Cramer's Morning Take: P&G 4/19/24

Jim Cramer (0:01)

Jim Cramer here to share with you a sample of my take on the market from today's CNBC Investing Club morning meeting.

I talked yesterday about a whoosh. You have to have a whoosh. And I thought at 10 after 10 last night, we were gonna get it, because the S&P was down, ridiculous, it was down, point down. And we didn't. And so until we get the whoosh, we're gonna get keeping, you know, get the up opening, everybody gets insanely bullish. No, you can be up excited about individual stocks that have been hammered. But this essence of thinking that we've bottomed has been at the heart of why we had a worse week this year.

Jeff Marks (0:42)

What's the psychology behind that, right? Why buy into that ugly open versus an up open, which can be, as we've seen, more dangerous to the bulls?

Jim Cramer (0:52)

Yeah, well, we have a lot of people who came in since October, it's always the case.

And they think, wow, I can go buy a stock because things aren't as bad as I thought things. Well, that's uninformed trading and I'm looking for informed investing. I can buy Procter & Gamble because it's a dividend aristocrat where the costs have gone down, but they didn't have to cut the price. So, I mean, we saw that same thing with General Mills, we saw it with Cunnigar. And so what I say is, oh, there's something I can buy, even though it is flat for the week.

Jeff Marks (1:27)

Right, so let's pull up Procter again. Down 1% today off a, even though it was a nice earnings beat, those sales missed. Pointed out Procter was up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, more of this defensive trade as the market was falling. So maybe it's just a little bit of a give back of that today. But the quarter was solid, I thought.

The call was upbeat, talking about volumes flat. That's an improvement from down one last quarter. So sequential progress.

And really, they're doing it without the help of anything from China. China, of course, their skincare brand, SK2, still being hurt by some boycotts in Japan. But if you back that out, China sales were down 3%. That's an improvement from down 10 the quarter before. Commodity costs still a tailwind to earnings this year. The dollar, less of a headwind, or FX, I should say. And that's because of the actions they took in Argentina.

Management not seeing trade down.

Core margins up 310 basis points. Operating margins up 90

Jim Cramer (2:27)

These are such great numbers.

Jeff Marks (2:28)

The volume trends in the right direction, which is encouraging.

Jim Cramer (2:30)

Right, core margins are fabulous.

Jeff Marks (2:32)

It's encouraging because companies can no longer rely on pushing through higher prices on the consumer. They are seeing some pushback now. So it's the volume stories, PG, Constellation Brands. Those are the ones that should separate from the pack.

Jim Cramer (2:46)

Absolutely.

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SPEAKER_3 (3:06)

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