As stocks from a variety of sectors saw gains on Wednesday, CNBC’s Jim Cramer examined what he believes is a multi-faceted bull market.
“This market feels almost blasphemous to me because we’re being led by an outrageously bullish combination of stocks, the kind of stocks that absolutely should not be going higher at the same time,” he said. “Nobody wants to say it, but I don’t know if I can recall a moment where we have such disparate stocks climbing together to new highs.”
The Nasdaq Composite, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 topped record highs on Wednesday, climbing after a lighter-than-expected consumer inflation report.
According to Cramer, this rally defies a lot of conventional wisdom about investing at this point in the business cycle. Cramer suggested that “the stocks leading us higher are supposed to be mutually exclusive,” but that’s currently not the case.
For example, he noted that industrial, utility and tech stocks are going up at the same time. Utilities usually see gains while industrials see losses, he explained, with the former doing well during a recession and the latter not so much. He also said many believe there’s an “either/or” market where tech stocks can climb or other groups do.
This dichotomy means that there are many different camps of investors on Wall Street, and perhaps they’re converging, Cramer said. Some feel weak inflation data could make the Federal Reserve move earlier to cut interest rates, so they buy industrials while others feel the Fed will leave rates higher for longer, so they buy the utilities.
“It’s a strange confluence — a remarkable, unseen, unrecognizable bull market — one that happens when the buyers see every glass as half full, even if they’re wrong,” he said.
