Confessions of a Street Addict

James J. Cramer

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780743233071
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

Bestselling author Jim Cramer takes readers on a wild Wall Street ride—revealing how to play the game, who breaks the rules, and who gets hurt. Everyone on Wall Street knows Jim Cramer, and Cramer knows Wall Street better than anyone. In the most candid and outrageous look at Wall Street since Liar's Poker, Cramer, co-founder of TheStreet.com, radio and television commentator, and for years a premier money manager, takes readers on the wild ride that is Wall Street -- revealing how the game is played, who breaks the rules, and who gets hurt. Confessions of a Street Addict takes us from Cramer's roots in the middle-class Philadelphia suburbs to Harvard, where he began managing money, and then to Goldman Sachs, where he went into business with his wife -- Karen, the "Trading Goddess" -- as his partner. He brilliantly describes the life of a money manager: the frenetic pace, the constant pressure to outperform the market and other fund managers, and the sharklike attacks fund managers make as they circle a fund perceived to be in trouble.Throughout the book Cramer is characteristically outspoken, offering his hard-won insights about the market and everyone in it, himself included. There has never been a more eloquent market insider than Cramer, nor a more high-octane book about Wall Street.

CHAPTER 1 Early Years

W hen other nine-year-old kids bothered to look at a newspaper back in 1964, they turned to the comic strips, or maybe the ball scores. But when my dad brought home that three-star Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, I chucked Peanuts, Archie, and the standings and went right for the only section that has ever mattered to me: the business section, or more accurately, the stock tables. You see, I didn’t care about layoffs or hirings or economic policy. I cared about the companies and the dollar signs next to them that gauged their value every day. I cared about that wonderful printed wall of abbreviations, Gen’lMot, So’CalEd, PhilMo, followed by a high figure, a low figure, another number, and a minus or a plus sign. I devoured those the way any normal Philadelphia boy might have devoured the batting averages of his beloved Phillies or Eagles or Warriors. I knew I could figure out where those numbers were going. I could figure out the patterns that drove those prices, and I could make money doing so, if only in my own well-played stock market game.

By fourth grade, I thought I understood the sequence of those numbers that came after those truncated names. I scrounged a used ledger book from my dad’s jobbing business, National Gift Wrap & Packaging Company, erased his all block capital letter tallies of boxes sold—men’s 9 by 12 locktops and 3 by 4 inch ladies’ jewelry—and replaced the columns with stock names and predictions of where they would close that afternoon. I never missed a day and couldn’t figure out why we had no pricings on Good Friday, Memorial Day, or election day. Didn’t those companies keep ticking despite the holidays? I couldn’t get enough, even when the rest of America clearly could. I wanted daily action.

By fifth grade, unlike every other son in America, I had to beg my father to stay later at work. The paper he ordinarily brought home, the Bulletin ’s three star, stopped quoting prices at 12:30 p.m. What good was that? I made him work an additional hour and a half so he could snare the purple five star final sold right to your car window at 16th and Market on the way home to the suburbs. How else could I measure how right I was about my predictions of where Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) and DougAir had finished if Dad came home with that miserable early edition with its midday prices? Each day, while others wasted time after school playing board games or combat or touch football, I’d be gaming the close. Each night, I’d rip the paper out of my dad’s hands, spread out the New York Stock Exchange tables on the living room floor, and see how much money my picks would have made.

I wasn’t content with my own prowess. Nah, I had to teach others, tried to get Mrs. Mixer’s whole fifth-grade class to play the stock market game with me. Even showed them how to read the tables. But I had no takers. They just didn’t get the process.

Didn’t matter. By my count, I would have made a couple of million dollars following my own picks before I had matriculated to sixth grade. That’s when $2 million meant something. My methods were simple, try to make small gains from the most active stocks, the ones that were involved in defense, because there was a war on, and defense seemed to be coining money. Seemed, and was—and will always be—simple enough.

If only fantasy equaled reality at 1401 Cromwell Road in Wyndmoor in 1965. While I beat the averages with my picks, my dad, like many of his generation, had gotten a tip from a local broker: National Video. He plowed the returns of his paper jobbing business into the prospects for National Video. I still shudder when I hear those two words. For a period of about a year, every penny my dad made at National Gift Wrap, selling paper bags and boxes to retailers, he lost to that generation’s e-commerce dotcom play. Every night at dinner I would hear how National Video had done. It never seemed to go up. Although a chart I saw of the stock shows a couple of gentle rises on the way to oblivion, I can’t recall a single conversation during that period that wasn’t punctuated with “that goddamned National Video.” It got so I dreaded hearing the most actives on the radio, a report that I used to tune in at 4:00 p.m. every day before my dad got home to get an early line on how I did, because National’s decline always got prominent featuring. Eventually, the pain of National Video overwhelmed the pleasure of my own game, and discussions of the stock market, fantasy or otherwise, were banned from the dinner table as just too upsetting.

My dad has pretty much forgotten about National Video and the fellow who put him in it. But I remember Jack P., the Philadelphia broker who turned a generation against the stock market, and I hate that charlatan as if it were yesterday. He and National Video ruined just about everything a kid could want at that age.

The stock, and with it, my father’s portfolio, like so many of his generation, never recovered. By sixth grade I thought it more prudent to downplay my stock prowess for my hitting and fielding abilities.

