The stock market’s recent resilience is creating a very favorable environment for investors, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Thursday after stocks held their gains despite negative action in parts of the market.
“Make no mistake: a market that can rally even when two signature leadership groups, the retailers and the airlines, get slammed? Well, that’s some kind of bull,” he told investors.
Stocks initially fell in Thursday’s trading session following a plunge in shares of Macy’s, which reported weaker-than-expected holiday sales results. American Airlines added to the pain after it cut its guidance, citing lower fares.
Both stocks’ declines dragged their respective sectors lower and raised questions on Wall Street about how weak the economy really is, Cramer said on “Mad Money.”
“With all of this bad news, … it would’ve been natural for stocks to get destroyed,” he said. “However, that’s not what happened. Not at all. Sure, investors fled from the airlines and the retailers — that’s natural — but they didn’t flee from the stock market.”
Instead, the money just moved around, swapping into consumer packaged goods stocks, industrial plays and tech names, he said.
Cramer argued that this kind of action — which he said is often a sign of a “rolling bull market” — is great for investors, who are not “fighting the Fed” if they buy stocks anymore now that its chief, Jerome Powell, has pledged to be patient when it comes to hiking interest rates.
“This newfound rolling bull market is all about the fact that we’re no longer fighting the Fed,” Cramer explained. “So, even with no Chinese trade deal, even with no functional government and no real sense of how weak these corporate numbers will turn out to be, the bulls are running free in this environment, even on a day where the averages arguably should’ve been crushed by the weakness in two monster leadership groups: retail and the airlines.”
