The Cramer-Roubini X-treme Index
Courtesy of Damien Hoffman at Wall St. Cheat Sheet
Case and Shiller have one. Dow and Jones have one. Black and Scholes have something similar…
Wall St. Cheat Sheet is proud to introduce our first proprietary index: The Cramer-Roubini X-treme Index. After toiling with quantum proofs and a stack of “For Dummies” books for years in the basement of Duke University’s Lilly Library, we have finally produced the perfect blend of Doom and Boom suffused with a subtle hint of X-Games adrenaline.
Unlike the VIX or other sentiment indexes which somehow fell into the shit pit during the Great Markets (Housing, Stocks, Credit, Oil, etc.) Crashes of 2008, The Cramer-Roubini X-treme Index held up like a Viagra induced E! party on The Girls Next Door. That’s right. While those old bags Dow and Jones couldn’t tell you what the hell was happening, our needle jolted from Cramer to Roubini faster than food passes through an American tourist who just ate a spoiled egg in Thailand.
By now you’re probably scratching your head trying to reverse engineer our black box indicator (which, by the way, is available to institutional and accredited investors for annual licensing at the bargain price of the US National Debt divided by 100). Don’t give yourself the mathematician’s cold sweats or the Bible Code mystic’s shiver. If you’re not an institutional investor or don’t qualify as an accredited investor, please read on (if you are one of the aforementioned investors, please pay now)…
The secret to our indicator is its lack of cutting-edge technology. We employ a Luddite style system where a handful of college interns sit in front of 52″ flat screens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week watching CNBC, Bloomberg, and FOX Business. Each time an unpaid viewer sees either Cramer or Roubini, he or she registers the viewing by clicking a baseball umpire’s out counter. We know it only goes to three, but we’ve hired some cum laude quality interns to do the higher math on paper from our recycling bin.
At the end of each session, we tally the Cramer and Roubini sightings on a huge chalkboard. Whoever has the most appearances on the three networks plus comments as “experts” in major print media outlets (which are monitored overseas, but that’s a story for another article), that person becomes what Billboard would call our Top Pop Hit.
Once we have a clear shepherd of the times, we can then determine whether we are in a bull or bear market. Moreover, we can monitor extremes of fear and greed as either Cramer or Roubini will slip outside the smokey corridors of Wall Street and end up at places like the Today Show, MySpace’s Most Popular Playa’ List, or even the White House.
So, there you have it. No longer must you waste time hearing Cramer call a bottom in housing or stocks every time the markets decline 5%. And the days are gone when you are forced to spend years watching your friends get rich while your self-proclaimed prophet Roubini tells you the end is near. Simply purchase an umpire’s counter at Dick’s, hit your couch, open a bag of your favorite chips, and start clicking your way to riches …
Stay tuned for updates to our Cramer-Roubini X-treme Index — we are rigorously backtesting whether public feuds between the two men indicate a sideways market.