And so it stayed, suppressed, with little more than a gentle skim of the closing prices through high school and college. What was the point for this indebted scholarship kid who didn’t have enough money to buy a share of a penny stock to keep up with the closing prices? If it hadn’t been for the night jobs of proofreading and delivering the college paper after it came off the presses, I wouldn’t have been able to maintain my day job as president of The Harvard Crimson, let alone complete the curriculum. Trading stocks would have to wait until I had some money.

I was a competitive person at Harvard, at least that was my reputation. Unrelentingly competitive. Mindlessly competitive. For me Harvard College was a sideshow to the Crimson, Harvard’s newspaper. I ran for president, or editor in chief, of the paper against Eric Breindel. The presidential race at the Crimson is written about more than it should be, probably because every one of the top officers of the paper goes into journalism. At least a half-dozen magazine articles have chronicled this particular episode in my life, always in the same inaccurate way. Some unsophisticated hick from a trailer park in Pennsylvania runs against the most well-educated, awesomely intelligent preppy kid ever to come out of New York City by way of Exeter. Yes, I was a scholarship kid, but so was most everybody in my class. And yes, I was less sophisticated than Breindel, but I knew enough to recognize that the previous president, Nick Lemann, believed in meritocracy, and I was willing to work twice as hard as the next guy, if only because I could go twenty-four hours without sleep. I also knew that Breindel’s backers had arranged a “slate” that filled all the top positions without me. When I told Lemann this, he thought I was being paranoid until he heard it from Breindel’s supporters the night of the Turkey Shoot, when would-be executives declared their candidacy for the top positions at the paper. The vote was very close, 12–11 for me, and when Breindel lost, most of his slate stalked off, but not before throwing a few punches at some of the outgoing execs who had voted for me. Didn’t bother me—three fantastic freshmen agreed to work with me: Mark Whitaker, who would later become editor of Newsweek; Jon Alter, who would become Whitaker’s star columnist; and Joe Dalton, a talented writer who would pass away without ever realizing his potential. We put out a great paper. (Eventually Breindel brought his supporters back to work with me.)

Two years as a journeyman general assignment reporter, first in Florida, for the Tallahassee Democrat, and then in California, for the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner, did little for my market fixation either. Not that I didn’t have the desire. Never a wealthy kid, but not poor by any means, during those two years I was subjected to a series of reversals that would have provided anyone with several lifetimes’ worth of catalysts to get wealthy.

Oh, I was a guy with a knack for being in the right place when it came to the news game. Only a few months after my arrival in Tallahassee, a crazed murderer broke into the sorority house down the block from my apartment. I got there early enough to leapfrog every other crime reporter in the country in the unfolding Ted Bundy national serial-killing spree. My reporting on that double murder received so much coverage around the country that editors who wanted hard-boiled crime reportage clamored to offer me jobs. In just a few months I found myself covering for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner everyone who died violently in California.

While my criminal reporting career was taking off, however, my personal and financial well-being deteriorated rapidly. A few weeks after moving into a bungalow on Orange Grove in the only neighborhood in L.A. that remotely seemed like home, the Fairfax district, I returned from work to find that someone had made a tuna sandwich in my kitchen while I was away—a discarded can lay in the middle of the kitchen floor, and the bread bag had been mysteriously opened. I called the police, who did a cursory check of my security against intruders and told me to change the locks. I did.

The next day, after work, I discovered that someone had broiled a chicken in my oven and eaten a couple of pouches of Birds Eye vegetables. The trespasser had left me with the carcass and some gizzards and a badly burnt broiling pan.

A call to the police again brought in a suggestion that I change the locks again. Having just done it, I said I would do so again, but I wasn’t made of money.

The next morning I thought I detected someone outside my little home smoking cigarettes. I called the police immediately, but by the time they got there, the man had disappeared. However, there was a pile of Winston butts right outside my bedroom window where the person had apparently been waiting for me to get up and go to work so he could start the day living in my apartment.

I told the cops where he had been standing outside my house, and asked if they would take some fingerprints off the butts or around the windowsill.

It was then I realized how overmatched I was. One patrolman looked at the other and said, “This kid thinks we’re Kojak or something.” His advice was more pointed. “Look, get a gun, hire a private detective, protect yourself.”

Thanks, officer!

That day I borrowed a .22 caliber pistol from a reporter friend of mine and brought out my Boy Scout hatchet that I had used in camping trips as a little boy. When I got home that night I learned that the stalker had made a nice salad, opened up a can of fruit cocktail, and taken a shower and a shave in my bathroom. He neglected to flush. He had also taken my extensive collection of John Coltrane albums and the change that I kept hidden away in a little Tupperware container in the hall. I didn’t bother to call the police this time.

Throughout this period I had confided in my editor at the time, Frank Lalli, later of the New York Daily News and before that of George and Money magazine, that the stalker was getting the best of me. I told him I had no place to turn and needed his help. He just nodded each time and gave me another assignment. He dispatched me to San Diego to cover a standoff between a sixteen-year-old sniper, Brenda Spencer, and the San Diego police. Spencer, one of the original school shooters, would later tell people that she killed because rainy days and Mondays made her blue.

When I got to the unfolding crime scene I called Lalli and told him that this was a well-covered affair with lots of press. He urged me to get something different. He suggested that I go past the police line and run toward the school to get a sense for what it would be like to be under fire. While I knew that Lalli was no fan of mine, for $179 a week I wasn’t going to become a live target of some crazed teen. I told Lalli that and said I wanted to get back to my bungalow because I feared what would happen if my stalker had the run of the place overnight.

He instead told me to stay in San Diego to see if I could get some good second-day angle on the shooting....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgment
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• 23
• Index