https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anti-midas-touch-of-mad-moneys-jim-cramer/
埃隆馬斯克控制的電動汽車公司特斯拉於 2010 年 6 月上市時，其 IPO 定價為每股 17 美元，吉姆克萊默這位無處不在且非常自信的美國電視主播在他的節目 Mad Money 中宣稱投資者應該避免不惜一切代價庫存。這是一個'賣！賣！賣！' 克萊默以他典型的誇張、過度含咖啡因的風格宣布。但他並沒有結束他的謾罵，遠沒有結束。
“你不想擁有這隻股票，”他繼續說道。'你不想租它。哎呀，你甚至不應該租這該死的東西。第二天，另一位 CNBC 記者在曼哈頓街頭找到了馬斯克，並告訴他吉姆克萊默前一天對特斯拉 IPO 所說的話：“我們自己的吉姆克萊默昨天說，”我不確定特斯拉是否有商業計劃去上班。這不是一項明智的投資。” 對於那些關注特斯拉現狀和你籌集的資金並說“他們有一輛不錯的敞篷跑車，但他們沒有好的商業計劃”的懷疑論者，你怎麼說？
特斯拉的首次公開募股籌集了約 2.25 億美元（1.84 億英鎊），股票在上市首日上漲了約 40%。那時馬斯克仍然留著大部分黑髮，顯然對事物感覺良好。“嗯，我想，你知道，”馬斯克回答說，“吉姆可能會說，‘是的，當然，吉姆，我們不是貝爾斯登。’”伯恩。大燒傷。燒傷病，正如 CNBC 老練的觀眾所熟知的那樣。
克萊默仍然很難把你的眼睛移開，如果狂野的狂歡節狂歡選股是你的事
馬斯克指的是兩年多前那個臭名昭著的時刻，也就是 2008 年 3 月，當時一位 瘋狂賺錢的 觀眾問克萊默，他是否應該擔心持有貝爾斯登的股票。這家擁有 85 年曆史的投資銀行在關於其持續生存能力的瘋狂謠言中搖搖欲墜。當天市場上漲了 400 多點，所以情況可能並不像市場傳言所暗示的那麼糟糕。回應另一個獲得專利的 Cramer 長篇大論，他說，'不！不！不！貝爾斯登很好。不要把錢拿出來！如果除了plus 400還有一個外賣，Bear Stearns還不算麻煩！如果有的話，它更有可能被接管。不要把你的錢從 Bear 轉移出去。那簡直是在裝傻！別傻了！
在馬斯克誇誇其談的時候，大多數人都知道，貝爾斯登在克萊默咆哮之後的第二天就準備申請破產保護。然後，由於美聯儲的大規模干預，摩根大通同意以每股 2 美元的價格收購貝爾斯登，這個價格看起來像是打字錯誤。貝爾斯登之所以避免破產，只是因為美聯儲制定了救助計劃；這是美國歷史上美聯儲首次拯救華爾街投資銀行。克萊默對貝爾斯登的看法大錯特錯。
如果 CNBC 的觀眾聽了他的話並持有他們的貝爾斯登股票，他們幾乎會失去一切，即使在摩根大通最終將其報價提高到每股 10 美元之後也是如此。並有 瘋狂的錢的觀眾購買了特斯拉的股票，而不是賣掉它，他們本可以像馬斯克那樣發一筆小錢，或者賺一大筆錢。自首次公開募股以來，特斯拉股價上漲了 13,000% 以上——這是在 2022 年下跌約 70% 之後。當克萊默稍微改變方向時，他在去年 8 月表示，“我全力支持特斯拉和首席執行官埃隆馬斯克，”馬斯克出售了價值近 70 億美元（57 億英鎊）的特斯拉股票，再次燒毀了他——很可能是無意中。事實上，自克萊默“全力投入”特斯拉以來，該股已下跌近 50%。任何在他的推薦下購買特斯拉的人都會被燒毀。
