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  1. Home
  2. / Jim Cramer

Jim Cramer: The Stock Market's Machine Buyers

These are simply programs where some ETFs and handcrafted baskets are overwhelming both sides of the market.
By JIM CRAMER
Nov 05, 2018 | 11:17 AM EST
Stocks quotes in this article: MCD, AMZN, FB, GOOGL, JNJ, GS

These exaggerated programs show you what happens when the selling and buying are insanely intense and the stock market can't handle all of the interest at once.

For example, no fund manager on his or her own would come in and start blasting out of high growth and driving into the McDonald's (MCD) of the world regardless of price. These are simply programs where some ETFs and handcrafted baskets are overwhelming both sides of the stock market

I think that this is the kind of behavior that is driving out what's left of the individual investor cohort because the whippy nature just makes the market into some sort of plaything for hedge fund managers.

It doesn't help that the president mulls taking antitrust action against Amazon (AMZN) , Facebook (FB) and Alphabet (GOOGL) but this guy has become short seller in chief of late, just bashing what he thinks should be bashed in totally baseless fashion and then demanding investigations that are European-like in their discouraging of American ingenuity.

I have said that you have to wait tech out. I would not be a buyer of any of these the stocks that the programs are taking up because once they are over you will get a downdraft that can't stemmed. Just to pick one, we own Johnson & Johnson  (JNJ) for Action Alerts PLUS. I wouldn't buy it because it is being moved up absurdly by the programs.

Now here's the hard thing to understand. I know it is a program because I have been good at detecting programs ever since I crafted them at Goldman Sachs (GS) .

The market now is much thinner so the movements are greatly exaggerated but be sure they are not real buyers they are machine buyers. No real person can be that stupid.

(Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, Johnson & Johnson, and Goldman Sachs are holdings in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS member club. Want to be alerted before Jim Cramer buys or sells AMZN, FB, GOOGL, JNJ or GS? Learn more now.)

Get an email alert each time I write an article for Real Money. Click the "+Follow" next to my byline to this article.

Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust, is long AMZN, FB, GOOGL, JNJ, GS.

TAGS: Jim Cramer |

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What does that mean for stocks? Consider Nvidia.

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