LooseSuits

Used to watch him once in awhile, then he just got too loud and crazy for me. Plus, I think that trading based on gut feeling instead of a proven system of defined entrances and exits isn't the way to go in the long run, but that's just me.

Yeah Mike - I agree. Very loud and crazy. Very smart when it comes to company fundamentals and market analysis but falls short when it comes to market timing and that is why his "Actions Alerts Plus" portfolio often sees minimal gains. Far be it from me to tell someone who is worth over $100 million now how to trade the market but he could drastically improve his gains if he paid more attention to technicals.

Fun to watch, but sometimes gets too loud, and is generally far too macho. Also, I don't have much money to lose in the market. Vanguard Index Funds. Boooyah!

Cramer spends too much time on truly fundamental analysis and rash booooyah, go for it type trades that I think appeal to macho guys who are using the stock market as a get-rich-quick scheme. While I'm sure that Cramer is genius when it comes to his own trades, I feel he's playing his viewer base about as much as he does the stock market. It's capitalism.

I did fundamental trading for a while, and during the time I was doing fundamental stuff I met a hedge fund trader working in Stamford. Although I haven't talked to him in years, the one thing he lambasted me for was not using technical analysis as the core of my trading strategy. Knowing that this guy knew way more about trading than I ever could, I went and bought a book on the essentials of technical analysis and really he's right - technical analysis does seem the way to go.

I'm not a business guy, though, and I'm not all about the stock market. It's a chance venture, and John Maynard Keynes's passages in General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to be the best thing I've ever heard someone say on the subject (these are my excerpts:)

Or, to change the metaphor slightly, professional investment may be likened ot those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds ot the average preferences of the competitors as a whole … It is not a case of choosing which, to the best of one's judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects average opinion to be …

… Speculators [Keynes is speaking about short-term investors] may do no harm as bubbles on a stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.

I'm not sure a lot of Cramer's call-ins really understand the market at all, and I think they're just kind of pouring money into something because some rich guy says that x stock is awesome.