For Friday’s “Stop Trading,” Cramer highlighted the coming week’s most important earnings reports.
“These are all what ... could or could not bring down certain cohorts,” Cramer said.
The cloud-computing names seem to have finally shaken off Equinix’s disappointing quarter, something Cramer thinks they shouldn’t have been saddled with in the first place. We’ll know if the trend will continue when F5 Networks announces numbers on Tuesday, Oct. 26.
“When they report you either get the cloud back to 52-week high or cloud goes back down,” Cramer said. “F5 is key.”
Procter & Gamble will be the tell for similar companies, such as Colgate-Palmolive , Avon and even Kraft and Kellogg . “Everyone is going to cue on” PG’s quarter on Wednesday, Oct. 27, Cramer said, and not Kimberly-Clark’s , which comes Tuesday.
“We’ve got to really focus on that earning,” Cramer said, “because if they guide up you’re going to see a huge move in that whole soft-good cohort.”
There’s a debate over whether the tech sector goes higher or lower from here, Cramer said, but 3M , maker of computer screens, “will settle that fight” when it reports on Thursday, Oct. 28.
Merck “for some reason, of which I don’t think is fair,” Cramer said, will be what “tells you if pharma is going to be good or bad in the fourth quarter.” Watch for this company’s release on Friday, Oct. 29.
Cramer said he’s “not a believer in Exxon,” but the company’s earnings will help us decide “whether these futures matter, that we trade off of, and how much oil there is.” The industry giant will hold its earnings conference call on Thursday.
Bucyrus International was down big on Friday, dropping almost $5, or 6.7 percent. But Cramer’s still bullish on the mining-equipment firm given the demand for the company’s products, and as well as those of Joy Global and Caterpillar .
“American machinery is ascendant,” he said, so he can't understand why investors “are giving this stock away today.”
The action in Apple and gold seem to point to two separate trajectories for the US economy, the former indicating healthy growth while the latter signals a slowdown. So which view is right, which of these investments will outperform the other? For Cramer, it’s a question of time frame.
He said Apple was “ridiculously cheap” right now and predicted the stock would climb “much higher within the next six months.” But over the next six years “nothing is going to top gold.”
“Because central banks around the world are printing money,” Cramer said.
When this story published, Cramer’s charitable trust owned Apple and Procter & Gamble.
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