Voice of Cramerica

Voice of Cramerica: Mea Culpa

It's time for a minor mea culpa. On last night's show Jim talked about the lack of pin action off of Hewlett-Packard's positive earnings preannouncement. We concluded that good news for Hewlett-Packard couldn't be extrapolated to the rest of tech because we'd heard so much bad news and so many negative forecasts, for example from Intel. Then I, like a doofus, went and wrote a post about pin action, or more specifically the lack thereof.

Who would have ever imagined that Dell would report a better than expected quarter today? Not only that, but Dell did it the same way Hewlett-Packard did, with really effective cost cutting. Looks like there was some pin action after all!

You could've made some money if you'd gamed Dell's earnings, buying the stock down 5.22% near the close. It's now up more than 5% in after hours trading as I write this. Now I don't recommend stocks, and Jim has been pretty negative about Dell on the show, but that would've been a nice pin action trade. Of course we're not a trading show. I'm just admitting that maybe we were too quick to dismiss the the idea of pin action off of the Hewlett-Packard news.

Cliff Mason
Nov 21 2008






Cliff Mason is the Senior Writer of CNBC's Mad Money w/Jim Cramer, and has been that program's primary writer, in cooperation with and under the supervision of Jim Cramer, since he began at CNBC as an intern during the summer of 2005. Mason was the author of a column at TheStreet.com during 2007, which he describes as "hilarious, if short-lived." He graduated from Harvard College in 2007. It was at Harvard that Mason learned to multi-task, mastering the art of seeming to pay attention to professors while writing scripts for Mad Money. Mason has co-written two books with Jim Cramer: Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Richand Stay Mad For Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer). He is 100% responsible for any parts of either book that you did not like. 

Mason has also had a fruitful relationship with Jim Cramer as his nephew for the last 23 years and will hopefully continue to hold that position for many more as long as he doesn't do anything to get himself kicked out of the family.




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