Product Description

You've been screwed.

You've been bludgeoned, skewered, crushed, mutilated by the stock market. Every day you read about another corporate scandal: loans to CEOs that didn't have to be repaid, accounting "irregularities," profits that never existed. You think the stock market must have been rigged. And you're right.

You were betrayed by the stock promotion machine -- the mutual fund managers, the brokers, analysts, strategists, and stock gurus who brainwashed you into buying and holding and believing that stocks, like parents, always come through and bail you out in the end.

So now what do you do? Where do you put your money? You can't just leave it in the bank or stuff it under the mattress.

For fourteen years Jim Cramer ran a hedge fund that compounded money at a rate of 24 percent annually after fees, and then he got out at the end of 2000. He knows that there are ways to make money, smart ways that don't require you to own stocks blindly. There are other investments that won't send you to the poorhouse.

This book will tell you what went wrong, who the bad guys were, and what you have to do to restore your financial health. You can't just close your eyes. Ignoring Wall Street isn't the answer. Cash alone isn't the answer. This book has the answers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #236698 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-05
• Released on: 2002-11-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

From Publishers Weekly
If you invested money in the last five years, chances are you lost some of it. Or even all of it. Rounds of layoffs at ill-conceived dot-coms may no longer be making headlines, but the toppling of behemoths WorldCom and Enron have alerted investors to the pitfalls of unprincipled accounting. In this little book, the outspoken commentator and cofounder of TheStreet.com breaks down how such widely touted companies got away with blatant fraud and why investors got screwed in the process. Cramer (Confessions of a Street Addict) uses WorldCom's Hindenburg-like plummet to illustrate how unscrupulous analysts hyped stocks they knew were already overvalued in return for hefty compensation. He goes after Jack Grubman, former analyst for Salomon Smith Barney, who "was the chief proselytizer for unrelenting, ineluctable, telecommunications growth." Grubman's success as an industry cheerleader got the better of WorldCom after he hyped its competitors. Turning his gaze to Enron, Cramer dissects this infamous corporate disaster. He examines who was really at fault, considering Ken Lay, Arthur Andersen, the SEC and Congress. He concludes, "maybe it was just everyone because Enron represented... a wholesale breakdown of every aspect of the legal, accounting, governmental and regulatory bulwark meant to keep corporate America honest." Without condescension, this compact volume serves as an easy-to-read manual on prudent investing as well as a deep-if opinionated-analysis of major bungles in recent business history.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
James J. Cramer is co-founder of TheStreet.com. After earning undergraduate and law degrees at Harvard University and working as a newspaper reporter, he joined Goldman Sachs, where he worked in the Private Client Services unit. In 1987, he founded Cramer Berkowitz, a private hedge fund that he ran until 2000. Jim Cramer is the markets commentator for CNBC and co-host of Kudlow and Cramer, also on CNBC. He is the host of the national daily radio program RealMoney, "Bottom Line" columnist for New York magazine, and markets commentator for TheStreet.com. He is also the author of the national bestseller Confessions of a Street Addict. Mr. Cramer and his family live in Summit, New Jersey.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: What Happened?

"Stocks for the Long Run...Buy and Hold...Next stop, Dow 36,000...Stocks as the only asset class worth owning...Tech Blue Chips...Stocks always come back...Don't ever sell...Selling's for losers...Why not put Social Security into stocks, after all they are the safest investments..."

Ahh, that litany, that rock-solid litany of reassurance about equities. Is there a soul on the planet who didn't suffer from the multiple brainwashings that the media, the academics, the brokerage houses, and the mutual funds mercilessly beat into our heads for a decade? Amazingly, after trillions were lost, we still have no regrets, no apologies, nary a mea culpa from those who heartlessly led us to the financial slaughter that outranks even those of the nightmare generations 1973-1974, and, alas, 1929-1934 -- that's right, the Great Depression. These one-note charlatans would, even after every penny of life savings had been lost, still recite their bogus mantras meant to take our eyes off the ball, and our wallets, even as they suffered not a penny for their admonitions. They haven't learned a thing about the havoc they have wrought. They are still out there shilling their wares, except now they are saying that the stock market is even more undervalued than before. Dow 36,000? You better hope they've perfected cryogenics by then. That's the only way you will live to see it.

This book is meant not as an epitaph to your hard-earned savings, but as an epitaph to their cynical reassurances and pseudo-scientific claptrap. This book should serve as an antidote to their sweet nostrums that have separated you so viciously and silently from your money. In short, they thought that if they got you in, you would never get out, and they would make fortunes off you before you figured out what the heck happened to your nest egg. The charlatans wrote their assurances of ever-higher stock prices when the market skyrocketed daily. Now that it has nosedived, their illogic seems deceitful if not downright larcenous.

Oh sure, the temptation to demonize seems far-fetched to some, particularly those who need stocks to go higher to make a living or have a successful venture. But as someone who has worked in the money business for more than three decades, and compounded money in his own fund at 24 percent after all fees, someone who has seen it all and done it all when it comes to stocks, I can tell you that exorcising demons may be the only way to assure you that it doesn't happen to you again.

