Jim Cramer says to get used to the market having down days, because the Dow didn't get to 19,975 without them, and it won't get to 21,000 without them, either.
"Sell-offs are a natural occurrence, and if they never happened, we wouldn't be fixated on Dow 20,000 because we would be closer to Dow 200,000," the "Mad Money" host said.
The market declined on Thursday, and Cramer explained the reasons why and whether investors need to worry about it.
The first thing Cramer does when he dissects the tape is to figure out what the leadership stocks are. On the downside on Thursday, it was retail, especially Bed Bath & Beyond, which tanked 9 percent after missing projections.
The Bed Bath & Beyond pain cascaded into the retail group, and hurt everything from Wal-Mart, to Target, to Dollar General. It certainly didn't help that most analysts didn't predict this, Cramer said, with the expectation that a colder winter and the confluence of Christmas and Hanukkah would help sales.
Boss also flagged the issue of cross-border taxation on imports, which could impact many retailers that import billions of dollars in items.
"Not even the lower taxes so many are expecting from the Trump administration can mitigate the kind of gross margin decline on true tariff like that would accord, since it's really just a targeted tax hike on importers," Cramer said.
The world's oldest bank, Italy's Monte dei Paschi could be on the brink of collapse, and Cramer marveled as to why stocks didn't bat an eye at the issue this week.
Monte dei Paschi is the third largest bank in Italy with 169 billion euro in assets, and more than 45 billion euro in debt.
Yet, no one on Wall Street seemed to care about the bank's problems.
"Our banks are now so big with so much capital that the numbers being thrown around out of Europe's ailing financial sector, as large as they are, seem like a drop in the bucket over here," Cramer explained.
Shares of Red Hat fell more than 13 percent on Thursday after the company reported a deceleration of billings and announced that CFO Frank Calderoni would step down.
In an interview with Cramer on Thursday, Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst said Calderoni was an "extraordinary" executive, and was always more of a CEO-in-waiting.
"An opportunity came up and he will be a CEO, and when he came to Red Hat he said his aspiration was to be a CEO. I fully understood that, and obviously the timing is not perfect, but he has a great opportunity," Whitehurst said.
Whitehurst added that the departure was always expected at some point, it was just unfortunate that it was announced this quarter. Calderoni joined Red Hat in June 2015 after serving as the CEO of Cisco Systems. He is leaving Red Hat to become CEO of a company that was not named.
With 2017 just around the corner, Cramer turned his attention to what the natural and organic food space could have in store for next year. The category now accounts for $200 billion, thanks to health conscious younger generations, and Cramer expects it to stay that way.
He spoke with Walter Freese, the CEO of Sterling-Rice Group, a privately-held brand-building firm that helps food, healthcare and consumer product companies create and launch new products. Freese's career spans over 30 years, as the previous CEO of both Ben and Jerry's and Stonyfield Farm.
"Fast forward to 2017 and we are really looking at the main streaming of natural and organic. And I don't mean that just in terms of a trend. I mean that in terms of hard numbers," Freese said.
Freese expects 57 percent of natural food products to be sold through conventional channels, including mass merchandisers, club stores and supermarkets.
In the Lightning Round, Cramer gave his opinion on various stocks from callers:
Southwestern Energy: "I like that one because I'm a believer in natural gas here because of all of its extra uses, and Cheniere 's Charif Souki was a visionary and still is."
Gilead Sciences: "Gilead right now is a don't buy. They've got to do an acquisition, they have no growth."