F5 Networks on Thursday was selling off hard after reporting what investors viewed as a disappointing quarter after Wednesday’s bell. While Cramer during “Stop Trading” admitted the numbers were less than what the Street has come to expect from this high-growth company, he still thinks the stock is worth owning.
F5 , which deals in application delivery networking, announced poorer-than-expected revenue for the first quarter and offered revenue guidance for Q2 that was also below the Street’s consensus. The stock had plummeted more than 20 percent during Thursday trading as a result.
But Cramer said the markets in which F5 does business—clouding computing, the Internet and the mobile Web—remain strong. It’s the strength of these secular trends that he thinks will carry the stock past the declines seen on Thursday, which is why he said this pullback was a huge buying opportunity. Plus, the stock was the S&P 500’s number-two performer last year, so profit-taking may have been inevitable. But now FFIV is cheap on a price-to-earnings basis.
Cramer also pointed out that F5 saw the same kind of drop back in June 2009 following a big run-up in its stock price like the one seen throughout 2010. And that proved to be the kind of buying opportunity he described during “Stop Trading.”
Similar action can be seen in agriculture stocks like Mosaic and oil names like Schlumberger . These, too, are down big despite the fact they operate in what Cramer thinks are steady, growing businesses. He urged viewers to use these dips to their advantage, as they are short-term fluctuations in otherwise solid long-term stories.
“The stocks that have the best long-term trends are really getting hammered here,” Cramer said, “and you ought to pick your spots and do some buying.”
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