Has it really been almost a year since Jimmy Ray's landmark, purely spontaneous Rage Against the Fed Machine?
CNBC drumming it up all day as some sort of touchstone event for us all and praising Voldemort for seeing it coming.
OK, let's get real. His rant did predict the job carnage on Wall Street. But it neglects to mention how many times he got all giggly at Fed moves since then, all those "Ben has our backs" moments. Starting pretty much two weeks later when the Fed made their first move, pre-open on the August 17th expiration. Here are some of Cramer's headlines that day.
This Rally's Part of Something Bigger
Don't Pooh-Pooh the Fed Move
Yes, the Cut Matters
You Should Be Picking at Stocks Here
Look for NYSE Euronext to Catch a Break Now
We're Saved! Except the Shorts, That Is
Best post though is this one, What to Buy Now.
What to buy? Exactly what everyone was shorting: the big holdings of the hedge funds that people were trying to break, including
Citigroup (C)
Goldman (GS)
Bear (BSC)
Lehman (LEH)
Freeport (FCX)
NYSE Euronext (NYX) (today's volume could be equal to a whole week's volume last quarter)
Sears Holdings (SHLD)
Washington Mutual (WM)
Downey (DSL)
Beazer (BZH)
Centex (CTX) (much better than Beazer)
and obviously Thornburg (TMA) and Countrywide (CFC), both of which will now get bids.
There was never a real case against this stuff short-term except that the hedge funds owned the stuff.
That doesn't mean they won't be bad a month from now. It does mean that you may have seen a bottom in their stocks.
Of course he went sour on most of these names later on. And loved many of them again. And hated them. And loved them. And...you get the point.
And I'm sure CNBC does too, and will note that in addition to calling our attention to the problem, he had countless calls like these along the way.
12 comments:
lol, yea Cramer does seem to get it right in the Loonngg term but the pathetic part is that CNBC is running a special to commemorate the occasion.
THEY KNOW NOTHING! lol
You know that on the night of that Cramer blow-up, there was some emergency meeting at CNBC on what to do about it. And you know some 26 year-old senior vice-president of something came up with the idea of patching the whole thing up and marketing it as some kind of all encompassing voice of "what's wrong"...like it was this conscious, pre-programmed effort to do something for the dozens of middle American yokels that watch Cramer every day.
They want that one 5 minute rant to count for 100% of Cramer's integrity...but let's forget about the never-ending stream of stock-picks that constantly flip-flop and could never be tradable. The Fed started cutting, so that means they "listened" to Cramer. It's all part of a phony machine that no one needs, and has 0 positive impact on the world.
yeah, I did love how he took credit for the Fed action. Remember also how this was about all the Wall Street jobs that would be lost, and that didn't exactly play well, so it morphed and "my people" now became all Middle Class homeowners.
I also love how the Fate of the Republic depended on Countrywide and Thornburgh surviving.
I thought that rant was born of Cramers insider friends, weeping about how their ponzi schemes were coming undone.
Doubt is there was much more insight than that.
I can't believe give that idiot any respect. Everytime I see him,beside getting a queasy feeling, I think of P.T. Barnum"s "There's a sucker born every minute".
procol: nope, absolutely none. It went viral though, so it became some sort of historical time piece or something.
john: it's almost like one of those football tout services that sends one "lock" out to half the audience, and the opponent out as a "lock" to the other, then crows to the half you got the right pick.
procol: nope, absolutely none. It went viral though, so it became some sort of historical time piece or something.
john: it's almost like one of those football tout services that sends one "lock" out to half the audience, and the opponent out as a "lock" to the other, then crows to the half you got the right pick.
No shame. I guess I'll wait for his book "Confessions of a Cable TV Whore" to read the real story.
In the meantime, I think it's pretty fitting that he's called yet another bottom in financials today based off the Merrill Lynch stock offering not crashing the market.
Here's the problem with all these serial bottom callers: there's nothing in the fundamentals to support it! Until the fundamentals stop going down, not even improve mind you, just stop being more worse any bottom call is a knife catch. Eventually you'll be right, but being wrong 5 times early will bury anyone investing with real money.
Speaking of real money, anyone know the balance on his AA account and how it's performed the last 6 & 12 months? I suspect he's avoided a lot of the carnage, because I don't remember seeing a disclosure he was long anything besides GS and BAC. That's the other interesting thing, he seldom follows his own market calls.
I am definately not his biggest fan, BUT I've learned in my practice in surgery that you should own up to your mistakes and celebrate saving a patient's life.
With that said,
He went out on a limb and he made a correct call ON THAT DAY and in a way it was a good foreshadowing of what was to occur.
DOes he make mistakes - of course - when I count my trades 1/3 of them go against me so it is not unusual that he is wrong and wrong often but ultimately, he is selling ad time on CNBC.
HIs model portfolio is lagging the indices this year - HOWEVER, he was a hedge fund trader with enough skills to amass a sizable capital base and graduated from Harvard law school..
SO he is, like all things in life, a mixture of good and bad - but his rant and calling out the FED on this call is a major positive IMHO - and his false calls after are a negative.
I would submit that he is neither Voldemort or president of 'Cramerica' wherever that is - he is just another guy with some experience making calls - some right, some wrong
Armen
Allan: Not sure, I don't actually know anyone who subscribes to AA. Not so much he doesn't listen to his own calls, it's that he is in so many venues with so many conflicting thoughts, what are his exact calls?
arno:yeah, agreed. IT's more a prob. with how CNBC promotes it though, as if 1) he was the original one with this thought that things were worse than they appeared (it was already bubbling under the surface, LEH and BSC were already denying all the stuff we now know to be true, BSC hedge funds had already gone bad, et. al.). He was just loud, and basically carrying water for his buddies there imho. And 2) I do think it's relevent he sounded the all-clear two week's later. If you're going to give him credit for "seeing" all this, pretty fair then to note he found it under control so soon after. And 3) Kind of ridiculous to act like the Fed did this in response to The Rant. If they were sitting with their head in the sand, and needed Cramer to tell them what to do, we all have bigger problems, lol.
So I do agree with your point, I really have more a problem with how Bubblevision is *marketing* this thing.
Adam: You should have your obsession with Cramer looked at by a professional. Or maybe you could rename this blog to "something stupid Cramer said today".
We all know Cramer (and Lenny for that matter as well) is an idiot - can we just agree on that and move on?
I do about 3-4 posts per day. Looking back on search, I probably average one or two per week on one or both of them. That will likely continue for as long as Cramer has this kind of influence, and Lenny has this kind of humor. Here's a great solution; Don't f***ing read any post that displeases you.
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