It's time to pay homage to my mother, the late Louise Cramer, who passed on 35 years ago and had more commonsense than anyone alive during her run.
You see, mom loved the stock market. Always had a couple of irons in the fire. She loved the ponies, particularly the maiden-claim races at Liberty Raceway. Loved the Daily Double.
But when it came to gambling, mom loved the slots. Me, I am blackjack guy with an excellent memory for face cards. Mom? She just couldn't go by a one-armed bandit at Bally's without throwing away some money. The funny thing, though, she always had good luck at a total chance game. I'm not talking about a row of cherries here. I'm talking peaches, plums, even three bars.
One time, a few years before she passed, we fished off her favorite pier in Margate, right next to the Motel Boatel and then headed up town to Resorts. She was an unstoppable force that day. She pulled and pulled and I swear the worst she caught was three lemons. There was a pile of coins so high I was worried we'd be held up. Didn't matter, she was hot, hot, hot.
And then she turned to me and said "we're done." I told her she was nuts. I had never seen anyone with that much mojo. Time to press the bet. Time to plow it back and go for three 7s.
"You can't leave now," I begged her. "You are on a run."
"Jimmy," she said, "we're out of here. We are going to take some of these winnings and go buy a beautiful cashmere sweater I've had my eye on forever."
I begged her. It may never be this good again.
"Let others make the money," she said as she sashayed to the credit window to swap the coins for a Benjamin and a couple other presidents. And wouldn't you know it? We went to the store and bought the darned cashmere sweater.
Right now, I like what I see. We have a smoking hot stock market that rewards companies for success like none I have ever seen. I am not talking about 1999. I am not talking about 2000, before the dot-com explosion. I am not even talking about the lead up to the Great Crash of 1987. I am talking about something that is, as we say at law school, sui generis, one of a kind.
Let's review. Last night Salesforce.com (CRM) reported one of the biggest beats -- you know much much, better than expected. I didn't think this company could report a quarter this big until late next year. The previous quarter had been a tad disappointing, so I guess the too-smart-for-their-own-good hedge fund lunkheads must have been short it. Don't laugh. A major firm just put out a report last week predicting a big miss for the company Marc Benioff built. Yes, they issued a sell on the darned and it sure seemed like this was going to be the end of the big run.
Far from it.
When I was interviewing Marc for "Mad Money" last night I was thinking that this stock could be up ten, maybe even 15 points, the quarter was that strong. Given that the stock had already run so much, though I doubted it could go higher. Hey, my charitable trust has owned it forever and I would be more than content with 15.
But 50?
Fifty points? What the heck? That's about $50 billion tacked on for a good quarter. That's not three bars, that's the whole shooting match.
The amazing thing though? It's not amazing. It's becoming par for the course.
Take Tesla (TSLA) . I recommended Tesla after it converted my non-car person daughter, my car-person wife and me. I had fretted about the balance sheet, but a guy who knows a ton more about finance than I told me not to worry about a thing. Elon Musk could raise $2 billion with a snap of some fingers. I had not been a fan of the man ever since he said there was a 50% chance that I was just a simulation after I questioned him about some cockamamie idea he had about our whole country getting its power from a giant solar field in Colorado.
But the pressure was too great. I came out here when Tesla was at $260 and said buy it. Just go buy it. I was immediately razzed as a Johnnie Come Lately by all my favorite haters on Twitter (TWTR) . I didn't care. Better late than never. Now, though, with the stock at $2,135, almost $1,900 points higher, I have to say, with a 413% gain, take me to the sweater counter.
These are all over the place. Today Facebook (FB) says that Apple (AAPL) could crush its business if a big app change the company wants to make gets integrated into the next iPhone. Why, this means war! You have to figure Facebook's down 10 on that, right? Wrong! Facebook has been bulletproof ever since it took up the mantle of the small business person. Companies worth millions and millions of dollars started on Facebook. It's shops initiative is the smartest thing the company has ever done and has changed the narrative from Darth Vader to, OK, not Yoda but maybe R2-D2?
Or how about the $2 trillion behemoth itself, Apple. I always say own it, don't trade it. And that's what I have done for my charitable trust. Now it is about to split. I can hear Grandma Louise whisper in my ear, sell one of those new shares they are giving. Oh my, did mom love splits. She always took something off the split-adjusted table.
Finally there is Amazon (AMZN) . Here's a company if you didn't know any better was created for a pandemic. Marc Benioff famously jokes that it's his first pandemic, so who knows what happens. To me, it feels like this is the 10th pandemic for Jeff Bezos. It's like he's a Johns Hopkins pandemic professor. We have a double in it for my charitable trust, which you can follow along by joining the Action Alerts PLUS club.
Are we taking anything off the table? Why? It's the best in show, the favorite, the machine that always pays off. Why would you ever leave? We're on a run.
Now owning Amazon is a game of skill. Same with Tesla, right? Apple? Facebook? Salesforce? These aren't slots for heaven's sake. But, then again, isn't there some chance involved? A chance that Jay Powell read the Toll Brothers (TOL) headline where the homebuilder said it is "raising prices aggressively" and says the economy's too hot? A possibility that the Treasury has to issue so much debt that interest rates have to rise? How about a shot fired across some South China Sea bow? Or a Communist Party attempt to takeover Taiwan Semi (TSM) ? Are we about to be overrun with new IPOs?
Those are all chances, not skills. So, I am saying it. I am here saying that it doesn't even matter what the next news is, and I am a believer that this market's doing well, because we will have good news, not bad news about the virus that will spark a reopening of the economy. I think the part of the economy that is represented by stocks is on fire. Yes, I am excluding the little guy, except the ones that are on Facebook shops or Shopify (SHOP) , whom we have on later today.
Today, I am wearing this blue cashmere -- the color of the Salesforce.com cloud, of course -- out of deference to my mah, to the woman who said "Jimmy, let others make some money." Time to at least take out the house's money, what you have put in. You can let the rest run. My mom didn't know about the Fed, she didn't know about interest rates, or any of that. She knew commonsense and commonsense says, even if you think you have the hottest hand in the world, it's time to ring the register on some cash and get yourself a nice cashmere sweater in Louise's memory and honor.
(FB, AMZN, AAPL and CRM are holdings in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS member club. Want to be alerted before Jim Cramer buys or sells these stocks? Learn more now.)
