Is the absolute worst thing you can do with your money. Spend some time getting to know what he did to his subscriber's money from 2000-2002 .... The good times are rolling, EVERYONE going long is making bank ... I predict that when it's all said and done, Cramer will be laughed off wall street, never to return ... Once again, read his archived predictions from 2000-2002 ....
I've been a reader since '99. I agree with you in part. His "off the cuff" stuff that he puts in his articles in RM is not to be trusted. He's thinking out loud and I'm not sure he's thought things all the way through. But I can't argue with his results in his action alerts plus service since he's been trading his own money. But remember, I'm only looking for relative performance vs. the indexes and he's accomplished that just fine. I can understand why some people hate him though. If you blindly followed everything he wrote in RM, you'd have a big hole in your account.
shred - i'll have to go back and see if i have the data, but his AA alert picks were just abysmal when i was a member... interesting thing - cramer doesn't use stops. not the brightest of ideas of course, but explains why he was averaging down in AOL, TYC, etc. "I don't use stops, but I do believe that it might help you to draw a line and say , lets take a stock, Intel, that you are not going to let that stock go down below $120 without selling some, because you don't want to give up a big gain." http://www.thestreet.com/_tscs/comment/wrongtactics/983712.html
Gaj, He did start off poorly and last year he had bad absolute numbers, but good relative to my index fund (VTSMX). I guess it's all in your expectations. If you expect him to make you money month in and month out forget it. But like I said earlier, stocks I own via his service are just part of a larger equity portfolio. How much I put in equities is up to me. As far as him not using stops I don't have a problem with that. He's very diversified IMO. I use stops religiously in my trading, so I see it as a kind of diversification of styles that he doesn't use them. I know this is a Cramer bashing thread, so I'll just step aside now. I just wanted to make the point that not EVERYTHING he does sucks. Shreddog
It's funny how someone on this thread has indicated that Rodgers has made more money "traveling over the past 3 years" than anyone that is on ET. When Rodgers left Soros and the Quantum Fund many, many moons ago . . . Rodgers would wind-up in interviews on TV talking about how he is LONG RUSSIA, SHORT JAPAN, LONG SPAIN, SHORT THAILAND, BLAH BLAH BLAH . . . and never once would give an individual stock recommendation. ( If anyone has heard differently, please by all means post it! ). Yet, no one from the Quantum Fund ever knew who he cleared thru. Hmmmmm....
shred - i don't knock everything about cramer. i think he's got an excellent ability to assemble quality talent around him in every field (that i know of). that's quite admirable, as most people can't do that. i'll have to contact someone i know who's an RM subscriber, and look over his records. (and for smaller investors, stops are absolutely essential).
Well, I've subscribed since 99 as well. He probably averages 4 column's a day over there and in the heyday he was writing (as someone else said "thinking out loud") non-stop, he would be a ragging bull pre market, a rabid bear by lunch time and neutral by the close someday, but we all were to some extent back then. In addition to reading RM, I also read both his book, as well as the one by Nicholas Maier that Cramer had removed from many books stores when he proved that it had several "FACTS"...i.e. trades that were incorrect. From reading both those books, and having digested about a thousand of his columns, some worthless, some pointless, but some also pretty profound for myself at the time (his articles on hegefunds pinning the strike on options exp for example....sheesh when PMCS was 170 or whatever and he would write about all the open intereste at 175 or something at lunch....to watch some of those stocks go like a magnaet (sp?) the last hour of trading to those strikes, well it impressed me because I thought he was blowing smoke up his ass when he first starting writing about it, but then everyone in the office starting making money off of running over the bloomberg every 3rd Friday. LOL. I'm sure this game was being played everywhere but it was my first exposure to it, and with the retail daytraders largely in control of the high flyers it was certainly satifiying to understand when certain stocks were just getting ramped or creamed those days by certain MM's at the end of the day. Anyway, this is clearly an opinion driven thread which means its destined to go on for another dozen or so pages, but like a few others, I just have to defend the guy even though I can't stand his on air persona, because as a reader I have made money off of a lot of his calls. Lost money too sometimes, his main weakness as far as I can tell on individual calls is he sometimes thinks something is "over done" only it isn't. But more often than not I think he has been right. Its clear when you read his book atleast that his hedgefund was setup with a large portion of the fund invested into well researched ideas and then they must have kept 25% of it or so in daytrading type ideas or very short-term ideas, where they blasted in and out of stuff the same way alot of us here do. At anyrate the bottom line is in the numbers: from the time his hedge fund was founded to the time he left, the compounded annual return was 24% compared to the s&p's 15%. I mean it wasn't "all" him, but obviously he has more than just a loud mouth because those are real returns and when the fund just started it was 2 guys, no research staff, just two guys total. Compare those numbers to the other know smucks that sat in on Squawk, and they are pretty damn good. Personally I think the guy that needs to be bashed more often is permabull Kudlow. That guy has hardly ever seen an economic number that he didn't like. His answer to everything in typical supply side fashion, lower rates and more high powered money into the system. Give me a break....:eek:
on either of these two things: "Compare those numbers to the other know smucks that sat in on Squawk, and they are pretty damn good. Personally I think the guy that needs to be bashed more often is permabull Kudlow" what shocks me is how often they kept having that dope from munder on. munder promotes a new fund; it's topped! i'll believe it's a true bull market when munder comes on promoting their new "all metals index"...
They still have that Tobin Smith guy on Fox all the time running his mouth who does that changewave.com stuff that is supposed to do well in bull and bear markets. He seemed so brilliant in all those news letters for so many years till he got to try his hand at actually running a mutual fund based on his ramblings. Wasn't so easy trading "real" positions was it Mr. Smith? His fund lasted less than a year, not sure how much they lost but I think it was cut in half. Hasn't stopped him from selling his advice for 2500 a year though and talking smack every weekend on Fox.