Yesterday was Jim Cramer's birthday. How do I know? He said so during last night's Mad Money on CNBC.
Yes, I'm watching. Yesterday was Day 2 of my Eye on Cramer experiment, where I will watch a week of his show and provide a second opinion.
Cramer kicks off his show by digging into Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's disappointing update yesterday.
"As I predicted, the market hated it," Cramer says.
Really? He may have been critical of Geithner in earlier shows, but I didn't get that out of Monday's show. His claim a day earlier was that bank stocks may rally after Geithner's performance. It would be Oppenheimer's Meredith Whitney, the dead-on bank bear, that would have the final say in deflating the financial services sector.
Cramer goes on to take a look at Transocean
Cramer is worried that the company will be unlikely to maintain its rates when its contracts are up for renewal in a few years, given the dramatic plunge in oil prices. Technical analysis and fundamental meat to boot? This is when Cramer is at his edu-tainment finest. He prefers Schlumberger as a better, more diversified play on the bottoming-out of crude.
Later in the show, Cramer opens up the phones for the lightning round. I'm uncomfortable with boiling down due diligence to a snazzy one-liner. "This thing's like a utility," he says about Microsoft
Really? I'm not a fan of Microsoft. I see its relevance fading with every passing quarter. I still don't get the "utility" tag. Duke Energy sports high profit margins for a sleepy utility, but Microsoft's net margins are nearly three times greater.
The rest of the frenetic lightning round plays out like a waiter trying to steer the hungry to off-menu specials the kitchen wants to move. A call asking about BHP Billiton finds Cramer preferring Freeport-McMoRan
Now Wednesday night's show beckons. Bring it on, Cramer.
Other tales of Cramerica:
- Day 1 of Eye on Cramer offers up plenty of inconsistencies.
- You can track Cramer through a dedicated page on Motley Fool CAPS.
- You don't need a guru to find the next stocks you should buy.