Bozo Hedge Funds

Now I am afraid, very afraid. Cramer says back up the truck?!!!!!! Look out below!!!!!!

so cramer is starting to talk about his imaginary hedge fund friends
“BUZZ and BATCH” like back in 2000 (The street.COM)

amazing how things change and still stay the same…..

Hedge funds could be dumping dollar denominated assets such as stocks, buying into foreign markets, and holding firm in metals and commodities. Makes sense given the performance of the dollar and all markets this week.

Pity the poor shmuck who listens to Cramer.

I hate to say it but he looks like he’s snapped, like he’s lost any sense of measured perspective. At one point he actually said he used to push the market around. My guess is he’s living the stress 20 hours a day, he’s been toddering on a very fine edge for longer than he can sustain it, that his personal life has gone into the toilet, & that he needs some professional help NOW! Instead, what he gets from cnbc is a highlight. This is obscene, it’s grotesque, the immolation of a shadow of a man for ratings.

He’s screaming hedge fund manip on less than 1% selloff; wait ’til the real selling action begins. I think the bulls have forgotten what a genuine selloff looks like.

hedge fund redemptions if you have annual liqudity were generally Oct 31, not November 30, cause most have 60 day notice. The only way this has anything to do with HF redemptions is if you have monthly liquidity or quarterly liquidity with 30 day notice.

Like many commenters said, we had two crappy econ reports in two days. The market should be down

if I remember correctly
Buzz and Batch would call Cramer
a “BALL HEADED BOZO” whenever they would give Cramer the low down on how the stock market
really worked.

At the time it was funny….
Cramer has now turned into a caricature of himself

don’t insult Bozo.
He’s a bald headed booooyahhhhh!

I’m turning off the italics…

Nice little bounce off the session lows… too bad volume dried up as it happened. (chart)

Maybe a lot of people went home early?

WOW what a comeback to almost unchanged! awesome. Maybe cramer is right after all…..hmmmmm

But I LIKE the italics! Makes me feel special!

That run-up was non-sensical. Anybody else feeling the urge to get way long this tape with this data? Thought so.

Then you can have the italics in your posts, I’m not special enough to have them. :p

I wonder what Monday will bring…

My most vivid memory of Jim Cramer…and it’s not anything he does on Mad Money. HE WAS BULLISH THROUGHOUT 2000, 2001 AND EARLY 2002. Just check out his archived commentary on The Street.com or RealMoney if you subscribe. I don’t need to go back to the archives. I took market notes starting in 2000 and all my entries over that period say, “JJC still bullish”. I lost a lot of $$ over that period…never again.

btw, reading through the comments above, “dark1p” has PEGGED the basis for Cramer’s HF management success. Sure he’a a super smart guy….his knowledge of the markets certainly blows me away…but he was extremely lucky to be born when he was.

barry, did buy the QQQQ puts? what do think about QID (short that doesn’t expire?)

“Avoid fighting the charts”….. oh give me a break…..

This market absolutely stinks…. volatility is still really low but the last two days it has been absurd. The greedy pigs can’t take profits even on bad news…. must be more of an excuse to take the market up.

Bad news= buy buy buy.

As for Cramer…. he keeps listing reasons for stocks to keep going up. There is a slowdown or recession coming and last time I checked that wasn’t a reason to run up the indices.

Lastly, rumours are so out of control….the bulls don’t have any good news left so they make up rumours to move stocks…i.e. Home depot today.

per Andrew:
‘”Avoid fighting the charts”….. oh give me a break…..’

hmmm, do you disagree with the basic idea that, regardless of what the ‘big picture’ may be or what *should* happen, the price action (as reflected in the charts) is what should govern the direction and timing of trades? It’s hard enough to win on the short side even when the stars are aligned and there is a flashing technical sign in front of you, but shorting against a pretty well defined rising trend is generally going to be a bad idea.

I’ve done it with great success and with great loss before, but that’s no way to trade in my opinion. I’ve got some older March puts on financials and an armload of straddles (including some on WMT that I bought Wed that immediately went green as it dove yesterday), so it’s not like I am cheering the bulls on. I just don’t see the odds in shorting a generally rising tape regardless of macro/fundamentals.

Once we see a significant technical breakdown like SPX going below 1360, then I’ll get interested in adding index short positions, but until then I am not going position my little self against Paulson, Bernanke and the financial media who provide the ambient upward market bias with their words even as common sense tells you that prices should be plunging. Been there, done that, bought the boots. Not going there again.

You don’t get ratings on a stock market show by being negative on the market. Cramer may very well be bearish but he’s not going to say it on his show. I’m watching the COT report. The commercials have had a historic short position in the S&P futures now for 3 weeks. They are typically a little early but when the big boys start selling heavily sooner or later the market corrects. I like the Jan. 08 QQQQ puts. Gives the position plenty of time to work.

