CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Wednesday that he expects uncertainty over the coronavirus pandemic to continue to cloud the investment landscape, stressing the need to bet on companies with proven management teams at the helm.
“Even though we’re in phase four now, we have no idea what the fifth phase will be like, and you’re wrong if you think you can come up with a meaningful forecast,” the Mad Money host said. expectations about how long it would take for vaccines to develop, for example, proved erroneous.
At this stage of the pandemic, Cramer said investors cannot try to predict the future based simply on indicators such as monetary policy, savings rate and bond yields. These indicators were reliable in a pre-Covidia world, allowing investors to speculate on which sectors they could highlight in the short term, Cramer said.
“All of this is gone now” because of the inevitable “insanity” that has become the Covid crisis, he said.
“That’s why you need to find large companies with CEOs who can navigate any of these phases. They’ll be the winners no matter how all of this develops,” Cramer said.
The current rise in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States, largely related to the highly transmissible delta variant, is the latest complication Wall Street has, Cramer said.
“We’re still trying to figure out what the latest outbreak means, but I think it could end up feeling more like the first phase – where we’re stuck at home, so home sales soar, offices are a little on the side , and there are a lot of demands for evidence, “Cramer said.
“In this environment, you have to rely on individual stock selection. The infrastructure package, the previous stimulus, helped you find ideas,” he added, “but the important thing is that you don’t really can extract much of the aggregate [economic] data. … He always has a look back. “