Whatever you may think about Cramer is secondary. Baruch’s main argument is that being a consistently successful non-professional investor requires enormous effort and is quite challenging. And the odds of finding good advice are far less then guessing the outcome of a coin toss. As an analogy, you need to learn to swim really well before jumping in with the sharks, and then, the even the best swimming skills only go so far. – Ilene
No Stock Recommendations here; move along
Courtesy of Ultimi Barbarorum
Baruch found himself commenting on Wall Street Cheat Sheet like ten days ago, on a post by Damien Hoffman, who seems to really dislike Jim Cramer. The post was about some investigation of TheStreet.com by the SEC, which Damien thought highly amusing, perhaps because he also runs a competing subscription-based financial edutainment site. Now, Baruch doesn’t pay attention to Jim Cramer on TV, but in fact quite likes him in print. He reads his posts on theStreet.com, and respects his track record as a hedge fund manager and pioneer econo-blogger. So Baruch felt a brief moment of annoyance about seeing someone he liked being unecessarily trashed, but soon his heart was filled with forgiveness and understanding again. We must not be too harsh; snark is Damien’s job, what he gets paid for. He is a financial blogger-journalist, and being cheeky about mainstream media figures is part of that David and Goliath thing blogging used to be all about.
Anyway, this post is only a bit about Jim Cramer and Damien Hoffman. The exchange got Baruch thinking about the differences between journalists/bloggers (or whatever you want to call them) and investors, and what it means to communicate about investments with the public. Baruch finds this terribly interesting, because of course as an amateur econo-blogger and a professional investor, he has a foot in both camps.
Some of Baruch’s best friends are, or have been, financial journalists and commentators, on blogs and print. Baruch in his time also attempted a bit of journalism, before he found his true calling (which isn’t blogging, by the way). Being a financial journalist is a good, interesting job, and very important to the proper functioning of a marketplace. Journalists can do things, find things out, and explain things the public and investors need to know in ways investment professionals can’t, at least without risking jail.
But in the end journalists are explainers, commentators. They are dependent on market participants to provide them with things to write about. They review what others do. They work with the huge advantage of hindsight. And when it comes to giving advice about what what should be done, most media commentators are no better than the rest of us. Probably worse, insofar as they don’t get as much practice at it.
The major problem that commentators have is that rewards are based on reputation. Praise from peers and increased readership is the only way they have of knowing how good at their jobs they are. It’s not quantitative, however, and is more dependent on how smart the commentator sounds, rather than how good he or she is at giving actual foresight. It’s a difficult thing, having to appear smart all the time. A well publicised prediction gone wrong can be pretty devastating to a reputation and undo lots of less well-publicised predictions which went right. Many writers solve this problem by not making many predictions at all. This is why most analysis pieces in newspapers and mainstream blogs end up in prevarication and fence sitting. Most journalists these days are smart enough not to end their articles with the words “only time will tell” — but they may as well.
The need to constantly appear smart also incentivises some to find a shortcut. A straw man can be a gift that keeps on giving, especially when it’s hard to think of a subject for the next weekly column. In most cases the best and quickest way of appearing smart is to find some fellow commentator who has broken the cardinal rule of journalistic punditry and actually had a stab at predicting something in a clear, unmistakeable falsifiable way — and got it wrong — then pointing out their error. Over and over again.
Ironically, consumers of financial media are actually crying out for someone to tell them what to do, rather than the prevarication they are confronted with everywhere. So pundits who do state clear positions tend to get eyeballs pretty quick. This unsettles their peers, who are universally relieved when these outliers inevitably cock it up, and they can now write relatively gleeful articles about how it was pretty obvious their colleague didn’t really know what he was talking about in the first place. Realising this, even sites which purport to give readers actionable intelligence, such as Lex, don’t actually tell them what to do, which would be too risky. A conclusion is always hinted at, but never made as plain as ” we think you should sell”. Instead you get some coded priggishness, like the chairman of company X “should enjoy the view while he can”. Which gives the Lex writer enough wiggle-room to appear clever whatever the outcome for shareholders. This is, after all, the point of his writing, which he would freely admit to you as well if you bought him a pint.