但對於 Cramer，總是有更多。去年 6 月，在 SBF 和 FTX 似乎拯救了幾家陷入困境的加密貨幣公司之後，他稱讚 Sam Bankman-Fried（即 SBF）是 FTX 現已名譽掃地和被監禁的創始人，稱其為“新摩根大通”。這不是 Cramer 第一次滔滔不絕地談論創始人億萬富翁：2015 年 4 月，他將 Theranos 創始人 Elizabeth Holmes 與 Steve Jobs 相提並論，後者後來因欺詐被判入獄 11 年。“我認為你是一個有遠見的下一代人，”他在 Mad Mone y 的採訪中告訴她。
在 FTX 於 2022 年 11 月 11 日申請破產保護的三天前，擁有約 175,000 名 Twitter 粉絲的獨立華爾街研究公司 Hedgeye 標記了 Cramer 關於 SBF 和摩根大通的推文。“在人類歷史上，從來沒有人犯過如此可靠的錯誤，”Hedgeye 寫道。“@JimCramer 是反點石成金者——這個混蛋接觸到的一切都會變成狗屎。”
或者考慮 Cramer 對 Meta Platforms 的呼籲，該公司曾被稱為 Facebook。2022 年 6 月 23 日，他表示 Meta 的股票值得買入，因為其首席執行官馬克扎克伯格“簡直不可阻擋”，而扎克伯格投入數十億美元的“元宇宙”是“一個很酷的去處” . 扎克伯格前一天曾是《瘋狂金錢》的嘉賓——克萊默讓他喋喋不休地談論元宇宙的奇蹟——該片段以 CNBC 主播的化身為特色，其中包括克萊默。他似乎真的很感動——扎克伯格甚至為園藝愛好者克萊默創建了一個 VR 花園。在與他的聯合主播大衛·費伯 (David Faber) 的談話中，克萊默 (Cramer) 滔滔不絕地說道，“這件事是真的”。他似乎幾乎被情緒控制住了。
快進四個月，到了 10 月 27 日，克萊默再次情緒激動，這次是謙遜，而不是喜悅。他似乎幾乎要在空氣中哭泣。Meta 剛剛公佈了令人失望的第三季度收益，該股一天內下跌 25%，跌至六年來的最低水平。“讓我這麼說，”克萊默哽咽地說，“我在這裡犯了一個錯誤。我錯了。'
他說，對扎克伯格及其管理團隊抱有信心是“不明智的”。他說：“我原以為會有一種理解，即你不能在自由現金流中花錢，必須有一定程度的紀律。” 當 Faber 問他哪裡做錯了時，Cramer 回答說：'我做錯了什麼？我信任他們，而不是我自己。為此我感到遺憾。我在這行乾了四十年，做得不好。我不驕傲。
一位認識他幾十年的 Cramer 粉絲質疑他的建議如今有多大價值。他說，他以一種根本不可能的方式表現自己是每一種可能的投資、股票、問題和公司的大師。“這就是為什麼記錄反映了基本的宏觀和微觀錯誤，然後它讓你問這個問題，‘這是否從智慧下降到狂歡狂歡？’”
許多人似乎都在想同樣的事情。事實上，有一個新的家庭手工業致力於做 與 吉姆克萊默所建議的相反的事情。在 Twitter 上，自 2021 年 11 月以來，擁有 170,000 名關注者的賬戶@CramerTracker 一直存在。它宣稱，它的唯一目的是跟踪“Jim Cramer 的股票推薦，這樣你就可以做相反的事情”。我在密歇根找到了該網站 24 歲的老闆——他拒絕透露他的名字——他告訴我他“總是著迷於”克萊默可以在國家電視台上“基本上說任何他想說的，每一天，沒有責任'。
CramerTracker 的傢伙說，他創建該網站是為了跟踪 Cramer 在 CNBC 上向觀眾推薦的股票。“但我花的時間越多，我就越意識到，就像‘天哪，這傢伙每個月都有數千個電話。’” 只是強調他做對的和做錯的，通常情況下，他擊中了一些石頭。
