Stewart Vs Cramer on Daily Show, march 12.

[kandrathe]

Pretty good interview on thursday night.

On my scorecard at least, I give the 'Brawl Street: Buy Low Sell DIE' match to Stewart.

K.O. moments of the night for me, was when Stewart said to Cramer something like, '...I get that you want to make finance entertaining...but this is not a f***ing game.'

Cramer seemed to be playing a mix of 90% pity me, mea culpa mode, 10% passive agressive counter attack. Hmm, counter attack seemed too strong a word actually, maybe counter whining at times.

I just don't buy what Cramer was trying to sell at first, the cratering economy is a once in a lifetime tsunami etc, and Stewart IMO, systematically cleaned his clock on that one. At one moment I wasn't sure if Stewart was naively asking which side CNBC is on (the answer is kinda obvious, I used to watch MSNBC money programs mostly for the laughs, but you can figure out easily who the target audience is, and it ain't 'main street') or was Stewart raising a point but couching it in a question.

But to me that pales in comparison to Cramer's counter point of 'they lied to me...some CEOs have lied to me...' I don't know which one is more sad, Cramer trying to play a wounded doe eyed innocent who got fleeced by some mean lying CEOs. Or the slim possibility that he really was that gullible.

Near the end it was almost painful to watch, Cramer's face at times almost looked liked he was asking for a mercy kill.

Then I remembered what Cramer's show and other 'Money Programs' was like when I had access to the MSNBC channel. :P Aw hell, I mostly watched it for the Money Honeys anyway.:wub:

When I used to play the market, and kept my ear to the ground it became obvious that you should do the opposite of what they recommended on the TV shows. After anyone recommended a stock I would always calculate its asset/debt and income/debt ratios, and mostly the recommendations were over valued already. As you might expect they were always reporting on things in the past. Like, it would have been good to have bought this stock 2 months ago... This resulted in maybe a small up tick followed by a massive profit taking. I eventually started earning money when I would just analyze companies for value, and stability then invest in the unknowns that had upside potential. A good strategy is to try to predict what will happen in the future, then choose the companies who are in the best position to make that happen. For example, we know that wind energy will be a much more important component in the US electrical supply. Who makes and maintains wind turbines, power lines, etc? The investor can be blind sided by corporate fraud, which is why 10-K and 10-Q reports are required and are now signed by the CEO and CFO. You can still get blind sided, but at least the CEO and CFO are held culpable now.