Investment guru Jim Cramer warns investors to be careful out there because the current market is one of the most treacherous he can ever remember.
“It’s not a safe market. It’s a treacherous market. This is the most treacherous market I’ve seen in a many a year,” Cramer told CNBC. “I think that there’s a lot of people who say, ‘I got to get out. I got to get out, because everyone else is getting out,’” he said.
Cramer says the persistent market sell-off has gone beyond concerns about the economy and the Federal Reserve.
“This was a soul-searching weekend for many of us because you left on Friday kind of in disbelief that the market could just fold. And it’s not just worldwide slowing growth. It’s not just fear of the Fed. But it’s basically exhaustion,” Cramer said on “Squawk on the Street.”
Wall Street’s major indexes each slid more than 1 percent on Monday on concerns about slowing growth and as DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach suggested that U.S. stocks are in a bear market, Reuters explained.
Speaking in a CNBC interview, Gundlach, chief executive officer of DoubleLine Capital and known on Wall Street as the Bond King, also said that the Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates. His comments pushed U.S. stocks to session lows.
“The markets right now are emotionally drained and are very prone to sell-offs,” said Oliver Pursche, chief market strategist at Bruderman Asset Management in New York. “It’s really about sentiment, and the Gundlach statement didn’t help the market.”
Gundlach’s bearish comments added to investors’ skittishness, which had been fanned earlier in the session as the National Association of Home Builders Housing Market Index indicated homebuilder sentiment had fallen to a three-and-a-half-year low.
But a dovish statement from the Fed indicating a slower pace of interest-rate hikes could lift market sentiment, investors said. The Federal Open Market Committee is scheduled to meet on Tuesday and Wednesday.