By: Billy Beerslugger
First of all Jim Cramer is a born and bred Philadelphian. This guys first job was selling ice cream at the Vet during Phillies Games. He’s taken a lot of heat lately from people like Jon Stewart and others and has essentially become the face of Wall Street’s economic meltdown. I realize he’s pretty heavily touted on CNBC. “In Cramer We Trust” is what they say over there. I recently saw a video on the Huffington Post and some dude was touting some other dude’s way of investing and saying we need, “less of In Cramer we trust”. To a certain extent, he deserves some blame. Apparently he was wrong about the collapse of certain companies before the recession started and told people to buy instead of sell, though in other instances he told people to sell resulting in a good call.
To be fair, there is some debate as to whether Cramer’s stock picks even beat the market over the last two years. However, from what I understand he has made himself and others a shit ton of money over the last 4 or so years with his Mad Money show.
So I have news for you, he’s not going to get every call right. While he’s reporting on the state of Economic America and picking stocks I don’t think for one second he did anything malicious to try and kill people’s 401k’s overnight. I just can’t see that happening even though he may have some inside tricks for driving up stock prices etc from when he was a Hedge fund manager.
So why is he singled out and not everyone who reports on Economics of America? Why is he the scapegoat? Because he says things like “Booya” and punches sound effects while commentating? I don’t know. One thing I do know is that no one is infallible. No one is perfect. There’s no hero’s out there. There’s “here’s what I think” and you can either choose to take my advice or not. He’s not holding a gun to your head and making you buy stocks.
Where’s the backlash for the thousands of brokers out there. Where was all the phone calls telling people who had their faith for X amount of years to get out of AIG and all those other stocks before they tanked. Why didn’t they see this coming? Are they not professionals too?
If you are serious about the Stock Market why not take some time to learn about it and not just listen to guys like Cramer and your stock broker and make some choices for yourself. Or use these stock pundits recommendations as a basis for stocks you should consider doing research on for possible purchase.
I’m not going to pretend I’m some big time Stock Guy. I’m not and I wouldn’t take my advice. Most of my vast fortune lies in a collection of Authentic Bob Ross oil paintings and the VHS tapes of him making them from PBS. My art dealer has told me these are going to appreciate like gangbusters so I decided in 2004 that I would take all my money out of Teldar Paper and Blue Star Airlines and invest in these classics from the man that made painting fun. That’s my retirement fund. And as long as Bob Ross resides in the hearts and minds of America my retirement fund is recession proof.