We recently compiled a list of the Jim Cramer Discusses These 11 Stocks & Finds Few Reasons To Sell. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK) stands against the other stocks.
In a recent appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, Jim Cramer commented on why the flagship S&P index remained stable despite multiple catalysts such as a trade war, DeepSeek, and a new administration. Cramer believes that “there’s still an undercurrent that the President is good for business.” He recalled how hedge fund billionaire David Tepper’s comments about the market were precarious and didn’t reflect the way it was behaving. Cramer outlined “I mean yesterday we had an individual talking about how the situation’s precarious on Squawk Box. And it’s not.”
Instead, Cramer shared “These are things where if you check the cadence of what happened, the President does something, it looks really, really harsh on Mexico. Claudia Sheinbaum comes back and says, you know what, I agree. Uh, the President does something it looks really harsh on Canada. And Canada comes back and says, let’s make a talk. Let’s do something. He does something that looks really harsh about China, it’s not harsh at all. So China then comes back, I mean these are all signs that the President’s strategy, I think people say, is working.” As a result, he wondered why there was any need to sell stocks. Replying to his question, Cramer pointed out “And the answer is why you would sell is because you don’t believe in the President. And you think that the President has got a strategy that doesn’t exist. I come back and say, well I don’t know. I mean there was a lot of success yesterday, so why sell?”
The CNBC TV host also commented on a JPMorgan note saying that policy shifts are moving towards business unfriendliness. Cramer holds a mixed opinion in this regard. On one hand, while he countered by wondering “how can it, look, deregulation is what businesses have been asking for. And they’re getting that in spade,” on the other hand he agreed that “Yes, did President Trump not do it in the order we wanted? Which would be first we get big tax cuts, we get deregulation. And then after that, you what we’re gonna hit them it [inaudible]. He went faster than that. And that was something that was perceived anti business.”
In fact, Cramer was surprised by the President’s China approach. He had “expected [a] sixty percent tariff on China. . . expected that the President would say listen, we will no longer import any steel from Mexico cause so much of it is from China. . . [and] thought that there would be tariffs on things that are necessary to China that would have made it horrible.”
Further commenting on the White House’s approach towards China, Cramer stated:
“If you’re China you’re saying, hey you know what, this guy really wants a deal with us. And let’s sit down. Now I remember when the President . . .he said look I think that things could be better with China. Now if you go back and read Peter Navarro’s book, about, when he talks about Trump and China. Oh man. There were people. . . Steve Mnuchin, who, he calls out, Navarro, as being China-poligists, and in a really harsh way, the book is. . . well written. And I just think that Navarro lost here, because these were not harsh.”
Our Methodology
To make our list of the stocks that Jim Cramer talked about, we listed down the stocks he mentioned during CNBC’s Squawk on the Street aired on February 4th.
For these stocks, we also mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds invest in? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points. (see more details here).
A close-up of a person’s hand holding a bottle of pharmaceuticals.
Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q3 2024: 86
Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK) is a pharmaceutical company that Cramer commonly discusses on his show. Its shares are down by 31.7% over the past year primarily due to troubles in China over the firm’s GARDASIL HPV. Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK)’s stock dropped by 9.8% in July last year after the firm shared that the HPV vaccine’s shipments in China dropped due to anti-corruption and anti-bribery initiatives in the country. The stock lost another 9% in February after it shared that it had paused GARDASIL shipments in China to allow inventory to clear up. Cramer also commented on Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK)’s China woes:
“[GARDASIL China pause] This is an inventory backup by the middleman in China and they basically said, listen we can’t take anymore. They haven’t been able to sell it. It’s a major defeat for Rob Davis. It’s unfortunate because they have tremendous franchising in KEYTRUDA. But they had to put this behind them. They had to be able to say, hey look, we gotta restart here. We’re not selling any GARDASIL. Which by the way is a terrific vaccine, and you would think that the Chinese, if they were good to their people would allow this to be sold. So it was something that I felt was, just came out of nowhere. You know David, we know that Merck is a great company. But the inventories, they could not, help the middleman, and say listen, we’ll take it back. They just had to say, okay we won’t ship anymore. And they have to work the inventory down.”
“It’s a giant franchise. And a great franchise. And I think that if you would have told me you know what the Chinese are not going to let it be sold, I . . .it’s a fantastic vaccine, but [the] fact is it got caught up in what I regard as being a geopolitical tension. And I think that there’s nothing Rob could do about it. But it is gonna bring down the drug stocks. Particularly ugly situation because people are in it for KEYTRUDA and didn’t expect the GARDASIL would be just, that there’s an inventory backup in a drug that’s so important.”
Overall MRK ranks 5th on our list of the stocks Jim Cramer recently discussed. While we acknowledge the potential of MRK as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than MRK but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