Why were the odds stacked so against the individual investor? Why was the bloodletting so incredibly worse than it would have been if the sole cause of the downturn were the economy? Put simply: money, greed -- there was so much money to be made simply by keeping you in the dark about the practices of Wall Street. There were fees to be taken by managing assets; there were underwriter fees, initial public offering fees, fees from advertisers, mainly mutual funds and brokers; there were fees from lobbyists, accounting fees, lawyer fees, and fees from publishers. There were returns, outsized returns, that no one wanted to give up, including the public itself, and there were those huge gains that insiders generated by selling common stock against their options at the very top of the market and long after, enabling them to take out billions upon billions of dollars in gains, some right before their companies collapsed, leaving workers and pensioners holding nothing, not even a bag. The sums appropriated were so fabulous, and the penalties for abuse so small that the temptation to rig individual stocks and even the market itself, in the name of earnings "management" simply grew too great for all but the most holy of chief executives, which, alas, turned out to be too few to be noticed or to matter to battered 401k's. What started as a few apples turned into the whole orchard, but no one in a responsible position in government wants to admit that harsh but true judgment.

The actions taken by the federal government subsequent to the prodding by elected officials such as Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York, who got the ball rolling, certainly helped clarify the conflicts, and even shed harsh light on the most revolting of them. But within weeks of these actions, the complex of interests that kept you in the dark about how the stock market really works was right back in action.

Which is why you need this book and need it now, because if you are going to rebuild your nest egg or fix your 401k, you first need to understand which forces destroyed it. Only then, once you understand the subtle means by which you were fooled into coughing up vast sums, will you be in a position to work your way back to where you were, regardless of the overall market's direction. It won't be quick -- after all, those overnight methods were what got us in this mess. Rebuilding your investments may not even be exciting, but we should have left the excitement for the ballpark or the movie houses. I will recommend to you a steady, solid way to make things back that can't be corrupted by the cavalier forces that coalesced into the current brutal bear market for stocks.

First, though, let's slay those nasty villains, those bear enablers that allowed the ursine capital destroyers to roam just about anywhere they wanted and take from you with reckless abandon. This will be a difficult task, but I intend to help you make your paycheck and your retirement money grow, not shrink, and I don't want your fees, your commissions, or your capital gains. I just want your losses to stop and the capital appreciation to begin.

Copyright © 2002 by J. J. Cramer & Co.

Customer Reviews

A Very Timely Read!
Cramer is an easy target for criticism, but this simple book has tremendous value.

I took this book with me on a 7 day Caribbean cruise and had a great time reading it under the coconut trees of St. Maarten and Antigua. Being away from CNBC, Wall Street Week, and the constant media attention to the stock market was a welcome reprise.

And so was this book.

At first glance this book may seem a little bit light on information. It's only 117 pages long at a time when we expect about 300 pages from a typical John Wiley-type finance book. But it's not the number of pages that counts, it's the information, personal interpretations by Cramer, and solid financial wisdom that matter.

By the time I actually got around to reading this book (on those great beaches), I must say that I truly enjoyed it!

The book is divided into 3 very distinct parts.

The first part is about how the public got totally used by Enron, Worldcom, and Rhythms Net type scandals. Since all of these events were so recent it doesn't take long before you start recalling all the pieces of information that came out about these cases. Mr. Cramer does a nice job of taking us all back to those days and recapping what went wrong. Each one was revealing in its own unique way. And yes, we got used!

The second part pinpoints the other culprits in the stock market's two and a half year demise (and giant NASDAQ crash!). Cramer reminds as of the all-stocks-all-the-time mentality that came to be at the market's peak. Also the potential danger of executive options, shady accounting, too many one-way mutual funds, and always bullish brokerage firms. And by the way, these culprits are still at today!!!

And finally, there is the last section about what to do. Here is current advice and simple guidelines to avoid getting used again in the future. Some of the gems are:

1) Have some bonds for income
2) Have some cash for annual buying opportunities
3) Buy stocks in incremental "get your feet wet" amounts
4) Buy at least 5 stocks from 5 different industries
5) It's okay to sell
6) Sell some on the way up
7) Sell your losers because bad stocks may not go up at all
8) Know your stocks and how they make money so you have a feeling of their value.
9) Buy index funds for diversification and low expenses
10) Hedge funds are better than mutual funds in concept. Here's something to research more on. Mutual funds are financial products who's time has gone.

For those readers who want an enjoyable read, who watch CNBC, have an interest in tech stocks, and feel like they were used and want to avoid it in the future, here's a book for you. It's a reminder of how to keep your head when things get too crazy on either the upside or downside.

A very timely piece!

P.S.: As a fellow author I can understand Mr. Cramer's disappointment in the reviewing process. Some people think it's a sign of brilliance to degrade intellectual property when it's simply a matter of them just not getting it. My advice to these negative types is to stand aside if you're not going to be fair. Let the reader have a chance to appreciate the author's work....the content and the spirit.

