I don’t watch him any longer either…

I’m not much of a Cramer fan but he does know an awful lot about specific companies. If he really isn’t coached ahead of time on what the callers are going to ask or have a heads up display on his teleprompter then his corporate trivia knowledge is amazing. He can regularly take a ticker symbol from some obscure company and tell you what company it is and the trading range and generally a thing or two about their management and the dynamics of that industry. Even though I respect his ability to memorize specific company facts I don’t value his analysis and I find his presentation obnoxious.

I agree with others, CNBC made a huge mistake in how they played this thing. They should have let it die, another funny from the Daily Show. Now it has become an ongoing joke, which turned out to be hugely popular, and you can bet the Daily Show will play it for what it is worth.

I’m not a Cramer devotee. I know how to listen to him. The reason I know how to listen to him is because I read and heard many of his frequent disclaimers. He tells people to never do anything he says immediately after he says it. Experts know how to fleece the uninitiated and you will always lose when you go against them. He never claims infallibility and insists you parse what he says and put it in the context of your own investment plans. Then he insists you study and never stop studying. Ever. The rest is schtick.

Idiot complainers are basically lazy losers who think a hot tip is all you need to make zillions of bucks. Now you want to get even by sniping at Cramer instead of reading a few books. If you lost after chasing a hot Cramer tip, you are stupid. Even he would agree, I’m sure.

I suspect a lot of the complainers here and elsewhere are either useful idiots or opportunists who are using Cramer as a distraction from their own malfeasance. If you put all of your effort into blaming the clown, you might not notice them silently stealing from you. Or notice their cheerleaders on the business news channels hyping for them.

I imagine Cramer will use his sell everything call as his lifeline.

comment:

I listened and it saved me a boatload of cash. I sold all in early Nov 2007, bought back in early 2008 and made a couple percent. I bought again and cashed out on his call. I lost a chunk, but much less than most. Idiotically, I put my toe in the water a couple of months ago and am now trying to figure out how to recoup. Still, his call was all the incentive I needed to avoid catastrophe. Right now I’m inconvenienced but fully expect to be whole long before the masses. Basically, I’m down my 2007 profits. If Cramer had not made his sell everything call, I’d be in much worse shape.

Stewart never goes for the throat in person. At worst, he only mentions the bad stuff, and only after a long and ponderous lead up. He’s charming, but not capable of performing an inquisition in person. This is in stark contrast to his far more pointed pieces when guests aren’t present. Frankly, Fred Willard would knock it out of the park if he were doing the interview with Cramer. (I’d love to see some America 2 Night reruns with Willard and Martin Mull.)

Cramer will turn on the charm, turn the subject to him personally, point to his numerous disclaimers that many, if not most, fail to pay any attention to, and they will shake hands at the end. It will be just slightly north of boring. ‘Rope-a-dope’ meets ‘aimless but charming’.

As I’ve said before, I have no major problems with Cramer. Yes, he goes over the top regularly. But put this in contrast with Madoff like characters and the parade of sales phonies on CNBC who want to impress you with their rock solid appearance, then personally take your money. Not to mention the carnival like atmosphere on the entire channel. Cramer regularly tells people never to buy without researching everything. He doesn’t troll for dittoheads.

Stewart should make Cramer a metaphor for the business news concept ant not make him the scapegoat for the industry.

Stewart is going to weenie out. He’ll go soft on Cramer and dilute the interview so that the lowest common denominator in the audience might understand it. The whole thing will be a washout, I suspect. Just about all of his other showdowns have gone this way. I am expecting a major anticlimax and a feeling of being used and discarded afterward.

I’d rather see Cramer and Stewart team up and do a Comedy Central 30 minute scripted special on the investment business. Now that would golden.

Cramer doesn’t stand a chance on this one. His miscalls have made him the rube jester king of business TV. Whatever street cred he had from his hedge fund days eons ago washed away in a flood of foot-in-mouth gaffs that have made him a laughingstock. As Stewart said in his previous bit about CNBC, “if I’d watched CNBC I’d have a million dollars today…provided I started with 100 million.”

If he’d only tuned into Cramer he wouldn’t have bus fare home.

The only thing that feels remotely like justice through this whole mess is the laughs that Jon Stewart has given me. He does better research than the supposed “news” shows, as evidenced by the Cramer takedown. And he has more “cojones” than the 535 nimrods in Washington combined.

One more thing that makes Jon Stewart so special is that he never forgets that his primary objective is to make us laugh, and he does that better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Cramer’s not particularly funny (or insightful, accurate, articulate, useful……), so I don’t think even the great Jon Stewart can make him funny.

The most troubling part of all this is why is the smartest guy on TV a comedian?