In Jim Cramer's weekly New York Magazine column this week he offers up, among other predictions, his thoughts on where the market is headed in 2006.

THE U.S. STOCK MARKET WILL GO NOWHERE Okay, so that standard Wall Street gibberish isn’t entirely useless. It’s true that our clueless president, huge deficits, and the like will act as an anchor, as they did in 2005, on U.S. stock averages. Unless a U.S. company has big exposure to BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), you can’t expect its stock to make much headway. Those companies that are able to crack into BRIC—companies like Boeing, Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, and Altria—will make worthy but boring gains that will exceed the averages. But you’ll do better to just pick among the potential takeovers with good fundamentals and keep the rest in cash, earning 4.5 percent by the time the Fed’s done lifting rates. That, as they say on the Street, is better than a sharp stick in the eye.

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