Stocks You Should Have Bought Thursday

The stock market “put on a magnificent sale,” Cramer told viewers on Thursday, with the Dow losing as many as 188 points intraday and the S&P 500 at one point falling 1.7%. Smart investor took advantage of the moment and bought the best companies at discounted prices.

On days like this, Cramer recommends returning to the long-term themes that will outlast these short-term fluctuations in the market. At the start of the year, he highlighted a few of his favorites: foreign companies, gold, natural gas, homeland security and the mobile Internet. Almost any of these sectors would have offered ripe buying opportunities when the market was at its nadir today.

Agnico-Eagle Mines as a gold play, Anadarko Petroleum or Chesapeake Energy for nat gas, Apple with its revolutionary handset, the iPhone – the businesses behind these stocks are solid, Cramer said, regardless of how their share prices fared today. And those are just a few of the names from Cramer’s long shopping list of companies that could have worked.

Speaking of solid businesses, though. Cramer saw something on Thursday that spoke directly to the strength of Apple: TriQuint Semiconductor , component maker for the most sophisticated of smartphones, blew away the earnings. In fact, the company reported a year-over-year fourth-quarter revenue increase of 55% thanks to the mobile-phone market, and a 15% jump sequentially. That’s tremendous growth, Cramer said, and jaw-dropping gauge of the mobile Internet’s strength.

Well, guess who makes chips for the iPhone. Yep, TriQuint, who earns $4.50 a device. And that’s the division that’s on fire right now, Cramer said. So if the company is talking up the industry this much, then Apple too must be a beneficiary. Cramer thinks AAPL is a buy.

Maybe some investors panicked and ran for the sidelines. Who could blame them with all the talk of health-care reform, Grecian debt and struggling consumers? But a closer look at this week’s earnings revealed signs of strength to counter the negativity. And if forced to choose between the bullish or bearish case for the markets right now, Cramer said he’d side with the former.

Cramer’s charitable trust owns Apple.

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