from the article: "I've never read a single article that I thought wasn't a massive distortion of what the show's all about," Barron's quoted Jim Cramer as saying. gee, imagine that. the show is touted as a way to make people rich, it doesn't, and he gets upset. it would be even better if the reporters would look at the performance of cramer's action alerts portfolio. that's when people call in and say "i own stock X" and cramer says "no, sell it and buy stock Y - i own it in my action alerts portfolio". and when they saw that THAT mirrored the s&p, it would show how cramer can't do "investing". of course, he said that 8 years ago, but that was before he had a tv show...
One other thing that articles rarely mention is if you evaluate Cramer's performance based on the day he mentions them, you cannot give him credit for the close of that day. To be fair, you would have to buy at the opening price of the next morning, not the closing price. But Cramer doesn't do this and so his performance is ALWAYS inflated. It is like analysts who upgrade/downgrade before the market opens and then they base their performance on the previous day's close. Someone trying to match this performance already starts at a 5%+ disadvantage in most cases. So Cramer's real performance is even crappier than what this article states. Cancel his show.
Agree. Cramer is a putz and needs to go. He recommends stocks based on how friednly the CEO seems. He says "I recommend that stock. I had the CEO on last week and he seemed like a nice guy."