Cramer published his Sunday column. Told readers to hold their noses and buy stocks. The ugly market requires ugly buying, apparently.
Hold your nose. That's the investment thesis. Not "valuations have reached historically attractive levels" or "technical indicators suggest a reversal." Hold your f*cking nose like you're about to eat a gas station egg salad sandwich that's been sitting in your trunk since Labor Day.
The metaphor does most of the work here. When you need to hold your nose to do something, that thing is usually rotten. Spoiled milk. Dead raccoon removal. Cramer's buy recommendations.
He wants you to put cash to work. Not deploy capital strategically. Not allocate according to risk tolerance. Put cash to work, like cash is a lazy teenager who needs to get off the couch and mow some lawns. Your money has been sitting around playing Xbox for too long. Time for it to go lose 30% in three months like a responsible adult.
The column promises to reveal where "we" will do the buying. We. As if you and Jim are carpooling to the stock market together. As if you're splitting an appetizer at Applebee's before heading over to NASDAQ to pick up some shares that smell like a dumpster behind a seafood restaurant in August.
Retail traders will read this. They'll think holding their nose means they're being disciplined contrarians. Brave value investors buying when there's blood in the streets. They're not. They're just buying stocks that Jim Cramer told them to buy in a column where he compared the experience to smelling something that makes you physically recoil.
The stocks probably taste worse than they smell.
Photo by Mauro Lima on Unsplash
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