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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29494)	12/30/2007 2:56:06 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78747

I've an idea your record is not sustainable. Large percentage gains off a small base in initial years. 'Course I said similar and worse about Mike Burry. And look where he is now. ----------------------- I got to see those audited statements to be convinced about Cramer. And I never see them anywhere. In '98 or so, when the market tanked, I believe hedge funds or funds or websites that claimed great success changed. What the owners did was to start new hedge funds and new websites. Thus essentially wiping the slate clean, starting over, and ignoring the disastrous year that killed performance figures they were previously touting. So I'd like to know just what figures on what fund for what people Cramer reports. I don't doubt that the billionaire who who gave Cramer his start and stuck with him (I presume), is happy with Cramer's performance. The people who came later, I wonder. I don't see them complaining in the media, so maybe they're happy too. It's really all irrelevant though. There would be two things somebody reporting in the media to have had outsize gains over a decade or more would be saying. 1.) I get these outsize gains, they're typical or have been for me, and if you want to duplicate that too, give me your money to invest. 2.) I get these outside gains, so I'm a guru, listen to me and learn from me (Buy my books, listen to my show, feed my ego. I want you to succeed.) With Cramer, from what I've read and what I've heard from him, if one listens to how he invests (not mad money, not speculating), he makes a lot of sense. That puts him in the investor group with which I am familiar. A group where 24% gains for 13 years or more is not common and not sustainable afaik. To get those 24% gains (if he got them), Cramer went beyond "investing" with his "trading goddess", his machinations, etc. For me, I am always looking for what works for the average investor, and these things Cramer employs are not available or are unappealing. In that sense, Cramer's record doesn't give any particular reason for listening to him. -- I have been looking at AIG as a value play. I happened to read Cramer's two sentence analysis: Stay away. Heavy insider selling will keep the price down. - And when I checked, I found it to be a compelling reason (so far) to not buy the stock. (The 10% or more holder seems to sell tons into strength.) I'm saying although I dismiss Cramer's record, and I can't take more than a couple of minutes, if that, of his theatrics, I do want to consider his stock ideas as separate from the man, his wealth, his record, his ability to irritate, or his questionable methodology. One never knows where a good stock idea will come from.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29494)	12/31/2007 1:57:04 AM
From: Paul Senior	Respond to of 78747

"Cramer ran a hedge fund, which has to be audited and send out statements to clients at least once a year, any one of which could disprove an exaggerated claim." I've been mulling this and have decided I need to see what all is included and excluded in an audited statement and in "%gains" before I change my opinion. I've never seen a hedge fund statement. If the auditor attests to the financials - the balance sheet, cash flow statement, the p&l, that is one thing. If the auditor also attests to the verbiage - e.g. "we were up 125% this year", that is a second thing. In theory, it's possible to take the balance sheet bottom line from one year's statement and compare it to the previous year's, and calculate percentage change. But that could be much different from the verbiage of stated gains. For example if the fund uses an October year-end date on the balance sheet, but reports performance % gains on a calendar year. Or maybe uses the calendar year for balance sheet but inception date for the performance year-over-year figures that management speaks of. Maybe they switch between 'em depending which shows the better gains. Or if, with people coming into the fund at various times of the year, and maybe also being allowed to exit at various times, the percentage gain is a composite -- calculated by management, not audited -- of the gains/loss % of all participants for the calendar year. And maybe they use the median percent vs. the mean percent -- whatever is more favorable to management. Anyway, I need to know a lot more before I come to believe performance figures as reported. --------- This somehow reminds me of funds that are able to state, "if you invested $10,000 with us in 1980 at fund inception, you would have $xx,xxx now, a compounded gain of over yy%. Once, just once, I would like to see the fund managers state exactly how many people bought the fund in 1980 and are still around now for the yy% gain.