Your first reaction? You want to go somewhere! You want to see your relatives. You want to take a trip. You want to flee the nest.
I am talking about what goes through your mind when you get that second jab, that delicious clear liquid that surges through the top of your arm and winds its way through your fun-starved brain to where it protects you from the aerosol that's flying around and wants so badly to get into your sinuses and your lungs.
I know I am one person and everything I am going to say is anecdotal which is nowhere as good as empirical of course. But I walked out of a 24 hour tent on Staten Island yesterday feeling entirely liberated and a liberated person does not want to sit at home and eat a delivered meal. A liberated person wants to go out to eat and be served. So if you are buying Uber (UBER) for its excellent delivery system or DoorDash (DASH) for the same my immunized brain says put the pause button on that. I saw Uber's numbers and I like them but the baton is about to be passed to the mobility side which can at least justify where the stock is. In the end though do not lose sight they are losing fortunes and the only real leverage in the model does not come for more rides or deliveries per hour, it comes from driver robo taxis which don't exist yet. If you want to play the delivery game I would prefer that you buy the stock of Domino's (DPZ) which has employed massive technology to make it so they make money on what is sent out, the pizza.
Most restaurants lose money on delivery and they make it up with liquor at the bar. Don't forget that when you decide to buy shares in a delivery company that their restaurant clients have had to rely on because of Covid rules not profit rules.
Second thought that goes through your brain: see the world. With the money that you have saved if you didn't do anything for the last year and you have a job you want to take a trip. This is why I have routinely said you need to buy the stock of Disney (DIS) which reports this evening. And you need to buy the stock of Boeing (BA) because there will not be enough planes to meet the demand and we have now gone long enough with the Boeing Max not having an incident - 18 months is about the memory people have for post-disaster fear, according to work that we have done and we are now 23 months down the road.
I have to emphasize that the quiet diplomacy that President Biden is doing will most likely be greeted with orders for big capital goods and nothing is bigger than a Boeing with two million jobs directly and indirectly related to production. As for the airlines themselves?
Having been integrally involved reporting on the way the previous president handled China, he, I think correctly, recognized them as not a friend but a rapacious competitor and he tried to starve them and have businesses move out of China. There was some success to it and it was excellent to see a President try to stand up to the Chinese. There's a code with China, though. If you go it alone, they don't order even if they say they will. But if you go multinational in your approach the Chinese believe that's a benign competition and they give you business as a sort of pablum to get you hooked. We are going into a multinational pablum mode because our allies are pushovers as they need the Chinese market. I think things will revert to the way they were rather quickly. Good for select businesses and bad for our working people because of the multinational approach, this is not Mad Kissinger though or Mad Diplomacy either. Buy Boeing.
Finally, I saw that Carnival (CCL) had to raise even more debt today but it was able to borrow at an astoundingly low 5.75%, $3.5 billion just like that. Why not? Norwegian (NCLH) has the best balance sheet. Buy it.
Is Moderna (MRNA) doing strange things in my head? It sure is. As an early vaccinator I can tell you that you can make money from these strange things provided you do them before everybody gets the jab.
(Disney and Boeing 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.)