Compare financial journalists now to actual market participants. While every now and then hedge funds get in a feeding frenzy and will short your longs and go long your shorts if they think you are in distress, the rest of the time professional managers are remarkably civil about each other in print, in person, and in front of clients. They don’t have cat fights very often.
I think this is because they have their annual Number to point to. You can have an embarrassing reputation for sartorial style or personal hygiene, but if you make me money, I simply won’t care. The only way to trash talk a competitor so as to negate his track record is to insinuate dishonesty or fraud, and that’s the nuclear option. Professional investors are all facing a common enemy, the market, very much as sailors do the sea. Unlike the pundits, professionals don’t have the luxury of wiggle-room. If your PALM blows you up you can’t go off to the exchange and explain that you didn’t mean to buy the stock, someone merely misunderstood your orer and took it out of context. They also know it’s impossible to make money without taking risks, some of which will crystallise. Many times you will end up looking like a total spazzer. For a financial commentator that would be a disaster. But for us that’s OK. We don’t have to show it. In the end we have our track records, the returns we create over time, which show our worth. Never mind the dumbass boneheaded calls we made, if we have succeeded, and produced a positive, audited return, no-one can take that away (unless of course you were running a massive Ponzi scheme with auditors were working out of a shack on Miami Beach, and you were just making it up).
When one of us blows up, our initial emotional response tends to sympathy, with only a bit of schadenfreude. There but for the grace of god, is our first response, before wondering how we can get our hands of what’s left of his clients’ money. We admire our peers who make consistent positive returns, but also those that came back from misfortune and prospered. To say “He knows how to take a loss,” is an enormous compliment, and the best of us understand that when someone finally capitulates , after months of pain, on a prominent call they have made, that is often the point the nasty market decides the bet was right all along and finally goes their way. Without them. Anyhow, it’s very diferent from being a pundit.
But don’t conclude from this that Baruch feels superior to paid commentators. Oh god, no. Baruch loves blogging, and it massively enriches his life. It would be nice to have a job which didn’t depend to such a large extent on luck, on factors totally outside your control. I know at any point a massive accounting scandal in a cherished long, or the misplaced takeover of a short could totally blow me up. I will have no idea what is going to happen to when I walk into the office monday morning. It could be the worst week of my life, as well as the best. People tend not to be able to do my job for long. Large parts of it are incredibly arbitrary and stressful. I fantasize about a gig where I have a weekly column or a couple of posts a day to write and not much else, where my time is my own, and I can work from St Bart’s, and my only worry is coming up with the next topic to write about. *
But I digress.
Jim Cramer’s biggest problem, or rather the biggest problem I think people have with him, is that he is neither fish nor fowl. He tries to have it both ways, and does both punditry and investment; he is like a free to air newsletter writer, who likes to “entertain” as much as he tries to “educate”. Investors appreciate that he does research and takes positions, but find it hard to take the buffoonery seriously, and distrust the snap judgements of his quickfire opinions. Bloggers and other writers do not appreciate someone having been wrong getting away with it. So when something does go wrong, or when a count of his verbal picks (tics?) throw up a negative result vs the S&P, it’s very satisfying for them.
Cramer probably feels he gets enough stuff right to compensate for the errors he will make. Indeed, his “charitable trust” portfolio seems to be handily outperforming the S&P500, a fact which seems to have escaped his critics. He does not lack self confidence, or self regard. In being a media figure who actually tries to tell people what they should be doing, damn the torpedoes, I think he is trying something brave and new-ish. I have more sympathy for him than I do for people unwilling to put any skin in the game yet who criticise risk takers with the benefit of hindsight. Damien can have a laugh at Cramer for saying “Bear Stearns is OK” just before it went under, but unless we know what Damien’s opinion was at the time as well, it’s a pretty cheap laugh.
