*OT* RE: "...Cramer... self-proclaimed guru..."
Gee Paul, are you sure that you know what you are talking about?
Wrong! Dispatches from the Front:
Cramer on The World of Gurus
By James J. Cramer
3/3/98 8:10 AM ET
Lately people have taken to calling me a guru.
Man, that scares the ^%$%^ out of me. I'm no guru. I'm a
hedge fund manager that writes a column that's trying to
educate you to the real ways of Wall Street, not the bogus
ways the conventional press writes everyday.
More important, I'm no guru because every guru I have ever
witnessed has fizzled and burned or was a charlatan to
begin with. I intend on sticking around, bull or bear, and,
hopefully, my record and common sense exempt me from
the mountebank category.
In my lifetime I have seen four gurus hold center stage. The
first, Joe Granville, ruled during the early 1980s. It seems
ludicrous that anybody would follow this bozo now, but man
was he powerful. He was a genuine showboat, a financial
entertainer, if you will. Retire me if I ever become one of
those please.
Joe could bring the whole market down at a time when
volatility was something people used only to describe
tempers. But he cried wolf too many times and disappeared
from prominence. Periodically, you hear from him, and at no
time does he hold himself out as anyone but someone who
has always been right. To which I say "shut up" and "give
me a break."
Next was Bob Prechter. I know this will sound
embarrassing, but I knew highly-paid traders, multi-million
dollar types, who at one time wouldn't start the day without
calling Prechter's hot-line. His apotheosis in 1987 in
retrospect seems very unlikely given the worthlessness of
his service for the last decade. But there was a time when
he ruled. His comeuppance came, oddly, on an appearance
on Wall Street Week, when Lou Ruykeyser just revealed
him to be a big joke. His negativity since the crash of '87, of
course, played quite a roll in his defrocking.
Elaine Garzerelli seemed to revel in the guru status that
her prescient '87 crash call gave her. We all used to gather
around the squawk whenever she spoke from her Lehman
perch. Garz's prognostications were only exceeded by her
arrogance. Her inability to run money herself, coupled with
her inability to read her own data, resulted in a brilliant guru
career cut short. We turn the TV to another station when
she shows up now.
Sadly, Marty Zweig was once my favorite guru. But he, too,
never really recovered from the crash. I know this, too, will
sound amazing, but Zweig at one time had to change his
hot-line number constantly because of all of those free-bie
listeners. He routinely had to urge people not to buy stocks
he recommended at the opening because his
recommendation power gapped them up.
But Zweig was too negative for the 1990s, and now his
newsletter is run by someone else, and he seems like a
shadow of his thoughtful old self. All of these gurus seemed
to enjoy, if not lust in, the power that they had to move
markets. All seemed bent on calling tops and bottoms. Boy,
is that a soulless exercise. I want no parts of it. I just want
to teach you how I look at things. I don't want to be the
reason why you are positive or negative. That gets old fast,
just like it did for the aforementioned. Sure I want to
entertain, but only as much as the best professors I had
entertained to keep the class lively and keep you interested.
As I have said many times, my goals is not to suck the
power or money away from you and give it to me, a la
brokers and advisers, but make you a formidable client in
your own right. That way you are your own guru. |
