July 27th - VLO

Cramer spoke of upside surprises and looked into his crystal ball and said VLO Valero Energy Corp. would be one of those stocks. This stock trades at $65.53 and is an oil refining stock, so not one that I am going to short with a 10 foot poll. My only question to this is....was anyone expecting poor earnings or just in-line earnings from this company? With oil being way up these days, shouldn't the refineries be sharing in those profits? And consider Cramer has mentioned several times that we have not built a new refinery in the last 25 years. Maybe I'm just missing something here, or Cramer is just trying to look like a fortune teller and win over a some new viewers. But maybe he just wants to point out the obvious to people who may be thinking too hard, but what if the upside is already priced into the stock? This was a $100 stock before it split not that long ago, and has climbed even more.

Cramer then looked at an analyst downgrade on HAL Halliburton Co. and how he disagreed (not only because he owns the stock for his charitable trust). Cramer says the analyst only downgraded the stock because it kept going down even when he had a buy on it. Cramer now says that HAL was bottoming and has even climbed a few points since. Although the stock is up from $32.35 to $32.70 after hours (on light volume) this is once again another oil/gas play, a sector which I don't short. And it may also be the conspiracy theory side of me, but any company that once had the vice-president on its payroll, I don't want to mess with.

Next Cramer created a Luxury Index to track how people might be spending. He believes this index is on the decline as a recession is looming and the rich are even spending less.

The index is comprised of the following stocks: COH, RL, TIF, FS, HAR, OEH, JWN, MOV, DEO, TOL, WYNN, RUTH

These were NOT picks from Cramer. These were simply a bunch of stocks that he can look at as a group to gauge the market and consumer spending. To be honest, I'm a little surprised that no one bought these stocks after hours (yet). I figured someone would just find the cheapest in the list and buy some, not realizing that they weren't really picks.