Glenn’s got it right. I was an everyday reader of TheStreet.com from 1997 to about 2001, and it was such a “trend-is-your-friend” phenomenon. Cramer ended up in early 01 basically endorsing momentum as the only reason to stay in. I even asked him about it in an email (I was in cash by then) and he admitted it: “there are a lot of people long and making money right now,” or something to the effect.
He’s a promoter–of himself, of the market, of the good old USA (shorts are unpatriotic). Cable news and the Street love that. It all just feeds on itself–while the smart money sells out.

per ani5000:
“Keep watching the $VIX. I personally think we’ve got a few weeks to drag this out. Way too early to short QQQQS, I think — even though I think the QQQQs will not break 44.80 again. But anything can happen.”

You may be wasting your time watching vix- have a look at http://www.minyanville.com/articles/index.php?a=11701 where Schaeffer opines:
‘The problem with using the VIX as a sentiment indicator is that it is first and foremost a measure of market volatility. And market volatility is low in large part because of the “steady as she goes” rally that we’ve been experiencing, which, perversely enough, registers as a “low volatility” input to the option pricing models, which then spit out low option premiums. In this manner, strong price action begets low volatility, which begets a low VIX, and those arguing that a low VIX is a sign of a market top are in effect making the less-than-compelling argument that a strong market is, in and of itself, a sign of a market top.’

I have a lot of trouble arguing with that reasoning. But maybe you see it differently?

Cramer. It seems most of his followers – college age and the other Cramerites or Cramericans or (maybe lemmings is a better term) out there that simply see him as the host of the TV show, Mad Money, and nothing less. They know very little of his shady past.

His hedge fund had some success in the 90’s as it was a bull market period as one poster pointed out. He personally gives credit to his wife, Karen Backfisch, who worked as a trader for Michael Steinhardt Co. Cramer called her the “Trading Goddess”. He forced her to come to Manhattan each day to help run his fund cause he sucked at it. Think about that, having to call your wife to help do your job because you suck at it!

Would he ever bring up the Street.com articles at the height of the bubble? Umm, well, not in this lifetime. As one poster said his picks in many bubble era articles (JDSU), etc, dropped well over 90% in many cases. He had no selling discipline at all, so buried anyone who followed. Funny thing is – he said they would come back. Most never did. Meanwhile he dutifully collected subscriber fees.

Today he courts young, naive 20 somethings with his antics, basically just promoting his wares, lining his pockets. To the uninitiated, he looks the part, and tries to play it. Little do most know he graduated from Harvard with a journalism and later a law degree. What no MBA, finance degree? What does journalism have to do with trading?
Everything you see! Cramer soon realized that he could write articles in the press and that would help out his own stock holdings. Clever idea! From Howard Kurtz’s, The Fortune Tellers:

“In 1995, he was writing a financial advice column for Smart Money magazine. In one column, Cramer praised four small, rather obscure companies, and they took off like a rocket. Trading in one firm, UFP Technologies, went from 800 shares in the previous 4 days to 703K share in the following 5 days. And the stock price doubled from $2 to $4 a share. All told, 3 of the stocks, UFP, Rexon, and Canonie Environmental Services – surged by as much as 66 percent in a couple of weeks on the strength of Cramer’s upbeat words.”

So there you have it. A star is born. He supplemented his journalism paycheck by not stock trading prowess, but by cheating. Later, he became well known with his street.com website, got a few breaks and pushed himself onto Squawk box on CNBC.

Why the push for TV? That should be obvious. He could pump his business, his IPO TSCM stock, his website, and yes stocks in his hedge fund. Possibly receive a little kickback from friends for pumping their stocks (or trashing them if they are short). He soon realized TV had a more immediate impact on stock prices than written articles, you see. The SEC investigated and unfortunately Cramer had a good lawyer or something and got away with one. Cramer was not allowed on the show for some time, as 90’s listeners can recall.

So one whore approached another (GE / NBC). They took his bait and he got his own show. I wouldn’t have a big problem with him if he was actually doing people a service – obviously he is not. Even as a so called fundamental guy, he sucks. So today he touts one pick that did well this year, ATI. See, I’m a genius he says. Gee, fire a machine gun all day and your sure to hit something. Why would one ever listen to this scum who cheated his way to success?

I do hope that if there is still cheating going on from his current show, (read: benefiting personally from his own stock touts) that he is caught this time and justice is served. Then GE will awaken to the fact that they made the same mistake again.

Short squeeze in GM rocketed the Dow the last 30 minutes. GM moved a full 2%. Sounds like good, fundamental buying to me. The rest of the market went along for the ride IMHO.

