I’d like to start off with something the comic Todd Barry said when he was presenting at the Comedy Central Roast of Chevy Chase many years ago:
When I found out I was going to be roasting Chevy, everyone pretty much said the same thing: They said roasting Chevy Chase is like shooting fish in a barrel. Actually it wasn’t “everyone” it was just my four-year old nephew. But roasting Chevy Chase isn’t as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. It’s as easy as looking at fish in a barrel. It’s as easy as being somewhere near a barrel.
This is precisely how I feel about illustrating the horrific stock market picks of the $5,000,000/year (CNBC base salary) investing “guru” known as Jim Cramer, who is perhaps the most famous stock market prognosticator on the entire planet. He’s so famous, he was even featured in the Iron Man movies.
My original “vision” for this post was to compile, say, a dozen really terrible stock picks, show a tweet where the man himself declared something a great buy, point to the super-high price he said so with an arrow, and then let you drink in the plummeting price that followed. I mean, there’s a ton of possibilities.
The sheer volume of horrendous, portfolio-destroying ideas is simply exhausting. You could ask me to compose one hundred examples, and I could do it. But I’d rather not. It’s a lot of work, and it gets awfully repetitive. In fact, you can even have your own Cramer Crash Construction Set to use and enjoy. You can just go here, the Twitter Advanced Search, and enter two things:
- the ticker symbol in the first field indicating the text you want to seek (example: NFLX)
- the account name @jimcramer as shown below. Bang, you’ll have a list of his tweets for that symbol!
For example, I could search for the ticker COIN or, instead, Coinbase, and I’d find his famous “We like Coinbase to $475″ tweet from April 14, 2021. I could then stick it on a stock chart to show you how that prediction went (spoiler alert: the price peaked literally on IPO day and has never looked back, and it is about 90% beneath the $475 “like” price):
Of course, in his finest backpedaling fashion, he offered up this newer tweet tonight, which I’ve juxtaposed with his tweet from thirteen months prior:
Arrogant, huh? My goodness.
Of course, I’m not the only one loudly mentioning Cramer’s catastrophes. The Internet is replete with folks doing the same thing, including those who are fairly scientifically keeping a running tally of hypothetical Inverse Cramer Funds (which are making serious coin, by the way). I think it’s starting to wear on the guy, because his tweets are beginning to border on the non sequitur………
I reached out to my own Twitter followers to ask them of past Cramer recommendations, and the price points at the time of the idea, and I had no shortage of help…….
What’s especially irksome to me is that the man is not owning up to all of this. He should do a full hour special about Where I Screwed Up and really lay it all out there. Instead, we have examples like the following. Please note his tweet from March 29th (I would point out one doesn’t have to reach back to the madness of the Covid stimmy check era; you even dial back the clock a few weeks to get these gems). Here we see him describe Dutch Bros (symbol BROS) as a “Cramer-fave” and he taunts the bears to “please please please short it” (presumably so they could get reamed). As is so often the case, kindly observe what happened to the price almost one millisecond after he tweeted out his message:
But, again, instead of tweeting “OH MY GOD I SUCK!!!”, he instead suggests very strongly that, all this time, he was just saying he likes sipping their coffee and really thinks their stock sucks out loud.
Sort of like – – oh, let’s see – – pretending that his famous Bear Stearns rant was actually about how people with their money in that bank shouldn’t take it out (umm, it’s not a retail bank) and didn’t at all mean the stock was all right. Uh-huh.
You see, these days both Jim Cramer and Cathie Wood are quite rightly the target of a lot of derision, but instead of seeing her as some kind of ally or sister-in-arms, he’s joining in. Although it seems that on April 22nd, he made a solemn pledge that he’d knock it off and say no more bad words about Cathie Wood. “PERIOD.” Let’s see how that worked out………..
Yet somehow this man has amassed international fame, a gargantuan salary, and 1.8 million hapless Followers on his Twitter feed. It’s interesting, though – – – even though he ostensibly is all about stocks and how “his mission is to help you make money” (I’m not making that; he really says that at the start of every show) he has lately made a point of pinning tequila information (I think he’s an investor?) at the tippity-top of his inexplicably popular Twitter feed.
In fact, today, instead of lambasting himself about the nearly 100% failure rate of his stock picks lately, he had this morsel to share with his long-suffering disciples………..
And yet, after the closing bell, more stocks continued to get absolutely torched, and once again, it was a piece of cake to find out what the man had to say about any given one of them………
So the whole thing leaves me baffled. Although there are theories………..