他決定分析 Cramer 在 2017 年至 2021 年間推薦的股票的表現——他的 12,564 次個人看漲——並將它們與標準普爾 500 指數的同步表現進行比較。分析表明，Cramer 的選擇比標準普爾指數低了大約 6 個百分點。無論如何，這並不可怕，但遠非恆星。“比我預期的更接近市場，”他說。
分析還顯示，第二天克萊默推薦的股票成交量增加了約 25%：人們聽從了他的建議，但很快就虧了錢。人們認為 CramerTracker 背後的人不喜歡 Cramer，因為他一直對他和他的股票推薦持負面態度。但事實並非如此。“我需要他，”他告訴我。“沒有他，我就沒有自己的東西。”
James Kardatzke 是 Quiver Quantitative 的首席執行官，該公司為交易者提供“獨特的數據集”，他希望這能讓他們對交易機會有特別的了解。他今年 22 歲，就像@CramerTracker 背後的人一樣，他希望靠 Jim Cramer 的缺點謀生。去年 8 月，他創建了“Inverse Jim Cramer Strategy”並將 其發佈 在 Seeking Alpha 上，該網站是交易員及其想法的知名網站。
卡達茨克寫道： “雖然他的選股表現略微乏善可陳，經常成為批評的對象，但這位 瘋狂金錢 主持人無疑是金融電視史上最具影響力的電視名人之一。” “然而，他的選股能力多年來似乎在慢慢惡化，這仍然是一個事實。” Kardatzke 分析了 Cramer 8 月份“最受推薦”的 2022 年 10 隻股票——從寶潔公司（排名第一，下跌 10%）到 Marvell Technology（排名第十，下跌 32%），Meta Platforms 排名第八，到那一年，損失了 19%。克萊默在 1 月至 8 月期間大肆吹捧的所有 10 隻股票都出現了虧損，考慮到標準普爾 500 指數自年初以來下跌超過 14%，這並不令人意外。
然而，令人驚訝的是，Kardatzke 的 反向 Cramer 投資策略——與 Cramer 的選擇相關的空頭和多頭的組合——獲得了豐厚的回報。從 2021 年 8 月到 Seeking Alpha 文章發表的一年期間，Kardatzke 的交易策略產生了 20.1% 的回報，而同期標準普爾 500 指數下跌 6.3%，高達 2,600 個基點不同之處。
Kardatzke 在 10 月份更新了分析。他在 Seeking Alpha 上再次寫道：“我們的反向吉姆克萊默策略甚至在這個困難的下半年表現出色。” “ Mad Money 主持人本人再次被證明是一流投資建議的主要來源，但前提是我們要顛倒這些建議。” 2022 年第三季度，反向 Cramer 策略的回報率為 2.2%，而市場下跌了 2.4%，波動幅度較小，為 400 個基點，但仍值得注意。
在他位於威斯康星州的家中接受采訪時，Kardatzke 告訴我，逆克萊默策略的流行源於他認為“專家”普遍持懷疑態度。他說：“很多人開始變得更加憤世嫉俗，認為這些人真的是專家，他們確切地知道會發生什麼，並且在提出建議和預測時是千里眼的。”
Tuttle Capital Management 的董事總經理 Matthew Tuttle 是康涅狄格州田園詩般的 Riverside 的一家小型投資顧問公司，他比 CramerTracker 和 Quiver Quantitative 背後的年輕人更進一步採用了反向 Cramer 投資策略。10 月，Tuttle 向美國證券交易委員會提交了一份註冊聲明，開始交易一種新的 ETF（交易所交易基金），這將允許投資者通過購買 Inverse Cramer ETF – SJIM（簡稱 Jim）直接反對 Cramer 的建議。 .