I didn’t use puts — just a “placeholder short” (QQQQ, IYR) while we run studies over the weekend to look for sector and individual name shorts.

Why? In case Monday opens down ugly.

Earlier this week, we did a (subscription) piece on the Transports as the 1st warning; Friday’s lower intraday low was the next warning.

This week marks the 1st time we have been short the markets since much earlier this year — but a sI noted, its not a huge position.

traderb

Agreed that the credit market is even more egregiously priced tahn equities. There is a certain amount fo self-reflexicity between the two – credit investors point to great “earnings” and equity guys say that as long as credit is freely available then all will be well. The problem with this is that if one of these two pillars was to crumble, there would be nothing left to propr either of them up.Credit markets are in my opinion held up to a large extent not by the lack of defaults but because reovery values are expected to be high – this leads to investor belief that over very short periods everything can be priced as AAA. well, one day we will find out how close the recovery values are to their expectations.

Zack,

Did you count how many stocks he called and was DEAD WRONG?

Out of all you guys, I think that ari5000 said it best.

“With high prices, bulls are convinced the ‘trend is their friends’. The trend IS your friend — until it isn’t.”

I see absolutely no point in speculating blind in this market. Grab a position, load up on dips (in your long term favor that is) and stock to it.

Remember, “Markets can stay irrational…”

“I see absolutely no point in speculating blind in this market. Grab a position, load up on dips (in your long term favor that is) and stock to it.”

Isn’t it what you are doing by loading up on dips? You are “speculating blind in this market” that the current aggressive denial of reality will continue, but one day you will catch the falling knife.

Judging from this blog, it appears that the emotional impact of this phony Wall Street rally (driven by liquidity, squeezing shorts, and denial of reality) has transformed many bears into the reluctant bulls; thus magnifying the growing divergence between the stock market and the actual US economy.

Although in the long run markets tend towards rational positions; nevertheless, “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”.

Nobody knows how much longer it can stay irrational. Nobody.

Looking at BP’s “emperor has no clothes” meme, through Ferguson’s War of the World lens, let’s propose that America’s financial markets are a form of disease on society, with credit card usury as the old physic’s blood letting.

Morphing Physician’s Desk Reference into the Wayback Machine, on a global basis, the Net hysteria of the late 1990’s was a media scarlet fever and a tetanus on truth, that led to an untimely disease and financial plague for tens of millions of Americans. Think of all the friends and neighbors you know who lost their entire life’s savings just five short years ago. Remember co-workers running in the halls, yelling, “I’m up 5% for the day!” They’re drowning in their own credit today.

On an unit basis, look at the HAL “organism”. [Google: “cheney halliburton”]. Once a common and innocuous fermenting agent, HAL was a oil service bacterium which made America stronger through its beneficial use as a saprophytic agent, turning fossil ooze into go-juice. Like any fermenting agent, it’s size and strength varied, and was tied to, the volume and value of the product it produced.

Then in 1995, under former SecDef nee CEO Dr. Cheney, HAL was mutated into an infectious virus, transforming into a hardy defense contractor variant known as HAL-KBR. Rapidly infecting the nerve centers of government, HAL-KBR became a full-blown debilitating disease by Y2K. Over the ensuing years of chronic wasting, HAL-KBR siphoned off hundreds of billions into private hands, and inflicted on US a necrotic Iraq-Syndrome that will cost well over a trillion.

Our Physic in Chief pronounced, “stay the course.” Odd.

Unlike the infamous ENE-KLL virus “Enron” population die-off in 2001, HAL-KBR was a silent killer. In the process, HAL-KBR grew over 300% in financial strength in only four years, a rate of infection unparalled anywhere, except on NASD. Then, as quickly as it exploded into devastating disease, and just a decade after it first mutated, HAL-KBR spun off its KBR genome, and reverted back to a seemingly innocuous oil service bacterium again.

Our Assisting Physic is five hundred million richer for creating this contagion. Good on ya’, mate!

So to return to BP’s “emperor’s clothes”, if we’re going to chart America’s vital signs, and measure how many quarts of M3 Ringer’s Lactate are being pumped into the banking system to keep US on our feet, then at some point a modern physician will take some fluid samples, do the lab workup and publicly identify these infectious diseases. Otherwise, we’re just throwing bones over the dying patient’s robes, here at BP, leaving US markets a Night of the Living Dead cerebral palsy on the rest of the world’s financial health.

Then what to do? Intern, would you agree with injecting GS-HMP as a SecTreas agent? A bold choice, administering an extreme form of hedge fund disease as our cure, wouldn’t you say?

bozo hedge funds. stiffling irony