Who's Screwing Who?
You just gotta love Cramer. Whether he's on his knees confessing to being a stock market addict or crawling across the table, ranting and raving on CNBC, he entertains, invigorates, and educates. But he's also a bull in the china closet - so now, after the 2000-2002 debacle, we get his condemnation of the whole Wall Street scene inscribed with the immortal words, "You Got Screwed," as he picks over the underbelly of the tainted beast. Yes, it's a short book, but that's its selling point: Cramer crams everything into something you can sit down and read in a couple of hours - and actually understand via his take-no-prisoners style. His brash attitude is more of the street fighter than the wood-paneled office executive, and this train wreck of a market comes alive with real personalities backed up against the wall as Cramer blasts them to bits. No words wasted. Just typical Cramer. You either love him or hate him, but you can't ignore him.
First he tells you why the system reeked and rotted, eventually collapsing under the weight of fakery and fraud. Then he ends the book by advising you how to never be caught up in Wall Street's self-serving ever again. And he does a good job of both.
His advice on how to protect yourself in the future is good, basic, Investing 101: "Admit the crash happened and move on, find a trusted financial advisor if you won't or don't want to do the homework yourself (he advises 2 hours a week), investigate and analyze companies prior to putting one red cent into them, forget 'buy and hold,' learn to read balance sheets, put emphasis on dividends, monitor insider and corporate ('buybacks') buying of their own stock, use P/Es to value stocks, always keep cash available, and avoid margin." Good advice from a pro who's seen and done it all.
Now the fun part begins. Mutual funds end up getting the brunt of the Cramer cannonballs. The game they played was "beat the numbers." The financial press loved it because it gave them "the reason" why the market was going up. Made they look smart. Cramer takes apart this silliness, exposing it for what it was - accounting gimmickry, pure and simple. All that the analysts and companies had to do was lowball the upcoming quarter, then "beat the number" by a penny, and we were off to the races. So why was the investing public taken in so thoroughly? "The public thought it knew all it had to know...Democratization (of stocks), however did not bring with it all the skills you needed to make good judgments for the long term. For example, no one provided the tools of how to read a balance sheet or assess cash flows. No one taught people how to spot red flags or how to tell if a company wasn't doing as well as you thought. And no one explained that stocks, particularly tech stocks, were high-risk pieces of paper..." (26)
Moving on to corporate governance, Cramer slams the looting of the treasury via stock options as corporate insiders served themselves a hearty dish of cheap stock, seemingly at no cost to the bottom line. Only later do we now realize that dog won't hunt either.
He indicts the SEC, the accountants, the corporate officers, the boards of directors, the media, the brokerage houses, the analysts, the academics...everybody except those whose money was being looted - the individual investor.
Cramer saves his strongest salvos for his slicing and dicing of Enron. His delivers an indictment of the whole political culture of the 90s with: "...maybe it was just everyone because Enron represented, not a simple fraud like WorldCom, but a wholesale breakdown of every aspect of the legal, accounting, governmental, and regulatory bulwark to keep corporate America honest." Sounds remotely familiar like another entertaining individual of the 90s who took shot at the same targets through humor. The comedian Seinfeld perhaps knew us better than we knew ourselves at the time, as his four scoundrels lied, cheated, scammed, and flimflammed their way through the decade - an era that produced a "something for nothing" attitude that seems to have permeated every facet of our lives, and emptied out our pocketbooks as well.
In the end, Cramer's diatribe is basically an intelligent, heart-felt cry for investor education. Education of investment techniques and strategies, and an understanding of ourselves. Learn that and you won't have to depend on a Cramer or anyone else to manage your finances, plus you won't get screwed by anybody either.

Sweet and Short
I have undergone usual love-hate type feelings towards Cramer multiple times. It is really diffficult to understand him, especially when he was writing his trading diary on realmoney.

Now that the greatest bear market is (probably) over, and I lost my share of money in it, I understand what Cramer was saying back then. I mean in 2000. In March. In 2001.

This book is small, and I had missed a lot of games that wcom and enron played with unsuspecting people. I was already out of markets as I could not survive earlier waves of selling.

I went back and read Cramer's writings in March, 2000. Most people think he is just a pumper - I was surprised that he repeatedly urged people to get out of markets - "cash is king" was his mantra during the bearish cycle. And he nailed it both, the great bull ride and the bear ride, with almost correct timing.

You can hate him, he did what he had to do at his hedge fund, a lot of what may be immoral - he had to, it his job. But his writing has been on the mark - you can't deny that.
As for the plug, he mentions thestreet.com few times which is a FREE news site. I do not recall him mentioning realmoney.com ever in this book, which is paid content. At the end, he just "mentions" his own investment product "alerts", but that is only if you want to do it with him. His first choice is always a seasoned investment adviser whom you can trust.

I am not his employee, just a general trader. I would now trust Cramer more than any other Wall St analyst or a journalist who doesn't know a thing about the markets.