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Pastimes : James Cramer Skeptic Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PaperChase who wrote (701)	9/30/1998 6:59:00 PM
From: mr.mark	Respond to of 1254

i recall cramer gushing right after the good intel news (around 9/11?) that the stock would be at 100 in 10 days. blah blah blah, yup!

To: PaperChase who wrote (701)	9/30/1998 9:20:00 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1254

Your completely misreading him. He has an investing account, in which he follows the rules you quote. Then, he has a trading account, in which he flip-flops constantly. Tom

To: PaperChase who wrote (701)	10/1/1998 11:13:00 AM
From: Michael Elizabeth Chastain	Respond to of 1254

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson Here's my take on it: the market is a dizzyingly complex place. Cramer has developed some guidelines for evaluating whether a stock is a good deal or not. But I think that these are all heuristics, not etched in stone. They are like guidelines for playing good chess: "take control of the center", "develop knights before bishops", "castle your king". If Cramer sees an opportunity to make money, and he has a guideline which says not to, of course he breaks the guideline. There is still a high correlation between his guidelines and what he actually does. It's just not perfect. Foo, he's had bigger divergences than this. He's pounded the table about accounting irregularities. "When a company has accounting irregularities, then I am interested at no price." Dec 11, 1997. Then when Cendant blew up and got cut in half, giving him a big loss, he bought more, which simply resulted in a bigger loss! Maybe he has some other guideline here, such as: when everybody in the world is dumping a stock, it's a good time to buy it. People who followed this guideline did make a lot of money on 27-28 October 1997. Here's a meta-guideline, not Cramer's, but my own: there are two sides to every stock. It's always worth more than $0 and less than $Infinity. The market usually prices stocks right in the middle between the bulls and the bears, so that there are good sound arguments why it might go either up or down from where it is. Therefore, anybody taking a position should know and respect the arguments on the other side; and guidelines are, after all, always just guidelines.