With President Donald Trump’s recently announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports dominating discussions on Wall Street, CNBC’s Jim Cramer discovered something investors might not be seeing.
“Money flows from where it’s scared to where it’s safe and it does so in a hurry,” the “Mad Money” host said on Monday. “We saw this happen late Friday afternoon. It occurred again today.”
Trump’s tariffs are meant to curb steel and aluminum “dumping,” or keeping costs artificially low to stifle foreign competition, by other countries. A top target is China, which has been producing and exporting cheap steel to the United States for years. U.S. steel companies say Chinese dumping has hurt the industry.
Many are worried about Chinese retaliation as a result of these tariffs, causing investors to flee from stocks of companies that use steel in their products to “safer” investments.
To explain this phenomenon, Cramer pointed to his age-old acronym for the market’s tech giants: FANG, short for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, now Alphabet.
Facebook’s shares rose by more than 2 percent in Monday’s trading session due to the fact that the social media company doesn’t have a lot of Chinese business, Cramer said.
Amazon, shares of which climbed 1.6 percent on Monday, was safe from fears of Chinese retaliation because the People’s Republic has its own e-commerce colossus: Alibaba.
China doesn’t have Netflix, either. That, along with positive notes from two Wall Street analysts, helped shares of the entertainment giant soar to a new 52-week high on Monday, closing up 4.6 percent.
Finally, Google parent Alphabet’s search service is prohibited on the Chinese mainland, making it one of the safer international stocks out there, Cramer said. Shares of Alphabet rose 0.98 percent on Monday.
“Of the huge international companies I follow, Alphabet may be the least shortable off of the Chinese retaliation fears, or, you could say, the most buyable,” the “Mad Money” host said.
Cramer also pointed to a host of industries that are barely in China’s blast zone.
“The retailers are largely domestic, even if many of them sell merchandise that’s made in China,” he said. “The financials, with the exception of some very, very, very, very, very large banks, don’t have China exposure. Health care? I don’t think so. Those groups rallied hard today.”
So as the bears grasp at straws to support their case that the world is ending at the hands of protectionism, Cramer told investors to stay the course and stick to what’s working.
“Bottom line: unless actual estimates get cut, … and they haven’t been — not one — there’s just not enough of a substantive bear case out there,” he said. “That could change Friday if we get an overheated employment report, which I think is far more important than all this, and the yield on the 10-year [Treasury] blitzes through 3 percent. But right now? There’s just too much that is going right, people, and not enough negatives to do the job of keeping stocks down.”
