Jim Cramer’s top 10 things to watch in the stock market Wednesday

1. Wall Street is under pressure Wednesday morning after a mixed session that featured a Dow decline and modest S&P 500 and Nasdaq gains. The market appears to be in a bit of a holding pattern ahead the Federal Reserve’s favorite inflation gauge coming out Thursday. The government said Wednesday the U.S. economy grew at a 3.2% annual rate in fourth quarter, less than initially estimated.
2. Bitcoin’s rally continues, breaking through $60,000 for the first time since November 2021 and just below its all-time high of $68,982 that same month. Traders see two catalysts ahead: the upcoming launch of bitcoin ETFs and the so-called halving event set for next month. Halving slows the rate of bitcoin in circulation.
3. Disney and Indian conglomerate Reliance agree to merge their India businesses. Disney’s Star India and Reliance’s Viacom18 will become a joint venture. Disney has been looking to cut costs and streamline many parts of its business as it looks to fend off activist investor Nelson Peltz’s fight for board seats.
4. Apple bags electric car and shifts to resources to artificial intelligence. This is a reason to like Club stock Apple. The decision was the car pursuits were not economic and not commercial and might not be either for some time. I think Apple didn’t want to be Alphabet, working on Waymo for years with no real return.
5. Alphabet early Wednesday is lower for the third out of the past four days as the Google parent faces backlash over its Gemini AI image generator. Lots of social media posts about historical inaccuracies and questionable responses. Google pulled it Monday, and the stock lost nearly 4.4% and roughly $80 billion in market value. The company plans to relaunch soon.
6. At Saturday’s annual CNBC Investing Club meeting, I said I don’t know what Google is and questioned management’s lack of focus. Alphabet has the lowest multiple of our Significant Six stocks and not in a good way. On “Mad Money” on Tuesday evening, I talked about want to see some order at Google.
7. Club stock TJX Companies beat estimates with its holiday quarter earnings and revenue. Will the off-price owner of T.J. Maxx, Marshall’s and HomeGoods be able to keep the growth going? Conservative guidance, but they have a history of doing that. The retail industry has been working off excess inventory, which ends up at TJX chains.
8. Club name Salesforce report earnings after the closing bell Wednesday. Goldman Sachs says buy the stock. The analysts see multiple growth. Cautiously optimistic 10% to 11% revenue growth. I have been a bit worried about all the price target hikes on Salesforce, possibly raising the already high bar for the quarter. Will good numbers be good enough?
9. Justice Department is going after UnitedHealth. The inquiry seems to be centered on the acquisition of health care providers. But we just don’t have enough information, yet. I am more concerned about the cyberattack outages at one of UNH’s divisions. UnitedHealth brought in external partners like Google Cloud’s Mandiant and Club name Palo Alto Networks to assess the breach.
10. Club name Starbucks agrees with Workers United to begin discussions on a foundational framework. Unionized cafe employees will receive pay hikes that their nonunion coworkers first collected in May 2022. Both sides said Tuesday they found a “constructive path forward” during mediation discussions last week.

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