Confessions of a Street Addict - Hardcover

Cramer, James J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743224876 ISBN 13: 9780743224871

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Synopsis

In the most candid look at Wall Street since Liar's Poker, James J. Cramer, cofounder of TheStreet.com, radio and television commentator, and for years one of Wall Street's premier money managers, takes readers on a no-holds-barred tour of life on Wall Street ­revealing how the game is played, who breaks the rules, and who gets hurt.

Everyone on Wall Street knows Jim Cramer, and Cramer knows Wall Street better than anyone. For fifteen years he ran Cramer, Berkowitz, one of the Street's most successful hedge funds with a compounded annual return of 24% after all fees. In Confessions of a Street Addict he takes us from his fascination with the stock market as a middle-class kid in the Philadelphia suburbs to Harvard, where he began managing money. After an apprenticeship at Goldman, Sachs, Cramer set out on his own with his wife, Karen, the "Trading Goddess," as his partner. Cramer brilliantly describes the life of a money manager -- the frenetic pace, the constant pressure to outperform the market and other fund managers, and the shark-like attacks fund managers make as they circle a fund perceived to be in trouble.

At the same time that he was managing money, Cramer was one of the best-known commentators on the financial markets. A former president of the Harvard Crimson, Cramer had been a newspaper reporter before he began managing money. While he was a fund manager, he wrote for SmartMoney and other publications, making him one of the first money managers to offer insight and analysis from inside the world of finance. With the rise of the Internet and online publishing, he co-founded TheStreet.com, the online financial Web site. In one of the most fascinating chapters in this book, Cramer takes us inside the IPO of TheStreet.com, where he found himself a knowledgeable but helpless onlooker as his own Web site came on the market at an unrealistically high price that it never reached again, a harbinger of the dot-com disasters that would soon haunt the stock market.

Throughout the book Cramer is characteristically outspoken, outrageous, and candid about everyone, himself included. There has never been a high-wired, high-octane book about Wall Street like this one.

About this title

About the Author

James J. Cramer is host of CNBC’s Mad Money and cofounder of TheStreet.com. His many books include Confessions of a Street Addict, Jim Cramer’s Getting Back to Even, Jim Cramer’s Mad Money, Jim Cramer’s Real Money, Jim Cramer’s Stay Mad for Life.

Reviews

Cramer, famous for appearing on CNBC as the "wild excitable guy [with]... a big mouth and lots of passion talking authoritatively about how you could make money by getting on the Net," recounts his turbulent dual career as hedge fund manager and media pundit. Cramer tells of his lifelong obsession with the market, beginning with childhood scenes of poring over daily stock listings. The story kicks into high gear once he starts juggling his law school course load so he can spend as much time as possible trading (over the phone, in the pre-Internet '80s). After that, the narrative's pace never relents from depictions of Cramer's early days at Goldman Sachs through the launch of his own fund, which led to magazine columns, a near-constant presence on TV, and TheStreet.com. Cramer's description of the financial news Web site's launch is ruthless, not just toward the executives whose scheming and mismanagement, he says, undermined TheStreet.com's success, but toward himself for hiring them and temporarily destroying his long-standing friendship with publishing fixture Marty Peretz. Cramer is equally self-recriminating about the effect his fanatical trading had on his personal life, but clearly still loves to linger over every major deal of his career (and a lot of the minor ones), even perhaps especially if they blew up in his face. This is a lively, informative portrait of the highest levels of finance and media in the last decade.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Very much in the mold of Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, this is the autobiography of Wall Street wunderkind Cramer. He has led various lives on Wall Street, ranging from inexperienced summer associate at Goldman, Sachs to legendary trader at his own hedge fund. But he's also been a financial journalist and is probably better known to the general public for having cofounded TheStreet.com, an online financial publication where he continues today as a commentator. Having made millions running his hedge fund, he pulls the curtains partly aside, shedding light on the backstage mechanics of how these funds work and why they can make such incredible returns for investors. Unfortunately, he does project somewhat of a high-testosterone image, exhibiting the abrasiveness that has made him many enemies while earning him TV viewers. But he writes engagingly and genuinely loves the business of stock buying and selling. Whether Cramer is advising on basic stock-picking or describing the intricacies of the initial public offering (IPO) process, readers will benefit from his knowledgeable insights. Those wishing to read more about working on Wall Street and Cramer might also profit from Nicholas W. Maier's Trading with the Enemy. Recommended for investment collections in public or specialized libraries. Richard Drezen, Washington Post/New York City Bureau
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743224876
• ISBN 13: 9780743224871
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 352