塔特爾在招股說明書中寫道，新的 ETF“旨在提供與電視名人吉姆克萊默推薦的投資結果大致相反的投資結果，在費用和支出之前。” 他寫道，至少 80% 的 ETF 投資將投資於“克萊默提到的證券的反向投資”，要么做空他推薦的股票，要么簽訂與他的股票“產生負相關”的衍生品合約。 -空氣建議。
雖然塔特爾似乎是一位機會均等的 ETF 顧問——他也在推動“Long Cramer”ETF (LJIM)——但他的心似乎恰恰相反。塔特爾自 1999 年以來一直是華爾街交易員，他說他“堅信”個人投資者需要了解華爾街和個別公司的財務狀況。“只要看看外面發生的所有廢話，”他告訴我。
個人投資者自我教育的一個地方是財經新聞網絡，例如 CNBC、Fox Business 和 Bloomberg。但塔特爾擔心他們內容的質量。他說，財經媒體變成了娛樂，我明白了，是收視率。“看看廣告商是誰……我不會那麼介意……如果他們這樣貼上標籤的話。” 他尤其惱火的是，CNBC 讓 Cramer 自由發揮他的建議，而當這些建議被證明是災難性的時，卻很少追究他的責任。“當吉姆克萊默上場時，他們尊重他：“嘿，我們要讓吉姆上場，問問他對這件事的看法，”塔特爾繼續說道。'而且從來沒有，“嘿，吉姆，昨天我們問過你對 SNAP 收益的看法，你說 SNAP 會很棒。而現在，它下降了 30%。你是不是聽錯了？” 而且從來沒有這樣的東西；' - 實際上偶爾會有 - '他對前一天和前一天所說的話有健忘症。底部從來沒有免責聲明，“嘿，這只是娛樂”，這顯然應該放在 瘋狂的錢。
就 CNBC 而言，我是偶爾的撰稿人，它拒絕讓克萊默在 《旁觀者》的截止日期前接受采訪，也不允許我與他的任何 CNBC 同事交談或介紹我給他的朋友。“克萊默不願意接受采訪，”CNBC 發言人基思·科科扎 (Keith Cocozza) 在給我的電子郵件中說。
現年 67 歲的吉姆·克萊默 (Jim Cramer) 是個神童。他在費城郊區長大。他的母親是一位藝術家；他的父親擁有一家包裝公司。十幾歲的時候，他在退伍軍人體育場兜售可口可樂和冰淇淋。在哈佛，他學習政府管理，後來成為哈佛深紅報的總裁兼主編 。除了他偶爾對哈佛課程的不滿之外，克萊默的大部分 Crimson 作品都是關於爵士樂的。
1977 年畢業後，克萊默在塔拉哈西和洛杉磯擔任報社記者，為 先驅報撰寫訃告。在他的洛杉磯公寓被搶劫後，他在車外住了九個月。1981 年，克萊默進入哈佛法學院就讀。他在那裡開始交易股票，在答錄機上留下股票提示，賺到足夠的錢來支付學費。然後是建立聯繫的時候了。哈佛校友邁克爾·金斯利 (Michael Kinsley) 將克拉默介紹給了 新共和國 ( New Republic ) 的老闆馬蒂·佩雷茨 (Marty Peretz) – 克萊默在 1977 年 11 月為該雜誌發表的唯一一篇文章是關於精英管理在國家橄欖球聯盟中的重要性，特別是在他心愛的費城老鷹隊。Peretz 還從 Cramer 的一些答錄機推薦中賺錢，並給了 Cramer 500,000 美元用於投資；他在兩年內為 Peretz 賺了 150,000 美元。
對或錯，收視率高，收視率低，Cramer 在 CNBC 二十年後仍然存在
從哈佛法學院畢業後，克萊默曾短暫擔任為克勞斯·馮·比洛辯護的艾倫·德肖維茨的職員，之後加入了高盛的銷售和交易部門。（他通過了律師資格考試，但從未從事法律工作）。三年後，他離開高盛，用大約 4.5 億美元的投資者資金成立了自己的對沖基金。除了 Peretz 之外，早期的投資者還有 Steven Brill， 他是 Cramer 為其撰寫的《美國律師》的所有者，以及他的法學院同學 Eliot Spitzer，後者後來擔任紐約州司法部長和州長。他一直經營著自己的公司，直到 2001 年從對沖基金業務退休。2005 年，他告訴 《商業周刊 》，他的平均年回報率為 24%，年薪超過 1000 萬美元。
克萊默也有一些副業。1996 年，他和 Peretz 創辦了 TheStreet.com，這是一個專注於財經新聞和投資的網站。克萊默於 1999 年 5 月在互聯網泡沫破滅之前將其上市，並賺了一筆小錢。他是 SmartMoney的特約編輯。他經常出現在 CNBC 上。2002 年，他與前貝爾斯登經濟學家、唐納德特朗普政府未來的國家經濟顧問拉里庫德洛合作，在 CNBC 主持 庫德洛和克萊默 。2005 年 3 月，Cramer 啟動 了他自己的 CNBC 節目Mad Money，以更好地教育不斷壯大的非專業投資者階層。它迅速成為 CNBC 收視率最高的節目，截至 2005 年 11 月，每個工作日晚上約有 380,000 名觀眾收看。（2022 年 11 月，只有約 147,000 人收看 瘋狂的錢；它不再是 CNBC 最受歡迎的十個節目之一。）
克萊默越來越出名了。2005 年 11 月，Dan Rather 在60 分鐘節目中採訪了他 。“他是商業節目主持人的傑里·劉易斯，他會做任何事情來吸引你的注意力，”拉瑟說。他讓 Cramer 承認他建議人們購買 Dick's Sporting Goods 的股權是錯誤的。
When Tesla, the electric-car company controlled by Elon Musk, went public in June 2010, pricing its IPO at $17 per share, Jim Cramer, the ubiquitous and highly confident American TV anchor, proclaimed on his show Mad Money that investors should avoid the stock at all costs. It was a ‘Sell! Sell! Sell!’ Cramer announced in his typical over-the-top, over-caffeinated style. But he wasn’t finished with his diatribe, not by a long shot.
‘You don’t want to own this stock,’ he continued. ‘You don’t want to lease it. Heck, you shouldn’t even rent the darn thing.’ The next day, another CNBC reporter found Musk on the streets of Manhattan and told him what Jim Cramer had said about the Tesla IPO the day before: ‘Our own Jim Cramer said yesterday, “I’m not sure Tesla has a business plan that’s going to work. It’s not a smart investment.” What do you say to the skeptics who look at where Tesla is and the money that you’re raising and say, “They’ve got a nice roadster, but they don’t have a good business plan?”‘
