Categories: OLD Media Moves

Solin: Ignore what Cramer says

Dan Solin writes for The Huffington Post that CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer‘s talk at the recent Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ conference in New York was full of misstatements, including when he said he was among the “best of the best.”

Solin writes, “If Cramer was really ‘the best of the best,’ he would disclose the puny odds of ‘beating the market’ by relying on his stock and funds picks and those of his colleagues. If you are relying on his advice, you are chasing rainbows. Instead, you should heed the advice of Jonathan Clements, the former personal finance columnist at The Wall Street Journal, who said: ‘It’s the big lie that, repeated often enough, is eventually accepted as truth. You can beat the market. Trounce the averages. Outpace the index. Beat the street. An entire industry strokes this fantasy.’

“It’s your choice. You can follow the bloviating hype of Cramer or the sound research of William F. Sharpe and many others. Which do you think is really ‘the best of the best’?”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.