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Technology Stocks : TheStreet.com, Inc. (TSCM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mr.mark who wrote (1318)	3/4/2002 12:14:48 PM
From: Jack Hartmann	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1822

I will buy the book. Should be entertaining. I gave the carnival barker $199 for a renewal. :P I like reading James De Porres, Herb, Peter Eavis, Helene, Tony Saliba. Jack

To: mr.mark who wrote (1318)	6/4/2002 5:12:49 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 1822

Anyone holding this stock should be annoyed....and that is puitting it mildly. Desks which cost $50,000 a pop???? Cramer has no conscience to waste shareholders money in such a way. I never thought I could lose respect for Cramer- I was wrong. salon.com ***************************************** "It was just stupid" TheStreet.com's co-founder, Jim Cramer, explains why he regrets his dot-com days. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Katharine Mieszkowski June 4, 2002 \| Back in 1998, when it seemed that anyone with an E-Trade account could make a bundle on Wall Street, Jim Cramer was having such a bum year he almost lost his business. The money manager who co-founded TheStreet.com, Cramer had become the all-purpose stock market media pundit, his red face and wild hair as much a fixture on the likes of CNBC as the scrolling ticker. While everyone else was raking it in, you could read about Cramer's humiliating bad calls every day in his columns on the TheStreet.com. Cramer's hedge fund -- the tightfisted mom-and-pop outfit Cramer Berkowitz, which had generated more than $300 million in profits -- was on the verge of insolvency. But somehow, his Internet company, TheStreet.com -- a dot-com with eight-figure losses whose very desks cost $50,000 a pop -- was taking off. It would go public in 1999, with trading opening at $63 a share. Soon the company that Cramer had spent his high-profile career building would be worth less than his dot-com sideline. But while Cramer might be Mr. TheStreet.com to the public, he'd lost control of that company to the point where he was not allowed even to visit the offices without explicit permission from the executives. In "Confessions of a Street Addict," Jim Cramer dishes the ironies of his career on Wall Street and at TheStreet.com. But for all the juice in Cramer's own revelations, the controversy around another book by a former Cramer employee, Nicholas Maier's "Trading With the Enemy," has stolen the headlines. First, Maier's red-faced publisher sent 4,000 copies of his book to the shredder when an anecdote about Cramer's having been investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission proved false. But according to the New York Post, which has been hot on the story, Maier has since testified to the SEC about allegedly shady practices at Cramer Berkowitz. Among other things, Maier has accused Cramer of using his relationships with on-air stock market reporters, such as CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, to work a trading edge. Under fire, Cramer has responded with his own finger-pointing. He accused Rupert Murdoch's media empire of conspiring against him, since HarperCollins is the publisher of Maier's book and Cramer has a checkered history with Fox News. Now retired from his hedge fund, Cramer works "only" from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., writing columns for TheStreet.com and appearing on CNBC and Bloomberg Radio. He talked to Salon about his book, Maier's book, and why he wishes he'd never started TheStreet.com in the first place. Who ultimately do you think is to blame for the dot-com bubble? Wall Street? The venture capitalists? The half-baked companies themselves? The government regulators? I like to look at it in terms of power and powerlessness. The government was powerless to stop it because you don't have an SEC that's chartered to examine value. It's chartered to be sure that you disclose, thinking that if people are confronted with the true facts, they will be able to make rational decisions. The government is taken out of the equation. The venture capitalists hold the key. Since all their companies are coming public at a premium, they have a precious commodity, so they're courted, and they can ask for more outrageous terms than typical. The investment banks are anxious to move as much product as possible. They are always value-judgment neutral. Like the SEC -- but not for the same reasons -- they're never going to put any judgment on [the value of a company], because there is too much money to be made. And the public loved it. The public loved it!