Mutual Funds Liquidate as Investors Say 'Enough'
By James J. Cramer / 01/30/2002 12:52 PM EST
(Hi Tom: Be very careful out there. Peter)
We are going into one of the most important meetings of the Federal Reserve that I can recall in my 20 years of trading, a meeting where the Fed might signal that we are finally on solid footing for growth, and you know what?
Nobody gives a gosh darn. Just like nobody gives a gosh darn about the strength of fourth-quarter gross domestic product, which was monumental in light of what's been going on.
Nobody cares because we are experiencing liquidations at mutual funds like you wouldn't believe. The 42 million pension fund managers out there -- the individual 401(k) holders -- are collectively marching. You can hear the footsteps: People want Treasury bills, they don't want accounting headaches.
In fact, when the clouds over this period finally break, you will see a wholesale shift of money away from the mutual funds that have supported the gamesmanship that got us in this fix to begin with. I am honing in on two firms: Alliance and Janus. Both are stocked to the gills with stocks that are considered to be supreme earnings managers. Both embraced Enron and now Tyco (TYC) and America Online (AOL) to the hilt. I think these institutions are at the brunt of the backlash against what has happened, as the people themselves are not stupid. You hit them with crummy numbers two years in a row and then you hit them with Enron and they say whoa, enough is enough.
The liquidations we are seeing -- and believe me, they are happening -- are so unbelievably heavy that they are reminiscent of that week after the Sept. 11, 2001, cataclysm. In some ways they are worse than that because they are more concentrated.
So let the president talk about the stimulus package. Let the talking heads talk about growth in durable goods and the GDP. Let people speculate on the Fed's next move. We know the truth: It doesn't matter.
What matters are the liquidations and the pullouts by the public from those buy-siders who share with Enron the desire to play the game, the game that ended in flames at the end of 2001. |
