go with JetBlue, and not before then. It’s too dicey for me.”
Energy Transfer Partners LP: “It yields 10 [percent], I know. They’re doing a lot of things to make the structure better. It is still too risky for me, but I understand why people would want to be attracted to it. That’s all I have to say about it.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet.
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