As oil prices hovered in the $70s on Thursday after a recent spike, CNBC's Jim Cramer recalled their 2008 breakdown in a teaching moment for investors.
The U.S. economy was falling apart, but the rest of the world was still strong. Foreign demand for oil coupled with instability in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa sent oil prices soaring to $147 a barrel.
"But what happened after that shows you just how fragile, skittish and easily manipulated the oil market is because the price of crude collapsed pretty much in a straight line" to $31, the "Mad Money" host said.
The fact that oil prices surged higher, then fell apart in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis seemed like "pure manipulation" to Cramer.
But what's different now is investors have grown wary of oil futures, he said. They know that oil traders tend to buy crude on bad news, and not necessarily because the commodity is in demand.
"Investors in the stock market know from this lesson not to trust these spikes," he explained. "So, sure, oil's gotten up there. No doubt about it. But we know the futures aren't necessarily the real deal and that's keeping investors in the stock market from panicking out as we watch the price of crude climb inexorably higher. I think that's the right attitude."
The three reports that sparked the rally
One month ago, the market looked to Cramer like it was riddled with fear and volatility. But three recent earnings reports changed the whole landscape.
"It all started with three days in tech," Cramer said. "Facebook, Amazon and Apple reported and everything began to turn around."
Before earnings season kicked off, these three technology stocks had been sliding on a cacophony of worries.
Facebook was embroiled in a data-mining scandal that brought its CEO to Congress; Amazon was being bombarded with tweets from President Trump; and shares of Apple were falling on endless analyst reports that iPhone X sales would miss the estimates.
As a result, expectations were muted ahead of the companies' earnings reports. But when they exceeded expectations, the entire cohort "came back to life," Cramer said.
The four horsemen of biotech
With a major market comeback underway, Cramer zeroed in on four key stocks in a sector that's not getting much love: biotechnology.
Biogen, Celgene, Regeneron and Gilead — some of the sector's most prominent names that Cramer labeled "the four horsemen of biotech" — have become outright hated by investors.
"Last year it seemed like these stocks were mounting a comeback, but lately, they've once again been sent to the glue factory," Cramer said on Thursday.
"Biogen's down 14 percent for the year, Celgene's down 21 percent, Regeneron's down 23 percent [and] Gilead [is] down nearly 9 percent," he continued.
While Cramer thought that most of the weakness was justified, he had to ask himself whether these stocks were getting too cheap to ignore.
Groupon CEO on leveraging his platform for partnerships
With new partners like Major League Baseball and GrubHub, Groupon has "been on a roll" in terms of securing new partners, CEO Rich Williams told Cramer on Thursday.
Williams attributed the trend to a realization his team had several quarters ago: that their platform, which serves 50 million customers, is coveted by potential partners.
"When we stepped back and we looked at what we were doing, we said, 'OK, we know that getting great brands, great inventory, more small businesses on the platform as fast as possible is incredibly critical, so why are we trying to do it all on our own? We have an amazing asset of 50 million active customers that a lot of these other companies and brands don't have. But we can open up our platform to them, give them access to those 50 million people and we can bring that inventory to our customers who are looking for it,'" Williams recalled.
For more on Groupon's partnerships and growth prospects, watch Williams' full interview here.
BioMarin CEO: Opportunities treating hemophilia
While much of the biotech sector is hated, BioMarin Pharmaceutical has been carving its own path in the space, with six drugs on the market that treat highly uncommon conditions.
One of the drugs in its pipeline is a "very exciting product" that would treat hemophilia A, a blood disorder that affects approximately 120,000 people, Chairman and CEO Jean-Jacques Bienaimé told Cramer in a Thursday interview. Click here for the full video.
"We are developing the first gene therapy for hemophilia A," the CEO said. "We're trying to replace two to three injections intravenously every week by one injection, potentially, in the lifetime of the patient."
While BioMarin hasn't obtained data tracking the treatment over a given patient's lifetime, tests on of hemophilia-afflicted animals have shown that the disorder is curbed for their entire lifetimes of about 10 years, Bienaimé said.
"We're going to give an update next week at the World Hemophilia Federation meeting with two years of data" on human patients, the CEO told Cramer. "This is such novel therapy that some patients are going to jump on it, but some patients are going to want to see several years of data before they get treated. So the market is not going to disappear after three years. It will take a while to penetrate."
Lightning round: What's cooking at CMG
In a special edition of the lightning round, Cramer zoomed through his take on guests' favorite stocks:
Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc.: "I think [the uptick] is for real because I really like this guy [CEO] Brian Niccol. He's very polished. Look, he's out of the Taco Bell world, but you know what? That's exactly what they need. They need discipline. He had a good conference call."
Verizon Communications Inc.: "You could hold it. It's at $47 bucks. I think it should go up to $50, $51. The stock's been under a little bit of pressure here because rates went a little higher. I like it."
Disclosure: Cramer's charitable trust owns shares of Facebook, Amazon and Apple.
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