"Mad Money" - Jim Cramer

[corndogggy]

Anybody else watch this guy? Love him? Hate him? I think it's awesome how he can teach you about stocks in a simpler manner, such as comparing picking stocks to picking a football team, then take such a dull subject and actually make it exciting. I mean, yapping about stock quotes to a heavy metal soundtrack? I think it's great. It's the only TV show I watch at all.

[Silent But Deadly]

I like him too. He gives out some good ideas to look further into and his reasoning behind thinking it.

[Buford]

I saw where it was reported that his picks over the last couple years underperformed the averages by a pretty big margin. He's entertaining and informative, but not a great picker.

[corndogggy]

I saw where it was reported that his picks over the last couple years underperformed the averages by a pretty big margin. He's entertaining and informative, but not a great picker.

I think the problem with this statement is that it's comparing apples to oranges. He will come out and tell you straight up that the "buy and hold" strategy just doesn't work... yet the only way to compare his picks to the average is to take his picks, compare their performance over a given period of time, then compare that to the average, which is basically a buy and hold strategy. That is just not what he's about at all. He dedicated the entire Thursday (I think?) night show on how and when to sell and get out... even when the stock is performing great, and all the analysts are saying to buy it. When he recommends something, he doesn't hold your hand and follow up on it and tell you when to sell... he only says that you shouldn't hang onto it forever. How could you possibly compare this mindset to the average without taking everything he says out of context and basically using his picks but with a buy and hold strategy? It doesn't work like that.

Reminds me of the first great stock that I picked about 10 years ago, Psion... symbol PSIOF. I knew it was going to do good but I was still in college and didn't have alot of cash. I started tracking it when it was about at $3. In a couple of weeks, it hit $12 with no signs of slowing down and I scraped up everything I could and bought it. A week or two later it hit $20. They were about to blow the lid on the handheld market in Europe so I told my college professor and the CEO of my company about it. My college professor immediately called up his broker and plopped $10,000 on it. There's no telling what the CEO dropped on it but he did about the same thing. I needed a downpayment for my house and had no other way of funding it, so I had to sell at about $24, which was cool... but it kept going. It stalled and hit $65 and my professor sold, making over $20K profit within a few weeks. That wasn't the end of it though. It took off again, hitting over $120, then stalling. The CEO never budged. Within a few months it had tumbed back down to about $3 a share. A few months after that, he got around to looking at it, and it was still about the same. He was rather pissed. So, depending on which type of guy you were, that was either a great stock, or a horrible one. It was just funny how the same stock in only a few months earned one guy a small fortune, and made another guy lose one. I imagine my professor is more like Cramer, and the guys saying that he sucks are more like my CEO.