Tesla’s IPO had raised some $225 million (£184 million) and the stock had traded up around 40 per cent on its first day. Musk still had most of his dark hair back then and was obviously feeling good about things. ‘Well, I think, you know,’ Musk responded, ‘as Jim might say, “Ya, sure, Jim, we’re no Bear Stearns.”‘ Burn. Major burn. Sick burn, as CNBC’s sophisticated viewers would have known all too well.
Cramer remains hard to take your eyes off, if wild-ass, carnival-barking stock picks are your thing
Musk was referring to the infamous moment more than two years earlier, in March 2008, when a Mad Money viewer asked Cramer if he should be worried about owning the stock of Bear Stearns. The eighty-five-year-old investment bank was teetering on the edge of the abyss amid wild rumours about its ongoing viability. The market had been up more than 400 points on the day, so maybe things weren’t as bad as market chatter might suggest. Responding with another patented Cramer tirade, he said, ‘No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine. Do not take your money out! If there is one takeaway other than the plus 400, Bear Stearns is not in trouble! If anything, it is more likely to be taken over. Don’t move your money from Bear. That’s just being silly! Don’t be silly!’
As most everyone knew by the time of Musk’s rhetorical flourish, Bear Stearns prepared to file for bankruptcy protection a day after Cramer’s rant. And then, because of a massive intervention by the Federal Reserve, JPMorgan Chase agreed to buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share, a price that looked like a typo. Bear Stearns had avoided bankruptcy only because of the Fed-engineered rescue plan; it was the first time in American history that the Fed saved a Wall Street investment bank. Cramer had been spectacularly wrong about Bear Stearns.
Had CNBC viewers listened to him and held on to their Bear Stearns stock, they would have lost nearly everything, even after JPMorgan Chase eventually increased its offer to $10 a share. And had Mad Money’s viewers bought Tesla’s stock, instead of sell sell selling it, they would have made a small fortune, or a massive one, as Musk has. Tesla stock is up more than 13,000 per cent since the IPO – and that’s after it was down around 70 per cent in 2022. When Cramer reversed course a bit, saying last August, ‘I am all in on Tesla and CEO Elon Musk,’ Musk burned him again – most likely inadvertently – by selling nearly $7 billion (£5.7 billion) worth of his Tesla stock. In fact, since Cramer went ‘all in’ on Tesla, the stock is down nearly 50 per cent. Anyone who bought Tesla on his recommendation would have been singed.
