Cramer: Gold Right Now Better Than Many Stocks

Sure, 125 stocks in the S&P 500 may have retuned more than 20% this year, Cramer said Wednesday, but “the average stock is still well behind gold,” which is up 16% in 2010.

“The trend for gold, and the way gold has outperformed stocks,” Cramer said during Stop Trading!, “is still the big story in this market, and it’s not over.”

The “Mad Money” host also called bonds “a sucker play” and pointed to the benefits of a weakening US dollar. The waning value of the currency has helped to push up gold, copper and oil prices, in addition to the potential earnings of multinational companies.

Cramer said the year-over-year comparisons for the dollar at this pace show a peak coming in the fourth quarter, at which point “you’ll be able to look at 2011 and make some earnings estimates upward, which no one’s thinking is going to happen.”

“Don’t be excited about” Citigroup , Cramer said, not even those trust preferred securities the government is selling. At least not yet. With the Treasury Department still dumping its massive common-share stake in the bank, the stock has little chance of breaking out.

In tech, there’s “an unknown story” taking place, Cramer said. Cree , SanDisk , AU Optronics and other secondary plays on the sector “starting to really catch on fire.”

“And when you see stocks like Cree and SanDisk get animal spirits, or Cirrus Logic,” Cramer said, “what it says to you is that group, which has been crushed, can come back.”

Analysts keep raising their price targets for high-flying stocks like Amazon.com , Apple and Netflix because the companies keep breaking through those targets. The constant adjusting to the upside by analysts, Cramer said, “makes a very rosy hue for the market as a whole.”

And lastly, Cramer said that while EQT is a great natural-gas play, he’d rather recommend a stock with a little less direct exposure to that commodity’s lagging price. Investors instead should go with National Fuel Gas , which offers a utility business and some California oil properties as well.

“That’s why I think NFG is the more conservative way to play natural gas going forward,” Cramer said.

When this story published, Cramer’s charitable trust owned Apple.

Call Cramer: 1-800-743-CNBC

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