Too many investors make the mistake of trying to call the bottom in "terrible stocks in terrible companies," Jim Cramer said Wednesday. Two stocks in particular that investors just can't seem to shake are tech titan Yahooand BlackBerry makerResearch In Motion.
The "Mad Money" host said that investors' incessant need to recognize these two companies as takeover targets and turnarounds is a "costly and destructive addiction."
Still, he understands why they do it. Ostensibly, these stocks do inspire hope. RIM has more than 77 million Blackberry users — which Cramer thinks is certainly worth more than the company's $6 billion market cap — while Yahoo (particularly Yahoo Finance) is still a heavily used search engine that enjoys plenty of daily traffic.
"People ascribe this tremendous loyalty to a website as something that should make them bullish on the company behind it," he said. "[But] the problem is that the boneheads at Yahoo seems committed to not bringing out that value or, at least, not being able to create it."
Cramer also said that given its $18 billion market cap, he thinks Yahoo is too big to be taken over. "Nor do I believe anyone would want to buy a company that's in such horrific decline."
He noted today's buzz about Yahoo's laying off 2,000 employees but warned against putting too positive a spin on the firm's latest cost-cutting initiatives. "It just means even more turmoil and confusion," he said.
At the end of the day, Cramer said investors should stop seeking out the bottom and worry more about the fact that RIM could suffer the same fate as Nokia and Yahoo the same as AOL. What were once the gold standards and the growth standards are now little more than shadows of their old selves, he said.
The bottom line: RIM is competing withApple and Yahoo is competing with Google, Cramer said. Both stocks are up against "impossible and implacable" enemies. Plus, Google boasts mobile, social and cloud offerings, while Yahoo has none of these things.
"You can't bring a butter knife to a chemical warfare fight, and that's what Yahoo's doing with Google," Cramer said.
When this story was published, Cramer's charitable trust owned Apple.
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