Recovery Time
By James J. Cramer
5/27/99 8:04 AM ET
This morning's futures say that yesterday is a "do over." They mock the gains of Wednesday's session with their decidedly negative tone. It is often like that. You will have a session that seemed spectacular, and then you will come in the next day and the whole karma -- and I am not a karma kind of guy -- will be negative.
Use it to your advantage. That turnaround yesterday was not bogus. It was a wake-up call to all who had given up on this market and pronounced its condition terminal. It was the patient ripping off the DNR sign (do not resuscitate) and saying, Hey, don't write me off yet -- I'm good for a trading bounce to the upside, if only to prove the doubters wrong.
Unfortunately, like the patient who has spent a lot of time in the hospital bed, you can't just resume the upside. Even Steven Segal, in the best-of-genre Hard to Kill, had to do some Zen time in the hills of Chino before he could come back and rip the lungs out of the bad guys.
What I like to do is wait until some of yesterday's big gainers have a few points erased from their latest gains, and then stick some bids in. While much of yesterday's move might have been short-covering, there was real buying in some Nets and some tech, particularly listed tech. I want to increase my positions in telco tech (stuff that makes the Net work better off of copper-wire phones), and I want to buy aerospace now that those stocks have come down.
And I want more negativity, more nonbelievers and more skeptics. Those things make the market go higher, not lower.
Random musings: It's cynicism times two. Some reader keeps emailing me, asking me why I don't like late-night trading. She doesn't believe that I want to spend more time with my kids. Heck, she doesn't even think that I went to the Mets game with my 7-year-old daughter. She thinks I made it up. Wow, talk about cynical! All I can say is, if you can pry that Mets black jersey from my daughter's body sometime this week, please do, as everyone at school has seen enough of it already! And reader, get a life!
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