St. Jude Shocked Back to Life

Heart Of The Matter

The desire to cause yourself deep emotional harm can be one of the most useful tools at your disposal, with Mad Money host Jim Cramer.

When a medical journal reported that St. Jude Medical’s defibrillator leads, the wires that connect the device to the heart, were perforating the organ – literally stabbing heart tissue – Wall Street abandoned ship. As if the fallout from Medtronic’s recall of its own leads wasn’t bad enough.

So it’s no wonder that Cramer called St. Jude a “sell” during Thursday’s Lightning Round. After all the drama, he and the rest of the market didn’t want to have anything to do with a company that made these leads.

But you know what the kicker is in all this? None of that was true.

Well, the St. Jude part anyway. It turns out the doctors installing the leads weren’t doing so properly and that was causing the perforations – not the leads themselves. And Medtronic’s problems weren’t St. Jude’s. None of the leads STJ made were cracking the way Medtronic’s were.

So now that this mess is out of the way, St. Jude can do what it should have done when Medtronic’s bowed out of the lead business for a while: take market share. And healthcare is right where investors want to be right now, Cramer said, so there’s another reason to own this stock. That and STJ is cheap, too, trading at just 19 times earnings with a long-term growth rate of over 16%.

Looks like St. Jude just got, ahem, shocked back to life.

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