But with Cramer, there’s always more. Last June, he praised Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF, the now disgraced and incarcerated founder of FTX, as the ‘new J.P. Morgan’ after SBF and FTX appeared to bail out several struggling crypto companies. It was not the first time Cramer gushed about a founder billionaire: in April 2015, he compared Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who has since been sentenced to eleven years in federal prison for fraud, to Steve Jobs. ‘I regard you as a visionary, next-generation person,’ he told her in a Mad Money interview.
Three days before FTX filed for bankruptcy protection on November 11, 2022, Hedgeye, an independent Wall Street research firm with some 175,000 Twitter followers, tagged Cramer’s tweet about SBF and JP Morgan. ‘Never before in the history of humankind has one person been so reliably wrong,’ Hedgeye wrote. ‘@JimCramer is the anti-Midas — everything this shithead touches turns to shit.’
Or consider Cramer’s call on Meta Platforms, the company that used to be known as Facebook. On 23 June 2022, he said that shares of Meta were a buy because its CEO Mark Zuckerberg was ‘simply unstoppable’ and that the ‘metaverse’, the creation on which Zuckerberg had bet billions of dollars, was ‘a cool place to go’. Zuckerberg had been a Mad Money guest the day before – Cramer let him blither on about the wonders of the metaverse – and the segment featured avatars of the CNBC anchors, including one of Cramer. He seemed truly moved – Zuckerberg had even created a VR garden for gardening-enthusiast Cramer to enjoy. In a conversation with his co-anchor, David Faber, Cramer gushed, ‘This thing is for real’. He seemed nearly overcome with emotion.
Fast forward four months, to October 27, and Cramer was again overcome with emotion, this time humility, not joy. He appeared to be nearly crying on air. Meta had just reported disappointing third-quarter earnings, and the stock fell 25 per cent in one day, to the lowest level in six years. ‘Let me say this,’ Cramer said, choking up, ‘I made a mistake here. I was wrong.’
He said putting his faith in Zuckerberg and his management team was ‘ill-advised’. ‘I had thought there’d be an understanding that you just can’t spend and spend right through your free cash flow,’ he said, ‘that there had to be some level of discipline.’ When Faber asked him what he’d got wrong, Cramer replied: ‘What did I get wrong? I trusted them, not myself. For that I regret. I’ve been in this business for forty years, and I did a bad job. I’m not proud.’
A Cramer fan who has known him for decades questions just how valuable his advice is these days. ‘He presents himself as being the guru on every possible investment, stock, issue, and company, in a way that simply isn’t possible,’ he said. ‘Which is why the record then reflects fundamental macro and micro errors, and then it makes you ask the question, “Has this descended from wisdom into carnival barker?”‘
Many people seem to be wondering the same thing. In fact, there’s a new cottage industry devoted to doing the opposite of everything Jim Cramer suggests. On Twitter, the account @CramerTracker, with 170,000 followers, has been around since November 2021. Its sole purpose, it proclaims, is tracking ‘the stock recommendations of Jim Cramer so you can do the opposite’. I found the site’s 24-year-old proprietor in Michigan – he declined to share his name – who told me that he was ‘always fascinated’ with the idea that Cramer could go on national television ‘and basically say whatever he wants to say, every single day, with no accountability’.
The CramerTracker guy said he started the site to track the stocks Cramer recommended to viewers on CNBC. ‘But the more I spent time on it, the more I realised, like “Holy cow, this guy has thousands of calls each month.” And just kind of highlighting the ones he got right and the ones he got wrong, more often than not, he hit some rock.’
He decided to analyse the performance of the stocks Cramer recommended between 2017 and 2021 – his 12,564 individual calls – and compared them to the simultaneous performance of the S&P 500. The analysis showed that Cramer’s picks underperformed the S&P by around six percentage points. Not horrific, by any stretch, but far from stellar. ‘A little bit closer to the market than I would have anticipated,’ he said.
