You know when you have gotten too negative? When you pick up the paper and the lead story is "Slump Sinks Visa Program," and you say, "That's it! I can't take it ... Visa was the one bright spot in my portfolio, and now they've taken that away!"
Then you read the story and you know it is not about bank fee rates or credit card usage or congressional bashing for once, but about a skilled workers program. It has nothing to do with the red-hot Visa (NYSE: V) (Cramer's Take) at all.
But that's what happens after you have had your head bashed in for so many days. It is also what happens when you fall prey to believing that all that is ever going to happen is the worst case, as I felt when I read the Goldman Sachs GDP forecast yesterday, the one that said this number today would be wretched.
That turns out to have been as wrong as my read of the Visa situation.
I still don't like this market. We can have an end-of-the-month snapback aided by the oversold condition, but what people liked in this GDP report is all about stabilizing (albeit at lower levels), not about growing the economy, and the claims numbers bears that out.
Yes, had you bought at the bottom yesterday, you are looking good.
But if you bought at Dow 10,000, I think you are thanking your lucky stars at a chance to get back to even, as slim as that can be, before the lead story in the paper is a story about bashing Visa the company, not the program.
Jim Cramer is co-founder and chairman of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com's sites and serves as an adviser to the company's CEO. At the time of publication, Cramer was long Visa and Goldman Sachs.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-01-2009 @ 3:35PM
The Citizen said...
Glad I bailed on market a few weeks ago, it's gonna get real ugly next week.