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Schwab Representative (0:00)
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Hotels.com Representative (0:29)
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Jim Cramer (1:08)
Hey, I'm Kramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Kramerica. Other people make friends. I'm just trying to save you a little money. My job is not just to entertain, but to explain how days like today happen. So call me at 1-800-743- CNBC or tweet me imKramer. Every day around here we have a referendum on stocks and you can't let it get you down because tomorrow's vote can always be different from today's. Yep, the voting booth never closes around here, so you get days where the bears turn out in droves. Dow shedding 115 points SB dipping 0.39% Nasdaq losing 0.38% why is it like this? Why do stocks even gyrate so wildly when nothing's really happening? Well, the answer is a mischievous one. On most days, stocks react to other stocks or the overall stock market. And the market itself is tends to react to the gyrations of its much larger sibling, the bond market. The bond market certainly colored today's stock market, which reacted naive to every tick down in bond prices because lower bond prices mean higher interest rates. When rates go higher, the bears almost always win the daily election. Take the stock of Home Depot, which reported this morning. That's somebody we all know. The orange roof, right? This will really help you to understand at first that stock rallied hard. At one point it was up almost 14 points in premarket trading. I like that the trust owns it. The gains shrunk to the single digits during the 9am conference call, even as the call was quite upbeat, as you'll hear later in the show. But as interest rates went up over the inability for Congress to find spending cuts, the stock wilted audibly. It finished the day in the red. Makes sense. Well then kind of you see, Home Depot does best when they're strong housing turnover which means higher rates are bad for business because they inhibit turnover. So the Home Depot reference rig by the bond market then turn negative and the most important stock of the day lost the boat that crushed a host of retailers. Some had to do with housing, others didn't of course didn't matter if there was real connection they might be joined by it together by an ETF or simply by the zeitgeist. That stems from Home Depot's importance importance in the retail firmament. Now I don't want you to worry too much because there'll be another election tomorrow and those reports there's always another election these days because there are so many companies that matter to the overall market and because the bond market never stops moving. And if Congress passes this huge tax cut, which I think it actually will, the bond market will be moving against us. The cut in the end will not make up for the pain of higher interest rates and what they can do to your pocketbook and the economy. Does it have to be this way? That's a great question on the eve of tomorrow's noon CNBC investing club meeting. Let me give you my answer. Some stocks are more hostage to the bond market than others. Stocks related to the fickle consumer are controlled by the bond market. For them, the daily referendum can get pretty wild. When rates go higher. The voters big institutional money managers have been electing the dollar stores betting the times will turn grim with rates going higher. And those stocks do well when the consumer is hard pressed. Dollar general stock rallied 4% today despite home Depot going down deserve to. It doesn't matter because we won't know how it's doing until the reports on June 3, which is light years away. It's just it fits the rate paradigm, that's all. Bank stocks tend to rise and fall for the bond market too because when rates go higher you usually get less economic activity. Banks need a stable environment to get deals done. Again, the bond markets in control here, some real bargains developing in the, in the banks but they're hard to pin down while interest rates are jogging higher. But then there are stocks and sectors that have no real connection to the bond market. And these are what I want to talk about for a second. These stocks are controlled, what I call powerful secular themes. So powerful the bonds simply they can't bring it down. Right now I'm feeling bearish in the bond market. So these secular growth stocks are kind of what I want to bet on. It's what I Am focusing on my talk tomorrow to join the club. So let me give you an example what's of what's not up for for election. What can override the daily plebiscite? Boy, these stocks are not easy to find right now. But when you do, you got to hold on for dear life. At a time like this, when Congress trying to come up with a budget, we're going to have to endure many suboptimal days where we have to expect upsets and reversals and defeats. But they will be nothing but distractions. See, it's an okay time. Not bad, not great. And there are plenty of stocks that can power through if they have secular themes pushing them. It's a little harder to find these winners given how much we've already run from the bottom though. So I'm going to give you a textbook once you know exactly what I'm talking about because it's so visible. We're going to talk about the stock of GE Vernova. That's the power division that was spun off from the old General Electric that so many of you like. Right now we've got several huge themes occurring at once. We know that we have a gigantic number of data centers being put up in the country. Correct. Now they require a tremendous amount of electricity. They're big drainers. Our most abundant source of power comes from burning of natural gas. We got more natural gas than any other country. GE Vernova makes the turbines. Those are used machines up to £700,000 that burn the natural gas which then generate electricity. Now there's a theme for you, but that's not all. Today the Tennessee Valley Authority, remember them, announced that it's going to submit a construction permit for a small modular nuclear reactor. Again because we need more power for the data centers. Who makes those? G.E. vernova. And we know that the Empire Offshore Wind project off the coast of New York just got re greenlighted by the Trump administration. According to a 2022 press release, G. Vernova responsible for designing and building the high voltage electrical system connected to this. It's a huge multi year project that will be fantastic for yes, GE Vernova. Oh, and if you are a country with a trade surplus for the US the best way to get it down and then you lose the ire of the President. Get away or get rid of the wrath. Well, it's always been to buy a Boeing plane, but I don't think that works as much anymore. You know what you got to do? You got to buy a turbine from GE Vernova. It takes a lot to buck the bond voters. But G. Vernova is not one, not two, not three. Before secular trends going for it, that's what you need. That's belt suspenders and suspenders and then belt again. Or take the stock of Tesla, which, you know, I like here. Today, my colleague David Faber interviewed Elon Musk. If you caught Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla, I'm very proud of David. He's my partner. Musk reminded us that his machines will soon be on the road, driving autonomously. One million of them. And the numbers have gotten better for the traditional business. Have a ladder, it can be verified. The former said a little bit like the hubris talking. Still, that kind of thing can allow Tesla to buck the bond market. Now, unfortunately, at the very moment the bonds are so in charge that Tesla stock could only go up. While David was asking most positive questions about the business, the stock would go down when David talked about Musk's government work and the impact it might have on car sales. Still, it managed to finish the session up a buck and change. I guess that's a victory, but I think it would have been up quite a bit if we had a more benign backdrop of bonds. Boy, this bond market, what a tough opponent. So here's the bottom line. The good news is that rates can also go up, and not just down by the time we get a budget deal. The bad news is that rates are starting to break out to the upside. And if they can't stay calm, if they jump to a new, higher level while Congress works on the budget bill, we're liable to have more days like today where you need a plethora of positive themes for any given stock to break free from the gravitational pull of these darn miserable treasuries. I need to go to Spars in California. Spars.