The analysis also showed that the volume in the stocks Cramer recommended increased some 25 per cent the day after: people were following his advice and promptly losing money. People think the man behind CramerTracker doesn’t like Cramer because he’s so consistently negative about him and his stock recommendations. But that’s not true. ‘I need him,’ he tells me. ‘Without him, I wouldn’t have my own thing.’
James Kardatzke is the CEO of Quiver Quantitative, a company that provides traders with ‘unique data sets’ he hopes will give them special insight into trading opportunities. He’s all of 22 and, like the fellow behind @CramerTracker, he’s hoping to make a living off Jim Cramer’s foibles. In August last year, he created the ‘Inverse Jim Cramer Strategy’ and posted it on Seeking Alpha, a well-known website for traders and their ideas.
‘While often the target of criticism for his slightly lackluster stock-picking performance, the Mad Money host is without a doubt one of the most influential TV personalities in the history of finance TV,’ Kardatzke wrote. ‘However, it remains a given that his stock picking abilities seem to have slowly deteriorated over the years.’ Kardatzke analysed Cramer’s ten ‘most recommended’ 2022 stocks into August – from Procter & Gamble (number 1, a loss of 10 per cent) to Marvell Technology (number 10, a loss of 32 per cent), with Meta Platforms at number 8 and a loss of 19 per cent through that point in the year. All ten of the stocks Cramer touted most vociferously between January and August had lost money, not all that surprising given that the S&P 500 lost more than 14 per cent since the beginning of the year.
What was surprising, though, was that Kardatzke’s inverse Cramer investing strategy – a combination of shorts and longs related to Cramer’s picks – paid off big time. For the one-year period between August 2021 and publication of the Seeking Alpha piece, Kardatzke’s trading strategy generated returns of 20.1 per cent, compared to a same-time loss on the S&P 500 of 6.3 per cent, a whopping 2,600-basis-point difference.
Kardatzke updated the analysis in October. ‘Our Inverse Jim Cramer Strategy excelled even during the latter half of this troublesome year,’ he wrote, again on Seeking Alpha. ‘The Mad Money host himself has once again proven to be a leading source of first-class investment advice, but only if we are to invert the recommendations.’ In the third quarter of 2022, the inverse Cramer strategy returned 2.2 per cent, while the market declined 2.4 per cent, a more modest 400-basis point swing but still noteworthy.
In an interview from his home in Wisconsin, Kardatzke told me that the popularity of the inverse-Cramer strategy derives from what he sees as growing skepticism with ‘experts’ more generally. ‘A lot of people are starting to become more cynical toward the idea that these are really experts who know exactly what’s going to happen and are clairvoyant when it comes to the recommendations and predictions they’re making,’ he said.
Matthew Tuttle, managing director of Tuttle Capital Management, a small investment adviser in bucolic Riverside, Connecticut, has taken the inverse Cramer investing strategy further than the youngsters behind CramerTracker and Quiver Quantitative. In October, Tuttle filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to start trading a new ETF (exchange- traded fund) that will allow investors to bet directly against Cramer’s recommendations simply by buying the Inverse Cramer ETF – SJIM (for short Jim).
The new ETF, Tuttle wrote in the prospectus, ‘seeks to provide investments results that are approximately the opposite of, before fees and expenses, the results of the investments recommended by television personality Jim Cramer.’ At least 80 per cent of the ETF’s investments will be invested ‘in the inverse of the securities mentioned by Cramer,’ he wrote, by either shorting the stocks he recommends or by entering into derivative contracts that ‘produce a negative correlation’ to his on-air recommendations.
While Tuttle appears to be an equal opportunity ETF advisor – he’s also pushing a ‘Long Cramer’ ETF (LJIM) – his heart seems to be on the inverse side. Tuttle has been a Wall Street trader since 1999 and says he’s a ‘huge believer’ that individual investors need to educate themselves about Wall Street and the financials of individual companies. ‘Just look at all the crap that goes on out there,’ he told me.
