I subscribe to both rm and rm pro. I think that RM pro is just about all kass and to a lesser extent rocker. I'd say that in the 3 months that I've used it, I've maybe made 10k off of RM pro. And I paid about 1k for that. So it's worth it to me. That said, I think that for the cost, regular rm is much better. The thing is that you have to understand all the seperate personalities and how to read them. You just can't take their advice piecemeal. You must learn how to interpret it all into your own vision of things. On that note, who here subscribes to streetview. Is it worth it? Does herb write a lot for it? I was interested in it, but I don't know how much it costs. They don't quote a price on the site.
Herb writes for it. (I write for it also but in deference to Herb I put parentheses around this sentence). It costs $30K / year. I think the only subcribers are super-big hedge funds who are able to make back the subscription price in one tiny trade.
vishnu what do people at real money really think of cramer. i heard that hes thought of as a joke by his peers.
he wouldn't be able to reply if that were the case... however, if he's not in nyc, he probably has (unless it's initiated) zero contact with cramer. most of the gossip comes out of nyc. if he makes derogatory comments that cross the line, he'll get a warning about this being a 'positive' site, etc.
It's kind of ironic that hedge funds are willing to pay $30k to read Herb, since my impression is 99% of his stuff is fed to him by hedge fund shorts.
I emailed Cramer a couple of years back and said I thought he was ONE BIG JERK. He emailed back... suggested I "take a pill".
Recently Cramer and I clashed on the site when I directly criticized the quality of Morgan Stanley's research. MS upgraded CSX (John Snow's company) without mentioning they owned 7M shares and that they were the lead banker on CSX's miserable $13B (thats BILLION) acquisition of Conrail. As you can imagine, I was suspicious of the research. As far as I can tell, all's fair on thestreet. The editors were pretty encouraging of the "argument" even though the MS analyst is a personal friend of Cramer's. Then again, I've only been there a month. I don't know Cramer personally other than emails. To be honest, he seems like a very nice guy to me. Also, most of the other writers/traders there seem to have a genuine respect for him. If I didn't like him I would have no problem posting it just like I had no problem arguing with him about an analyst that was a friend of his. RM Pro pays basically nothing and I just like doing it. If it was taken away from me I'd be disappointed for a day and then get back to 100% focus on my fund as opposed to 99%. Already I'm getting a lot of flack from my investors for posting ideas there. A couple of points in general: a. in my opinion, nobody should take any trade ideas from any site. There's a saying told to me by a guy who's successfully built up a $3B hedge fund, "he who rides the tiger's back gets eaten first." b. when i post a trade idea i post the very specific methodology i use to get that idea. Most of the other traders on the RM and RM Pro sites do the same. If you start to see the trades work it might encourage you to try a similar methodology. I think thats the real value there and worth the fee. c. I'm not trying to defend him but Cramer did return 30%/year for about ten years and most of that time he was also a journalist and writing abt his trades, which is pretty difficult to do. Yeah, maybe he did this, that, or the other thing. Who knows? But I "grew up" in the dot-com fantasyland and I saw some pretty bad stuff that can't be compared with. Swap revenues, debt moved off-balance sheet, hiding losses in acquisition writeoffs, lying to analysts, etc was all child's play for most of the dot-com companies that were making daytraders rich. Nobody was complaining then. Its just a different world now. d. One thing abt Cramer is that he really did a lot to popularize the whole notion of trading among the masses. This created a whole class of retail investors who were suddenly doing swing trades. Again, I don't think this particularly hurt the hard core traders among us. Probably the opposite. Like most of us i spend a lot of time reading all the main financial sites: briefing.com, marketwatch, msn money, smartmoney, thestreet, realmoney, minyanville, etc. My own personal feeling (and I acted on it by choosing where I wanted to write) is that realmoney had the best in-depth commentary, briefing had the best news updates combined with commentary, and on a one-off basis I really like Niederhoffer's articles on MSN Money and Markman's articles there.
thanks for taking so much of your valuable time to write a lengthy reply on elite trader for us .... have a happy and safe 2003