That said, I don’t think what Cramer is trying to do really works. I trust he’s totally genuine about trying to help, and I am sure a lot of people get something out of it. But no matter how much people may want to have someone to tell them what to do, there’s no real benefit to anyone in trying to do that. They won’t be grateful. It will go wrong. People will wilfully misunderstand you, point out your failures and ignore your victories. “Cramer makes money” is not good copy for editors; “Cramer in fact an idiot” is much better. Cramer knows this; tips are for waiters, he says. He wants to “educate” the public instead, so individuals can go up against the “big boy” institutional investors and hedgies and “have a chance”. Fat chance, I say. Even if it is full of excellent advice, 20 minutes of TV a day isn’t going to help Joe Schmoe have much of a look-in trading against me in stocks I know really, really well. It’s like giving someone a spear and telling them they now have a chance against someone piloting an Apache gunship helicopter.
This is why, among other reasons, I have been very careful to resist making this blog into anything remotely appearing like investment advice. I am terrified of the dunderhead who goes out and sticks his life savings into RIMM because I blogged about it positively. I don’t want anything like that to happen, even if the stock goes up and it works well. Because at some point it won’t, and then he’s going to be well hacked off. It’s not like there’s anything in it for me either; I won’t make any money out of the dunderhead. All I have are non-offsettable downside risks — he might come after me with an axe.
The world is full of crazies, dear readers. Spinoza himself knew this, and was careful not to have his ideas spread around C17th Holland, no matter how convinced he was that they were true. His Ethics were published only after his death. Not everything is suitable for everyone, all the time. Unlike my thoughts about iPhones, Spinoza’s ideas about religion and nature were radical enough to put him in mortal danger. For his philosophy he had been excommunicated and made anathaema to his ethnic community and family, someone had tried to assassinate him, one of his best friends died in prison for similar beliefs and he had seen his own political protector dead, torn apart by an angry mob. So “Caute” (“Caution”), the motto on his signet ring, was not merely for fun. And so it is with this Baruch.
Much more than philosophy, investing should be a solitary activity. A group of people or colleagues you can check your ideas with is a good thing, but you must take responsibility for your investments yourself. You will receive conflicting advice, all of which will sound plausible but most of which is wrong. Consider that 98% of the people you encounter who claim to know what they are talking about, and who may be followed in the media, don’t really know, and have as much chance of being right about these things as you do. You will find out about things you need to know much much later than the professionals. You will need to make most of your mistakes yourself, and it will take a long time until you gain the context to be able to properly learn from them. Being in the market is the only way to get its benefits, the positive black swans that occur all the time and which rarely get written about, but know also that professionals as a rule consider retail investors to be the patsy in the market. In their minds they are the sheep, and the sheep get shorn. The greater level of sophistication you are likely to get out of watching Mad Money or subscribing to some websites may help, but it is a drop in the ocean compared to what you will need to succeed.
Unless you are willing to make the huge effort being a consistently successful investor requires, I still think the best way to exploit the market is to pay someone you trust to look after your investments and/or to invest with professionals who you think can really make money consistently (at least you can threaten to sue them if it goes wrong). This will, I promise you, not be cheap, and you may need to give them a lot of money to invest to get them interested. But if you find the right one, you’ll probably end up ahead. Or join an investment club, concentrate on a few stocks and parcel out the research. That could work too.
Ultimately the gulf between investor and pundit exists for a reason. Maybe one day it can be bridged. Maybe individual investors will somehow smarten up relative to the professionals. But I doubt it for now.
* if you do have a pure writing gig for Baruch, I refer you to the “contact me” page. Note well though, that his current beloved employer pays him vastly more than you are likely to be able to afford, with probably more job security, dying newspaper or struggling online franchise that you probably are.
