Cramer Remix: Why Apple is the best consumer products company in history

Before there was FANG, Jim Cramer's acronym for the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, now Alphabet, the "Mad Money" host had another group of growth stocks to watch: the CANDIES.

Those stocks — Chipotle, Apple, Netflix, Deckers, Intuitive Surgical, Express Scripts, and Salesforce.com — are up 281 percent on average since he formed the acronym in 2010, versus 121 percent for the index.

And while Deckers and Express Scripts turned out to be disappointing, Cramer said that Apple, which has run 312 percent since CANDIES formed, with a 34 percent rise in 2017 alone, gets too much heat from analysts for its alleged lack of innovation.

"I think Apple's innovated well beyond what anyone else has done in the consumer space and the quality has only improved with each new iteration [and] each new product," Cramer said. "Apple may not be the greatest tech company ever, but it's clearly the best consumer products manufacturer in history, by a long shot. What's wrong with that?"

Then, on a day where the major averages inched up, seemingly unphased by the congressional hearing of former FBI Director James Comey, Cramer found a different story worth noting.

"I think the story is much less about Director Comey versus President [Donald] Trump than it is about two stocks: Nvidia versus Nordstrom," the "Mad Money" host said. "I know, I know. Only I could really boil down a constitutional crisis into two stocks, but that's alright. They're jumping. I can do it because as riveting as the Comey testimony was, to me it means only one thing: forget about Washington ... if you're looking for anything good."

While the hearing is bad for Trump's pro-business economic agenda, Wall Street was focused on these two other stories, which Cramer said represent the conflict of growth versus value.

Cramer also went off the tape and sat down with David Yeom, the co-founder and CEO of online bargain retailer Hollar, to see how the privately held dollar store is faring in the internet realm.

"We have been just pounding the pavement, working with amazing suppliers and sourcing just unbelievable products," Yeom told Cramer on Thursday, highlighting the company's ability to offer products like the fidget spinner at competitively low prices.

And as the company rides what Yeom called a "macro trend" of bargain buying in the otherwise bleak world of retail, the CEO said that Hollar is perfectly positioned to benefit from two of the struggling industry's most popular segments.

"There's really two things working in retail right now, and that's online and off-price, and we're doing both. And we're chasing after a consumer group, really Middle America millennials, that's really been under-served for a long time," Yeom said.

Although its stock has doubled over the past year and rallied over 64 percent in 2017, InterActive Corporation does not get enough love from the market, Jim Cramer says.

"It's because IAC is a confusing conglomerate of online businesses that people simply don't understand. They don't know how IAC is structured, and more importantly, they can't keep track of what IAC even owns," the "Mad Money" host said.

So Cramer broke down the business to find the key to its soaring stock and how IAC has kept creating value over the years under the leadership of Chairman and Senior Executive Barry Diller.

Finally, Cramer sat down with Joseph Kim, the president and CEO of Inovio Pharmaceuticals, to hear more about the rise of the speculative biotechnology play that focuses on DNA-based therapies for cancer and other infectious diseases.

Kim told Cramer on Thursday that despite the company's relatively small market capitalization, it has managed to stay efficient in developing and testing their cutting-edge treatments.

"We're very focused and we're very good at what we do, but also, it's our technology platform," the CEO said. "It's a very innovative way of jump-charging a patient's own immune system, and we can do this very rapidly and effectively."

And although the company is small, it has partnered with pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca's Medimmune, Regeneron and Roche's Genentech to continue developing its medicines, Kim said, adding that his confidence about Inovio's future is not unfounded.

"The confidence isn't out of ignorance, it's really based on our data. We have about 1,000 patients' worth of strong and potent immune responses already recorded across our early trials," he told Cramer. "While we're still growing, this is a wonderful platform that's been validated with a lot of these data."

In Cramer's lightning round, he flew through his take on some caller favorite stocks, including:

Anheuser-Busch InBev NV: "I like it, but I have to tell you, I'll see your Anheuser Busch InBev and I'll raise you a Constellation Brands. By the way, I didn't that Molson Coors report yesterday at all."

BlackBerry: "No, it's already moved so much. Intellectual property can only get you so far. We missed that one. Let's find the next."

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