It's not rigged, it only seems that way. I'm talking about that now-ridiculous 150-point decline in the last hour on Monday on worries about Italy, or the big swoon last week over the month-old Fed minutes.

Neither seems to make much sense to me now. The Fed minutes were simply moldy with age, and when we heard from Fed chief Ben Bernanke on Tuesday, it was very clear that nothing had changed whatsoever about his plans to keep buying bonds as necessary. All that sturm und drang and those point-losses for nothing.

How about the last hour on Monday? Sure, there had to be worries about what the Bernanke would say. And there had to be concern and angst about whether Home Depot (HD) could do better than Lowe's (LOW). But let's face it, on Tuesday people figured, "I better sell now, because Italy will be down big tomorrow, and we will open low and get killed."

Did that happen?

Well, the first part sure did. Italy was down almost 5%. But the second part? We went up 90, got hit and then soared past that. The whole worry turned out to be chimerical.

After a while, we have to ask ourselves: What gives here? What are people doing? What's the point of selling down 150 in the last hour?

Again, with mixed signals you can look at the data all sorts of ways. You can say, "Well, with Italy on top of sequestration and blah blah blah, we should be down."

But the sudden swings and lurches simply aren't in synch with the data in any way whatsoever.

Unfortunately, we're in a new pattern here. We're now in a world again where there's no conviction, and everything is one-off or there's no memory, as Doug Kass said earlier Tuesday. The only stocks that seem immune to it are Clorox (CLX), Hershey (HSY), Colgate-Palmolive (CL) and maybe Procter & Gamble (PG).

• Also see: 'Mad Money' recap: don't focus on Italy

All that said, though, if the market has no memory, you have to have one for yourself. Monday, for example, we caught a prescient upgrade for Cummins (CMI). The stock opened up a couple and then proceeded to give up the ghost into the futures-driven sell-off.

Tuesday, the stock rallied back to where it was before the sell-off, because nothing had changed.

You simply had to remember what the market forgot. I think going forward, it's going to be like that market. You need to remember the cards while the market keeps shuffling the deck.

 

Jim Cramer is a co-founder of TheStreet and contributes daily market commentary to the financial news network's sites. Follow his trades for Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust and is long HD and PG.

 

 

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