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Here’s what I’m watching to see where the market goes next after the S&P 500 record close

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3 months ago

January 22, 2024

We don’t know what we want. This week, we will find out what it is that will propel us forward or turn us back after the S & P 500 on Friday closed at a new record high for the first time in more than two years. For example, we have three rails that report this week: Union Pacific , CSX and Norfolk Southern . Among them, you have pretty much every non-service portion of the U.S. economy spoken for: housing, industrial production, minerals, road building, heating, and food. What kinds of numbers do we want from these three? Do we want them softer to help the case for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates? Or do we want them to show positive year-over-year numbers to demonstrate that there will be no hard landing for the American economy? Or do we want them plain out strong so that we flirt with tightening even as so many central bankers have assured us the Fed is done? I imagine the answer lies somewhere in the middle, the avoidance of the tightening hard landing with decent comparisons. The rails are too significant to ignore even as the bond market seems to rely, I would say, wrongly, on the broader data. Maybe that’s why you have the forward curve so wrong. And why is it that the forward curve could be so wrong? I think it’s a factor of big money flows that aren’t sensitive to what moves rates and don’t mind being wrong. We know from the banking crisis that followed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank nearly a year ago that banks make so many stupid investments that you can draw no conclusions from them. No matter, I think that stock investors will stay focused on both rates and what moves rates — and if you want to be informed, we need to watch the reaction to the rails, regardless of what informs us on what the market wants to see. The Super Six Why is this so important? Because we have a default mechanism that pops up constantly: a return to the Super Six, my new moniker for the Magnificent Seven, because Tesla , which reports Wednesday, has become divorced from the rest of the group as electric vehicles wane until, perhaps, charging stations grow faster and become more prevalent. No, the default mechanism is the stock of a company called ServiceNow , which reports on Wednesday. ServiceNow has pretty everything you want from a company: upside to estimates, profits from generative artificial intelligence, and a charismatic leader who doubles as a charming closer. I would not want to go against CEO Bill McDermott if I were up for consideration for a company to help me figure out how to be more productive, which I regard as the principal, broad reach of this company. It’s why businesses and governments select ServiceNow: they know they have a force multiplier on their hands and won’t be ripped off. If you see ServiceNow deliver nicely better top- and bottom-line numbers and you have the rails disappoint, then you know we are back in the world of Microsoft bursting through $400 and Nvidia tacking on another 50 points. Terrific for the Super Six — Google-parent Alphabet , Amazon , Apple , Meta Platforms , Microsoft and Nvidia. They are all Club stocks. But then, we’re going to see a lot of hand-wringing about how the Russell 2000 small-cap index isn’t rallying — as if that has mattered for the last decade and a half. Health-care stocks The performance of the health care stocks, excluding the miserable health insurers, could also be a telling tale. We know from the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference earlier this month that we are on the cusp of a lot of ingenuity. Abbott Laboratories will be the most important stock in the group because it encompasses all sorts of health-care lines. The company has a nasty habit of doing the number with only some line items being better than expected. If it actually goes up, then line up for your favorite health-care company. We’ll have a bunch to say about our Bullpen favorites from the sector at our Investing Club Monthly Meeting on Wednesday at noon ET. Following my trip to the JPMorgan conference in San Francisco, we added Abbott, Amgen , Novartis and Walgreens Boots Alliance to our Bullpen watch list. At least Abbott tells a decent story. I am beginning to dread Club name Procter & Gamble ‘s report because CEO Jon Moeller is a one-man wrecking crew, always pointing out what’s not working within the confines of some meager positives. I wish someone would tell that company that you don’t need to find 10 Achilles Heels on a call. Maybe it’s some sort of Cincinnati thing. P & G issues quarterly results on Tuesday. Can a market go higher being led by the Super Six and health care? I sure think so. The Fed’s role This is a market that is much more comfortable being led by companies that thrive in a non-inflationary environment because it still lives in fear that the Fed will change direction on rates. Without anything other than what we have had, if I were on the Fed’s policymaking committee, I would be more concerned that we have already started heating up. Just ask yourself, what’s done in price from last year and you know the answer: nothing. You just have a slower pace of inflation, and I bet the Fed regrets ever saying anything about no more tightening, something that, in hindsight was ill-advised. Power of tech AAPL 1Y mountain Apple 1 year Nevertheless, the Super Six keeps confounding. Take Apple. If you go back to the myriad downgrades both before and after its earnings report and its swoon of late, you find nary a word about the most obvious of powerful introductions, the Vision Pro mixed reality headset, which went on Friday and was immediately sold out despite a starting price of $3,500. This pre-ordained “dud,” delivered by a company that “hasn’t innovated since 2011” when Steve Jobs died, is a hit. That’s because, in reality, the company is an innovation machine hidden with all the iOS mobile operating system refreshes that occur at night. The Vision Pro will change how we watch entertainment and put the lie to the joy of a 75-inch screen situated 20 feet from you. I know I hear people say they don’t want to be watching a football game outside in 20-degree weather, but you never hear anyone who says they feel like they are “there” when they are watching a flat screen in a living room. Welcome to a world where you are lying down watching, or switching from commercials to something you want, instantly at a touch of a thumb to your index finger. It’s no wonder that Google’s YouTube and Netflix won’t let their wares on Vision Pro. It’s too powerful and, somehow, they will lose control of their viewers. Amazingly neither the high price nor the labored instruction at the stores kept the early adopters back. I think the adopters will spread a loud word that gives Apple something to talk about when it reports its latest quarter on Feb. 1, other than the weak handsets from China. Apple can’t hype to save its life, and don’t I know it. I just want to talk about the phone that worked after a 16,000-foot plummet from a plane with all-too-flexible doors, and I can’t get a positive word out of them. I don’t imagine that Apple will discuss the remarkable revenue stream the Vision Pro will spawn. It’s just such a good story because of how little a role the Vision Pro played as a defense against the downgrades. There’s nothing like a new product line with a higher price point than a phone to make the story a better one. I am just picking on Apple. Amazon and Alphabet can talk their efficiency raps without a problem. Meta has something up its sleeves with these connected Ray-Bans. Maybe because I have an Instagram-loving-daughter do I know how powerful a concept they will be. An actual pair of regular Ray-Bans looks like it has more baggage than the Meta versions. All Microsoft has to do is disclose the number of seats sold for its Copilot AI assistant for its Office suite to take that one up. Suffice it to say that Kimberly-Clark can’t cut it against this competition. Boredom is unacceptable in this market. So here we go – excitement plus a tame bond market equals higher stocks. But that’s only if their companies’ offerings are, as the advertisements say, new and improved. Only the Super Six can say it without it being untrue. (See here for a full list of the stocks on Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.

Jim Cramer at NYSE with bull. June 30, 2022.

Virginia Sherwood | CNBC

Source: CNBC

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