As investors move to secular stocks like Amazon in the wake of White House unrest, Jim Cramer wanted to flag that the e-commerce giant’s shares grazing $ 1,000 could be bad news.
“This temporary crossing of the $ 1,000 barrier is something that’s psychologically what I could call, I have to admit, a red flag,” the “Mad Money” host said of the stock’s move on Tuesday.
Cramer recalled a group of popular stocks in the 1970s called the Nifty Fifty that rallied well past their fundamentals and later erased their gains, leaving many investors bitter with the market.
“This ‘Nifty Fifty’ concept went hand-in-hand with a blue-chip, buy-and-hold philosophy that said you didn’t need to touch these stocks as they would just keep going higher,” he said.
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And while the group, which included Coca-Cola and IBM, did not cause a full-blown crash, its “death by a thousand cuts” effect left a lot of people unwilling to invest in the market at all.
But investors are now turning to stocks like Amazon’s, which seem like they will grow regardless of whether President Donald Trump’s economic agenda is fulfilled or not.
Cramer argued that lower corporate taxes would not move the needle much for Amazon, since the company does not need to make more money right away to continue its global expansion.
Bringing back cash from overseas, otherwise known as repatriation, would likely not interest the e-commerce giant either because of its focus on growing international operations.
And deregulation does not affect the not-very-regulated Amazon, though Trump’s hardliner stance on some of the United States’ trading partners, like Germany, could bring tariffs on some goods, which could cause the company to lose money.
“In short, Amazon is a stock that performs better than a lot of others when it seems like Trump is incapable of getting anything done, and we just need to adjust to the status quo of slow growth with two interest rate hikes from the Fed, including one possibly coming next month,” Cramer said.
But the “Mad Money” host finds Amazon’s status here to be problematic, mostly because of the way investors view the stock’s brief blips over the $ 1,000 share price.
The stocks of Amazon and fellow tech giant and Google parent Alphabet have run up 33 percent and 25 percent, respectively, since 2017 began.
And while Amazon’s ability to build its audience and be a go-to cloud provider for other companies and Alphabet’s hidden value in its self-driving car arm, Waymo, are promising, Cramer says the companies need to execute to really be deserving of their recent gains.
So, with Washington policy at a standstill, Cramer sees two ways this market can go.
“The first is that we begin a long, hot summer of wall-hitting, where one after another of these frantically thriving momentum stocks just goes full stop and starts building giant heads-and-shoulders patterns before tearing lower,” the “Mad Money” host said.
The second is that other stocks join the rally, broadening the upward trend and suggesting that it has some staying power.
“We aren’t there yet. We can’t make a judgment, and who knows what will happen if the bears are wrong and the president actually gets his way on some tax reform, any tax reform,” Cramer said. “But the bottom line is that we need to be cognizant that a few big capitalization Nasdaq stocks are leading this parade and it really doesn’t feel like [there are] enough followers yet to make us more comfortable.”
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