The market rallied on Thursday, and Jim Cramer said the reason was seller’s remorse. The same stocks that were clobbered when they reported earnings are now roaring higher because investors have either forgotten the bad news, overlooked it, or decided it wasn’t as bad as they thought.
“I often marvel at how short term people’s thinking can be when it comes to earnings, and how they should think so much longer-term if they story is really unchanged or actually better,” the “Mad Money” host said.
Kimberly-Clark reported earnings recently, and, in Cramer’s opinion, the numbers reflected fantastic growth and a lot of cost reductions. But regardless of the CEO’s positive outlook, the stock still plummeted.
“I threw up my hands and stopped trying to shoehorn why people sell and proclaimed my own bafflement, too!”
Cramer read the analysts’ notes and listened to the conference call. And while Kimberly-Clark had a lot of good things to say, it was hurt by currency, as so many other companies were, and had some on-time issues that obscured the good quarter.
“It seemed so obvious if you had actually done the homework,” Cramer said. (Tweet This)
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Sure enough, Kimberly-Clark soared to $133 a share and hit an all-time high on Thursday. The sellers were just plain wrong.
Another example was Allergan, when it reported what Cramer considered to be the best quarter of any pharmaceutical company in 2016. The company’s FDA approval rates were strong, and its merger with Pfizer was on track to close the second half of the year.
When Cramer asked Allergan CEO Brent Saunders why the stock was hit so hard lately, he said he was “baffled” and had no explanation for the weakness.
“I threw up my hands and stopped trying to shoehorn why people sell and proclaimed my own bafflement, too,” Cramer said.
Turns out, Cramer and Saunders had a right to be baffled, because the stock is up more than 6 percent in the past five days. Cramer thinks there are many more cases out there, just like Kimberly-Clark and Allergan.
“All of these are examples of fear and panic trumping rationality. But, fortunately, the panic is now receding,” Cramer said.
Keep in mind these instances that the first judgment might not always be the best judgment, as worry could be keeping investors from making money.
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