Mad Money

Sell Block

Of all the calls Cramer made during last week's Game Plan, he missed the most important: Sell the stock market going into this week.

He admits his focus on individual equities kept him from seeing the big picture, which was the movement in the bond market. Yields have crept past 5% of late.



"I know that whenever the bond market passes a milestone, and 5% is a milestone, you have to recognize that people will sell stocks and buy bonds," Cramer says.

Stocks dip under the pressure of competition when bonds yield such attractive rates. Hence the sell-off in the market this week. If Cramer were paying attention to bonds, he might have been able to protect Home Gamers from the hit the market took.

On a more positive note, though, he's still supremely confident that Monster Worldwide will get a takeover bid. CEO Sal Ianuzzi has the same key executives in place as when he was running Symbol Technologies, which was sold to Motorola. Some might doubt that a new chief financial officer would signal the sale of a company, but Monster's new CFO, Timothy Yates, was hired at Symbol only six months before it was bought out. Cramer thinks Yates' arrival at Monster signals the same is in store for that company.

Bottom Line: Cramer screwed up big time and missed the sell-off this week, even though he could have predicted it by paying attention to the bond market. Don't make the same mistakes in the future. And don't sell Monster Worldwide even though the conventional wisdom says there will be no bid. This time the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Questions? Comments?