One place individual investors go to educate themselves are the financial news networks, such as CNBC, Fox Business and Bloomberg. But Tuttle worries about the quality of their content. ‘What financial media has turned into is entertainment and I get it, it’s ratings,’ he said. ‘Look who the advertisers are… I wouldn’t mind that as much… if they labeled it as such.’ He’s especially miffed that CNBC gives Cramer free rein to make his recommendations and then rarely holds him accountable when they prove disastrous. ‘When Jim Cramer comes on, they treat him with deference: “Hey, we’re going to bring Jim on and ask him what he thinks about this,”‘ Tuttle continued. ‘And there is never, “Hey, Jim, yesterday we asked you about what you thought about SNAP earnings and you said SNAP was going to be great. And right now, it’s down 30 per cent. Did you get that one wrong?” And there’s never any of that;’ – actually occasionally there is – ‘there’s amnesia on what he said the previous day and the previous day before that. And there’s never a disclaimer on the bottom, “Hey, this is just entertainment,” which there clearly should be on Mad Money.’
For its part, CNBC, where I’m an occasional contributor, declined to make Cramer available to be interviewed in a timeframe to meet The Spectator’s deadline, nor did it allow me to speak to any of his CNBC colleagues or make introductions for me to his friends. ‘Cramer isn’t inclined to be interviewed,’ Keith Cocozza, the CNBC spokesman, said in an email to me.
Jim Cramer, now sixty-seven, was a wunderkind. He grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. His mother was an artist; his father owned a packaging company. As a teenager, he hawked Coca-Cola and ice cream at Veterans Stadium. At Harvard, he studied government and rose to become president and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Crimson. Along with his occasional beefs about the Harvard curriculum, most of Cramer’s Crimson pieces were about jazz.
After graduating in 1977, Cramer worked as a newspaper reporter in Tallahassee and Los Angeles, where he wrote obituaries for the Herald-Examiner. He lived out of his car for nine months after his LA apartment was robbed. In 1981, Cramer enrolled in Harvard Law School. He started trading stocks while there, leaving stock tips on his answering machine and making enough money to pay tuition. Then it was time for connections to kick in. Michael Kinsley, a fellow Harvard alum, introduced Cramer to Marty Peretz, the owner of the New Republic – Cramer’s sole article for the magazine, in November 1977, was about the importance of meritocracy in the National Football League, specifically at his beloved Philadelphia Eagles. Peretz also made money from some of Cramer’s answering-machine recommendations and gave Cramer $500,000 to invest; he made Peretz $150,000 over two years.
Right or wrong, ratings high, ratings low, Cramer endures after two decades on CNBC
After graduating from Harvard Law, and a brief stint as a clerk for Alan Dershowitz, who was defending Claus von Bülow, Cramer joined Goldman Sachs in the sales and trading department. (He passed the bar but never practiced law). After three years, he left Goldman to set up his own hedge fund with some $450 million of investors’ money. In addition to Peretz, the early investors were Steven Brill, the owner of American Lawyer, for which Cramer had written, and his law school classmate Eliot Spitzer, later attorney general and governor of New York. He ran his firm until 2001, when he retired from the hedge fund business. He told BusinessWeek in 2005 that he had averaged returns of 24 per cent annually and taken home annual pay in excess of $10 million.
Cramer also had some side interests. In 1996, he and Peretz started TheStreet.com, a website dedicated to financial news and investing. Cramer took it public in May 1999, before the internet bubble burst, and made a small fortune. He was an editor-at-large for SmartMoney. He appeared frequently on CNBC. In 2002, he teamed up with Larry Kudlow, the former Bear Stearns economist and future national economic adviser under Donald Trump, to host Kudlow & Cramer on CNBC. In March 2005, Cramer started Mad Money, his own CNBC program, to better educate the growing class of lay investors. It quickly became CNBC’s most watched show, with some 380,000 viewers tuning in every weeknight as of November 2005. (In November 2022, only about 147,000 people watched Mad Money; it’s no longer among CNBC’s ten most popular shows.)
Cramer was getting famous. In November 2005, Dan Rather interviewed him on 60 Minutes. ‘He’s the Jerry Lewis of business show hosts and he will do anything to grab your attention,’ Rather said. He got Cramer to admit that he had been wrong about recommending that people buy the equity of Dick’s Sporting Goods.
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