Cramer: Stayin' Alive With the New High List

N E W   Y O R K, Nov. 27 -- — What is working? What is making money for people? We don’t ask that enough around here. For the past four years we have been so fixated on tech that we forget the other sectors that have been putting points on the board.

As a reality check about where to spend my time, I always find the New High list to be the most refreshing gauge there is. In a brutal market like this, you tend to forget that there is money being made every day on the long side.

The New High list is where that money is being made. Take the list from this weekend. It is chock-full of decidedly unmixed messages about what is making you money in this market.

The PicksImmediately, a whole group of stocks just jumps out at you: restaurant stocks. Darden is there. So is Wendy’s, Landry’s and Jack in the Box.

If one or two were on the list, you could say, hmm, coincidence. But this kind of pattern is just downright noisy. It is saying, “Mid-priced restaurants work.”

Interestingly, this group correlates quite well with a decline in wage inflation. I think the restaurant move might be signaling a shift in marginal costs in favor of restaurants. These companies have had to pay far more than the minimum wage to staff their stores in the past few years. Maybe that’s about to end. Maybe costs are coming down.

What will I do with this? I will redouble my efforts to find something I like about McDonald’s because it fits. I will look at others in the cohort. And I will wait for some of these to come down, so I can pounce.

Still Talking about the ElectionCoors, Brown-Forman and Anheuser-Busch also make the list. These are recession stocks, as are the plethora of tobacco stocks that find there way on the list. I had thought that the tobacco stocks were going up because of a potential Bush victory, but now I think they are going up because they hold up well when the economy slows.

I feel that way because I don’t sense that Gore is any more or less positive for alcohol than Bush. When both these groups go up simultaneously, that is a sign that people think that we could be headed into a recession. Wouldn’t shock me considering the anemic profit figures we have been seeing lately. I will buy more Philip Morris today, but then again, I always buy more Philip Morris.