Confessions of a Wall Street jerk
Former insider paints self-portrait, and it's not flattering
05/27/2002 - Updated 11:15 PM ET
By Nancy Blair, USA TODAY
Jim Cramer'sConfessions of a Street Addict is a frank look at an insider's ups and downs.
Jim Cramer is happiest in a hair shirt.
In his controversial autobiography, Confessions of a Street Addict, Cramer — the former hedge fund manager and co-founder of TheStreet.com — recounts with gusto his many failings, including some very public displays of ill humor and bad judgment.
By turns, Cramer pukes all over the guests at his 40th birthday party, betrays his best friend and hurls everything from computer keyboards to telephones when employees disappoint.
The pyrotechnics fuel the rocket that was Cramer's life during his run as one of the poster boys for the roaring bull market. This memoir is about what drove him to resign from that life before he could crash and burn.
It all seems terribly prescient now — after the bursting of the tech stock bubble and against the backdrop of the current wave of accounting scandals.
Cramer quit his Cramer Berkowitz & Co. hedge fund after posting an astonishing 36% gain in 2000, according to Confessions, when major stock indexes were down dramatically.
In his spare time, he had helped launch TheStreet.com, a pioneering financial Web site and former dot-com darling that shot above $70 a share after its 1999 initial public offering. It now trades below $3.
For a time, it seemed that Cramer was everywhere: writing about investing for Smart Money and New York magazines, and later, from the back of his limo on the drive to and from his Manhattan offices, writing several columns a day for TheStreet.com.
He'd also pop up as a commentator on CNBC's popular Squawk Box morning markets show and on ABC's Good Morning America.
And all the while, he traded stocks like a madman.
Problem was, he wasn't very pleasant — a self-described Bozo-haired Type A with bulging eyes and a fast mouth. In his own words, he was "a visible guy on Wall Street, and not well-liked, given my penchant for carpet-bombing my enemies on television and in TheStreet.com."
It's that unflinching, rat-a-tat-tat style that gives Confessions its edge. There are way too many details about the early days at TheStreet.com. But his hair-raising descriptions of Wall Street in the waning days of the bull market are worth the price of admission:
"You had to believe in nothing when it came to buying stocks because if you believed anything rigorous — price-to earnings, price-to-book, price-to-sales, dividends, cash flow — you looked like an idiot. An old fogey."
He writes about mutual fund managers "juicing" performance by leading a buying wave on a stock. He cringes at the nosebleed $63 initial opening price for his own Web site. ("No way this stock would stay at this price level. No way it would last.")
As the stock market topped in 2000, major companies trooped through Cramer Berkowitz "and when closely questioned knew nothing about their own business or the way analysts categorized them. Anything went. Capitalism unbounded and unrestrained."
Cramer's an elbows-out kind of guy. He ran afoul of the media and brushed up against regulators in flare-ups over non-disclosure of his stock holdings as a Smart Money columnist. (The magazine forgot to include a disclaimer about his stock holdings in one piece.)
His Fox television show was later canceled after he touted TheStreet.com stock on air.
It shouldn't surprise that he's managed to tick off a lot of people. A rival book by ex-Cramer employee Nicholas Maier, Trading with the Enemy, draws roughly the same unflattering conclusion as Confessions : Cramer was a jerk.
But an early version also accused him of crossing an ethical line into insider trading — a charge that Cramer challenged and that was subsequently yanked.
Life seems demonstrably calmer now for Cramer. He writes for magazines and co-hosts a nightly CNBC cable show.
In an interview on Today, Cramer described Confessions as "a cautionary tale." Cramer was talking about himself. But at its best, Confessions is also a cautionary tale for any small investor tempted by stock market hype and mania. |
