In Defense of Jim Cramer

Is there anybody more loved and hated in the stock trading community than Jim Cramer?

I doubt it. The guy is a lightening rod, and deservedly so. He's opinionated and isn't afraid to speak his mind. Anybody who takes that approach is going to make some great and not so great predictions. If he's wrong, I've got no problem with bloggers pointing it out.

Not surprising, there has been some intense Cramer bashing in the blogging community. What concerns me is not just the seething commentary, but the misrepresentation of his commentary. For example, Chris Perruna and Tate Dwinnell (bloggers I respect and enjoy reading) both point to Cramer's bullish October market calls, after the Fed had cut rates, and use it to put down Cramer and pat themselves on the back. This does seem a bit hypocrital since Perruna admits he did not follow his own advice, while Tate's model portfolio is down big this month. Anyway, I digress.

How bad were Jim's market calls? If you actually listen to what he was saying, they were fantastic. In fact, if you read my blog, you'll see that I made a boatload of money using a similar approach. In October, Cramer was talking about what to do *going into the end of the year.* He also said, once you get gains, *take some off the top* to lock in profits. Some specific stocks he mentioned were GOOG, BIDU, AAPL, DE, RIG, along with hot stocks from agriculture and energy sectors. You know what? He was RIGHT. Everyone of these stocks could have yielded nice gains if you bought, took profits as the stocks and sectors went up and sold at the end of December.

I am not saying Cramer is perfect. Nobody is. I can go back and find a lot of bad calls he's made. In fact, I could do that to just about anybody, including the bloggers that criticize Cramer (usually for self serving purposes), and myself. Criticism of public opinions is fine. What's not cool is misrepresenting those opinions and not giving credit where credit is due.