I e-mailed Cramer suggesting he might want to comment to the subscribers of RealMoney. I suspect I'll either get no answer, or a dusty one.
To be fair, he raised the 1995 incident in a column this week. Here is his version, in part:
The top people at the SEC enforcement division were involved in my case. At stake: How much of the $2 million in a short-term spike of four stocks that I had written positively about did I take for myself at the expense of the readers? All four stocks had jumped after a SmartMoney article I had written that said that they could be good buys. The magazine had left my disclosure box off, but it was clear that I owned them.
The government had me shaking even though I hadn't sold a share. In other words, even though I said I owned the stocks for the long-term, even though I did not seek to or try to profit from the gains, which lasted about three days, they wanted to know everything. I hired the best lawyers, spent months of worry on it and $700,000 in legal fees and finally convinced the Commission to go away because while I may have "pumped" the stocks in the article, I didn't dump them. The fact that one went up big -- a takeover ensued soon after -- as the others wilted didn't matter. I never sold any of them. |
