Jim Cramer: ‘The futures just can’t seem to drag this stock market down’
Stocks took a breather on Monday after a multi-day rally took major U.S. indexes to record highs last week, but market sentiment remained positive as investors continued to find new reasons to put more money in the market, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said after the close.
On “Mad Money,” Cramer likened investor attitude to American lyricist and Capitol Records co-founder Johnny Mercer, reciting lyrics from the popular song “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” that was written by the record label executive in the 1940s.
“We’ve got a Johnny Mercer market, as in ‘accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between,'” Cramer said.
“This market refuses to traffic in everything that’s going wrong and instead focuses on what could go right,” he said.
Cramer said that’s the prevailing wisdom among market players who continue to pay up for stocks, despite Monday’s negative session where the indexes finished up at least 0.27% from intraday lows.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell for the first time in four trading days, shedding 89 points to close 0.3% lower at 31,008.69. The S&P 500 slid 0.7% to finish at 3,799.61, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite declined 1.3% to settle at 13,036.43.
Meanwhile, bitcoin tanked with $150 billion at one point being wiped off the cryptocurrency market within a 24-hour period.
Before the market opened Monday, political tensions lingered in Washington, D.C. after last week’s pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill. House Democrats on Monday moved forward with their plans to impeach President Donald Trump, blaming the outgoing Republican leader for inciting the attack.
“The futures just can’t seem to drag this market down,” Cramer said. “We had a weak opening, but then the accentuate-the-positive crew came in and started buying. They created an in-between market with pockets where investors kept latching on to the affirmative no matter what.”
The emphasis on positivity on Wall Street could be seen in the way that numerous individual stocks exchanged hands, Cramer said.
One of those is Boeing, which saw its passenger aircraft involved in an Indonesian airliner crash that killed dozens over the weekend. While it was a Boeing 737-500 — not the scarred 737 Max — that crashed in the Java Sea, Cramer said it was safe to say that the stock would come under pressure on Monday.
Boeing shares declined about 1.5% to $206.79, but they finished well off their session lows after a Baird analyst in a new note called it a “top cyclical play on recovery,” which Cramer said helped stop the stock from nosediving.
Twitter stock plunged more than 6% Monday after the social media company permanently banned Trump from the platform. Cramer believes the stock would have sold off more, had it not been that Twitter became an essential tool for news junkies. He said it’s a sign that Twitter investors are “latching on to the affirmative.”
“If you’re wondering how long the Johnny Mercerization of this market can last, I say stop right there,” Cramer said. “That’s the kind of central-casting question that’s kept people away from stocks for ages.”
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Boeing.
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