Cramer Almost Changed His Wal-Mart Stance

Cramer on CNBC’s MAD MONEY tonight, actually came out and reviewed Wal-Mart (WMT) as one of his segment stocks.  He is taking a contrarian view on it to see the other side after having a challenge on it from his UT Austin presentation yesterday. He still has Lee Scott on his Wall of Shame (we think Scott still needs to be fired).  Cramer thinks that despite all the negative press and negative coverage, the fact that 16 of 28 analysts follow the stock with a BUY or a BUY-bias and that is too bullish for him.  He thinks they will scale back store openings to boost the dividend and that is good, but he doesn’t like the company stores even if they are trying to make them better.  He says he is taking this rating UP now (sort of) from a Triple Sell to a "DON’T BUY."  There was some trading activity as it sounded like Cramer was going to change his stance on the company, but it is back to unchanged after closing up almost 1% on the day.

We actually had something here on this today as far as a strategy for the company.  Wal-Mart needs to lower its headcount.  We actually gave a strategy for it where it could avoid announcing lay-offs and thereby avoid the massively negative PR they would get for it.  That might not entirely save Lee Scott, but it might help shareholders that have been long and wrong for far too long.

Jon C. Ogg
March 21, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.