Market for idiocy

Jim Cramer asks an obvious question in this week's New York magazine. The question: Why does everybody hate me? There are, of course, the obvious reaons, like the “Booyah" chants and the bell-wringing and the diaper-wearing. But let's put all that off to one side, and get to the more serious matter of hosting a TV money show in which investing is treated as a game - a silly game at that.

No one with a television show who attacks people and companies as relentlessly as I do has any right to complain about this, but don’t you think the whole thing is a little strange? Why do people care so much about this Cramer bozo? Why do so many people seem to enjoy watching me act like a lunatic on television, and what the heck are so many young people doing watching a 52-year-old man talk about stocks? I’m not cool or charismatic, but those auditoriums full of college students all chant “Booyah” and scream when I make my big entrance. This cannot be just because I make people money, or because I talk about Shakira on the show sometimes. Something bigger is going on.

Cramer admits he's been incredibly lucky with CNBC's "Mad Money" because he caught two trends: individual investors finally understanding the rules of the investment game, and a media world where unscripted buffoonery somehow pays dividends.

How does the market really work? The truth is, it’s a big fashion show. People mess up because they focus only on the merchandise, the stocks, and not on the audience, the buyers—all the big funds that do most of the transactions on any given day. In the press and in most of the Wall Street research departments, everything is about the companies, their earnings, their products, sometimes their management. I spend plenty of time talking about all of that, too, but always within the context of what the big institutional investors want, what styles they seem to prefer this season. I know how the big institutional money managers think because I was one of them and because I have been predicting their behavior and buying stocks accordingly, for almost as long as I’ve been a professional. The truth is that the people who control most of the money that moves the market tend to think the same way. They were all trained at the same funds or investment banks, they all know each other, they all gobble up the same conventional wisdom, and they all buy the same stocks. The way the market really works is the way these big-time investors operate. Stocks don’t naturally gravitate to a special level where they become “properly valued.” They go where the managers of the institutional funds send them. The market is a plutocracy, not a democracy. The big institutional money managers are the market. Keeping track of their ever-changing tastes is the key to success.