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Pastimes : James Cramer Skeptic Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Utopian who wrote (924)	10/30/1998 1:56:00 PM
From: Greg Jung	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1254

Cramer must've missed the 50% moves from Oct 8 but bygod he'll get his points to earn the rent on the Bloomberg terminal. Vintage Cramer: Oct 30, 1998 Wrong! Tactics and Strategies: Beware of Foot-in-Mouth Disease By James J. Cramer Beware of the rogue quote. A couple of weeks ago, Lew Platt, the Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HWP - news) exec who can't seem to keep his foot out of his mouth, was quoted on a wire service as saying that Y2K will cause a slowdown that will hurt his business. When it came over, Jeff Berkowitz and I pondered it for about 20 seconds and then ran in to buy puts on HWP. Before we knew it, we had made a dollar and skeedaddled. The stock quickly dropped another three points before it was at last corrected by a well-meaning corporate spokesman, no doubt horribly embarrassed that the comment had been made to begin with. Wednesday night another wire service wrote up a story involving Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO - news) that gave guidance to growth that was below the traditional guidance from the networker. We quickly sold some Cisco to buy it back when the service was corrected. Like Hewlett-Packard, Cisco traded down another dollar from our purchase before the denial was fully circulated by the analyst community. What do these have in common? In a world where guidance is everything, comments that are made off the cuff or are misinterpreted by a reporter take on incredible significance. These two incidents will look like blips on the chart that will barely be be noticeable several months from now. But for a couple of scary moments, both stocks looked like goners. My advice is that when you see off-the-cuff remarks by an exec of a firm on the wires that is directly contrary to the party line of the company, you must presume error on the part of the wires. Both of these instances were phenomenal buying opportunities once they were refuted. blah blah blah ...